On Stillness

I'm sitting on a white Adirondack chair very early in the morning, peering into the distance across a quiet lake. I can just about see two geese or swans gliding along the far shore. A small girl in a pale yellow sundress is dancing dreamily on the lawn behind the family summer cottage. Further south, a man is sitting on the dock with his feet trailing in the weedy water drinking a cup of coffee. It's too early for speed boats, jet skis. All you can hear are the birds storytelling. The surface of the lake is free of ripples, undisturbed, an essential calm.

The girl in the yellow dress, the man drinking coffee, the birds, even the lake itself are all inventions. I go to that place when the sheer volume of the political static demands an exit strategy. When the pace of events becomes untenable. Sometimes, this fantasyland appears in my mind unbidden. If, for example, the person posing as our president decides to play Monopoly with the Saudis, I might suddenly find myself staring at the distant horizon, taking in a wider geometry. I know this place like I know my grandchildren, their smiling, their crying. It's a comforting, elemental rest stop I will always recognize, but for some reason I do not choose to visit it as often as I could. I remain as yet mostly in the noise, both the external noise and the internal noise. Comey, Comey, hear me, see me.

We are always excavating the waxy build-up of our own concerns and regrets. But now, there is so much more to worry about. Not only are we responsible for our own sanity, we're on the hook for the safeguarding of the rule of law, the survival of the planet. It's a one-two punch every day, the political right jab, the personal left cross. Stillness is a matter of self-preservation. Stillness and mercy.

Stillness is precious and fragile. It needs loving protection, old blankets to wrap around the ancestral crystal. It is easily damaged. The stories that barge into my mind uninvited when I give them an inch are boorish and self-important like Trump. They aren't mindful of the pain they cause, bouncing off the walls, knocking over anything that gets in their way. They are willful, infantile and grandiose, demanding their say. You know the type. They shout over everyone else, convinced of their own rectitude. I'm right! He's wrong! At the same time, the flavor of my old persistent stories is sweet and nostalgic like chocolate pudding. It's not the bad taste that lingers after a day of consuming retrograde Republican fast food. It's the pleasure of scratching an insect bite till it bleeds. I wouldn't open the door for these stories, these thuggish guests, if I didn't somehow enjoy having them around. Even in my dreams, some surly narrative is always elbowing ahead of me to get to the bar. To resist the hostile takeover of the American enterprise, I will need to fortify myself with stillness, a merciful stillness that furnishes a safe house for righteous anger. Without it, the rage will tear right through me.

The other day, I sunk down into a lower level of silence. I sat in a funeral home for several hours watching over the casket of a man who would be buried later in the day. This was in fulfillment of the Jewish observance of shmira, or guarding. People who sit shmira take turns attending the deceased person through the night and into the next day from the time of shrouding to the time of burial. I didn't know the man. He was not a friend or a family member. My role was simply to keep him company and witness the deep silence that enfolds us when the noise of life has run its course, the peace that can be so elusive while we're here on hold, listening to the canned playlist. Every now and then, I could hear a phone ringing, a murmured conversation far off in the building, but mostly nothing. The shouting match, the name calling, the physical and verbal violence and the lovemaking end in a carpeted hush.

And I thought....What was all the fuss about? Do our minds maintain a constant carping chatter just to distract us from the galactic silence that waits for us? And is that what he's thinking about, somewhere on the back porch of his non-awareness, when he's up tweeting before sunrise?

Something special from my friend Deb Koffman
http://www.debkoffman.com/tag/mindfulness/


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On Impermanence

We all wanted to be Joan Baez. It wasn't about the vocal range or the political passion. It was the hair...that long, straight, black hair. We all had jewfros, nests of uncontrolled frizz burgeoning out of our overworked brains, as if the electrical impulses of precocious literacy and self-consciousness had gone haywire. We suffered the cartoonish antics of hair springing off the head of someone with her finger in a wall outlet. Some girls put their heads on ironing boards and pressed their curls into a flat, singed stink. Some took it a step further. I got off the Broadway local at Times Square and climbed a steep, garbage-strewn staircase to an enormous salon that specialized in straightening, the only white person in the room. The treatment was like something that should have been outlawed by the Geneva convention, a thick paste applied at the roots that scorched the skin right off your scalp. You had to submit to this torture for a length of time, flipping through old copies of Ebony. The goop gave off the same odor as the stuff they would paint on to send your hair in the opposite direction. If, let's say, you were getting a permanent, replicating the style of a famous model or actress. Apparently, whether you were going from frizzy to straight or from lank to curly, the punishment was intended to be equally painful and sulfurous. A season in hell for the sin of failing to be satisfied with who you were.

This, then, became the paradigm. Whatever you looked like, you wanted to look like someone else. Whatever gifts had been bestowed on you, they were the wrong gifts. Whatever club included you, it meant automatically that you wouldn't be caught dead belonging to that club. What does that even mean....."caught dead?" Maybe it means finding yourself in the irreparable situation of arriving wet and cold on the far shore of your life and discovering, too late, that you have expended your time here masquerading as another person altogether, hoping to be admired in what was at one time called a bathing costume. Once, in my early twenties, I ventured too far out in the surf at Montauk. A predatory wave knocked me down and snatched my bikini top. I took in a gallon of salt water. I could have drowned going back under trying to find it, but instead I ran up on the beach topless. In spite of the exposure, in spite of the shame, I chose the naked alternative. This is the story I'm telling myself now, my midrash on the biblical dictum, Choose Life. Be naked, be frizzy. Occupy yourself while the house is still standing.

This is especially true when I am writing. People who write, draw, dance or any of the other divine mimicries are especially vulnerable to self-doubt. There's not much point in doing it if you're dressing up as someone else. The role of playing Zadie Smith has already been cast. Richard Ford has cornered the market on Richard Ford. I have to rescue my stories from the undertow and bring them up for air. Once my words are out there, they are no longer mine. I can't swaddle them. I can't keep them safe. There is always potential for misunderstandings, for damages. I was struck recently by the comments of a friend who is now showing three-dimensional drawings, fragile paper sculptures. What if they get torn, I asked her? What if they get dirty? Maybe they're supposed to be impermanent, she explained. Maybe I'm making them just for the pleasure of making them. It would be, I thought, like cooking a meal to be enjoyed and consumed, like writing a blog. You make it, you offer it up, you let it go. Doing this is practicing a radical theology.

The spirit that sustains all of life never rests, I remind myself. Creation is ongoing, giving birth to new apple blossoms, new words, new poems. It is constantly recycling old songs, old thoughts, old versions of the self. Not only am I not Zadie Smith or Joan Baez, I'm not even the person I was last week. I am a swarm of words, a frizz of awareness, getting acquainted with impermanence, the truest friend.


Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.