Juncture: Between Roots and Flight

“And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.” -Cixous

We are in the middle of the juncture between early fall and autumn.  

Right now, I do feel afraid.  I do feel myself walking on a dizzying silence. I think it's because I've been struggling to find the perfect metaphor for what has been going on this past week or so.  Perhaps it's because  I am trying to build my words upon the emptiness of time. I just haven't had enough time to contemplate all that has been going on.  I need that open space.  I need the blank page. I need to face the blank page and sit with the silence. The discomfort. The fear of flying.

Flying.  My dreams keep filling up with air and space. So much vata.  I have recurring dreams of flying into space and taking plane rides to new places that terrify and excite in equal measure.

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” 

With moving out of the time of remembering my ancestors, I decided to return to another  family. My intellectual and emotional family.  Hélène Cixous is one of my divine mothers.  Her book, Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting is one of my favorite books. And it has occurred to me that for the remainder of this juncture, I need to read that book.  I know she will help me find the right metaphor.  She is my mother bird nudging me out of the nest.   She was that for me years ago when I embarked on my intellectual and academic career.  It is time to return to her for yet another push.

Between roots and flight. That is the juncture in which I sit. A cross section of contradiction. 

"Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.” -Cixous

It's time to laugh.

His Locker: Unpacking the Gift

It is the time of pitru paksa, the time of ancestral remembrance. It is also the year anniversary of the start of this blog, Life in Seasons. This has brought me to a lot of reflection over the past week as I move forward in my seasonal work, as I think about heading into another cycle of this life of mine.

It has also been a time of reflection upon the professional side of my life, because I recently signed a contract for my dissertation manuscript to be published into a book. I spent the past few weeks rereading and editing the dissertation, turning in all the material just a few days ago. It was scary.  Revisiting the place where my professional life started was frightening and liberating--in equal measure.  It meant I had to sit in the place where it all started: children of Vietnam Veterans.  It is a knotty and dense place for me. A place where everything meets: personal, professional, past, present, hopes, and dreams. Everything. To revisit it as a person who has grown and become something so new was disarming.  Yet it provided a way for me to see how my hard work has brought me to where I'm at. Here.  Now.  As I write this, I can see why the past week or so has been... challenging.

His Locker

The photograph, "His Locker," is symbolic of a lot of what has been happening over the past week or so.  It is a haunting photograph. My father gave me this photograph quite a few years ago--back when I was in grad school.  I had asked for photos from his time in Vietnam and this one struck me as intriguing, undefined, yet full of meaning.  It was his locker.  His Vietnam locker. Until now I did not know what to do with it.  As I read my manuscript, though, I hit upon a section in which I analyze parts of Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried.  Here is a section of my introduction:

"The Things They Carried focuses on one of the greatest hurdles in the process of remembering: putting traumatic memories to words. The quagmire of a lost past full of contradictory emotions, and the irresolution it carries, can (and often does) leave one paralyzed into silence.  O’Brien counters that silence through his disjointed stories that attempt to make sense of the things he carries. The book opens with a laundry list of things Lieutenant Cross and his men carried on their combat missions.  As we read the list of items, it soon grows apparent that there is a complex mixture of tangibles and intangibles.  With the guns, malaria tablets, and P-38 can openers, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” (O’Brien, 1990, 21). Thus, while language is necessary to express memories of the past, the stories of the past carry weight that goes beyond words.  Included in the stories O’Brien tells us are the interactions he has with his daughter. Kathleen has more than words to make sense of; she carries the weight of her own memories with her father.  Enmeshed in those memories are the love and turmoil found in their relationship. Language provides a skeleton, but the meaning, the flesh filling out the structure within it, comes from something beyond the words themselves."

For me, this locker carries all of the baggage and emotion that my father brought home with him--and what he brought into my life.  It is part of the gift that he left me. It is the ancestral legacy that I must work through in my own way, in my own time. Another excerpt:

"Walter Benjamin, via Shoshona Felman’s analysis, invites us to ponder the residue of a traumatic history.

What Benjamin attempts, in other words, is to transmit the story that cannot be told and to become himself the storyteller that cannot be one but that is one—the last narrator or the post-narrator. The trauma—or the breakdown of the story and of memory, the fragmentation of remembrance and the rupture of the chain or of the “web of stories”—is itself passed on to the next generation as a testament, a final gift. (2002, 46—my emphases)

The ruptures emerging from the breakdown of articulation is what makes trauma visible; the pieces being the gift handed to the next generation. For children of Vietnam Veterans, piecing together the fragments of remembrance is fraught with uncertainty; yet, it is the process of piecing together that transforms trauma into a space of insight, creating meaning in the crevices between what is known and unknown."

That locker holds so many stories, but they are fragments for me to decipher. A suitcase, shirts, canteens, cups, bottles, and numerous unknowns. 

My Altar

I also look at this photograph and think about how my father's aesthetic is similar to my own.  I like photographs that capture meaningful things. Thing that are rich with meaning, yet undefined, chaotic, and full of metaphor.  Things I don't want to forget.  I think of my altar photograph and can't help but think about the ways in which we are both trying to communicate moments full of emotion. His locker (altar) is very different from my altar. But I can see how he might have gone to that locker for retreat, solace, and to get through a difficult time in his life. It was a space full of transformation and growth. He saw value in snapping that photograph.  That moment meant something to him.  And now here I am working through that meaning in my own way.

I'm not sure if the publisher will use my dad's photograph. I hope they do.

This time feels appropriate as a marker of the transition out of one cycle and into the another.  This book work, along with the ancestral work I have been doing during pitru paksa, is the perfect set of sadhanas to close out this cycle--and season.

Kali

Lately, I have been experiencing an intense transition in how I see myself in the world. I know it might sound a little cheesy or strange, but something has unsettled within me. It is intense, not because there is some dramatic unraveling of my external life. It is intense because it is happening at such a deep and subtle level that it is only now that I can feel like I have some ability to articulate what is shifting around for me. 

Sadhana: a discipline undertaken in the pursuit of a goal.  The goal of sadhana is to attain some level of spiritual realization, which can be understood as enlightenment.  For me it is the practice of practicing and the practice of reflexivity. 

The Path of Practice focuses a lot on sadhanas involving ancestral memories and accessing the divine feminine. Both of these have been practices I have been working with in a variety of other ways over the summer (and less so over the past few years) that didn't initially have any connection that I could see with what Tiwari articulates in her book. It took me some time to realize that my summer of research in Colorado was very much a practice of delving into the past of my family.  In addition, as I read my fun books, they had a consistent theme: the divine feminine and how vital it can be for a woman to access that internal power.  The link between that work and what I embarked upon with Tiwari's book very slowly started to come together.

As I worked with sadhanas that emphasized Kali and moon cycles with clarity and intentionality, I was facing challenges in my external world. Mother challenges. Work challenges. And in the face of these challenges, I could no longer react the way I have in the past.  Something in the sadhanas left my old ways of coping and handling stress unsustainable. 

Kali

Kali: the Hindu goddess associated with empowerment, shakti. She is the fierce aspect of the goddess Durga. Kali is the goddess of time and change. 

There are times when everything seems to fall together. Align. In the past few months experiences have aligned to bring me face-to-face with a woman I know well: me. It has brought me to a place in which I have to confront what I haven't been able to see within myself. It has also brought me to a place in which I understand that if I want the life I dream about, I have to start seeing myself with the fierceness that Kali embodies. No, I don't need a bent sword or a necklace of skulls, but I do need to comprehend that I have the right to assert my own voice and that I do have important things to say, things that matter. The time for people pleasing is drawing to an end and I have to stand by my own voice--not hide from it.  It is time to assert my right to be me out in the world, and not try to hide behind veils of fear and insecurity.

I know in the past I have worked with Kali mantras and practices, but there is something different in the practices I have undertaken in the past month or so. There is a visceral, qualitative difference. It is not just words I repeat, but something that truly has an energetic quality. There have been times my body has not known what to do and I've been frozen with fear. There have been other times in which I have been braver than I thought I ever could be--to the point in which it has actually startled me afterward. But I realize I am at a point in which I can't turn around and run for the hills of my previous self.  I have to settle into this new self that is intensely, subtly, me. 

Doing the Kali sadhanas while doing sadhanas that draw me into memories of my past and my family has created a strange synergy of shifts. I know it might be hard to comprehend if you haven't experienced it for yourself, but I am not exaggerating when I say that I can feel the unsettling changes not within my perspectival thoughts, but within my tissue and bone. It's like my body is trying to settle into what it going on and my brain is an observer, waiting for the tissue to find its own grounding and new set of normalcy. I say this because I have had moving muscle pain throughout this month of Kali and family sadhanas.  Muscle tension in places I never have muscle tension. I had a muscle spasm the first week I started doing the family work. I'm sure these things could easily be identified as coincidence or I could find numerous logical explanations. But what is going on right now is not about logic. It is about trusting what is going on and continuing with the sadhanas. It is about listening to my body with multifaceted ears that can hear the rational and the visceral and the primeval with equal measure.

Galaxies Inside

This has been a challenging week or so.  I've missed a few weeks of posts because I have been struggling to get myself to write.  I have been in a state of unrest. It is almost like I've been shaken up like a snow globe and I'm slowly waiting for things to settle.  

Yet, I can't wait for things to settle.  I know in this state I need to feel and allow what surfacing to have a moment be alive and awake.  But the feelings are prickly and painful.  Yet beautiful.  Much like the Joshua Tree.  

I have been trying to do work that takes advantage of this moving and shifting around to try to push for some deeper changes. The Path of Practice has been an important guide through all of this. Tiwari has introduced new mantras and breath work that are not letting me turn away from what I'm experiencing.  I have been working a lot with the mantras of Kali and Durga.  I have also been journaling on my family relationships.  I'm doing this simultaneously with school starting, which requires me to enter into an intense dynamic.  This is early fall. It is supposed to be a season of reorganization and celebration.  This year, it has been a season of disruption and discomfort.  And I don't mean this in a bad way. The feelings are intense and I know it is work that I need to do.  But I'm in a place of discomfort that leaves me wanting to jump out of my skin.  So many times this week I wanted to turn around, run, and burrow as deeply into the ground as physically possible. But it wasn't simply because bad things were happening. It was because I was trying to do things in new ways.  I am trying to change some deep patterning.  

Dream Stop
I have had a recurring dream of traveling in a space ship and leaving this galaxy.  In the most recent one, I was on the ship with a man who was the captain and then his son was on it too.  It was incredibly vivid. The colors, textures, nuances of the world introduced to me. I watched out the window as we traveled through different atmospheres.  I was filled with an incredible amount of excitement, yet at the same time overpowered by the feeling of being out beyond any safety net.  I thought about how, if anything happened, there was nothing there to save us.  Then, I thought about how this was an opportunity so few people would ever have in their lifetime. I was seeing something others would never get to see. I was taking a journey that few people get to take.  In my dream, I began to realize that this was something to revel in and not let my fear take over my ability to find true joy in traveling the galaxies.  

The Lull is Really Dragons

Dragonhood

I've been in a weird place. I'm calling it 

a lull, 

because I'm trying to figure out where I'm at....  I know that where I've been is moving further into the background and where I'm going is coming into focus along the horizon. I'm here.  For now.  And I keep reminding myself to be here.  To be now.  To be awake and alive, here and now.

I took a picture of this quote some time ago. I was in a waiting room, reading this book of quotes and was struck by the tension between reptile and bird. I was intrigued by the idea of dragonhood. Honestly, I can't remember who wrote this, but the quote seems particularly relevant to me this morning.  "Mired in the mud of our animal nature and the muck of our cultural prejudices" struck me. I'm mired. Feeling the heaviness of kapha this morning, the reptile in me is alive and awake. It's like she was awakened from a deep sleep and decided to stretch her legs upon my heart. 

At the same time, I can feel the agitation and restless air of vata taking me on a crazy ride upon her wings.  I can feel her dragging me through the air whether I'm ready for it or not.

I think this creature alive in me today is demanding that "come to terms with my dragonhood."

I imagine my dragon as fierce and angry, a force to be reckoned with. She has risen from the earth's center, unashamed of the rage and havoc. It's time to see that part of myself as alive and awake.  My dragon is not afraid to let the steam out of her nose and dig her claws into the earth as she prepares to fly high above the shit and muck that becomes so entrenched in my heart. She has horns on her head, her spine and on the tips of her wings.  She is not to be fucked with.  She is red with anger... and love...and hope. 

 

But wait, my dragon is fierce and angry, but she is also full of electricity. She was born out of the energy of a lightening storm and is not afraid to take up space and open it up with her electric touch.  She is ready to wake the soporific trance that fills my lungs and blood. She is clear, translucent, and fully alive. She is purple with depth... and power...and creativity.  And, again, not to be fucked with.

Both of these dragons are mine... me.  They encompass something in my waking and known self that cannot find a way out.  All to often, they lay dormant and unknown. I neglect them.  

Try to pretend they aren't me.  

But they are. 

And it seems that this lull is not at all a lull.  

It is a fissured moment through which my dragons escape.  It's the space through which they seek attention. They don't want to be calmed or soothed.  They want to spread their wings and fly.... Red dragon wants to fly from the earth into the highest clouds.  Purple dragon wants to fly from her lightning bolt into the center of the earth.  Both want to disrupt my plans. They want to remind me that I am not always (ever?) in control of the world around me.  Their wings are moving things around and it's uncomfortable, stimulating, scary, and thrilling.  I'm clinging to their wings, trying to hold on to the thrill and let go of the fear.  

Now if only I can get to know my dragonhood off the paper and the yoga mat and allow them to soar in the rest of my life.

Juncture Planting....

Filling my container this week.  

In meditation I found a container that looked like a small fissure in an extensive root system.  My imagination gave me a thin, long, flexible flashlight that allowed me to see what was inside the fissure.  Initially, I did not want to look. And then the meditation ended.  The next day I returned to that spot and I looked inside.  It was dark and dank. I found the edges of the container in the dirt and lifted it up.  It opened-- it had a hinge of some sort. I saw it was full of gritty gunk. I wasn't sure what to do.  Do I leave all that alone? Do I clean it out? Do I analyze it?  My meditation-mind made the decision to use my hands to dig out the dirt and whatever else was inside.  I didn't see the necessity of inspecting the contents.  I simply decided to clean it out.  I rinsed it in the dark water that was nearby and then closed it up. The fissure was still there (akhilanda--never not broken).  I set it back down within the root system, where I found it. And then I proceeded to pour some sort of dust and seeds into the crack. I returned to this spot in my meditation again yesterday.  I continued to pour some dust into the crack. This time, though, there was a strange salve that emerged on the outside of that container.  I lifted up the container and slowly poured the salve into a bottle.  My meditation-mind was telling me that I would need it later.

This week has also been about filling the raised flower container in my yard.  Filling that space felt similar to those meditative moments in which I was simultaneously cleaning out and filling up. Sure, there was dirt in the container, but it was time for something more. I was not planting seeds or pouring dust. I was planting root systems. Planting in the juncture between summer and early fall felt a little out of place.  But juncture is about paying attention to the disjunctures--the open and disjointed spaces that try to tell us something deeper about ourselves.  These moments are the times our unconscious reaches out to the conscious world to try to teach us something about our patterned (re)actions. 

And planting so close to the time of bloom and harvest was a way to pay special attention to the disjunctures going on within me.  The need to tend to the creative blooms developing right now.

As I picked the plants that would go into my container, I did not think about horticultural rules. I don't really know them.  I thought about the types of plants I wanted. I thought about the colors. And I thought about how much I wanted to put together an organic and chaotic mix of things to see how they fit together (not unlike my creative research).  It was intuitive.  I wanted sage to clear the space and create a beautiful smell and color.  I wanted hastas to express fullness in the garden.  I picked echinacae because they have a simple grace to them that I enjoy.  The day lily rests in the middle for the attention it deserves. 

My container is a beautiful space that I marked out and created. The planting work is done. Now for the work of stillness, as I wait and watch for the blooms. Let the internal work take over. Let the roots find a home. 

The day lily's blooms popped out a beautiful yellow this morning.  

Metaphors are wonderful things. They help convey an emerging world. A world not yet understood.  They help the unconscious communicate--if we want to listen. I look out at the garden box and do not see anything that is contained in the sense of restraint.  I see things that are being asked to mingle and co-habitate in a way they hadn't before.  What a wonderful metaphor for my summer journey as I transition into early fall.  

I see me in that container. I see the work of letting several research endeavors rest together, so I can look at them as a whole. Trying to establish grounding amidst the chaos growing and tangling together.   Many parts of a singular whole.  Will they fit together? I'm not entirely sure.  For some things, all I can do is lay the groundwork, thoughtfully, and then surrender.  

As much as I try to claim the container as mine, I know it has a life beyond me. And I know the work involved is happening in the literal and metaphorical universe. Control is finite.  I'm simply doing my best to nurture this container, embrace it, and accept it for what it is--and what it isn't.  


















Metaphors are wonderful things.