The Canopy of Conversation

When we are small, a canopy of conversation spreads above our heads. Before we can speak it is a part of our environment, like the trees rustling in the forest when we walk. The texture of voices and the emotion they contain inform our sensibilities long before we begin to decipher that other layer of language, that which we impose upon words and call meaning. But there is another sense in which language has meaning, apart from even the words themselves, and this other form of meaning teaches us just as much. Sometimes words obscure those other meanings and become like clouds covering over that sky spread above us.

As we grow taller, we begin to poke our noses into that canopy, begin trying the words in our own mouths: we engage. And after adulthood we have so few new occasions to experience that sensation again, of finding a new world of language. I think that is why I enjoy the ladies' locker room at the gym so much. I go midday, to change before I go on a run outdoors on my lunch break, most days of the week. At that hour, I am by far the youngest person there, in my mid-30s. Everyone else is 70 at least, and they come every day in large groups to take fitness classes in the pool. They all know each other and the place is filled with mirth. (In fact, just the other day one of the women forgot her underwear so a whole group of the ladies decided to go commando with her!)

But mostly what I overhear is conversations about visiting their grown children in other states and trying not to impose; who they hired to do their yard work; things their doctors told them. One woman brought in a quilt she had made to show her friends one day. There's a rich social environment there that I want to be a part of-- not now, but some day. I want to be the kind of person who behaves that way when I'm 80-- someone who's still meaningfully connected and engaged, thoughtful and open. I guess I am at least in the right place.

I have the feeling, when I am around them, of being a child again in a grown up world that I am not yet ready to access or even to fully understand, but one that I hope to gain the language for one day. It's a precious thing, at 36, to be able to feel that way. It reminds me of running around extended family members' houses on holidays playing games with other children while the grown ups cooked the meal-- feeling carefree and surrounded by the ones who are carrying the real weight of existence, because they are a head taller than I am, rustling above me, forming the shape of the larger world around me. One day I hope to be one of the few left looking out above the forest canopy and still shaking my leaves with laughter while the children run around my feet.

Do Not Grudge Her

Do not grudge a woman her quiet imitation of a flower,
Though you may say it's only a daisy, and how obviously
She's tripping over metaphors.

Maybe she never knew how to open her face like that
And honor the sun with her simplicity,
Without holding a thousand small intentions in reserve.

And maybe she's never known the art of holding her own space
Without her silence turning into acquiescence,
Trusting the slender stalk of her being

To waft her fragrance out across the field grasses
She towers over, wondering when the wind
Will come to stir her essence up

With others now that she has learned how to be still,
To bend and open.
Do not grudge her all the beauty of her silence.

Passive Awareness

While most of our daily endeavors require our direct attention, and preferably concentration, there are certain activities for which it's beneficial for our attention to be directed elsewhere. Like safely viewing an eclipse, it's better to look at them indirectly. Take, for example, the placebo effect. If we know that medication we are taking may be just be a placebo, it is best not to think too much about that possibility because doing so will undermine its effectiveness. Yet I have found, much to my surprise, that holding such knowledge in passive awareness is not detrimental.

I experience this on a regular basis when I take Melatonin pills to help me sleep at night. I take them and immediately, when my head hits the pillow, I go to sleep. I know that it's not possible for the pills to work that quickly-- it has to take at least 20 minutes for the hormone to be absorbed into my bloodstream. Yet it works. And oddly, my knowing that it is just a placebo effect and acknowledging that fact to myself somehow does not undermine it. I suppose if I were to dwell on it, it would. But I hold that knowledge instead in a sort of passive awareness, a knowledge held in check, given a nod and passed over without too much deliberation. I think this type of awareness can be useful in other arenas as well.

One arena that is directly related to my Melatonin example is the process of falling asleep itself. There come these moments every night when I am aware that my mind is slipping off into a sort of dreamlike consciousness. Thoughts will begin to occur in nonsensical patterns, with images and feelings and words falling out of joint into new relationships with each other. I know in those moments that I am in the process of falling asleep and soon will be slipping away from my own consciousness. I used to think that if I were to acknowledge to myself that I was falling asleep in those moments, it would break the spell and I would rouse myself back to full wakefulness, but again, to my surprise, that doesn't happen if I hold my knowledge of my impending sleep state in a sort of passive awareness, where I give it a silent nod and then don't deliberate on it.

It strikes me that this same sort of passive awareness is useful in all kinds of activities where we are pushing our minds to do something; recognize that we could undermine our own mental process; and need to step out of our own way. This applies to coming up with a solution to a complex problem, a situation in which often, after conscious weighing of pros and cons, need to "sleep on it," to let the unsolved problem lie dormant in our subconscious mind and not pick it up again until sleep has done its work of sorting the issue out in our minds. Often we wake up with a clear answer, or a clearer one when we have let our minds do this work away from our direct gaze. It's often tempting to pick these problems back up for conscious deliberation (often in the middle of the night), but doing so will only hinder the work our minds must do without our interference. In those cases it's best to give the silent nod to the existence of the problem, and then turn away again from direct deliberation so that we do not interfere.

Opening Doors

I have my socially acceptable synthetics
And I know the air conditioned dance
Of ideas around the water cooler too.

Consider: Everybody gathers around water,
Even the frogs. And trust me,
They understand change.

When they change, it's not mere
Window dressing: it's entire.
Not like us or like the sky,

Who's constantly shedding appearances,
Becoming one color then the next,
Opening and closing its doors.

And when they're mature,
You can hardly spot the frogs.
They exist more in the bent grass blade--

For us-- than they do in their skin,
They are so subtle.
Yet all day long, their chorus haunts the marsh,

As if the mud itself is singing.
And listen: if you go outside
You can still hear it.

Meditations on the Flesh

On darker Sunday mornings when the walls
Of the old sanctuary chance with muted echoes
As they pass the cup down through the fingers
Of the strangers in my pew, I reach out
And bring the darkness in and hold it in my cheek,
Wishing I could hold a whispering deity like that--
Like a warm velvet liquid that flows through my teeth
And forces swallowing.

In the evenings, darker still,

I sink myself into you
With the expectation of tasting your flesh
Down the long lick of my body--
That catacomb of half-forgotten pleasures
Lying under the covers, awaiting audience.
Under the hushed breath rush of our meeting,
The whispered panegyric pealing like new church bells,
I am wishing I could hold a breathing God like that--
Like a love that laces my palms full of holes.

Then, as always, the black panic of night grips me,
Suddenly awake and sweating, sending
My fingers to your pillow, fingering for slivers of breath.
My palms come up empty,
Gaping at the loss of something sacred.

But in the morning, I wake up with you
Still on my breath, with that suspended
Knowledge of things hoped for and half-touched.
I wonder what it is to hold out a hand
In the dark and to know
That the emptiness holds an intangible breath
That touches my blood, that touches my flesh,
That whispers blunt nails through the thick of my palms
Until I start to feel under my skin
That curious audience, with heads bent sideways, trying to follow
The meter of the strange new song that is ringing through the hollows.
 

Escalators

Each June, immigration lawyers from all over the United States make pilgrimages to whatever city our organization has located with a gargantuan enough conference center to accommodate three to four thousand of us as we shuttle from one ballroom to the next to listen to each other talk. We are as organized as an ant colony in our glassed-in rooms, with social and professional hierarchies to determine which ones of us warrant a microphone for an hour here or there. We go from room to room, reflecting back and forth our clients' experiences to one another, along with our insights, forming a consensus of best practices.

Between floors, between rooms, giant escalators ferry us around. I have a vivid mental image of a colleague now passed on, whom I saw riding up an escalator at one of these conferences the last year he attended. I had only ever interacted with him online and over the phone and had never met him in person. Yet we had become friends; we had a similar view of the world, and the practice of law. I had hoped to meet him at that conference but our paths never crossed. But there was one day when he was going up an escalator and I was going down the opposite one and I spotted him and, for whatever reason, I knew it was him. I just recognized in his body language something of the person whom I knew. I verified this later with a photograph. We never did meet before he left this world.

Ever since then I've been haunted with this sense of poetry about seeing my colleagues riding around on these escalators. There's something strangely ennobling about the posture people adopt as they arrest their forward motion momentarily to be carried from one floor to the next. It looks almost as if time has frozen for a minute and that the observer is able to watch those who are being carried along on the current of the machinery, somehow outside of time.

Thinking of my departed friend while watching those I know this week in the same posture did carry me outside of time, to his past, their future, the intersections of all of our timelines and the strange ways that the understanding we collect from each other informs our reality, the practice of our profession, our journey through life.

Those Hours

Almost exactly 8 years ago, I gave birth to my first daughter and 6 weeks later, began practicing as an attorney. The scariest part of my job was going to the border. It took awhile to learn how to shoulder the burden of my clients' expectations and fears, how to prepare them for the worst case scenario without making them so anxious as to cause them to bring it about. The worst part was the waiting-- sitting with a client and giving them the impression that everything was under control while my own stomach was churning as we waited to ask a government officer to pretty please let them come work in the United States.

Sometimes we would be there for hours in the same room. I was still nursing my baby, and a few times I was stuck there so long I started leaking milk. I remember the agony of putting on my shoulder belt in the car afterwards. I suffered in all manner great and small. Nothing to follow in my entire career has yet been worse than balancing all of those things in those still hours. And nothing was more important in shaping me.

In those hours, I instinctually returned to the yogic breathing I had learned during my pregnancy, centering myself, remembering how in giving birth, my job was to step out of the way of what would happen naturally, how that is always my job. To be present. To breathe. To witness. To step aside for what is larger.

And still my mind was frantic in seeking out comforts for itself. Often it would settle on the very old or the very young who also sat waiting-- mothers holding sleeping babies close to their hearts, old couples conversing-- people whose essence was not modified by the stressful environment because it could not be altered by anything, was immutable, a step removed from the commerce of the world. They stilled me. The babies would stir my milk, summon it down, remind me of my connectedness.

After 8 years, I view the same waiting room quite differently; it is a comforting place, the scene of years of pleasantries and happy clients.  Stress no longer transforms me when I wait there. It is a time of stillness and conversation, a blank, electronics-free space in which the ancient practice of human interaction is still alive if I cultivate it. My clients are no less stressed but I become like the baby for them, the person they look to for comfort because my essence is unchanged by the environment. And they tell me all kinds of wonderful things when I poke them. I think stress loosens the lips. They will tell me things they wouldn't tell their priest. It's like magic.

Going to the border is now fairly routine for me. I know how it works, I know the people. But the other day, I had a similar experience, of trying something new. I went to immigration court for the first time in my practice. It was for a case that arose out of a border issue. Again, there was a waiting room. (Any life event of any significance is preceded by an antechamber; if you are in a waiting room, pay attention. It's important). And while we were there, a mother sat down with her sleeping toddler molded into her shoulder. Suddenly, I had the physical sensation of milk letting down, even though I stopped breastfeeding my second baby over three years ago. It was a bodily reminder, an echo of that distant time. But I was not frantic this time, I did not feel like I was searching out comforts. I just found one-- or it found me-- anyway. And I felt myself again part of a very old and very large family, and was surrounded by it. It is everywhere. And for me, the coincidence of my first child's birth with the beginning of my practice, seems like no small thing. Both called on me in a similar way, to give through a stillness and presence that came from beyond and through me, and are forever intertwined.