as it were

meanwhile, snowbellsI do my part in the war effort by listening to podcasts. This one on Ezra Klein delves into the complexities of economic sanctions.* His interviewee, Adam Touze, peppers his parentheticals with "as it were." This is not as familiar to me as "like" or "uh" so I listen as if it has meaning. 

As I write, errant tabs accidentally fire updates. Bombing my mind. as it were. if you will. if I may. 

Today my daughter is taking me for a ride somewhere, downtown maybe. So I'm going to copy bits of what I wrote on the Village Zendo listserve in response to a beautiful question: What supports you in times of suffering?

My father is a Russian born in Kiev. His father, a professor, was seized and murdered by Stalin. My father remembers Kiev under siege, and feels it again now as he watches the bam bam footage.

as it were. 

He joined the U.S.military because he believed in this country, its democracy, its inclusion. So we lived on military bases during the cold war and were shunned for being Russian. Now my daughter asks if everyone will hate us. No, I say, Russian is many things, too complicated to be an enemy.

We watch the poetry of Tarkovsky (Stalker) and I feel supported. Humans flailing, looking for hope. I am like that.

My friend writes of dancing ash and co-dependent bundles, and I feel supported because his turns of phrase spin me into a new dimension. He writes about writing: "let the page overhear as a benevolent sponge." His words legitimize the hours I’m spending reviewing my diaries. Maybe not so benevolent, in my case. The stories I lived had the power to wound again. as it were!  Now the words begin to blur, lose their meaning, lose their might.

A friend of a friend, Chad, just fled Ukraine. Chad made a beautiful film featuring a Ukrainian artist traumatized by Chernobyl et al.  Russian Woodpecker won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2015. I watched it on Vimeo for 99 cents, and I felt supported.

I feel supported as I email with my father, hear his analysis and heartbreak, and as I read your accounts of wars in your history. We are like that, built to fight. Is there such a thing as fighting for good?

My friend, Kansho, gave a dharma talk (not yet posted, will link when it's ready). He spoke of of the danger of making meaning and also the danger of abandoning it. A bomb is a bomb is a... 

I am grateful to this sangha and our teachers for holding our face to the fire, and especially for the way that art in its many forms calls us to witness, to hold each other, no matter what. As it is.

March 2, 2022

* Here I learned the term: weaponized interdependence. no modifiers needed.

It's the Format, Stupid?

Hotei, a laughing monkWhy add that cruel address? stupid? I'm talking to myself like that because this is maybe the hundredth time I've realized that format steers human interaction. When I told friends about my big Aha, they were, like: oh yeah, look at the signature on your email. 

PsychoZen.Org, Method Meets Life

But, no, I'm not stupid, just making the same old error. What prompted the too familiar revelation this time was that I found myself comparing my Zen friends with other important people in my life who seemed to misunderstand my nature. And then I remembered The Cloakroom, a tiny area at the Zendo where people doff and don their shoes and jackets. In this bitsy space people overflow with the kind of small talk that has always made me freeze with fear and then burn with irritation.

How are you? [do I tell about my disease or just kvell about the weather?]
I'm excited about my new show. [did I know this? should I ask, but do I have to go?]
Got any exciting plans for the summer? [no, I'm hopelessly behind as usual and now I have to ask about yours and feel even worse]

But then the format changes and everything changes. We sit quietly together as our minds entrain to the lower frequencies that can hold and modulate the usual cacophony. The people don't change, except they do.

My patients rarely saw me as judgmental, but plenty of friends and family think I'm pretty opinionated. Who is mistaken? Neither, of course. I didn't judge during sessions because that isn't the format. It would mess up my listening mind. It wouldn't transform anything. It would make people feel worse. While all that is possibly still true outside the therapeutic environment, it's damn fun to have a good argument. Maybe not in the cloakroom, but...

Similarly, tweet all day and your mind will be shallow and fragmented, unless you vigilantly curate your feed. Go to a traditional school and you will produce traditional ideas, unless you make a point of rebelling. Hang around with woke people and you will probably become facile with the splendid spectrum of pronouns. 

Format. Context. Method.

So, I've designed improvisations that elevate the sound of language over the meaning. I've created groups that bend toward truth instead of social requirements. And I've tried to avoid formats that make my brain explode. 

That doesn't make me right and you wrong, just because you like cloakrooms and cocktail parties. And it doesn't make me dislike you. In fact, I might admire you a little. Just don't invite me to your opening. 

Hah, no, that's too harsh a conclusion, though I can't go to your opening now, and you probably aren't having one. But if I could and you were, I might spit and stammer before I finally gush appropriately. I might need an hour or a day to recover. It's ok. I'll survive.

oops, or maybe not. ;-)

February 9, 2022

Adaptation

A dear friend innovated to help me participate with power in social engagements. It's hard to get attention when I can't speak. It's hard to be understood when I can't speak. It's hard to get the help I need, hard not to feel alone, hard to shine. But when people really tune in, I am touched. I don't mean that I feel moved, or maybe I do, but what I mean, physically, is that there is contact. 

The world I live in now is unique, and I don't have company in it. I am adapting in crazy ways, unusual ways. You could say that my adaptations are me. 

As I write this the sun is suddenly brandishing its light and the clouds are making room, their edges glowing responsively. Sky makes an appearance after a morning of gray. Each is adapting to the other. My body responds to the change.

I had fun flashing my cards and it made me feel a bit bossy, something that I rarely feel nowadays. My friends were adapting to my limitations, keeping me company in this unique world. This is love.

November 15, 2021

See me...feel me e ee

That's a lot of 'e's, eh? When you make the sound, do you feel it in your throat? your tongue? How about your teeth? Do you feel the resonance in your cheekbones?

There is a big difference, isn't there, between seeing it on the page and feeling it? I thought of this difference the other day on my first wheelchair ride. I had convinced my daughter to leave me outside for a bit so I could feel the breeze. Sitting under a sprawling tree bending in the soon-to-be-stormy wind, watching leaves shimmer a little hysterically, I felt bliss. I was the tree and the wind and the sun. My pores shouted Oneness with All, and I listened. Alas, we were pressed for time; the bit was over too soon, and then I was inside again. 

Inside I can see a tree (I'm lucky, I know), but I cannot feel it. Or so says my limited mind.

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Including Judgement

Updated on Friday, June 11, 2021 at 5:37PM by Elena Taurke

Last night I went to an online premier for a wicked and brilliant and thrilling dance at the Joyce, Giselle of Loneliness, by Katy Pyle. I urge you to buy a ticket and see the show, streaming through June 23rd. In it, seven queer dancers audition for the role of Giselle by dancing a compressed and extremely difficult sequence from the mad scene. Any one of them would blow your mind, and yet we as audience were asked to judge them according to criteria like Jumps and Extension, but also Ethereal and Hysteria and Suffering. I laughed and scoffed but then got into it. We were given 30 seconds so the judgements had to come fast.

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at least...

there is no good reason for this picture of me as a happy kid in flippers. still, here it is. at least you know what is going on... no I don't. This is supposedly a kind of ALS but no one knows the etiology, the mechanism or the cure for ALS. And Progressive Muscle Atrophy is even more rare, so even less studied. 

at least now you know you weren't crazy... I didn't think I was crazy. Did you?

at least now your symptoms make sense... yes, that's a little closer but, as David Byrne said, Stop Making Sense.

Diagnosis does not always confer coherence. In fact, in my experience it rarely does. It's an effort to put a boundary around things that always bleed into each other. But the intersectionality of the body does not succumb to a dose of diagnosis. 

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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

On Limits

Dharma Talk June 30On Super Gay Pride Day, June 30th, the weekend of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, I gave a talk on limits. I've decided to post the whole transcript as well as the link to the talk, just in case you want to hear my personal story and the story of several female Buddhist ancestors, two of them disabled. 

I'm posting the transcript, in its talky format, to save myself time editing. Why? Time limits.

For those of you who don't want to read, I begin by asking, What is a limit? and talk about what we are not able or not allowed to do, how that starts a process of adaptation that can be mutual. We can adapt to the culture and the culture can adapt to us. I use examples to show the complexity of navigation. How do we know whether to sit through pain or change positions? And I conclude with a sweeping generalization: Limit is the answer to limit. We limit our reactions to release us from limited thinking. Our practice of sitting zazen, subtle and mysterious, is a radical act, especially now in the face of weaponized distraction and scapegoating.

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Taking the Poison

Joanna Macy: Ever Widening CirclesYou know how when the jackhammer stops you realize how much your body was participating? It stops, I relax, relieved, now I can write. But then it starts back up again and, oh the pain, can I write through it, with it? It doesn't do any good to try to feel what I felt when it stopped; it just adds a layer of frustration. It doesn't do any good to pretend I don't hear it; that adds a layer of tension and dishonesty. When I'm pretending I'm not noticing, and then there is no flow. Writing about it, on the other hand releases me to make connections, thus:

Some of us want to leave the country. It's just too much. The oligarchs seem to have all the resources, the patriarchy is entrenched, the good don't win, the earth is wailing as we gang rape her. New Zealand looks so much better from here. But recently I listened to a podcast with the very old and very wise Joanna Macy in which she drew inspiration from Rilke as she faced difficulty. Some words from a sonnet to Orpheus:

Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.
As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What's it like, this intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses

Macy talked about what we do if a dear child or our mother is dying. If we love we stay, we try to stay, we don't avoid the pain, and neither should we love the earth less because we fear it to be unhealthy, or even our democracy. Even that. Or our poisonous culture.

I love to say I don't watch TV, don't have a TV, but that requires that I mildly pretend to myself that I am immune from formula, from a hunger for suspense, for romance, for good guys triumphing over the bad, and it is nearly always guys. Looking for a new show to binge, my friend recommended Rectify, and so I watched the whole 20-plus hours, watched the wronged white guy get supported by his family, his black friends who held no resentment for his comparative freedom, and countless lovely women who were smitten by his awesome depth and fascinating awkwardness. Yeah, because I fell for guys like that, wasted a lot of time projecting my own qualities onto them and then trying to obtain them by getting them to love me. It doesn't do any good to try not to do that. I can only ring the bell of pain. And as I do that I hear my voice, and there, I'm free because I already have what I want. 

Now I'm working on understanding Game of Thrones. So far the best part is that instead of checking phones, they have to wait for ravens to deliver news from other realms. What seems problematic are the gorgeous happy naked whores being trained by men to pleasure men (someone tell me they fix this in the next 20 hours!), the equation of honor with blood lineage, the constant butchery and treachery in the name of revenge and justice, and of course the damnable disproportionate screentime for men. If we don't see it, we can't interact with it at all. There are virtually no non-pretty powerful women anywhere in film or TV. Behold the first two lines of the cast page:

70% male

The whole page has 19 women, all beautiful, and 31 men, many old or fat or strange looking. Actually I'm remembering that there is an old woman who played a maid, but she is not included in this cast page. Anyway, seeing this line-up activates the not-enough software installed by the symbiotic glamour industry. I feel mad, gloomy, anxious, want to get highlights, want to disappear. Move back and forth into the change. I am still here, existing as I am, as are the beautiful women around me who don't look like the Hollywood ideal. If I keep showing my face as it is that isn't nothing. It is an intervention. I turn myself to wine. And maybe get some highlights? 

Joanna Macy and others have noted that even as our country is being devoured by the forces of greed there are many communities growing out of a different model, one that acknowledges interconnection and strives for justice and the true equality of appreciating difference. We can ground our attention there while we partake in the poisons. We can notice our breath as we feel jerked around by the unceasing demands to look, to buy, to one-up the other customers. I am a customer, yes, but I am also the mystery at the crossroads of my senses. Thank you, Ms. Macy and Mr. Rilke.

April 2019