Life Worth Living

Progressive Muscle Atrophy is what they say I have, a variant of ALS with a less predictable course, and what I feel is that it takes huge effort to breathe and cope with the pull of gravity. My spine wants to collapse, curve, curl up and rest. And yet I notice that when I activate my muscles gently, with full attention and entire ease, they respond a little. They do hear me. 

It's such hard work. So I ask myself, why do it? What makes this particular life worth living? I am not particularly struggling with the popular question of what good am I. It's true that I don't seem to be of much use. This week I finally told all my clients/patients that I won't be back to work, and that hurt.

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Sculpt

I'm excited to finally offer this little 6-minute vignette of the work of the PsychoZen Mixed Messages ensemble. Here we are playing with a format that I designed from the family therapy technique of sculpting. One person begins by arranging two people into a shape that expresses a relationship between mother and daughter. It could be her own relationship or an imagined one. Then the players reveal the sensations, emotions, thoughts and desires that arise. The director modifies the flow and the sculptor continues to shift the tableau according to what is happening, what is needed. It enables us to move and shift trauma, and emerge with freedom and love. 

November 2020

More Dharma on Healing

In this talk I get into the details of healing, and draw a clear parallel between how I work with my body now and how we can work with the body of racism.  The talk was given online at the Village Zendo on October 25, 2020.

October 2020

My Body My Country: Lessons From Healing

Back in June I gave this talk on my experience of working with my traumatized body and how we might apply what I learned to heal the trauma of racism. Now seems a good time to post it, though late, because soon I'll be co-leading an ongoing support group for White people to uncover and transform racism, White Work on Racism (WWOR).               

August 2020

Who Was We?

This 2-minute video is another expression of the complex and loving relationship between mother and daughter. My mother's death in February set in motion a process of opening to who we were together, of letting go, and of appreciating life as it is. 

I've included a passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here I am." My mother and I turned out to be reading it at the same time, and when Sal Randolph asked for contributions to a collection of performances of reading, I asked my Mum to film herself. Then I read the passage she chose while filming myself. You'll also hear me reading bits from her poem, "Blue Butterfly," which I wrote about here. 

Sometimes people who see this work pity me. Please try not to. Sadness is a part of life and love. I'll take it. 

July 2020

Who Was She? Part Two

My mother died on February 17th.

In recent years I called her Mum as a repair for the awkwardness in my youth that arose from obeying my father’s insistence that we call her Mother. This stilted salutation, I believe, was to repair the fall from aristocracy that our family suffered by leaving Russia. The proper word really would have been Mama but it didn’t stick, maybe because we were repairing our Russianness too. So much brokenness, never spoken but always implied.

Who was my mother? Who are any of us under all those repairs?

While I was mourning her loss, my Zen teacher, Roshi Joshin, asked if there was an image of her that came to mind, a way that I could sense her presence now. I thought of a butterfly, then changed my mind because butterflies land on things, and my impression of her was that she never really landed. "Perhaps a hummingbird," said my daughter. Perhaps. All I know is that I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her. Or I couldn’t get her to reach me. I’m not sure what the difference is.

Later I realized that she saw me as a butterfly. And when I saw one several days later, seeming to call for my attention at the window, I realized that she was present in the way I see myself. In fact, my first memory is of a blue butterfly crushed by my brother. Maybe I expressed it to my mother. Or maybe I constructed it from things she said. Anyway she wrote a poem called "Blue Butterfly" for my 50th birthday. It memorializes the time when a photographer asked to use my picture in an ad, then saw that my legs were in casts and I could not walk. Here’s an excerpt:

Here was a spotlight on the indifference around, the dismay of a mother,
the trust of a child, and her innocent faith that she would be well,
made so by the grown-ups who loved her. With a turn of the prism,

our powerlessness was bared in the glare. A slight twist cast a softer
yet lucid light on the sweetness of innocence that, much too soon,
would be lost. 

Yet another refraction made blaze the pain that awaited
in the tomorrows, no matter our will or resolve. In the midst of this spin,
there she sat, my blue butterfly, tranquil still in the moment.
Time enough later to learn of the future and change. 

Refractions upon refractions. Reading her poem now, I understand that my illness (JRA) destroyed her idea of innocence and beauty, and there she was, spinning, while I sat, tranquil still. Of course I had no choice; I couldn’t get up and walk, could I?  And this, in a nutshell, produced my lifelong struggle. She was moving so fast I couldn’t sense her center. I felt like I needed to move faster but I couldn’t. The frustration was immense. When I expressed it, they called it rage. And then it became rage. Such is the tragedy of interconnection, healed somewhat by poetry belated. 

The 9th Zen precept is classically translated as "not being angry." I remembered that the Zen Peacemaker version was something like 'transform suffering into wisdom,' but when I went to look it up, it had changed! Now it is "bearing witness to emotions that arise."

Oh, if only someone had been able to bear witness then! How different our lives could have been if she had been able to bear witness to her dismay and grief instead of trying to escape it; how different had I realized that brokenness is part of the nature of things, to be included, not rejected. What if the photographer had chosen to feature the disabled girl? How different the perceptions of all those consumers of culture, how different our understandings of each other! 

Thankfully the world is trying to change. Thankfully I have access to this wisdom now as I heal and accept my body as it is. I just listened to an On Being podcast with Resmaa Menakem on healing racial trauma through awareness of the body and an understanding of the context of trauma. And our own Village Zendo featured a talk by Tokuyu Hoshi on brokenness. And yesterday I watched a conversation on Disability Justice sponsored by Dance NYC on Facebook. We are bearing witness. We are acting. We are healing. 

was me not you 
I thought
I knew
butterfly adieu
now who? 

Related: Who Was She? Part One

June 18, 2020

Who Was She? Part One

Womanhood: three generationsMy mother died on February 17th after refusing invasive medical treatment for several weeks. I was ill at the time with the thing that landed me in the hospital later, yet I travelled to California twice, once before she died and once after. We were able to have a conscious final conversation, for which I will always be grateful.

At the gate to the other world she finally saw herself as what she was, divine woman energy. "I'm not just crazy mixed-up me, I am a great woman, I am womanhood." Later during our vigil she revealed how she wanted to be a boy when she was young. I remembered her as a woman aspiring to appeal to men, whom she valued over women. "Dress for men," she would say, "women's fashion is ridiculous," or something like that.

She insisted I survive, called me a humanitarian, beeped my "pretty nose," said she wished I could have believed I was pretty. Later she bumped up against a disturbing memory. "Wasn't there something, something hostile when you were a teenager?" Oh, yes, there was something--so much rage the neighbors called the police, so much hurt that couldn't be expressed. Naturally I tried to brush past it, absolve us both, go back to the divine absolute love, but she stayed, wanted to resolve it so that she could let go. It was too big for that, but I gave her a morsel and it turned out to be enough.

Enough for her but not for me. Only after emerging from the nightmare hospitalization did I start to ask into what I had lost. What was this "crazy mixed-up" legacy? How could I reach her, touch her, so that I could let go?

My mother is a winding road
of pockets far from the center
My mother is a winding of whorls and eddies,
each teaming with tiny life
safer tinier far from the center 

Lost in the eddies that she
mistakes for the big life
No, not lost
She is hiding there 

June 18, 2020

Open the Country

How are you?

Can you answer as you did before the plague, before the knee to the neck, or before you knew about the knee to the neck?

Nowadays you might share how you are coping with it, or your opinion about it, or your feelings about it. For the first time in a long while, we are experiencing the same subject, no need to dither on about the weather, our usual common ground. We’re in it together, in this worldwide connected suffering that bitterly divides us. And we’re in it alone, suffering in our own way, fed by our own history, nourished by what we attend to in our present, and sustained by the story we tell about it.

My story features a hospital ICU, a ventilator, a deep tongue kiss with death, and maybe a recovery. People wish me recovery, and so do I, but the truth is I can’t have back what I had.

How about you? Has it all been taken away? your routine, your people, your purpose? or maybe those things are there but changed so much they are unrecognizable. Mostly when we find ourselves in virgin territory, we reach back for what we know. We want to ‘open the country,’ resume operations, resume shopping and consuming. But many now see this moment as a potential turning point, a moment to start over, to really open the country, open our eyes to the injustice we didn’t want to see, to learn about ourselves, to join together to create meaningful change.

The first tenet of Buddhist practice, classically translated as Cease from Evil, is understood by the Zen Peacemakers as Not Knowing. It’s different from what we experience as uncertainty, which I contend is more like rehearsing scary outcomes. Not knowing means we see the world as it is instead of what we think it is, fresh at every instant, instead of an idea. What is this world as it is? It is impossible to answer; it is only possible to become aware of our ideas, gently let them go, and let the other show itself.

Dropping ideas and starting fresh is not so easy. Ideas and habits re-assert themselves like weeds in the suburban lawn. The Zen koans use weeds as metaphor for our entanglements. We can never really get rid of them, even in a monastery or a mountaintop, but with practice— either meditation, good psychotherapy, a creative process, or all three—the weeds can stop choking our little buds of wisdom.

If I think about what gave me pleasure before—singing and dancing, and I compare that experience with my current condition of labored breath, choking voice and unsteady body, I feel anguish, grief, frustration, and even rage. Those feelings arise from ideas like “I need to get better,” “What happened to my strength?” or “Maybe I’m going to die.” The only action that can follow from those thoughts and feelings is war with my body as it is. Tension then accumulates and makes it even more difficult to breathe or vocalize; if someone speaks to me I snap, or croak. I’m sure they don’t understand. I suffer.

But with practice, I can dive into the experience itself, I can breathe the breeze as it moves through me, chew my food, swallow, flow with the rhythm of my body and the world that I sense. I enter the bitter comparison and I am free of it. I enter the grief and see that nothing is lost. I enter the rage and warm myself by the fire as I do good for others. Such is the enticing paradox.

On Sunday at the Village Zendo, Roshi Joshin invited the community to speak to each other about their experiences. People have been protesting, marching, calling on elected officials, risking their lives to transform the world. And now, in this space we were encouraged to turn inward to notice our responses and share them with each other. When at the end she asked us for one word to describe what we were feeling after the practice, many said ‘opening.’ We opened the borders and were nourished by what we received. And now, back to work.

June 2020

Mixed Messages: Talk to Her

Ekin talks to her mother. The company participates. Are they supporting or hindering? 

A 15 minute set including this improvisation will be featured at Movement Research on Mondays at Judson Church. We are in good company. On the same evening, my daughter, Vita Taurke, will show her work, along with John Jasperse and Larissa Velez-Jackson. May 11th. Save the date!

Cinematographer: Traven Rice

featuring

Ekin Naz Demirok
Katelyn Atanasio
LaVeda Davis
Ara Fitzgerald
Katherine Ann Marie
Yuriko Miyake
ReW Starr

Directed by Elena Taurke

January 2020

Mixed Messages Medley, Chapter One

If you could go back and change one thing about your mother's life that would make a difference to your own, what would it be? How would it affect your life?

I'm working with older and younger women to explore this question through improvisation, to feed from it to understand each other, to confront what we transmit so we can be free. Here is a sampling from our first rehearsal. 

If it moves you please consider making a contribution so we can continue the process. Funds go to paying the players, the cinematographer, and for rehearsal space. Find me on Venmo (Elena-Taurke) or if you want to make an official tax deductible contribution, here we are on Fractured Atlas. 

Here are the cast and crew for this rehearsal. 

Cinematographer: Traven Rice

Players:

Ara Fitzgerald
ReW Starr
Elena Taurke
Barbara Thomas

Katelyn Atanasio
Katherine Anne Marie
Manatsu Tanaka
Vassilea Terzaki

August 2019