The weather’s been perfect lately--cool enough to require a sweater or my perfect new jacket but warm enough to jog in a t-shirt. The past few mornings we woke up to rain, which is something I don’t mind, especially when I know there’s a fine red umbrella hanging on the door that I haven’t lost yet. I drink half a French press of coffee in the morning now. Max became sick just after drinking coffee a few weeks ago so he hasn’t had a stomach for it. He drinks tea for the time being so I grind half as many beans and boil half as much water. The coffee gets me to school and my love for fifteen little people gets me through the morning even if we have to read in unison like robots....Even if Bena, the new girl, is crying again or Erica’s hitting pitches that rattle my brain. The rain clears by the time I venture outside for my afternoon break. On Tuesday the clouds covered the mountains behind Tienmu and on Wednesday they turned purple like cold lips. I went to the Riverside Park near school a few times this week. It is a different park than the one near home, with well-tended gardens and paths lined with trees old enough to co-create canopies. I like their exposed roots, teaming and tangled like piles of worms. The same long white fish fly out of the water in this river and blue herons land where it’s shallow. I saw a man with a sweatshirt that said, “Cornell Dad” on his proud round belly. He was so happy to say hello. Another female runner gave me a look equivalent to a fist-pump. There is something very special about our riverside park but I think I’ll spend time in this one for a while.
So many Taiwanese like to say hello to foreigners. Alyson, Kiah’s good friend, was sweet to let me borrow a bike for the rest of the time I’m here. I get more hellos while riding the bike than I do when I walk places. I guess people become bold knowing we won’t hold eye contact for more than a few seconds. I feel very free riding the bike around. I can’t help but sing children’s songs “Do you know the Chinese Zodiac Signs? Yes! I do! Well what are they?” or the Carol King song that never seems to leave my head, “So far away, doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Other people talk to me when I’m trying to read or write at coffee shops or at picnic tables outside of breakfast places. These interactions are usually awkward, “We can be friends?” sometimes, sketchy, “I know very much about both The West and The Orient. I love classical music, do you? Please can I have your email and phone number?”
Once I talked with a woman for an hour and a half about Buddhism. She gave me a little jade rabbit to hang from my cell phone. I couldn’t manage to string it through the little hole so she did for me. That was on Christmas. She drew pictures and wrote English and Chinese words all over a piece of scrap paper while we talked about reincarnation and the Bible, which she loves to read, and why she goes to Catholic services but ducks out before the group meetings. She told me that certain questions preoccupy certain souls and that the experience of embodiment is a way for a soul to come in contact with those questions. When she reads the Bible she finds things to hold on to and sometimes when she goes to a church service a handful of words hit her just right and stir up her sense of purpose. Other words pass in and out of her like smoke, or don’t even enter her at all because her soul rejects them so strongly. She rejects the certainty of the people in the little group meetings, for example, and the “all or nothing” they say that their son of God requires, the impossibility that other God’s or ideas might help relieve suffering. “Me too!” I say. “You read the Bible?” she asks. When I say “no, I don’t," she tells me, “you should.” And she’s right, I probably should. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her if I would like to sit with her at the edge of her favorite river.
From what I gathered in that conversation as well as talks with Max and Sam, who are studying Buddhism and Daoism, there is no concept of absolute truth in Buddhism. After meditation every Sunday, they sit and listen to their peers ask the teacher questions about anything from poop to burglary to pleasure to karma. He doesn’t claim to give the right answers, he only promises to tell people what he thinks and to share what has helped relief him of some suffering in his own life. He often contradicts himself within a single sentence, gives many different answers to one straight forward question or a simple answer to one that's packed full. He encourages people to listen and take with them what they will, what speaks to their particular preoccupations. There is no moral code in Buddhism, no single way, no fear of contradiction, no demand. There are only suggestions, ideas. Their teacher, in the same vein as the Buddha, encourages his students to practice discipline only in so far as it helps them relieve themselves of unnecessary suffering and helps them recognize what little they actually require to live loving, fulfilling lives. (From all the things I’ve heard, the stuff I share with anyone reading this blog is the stuff that has stuck with me and the stuff I will keep and return to so long as it helps. This is not a comprehensive, or necessarily accurate description of Buddhism, only my impression of other people's impressions.)
I don’t believe that I have ever truly suffered, but I have been pained, saddened, hateful, and a host of other negative things. I set bombs to my insecurities and fears and they blow up in my head, splatter smut on its walls and distort the way I look at the world. I have a wonderful life full of love, security, power, and opportunity, and yet still I set off these bombs. I’m not angry with myself about this. I am not perfect. Everyone falls victim to these mental spirals, and, from what I hear, no one Max and Sam studies with would dismiss me for my superficial and self-induced aches or call them insignificant. No one would judge me for taking pleasure in material things. I think that their teacher would be happy to see me enjoying myself, but he might ask why I take pleasure in a morning glory muffin from Wild Oats Bakery in Brunswick Maine (let’s just say, because I could really go for one right now), and whether or not I felt attached to it or felt that I really needed it to be content. I want to enjoy those kinds of things, not depend on them or live for them.
Max and I have had another flu since the last one I wrote about. I haven’t been able to depend on my body these past few months. I’m trying to appreciate my health now and to keep in mind that I’ve been healthy throughout my life. Max listened to something about how much a false idea of permanence impacts our existence. When we get sick we feel like we’re always sick. It’s hard to remember what it feels like to be healthy and hard to remind ourselves that we will be healthy again. And then if it’s not one thing it’s another. Our bodies are hardly perfect machines, or a machine at all really. They never promise to be. I’m practicing letting my mind take me out of these things. Not to ignore them, but to get along with them and to pay respect to all that’s working. It’s so easy to run around trying to catch the things that are wrong. I trap them in a jar and call people over to come look. I don’t trap them long. I see something else in the corner of my eye and unscrew the lid, free the old thing and race to catch the new one. They’re all so fleeting, these preoccupations. When I can, I just want to watch them fly by.
And so…
Bye-bye guilt for not writing in the damn blog for a while (I haven’t felt like it), bye-bye guilt for eating the muffin, bye-bye timeline, bye-bye mistake, bye-bye headache, jealousy, unproductive judgment, disgust with self, pressure, feigned confidence, so much pressure! Self-inflicted! I can be quite hard on myself. The sad truth is that I’ve been quite devoted, at least in the last year or two, to a shady idea that good comes from self-criticism and self-improvement (Oh New England, you made a Little Wom[a]n out of me!) Think: There are so many things wrong with the way I exist! The privilege I experience! And so I ought to do so much with what I have. I must set goals and accomplish them. I must be responsible. I must not offend. I must think through. Out of fear that I will do the wrong thing, the ignorant thing, offer the wrong interpretation, or offer no interpretation when one is called for… aiyah! This double checking has become part of my identity, and I’m not sure how I feel about it or what to do. It’s certainly a post-grad preoccupation of mine, which this blog is a testament to. I like to remember that I wasn’t always this way. I used to live with less trepidation. I was unprepared to look out at the world, and, of course, I still am in so many ways, but I offered my love to strangers a lot more easily. Feeling, rather painfully, my unpreparedness, I learned to look in more because that seemed like the best, or at least the more possible, way to be a good citizen of the world. But I’m less and less sure. My co-worker called me a “typical writer,” and, to clarify, “rather neurotic.” Immediately following his comment, my interior dialogue went something like this, Shit. What makes him think that? Am I always talking about myself? Am I really so self-involved? Do I make a lot out of a little? Am I negative and awful to be around? Am I just a conditional? A human conditional? A giant “but”? I write a blog! Ah! He’s so right! We’re all pretty self-involved, and I heard a good argument about why I am particularly so. We forget to notice the difference between things that happen and things that happen to us. He apologized later, “I’m sorry, I can be blunt,” which made me feel worse at the time. But all of this brought me to consider that lately I look in more than I look out.
I’ve believed many different things, lived many different ways, harbored many opposing thoughts, and through all of this I’ve been Sophie. I like to remember that.
This poem is for Alex,
Am I the way my hair smells
at the end of this muggy day
(and every muggy day of my life)
or the things I thought
just before that thought,
which I can’t even remember now?
Certainly I am more those things
than what I say I think is beautiful today,
or what I think is good.
One summer I felt very lonely.
I sat down in a diner
with a cousin I don’t often see
in a city we both happened to live in.
“It’s okay,” she said,
“I know the way you eat yogurt with a spoon.”
That is enough, I felt,
to house different versions
of all the good people
I have loved.
To be the idea of me in her memory.
I must tell you that part of me liked being called a “typical writer.” It made me feel authentic, like a “kind of person,” made for some special sort of work.
I believe (today) that what we do becomes a part of who we are and the goals we set for ourselves, whether we accomplish them or not, drop us off at different vantage points that are useful to look in or out from. But we are not what we do; our meaning is not so static as that. We are the composition of all we’ve done and all that we’ll do in our lifetimes (and who knows? perhaps for lifetimes and lifetimes after this…) We are constantly in the making and never made.
He has a point about writers, doesn’t he? Isn’t it true that that's what writer’s do--make a lot out of a little? Find big things behind little things? Or find the small, contradicting parts of big things. Shatter concepts into a million pieces. Shatter love and hate, hunger, pity and power. Pick up a moment, feeling, gesture, and put a human reflection in it? Ask someone else to see his own reflection in the same slice of glass. Do we connect with other people because we see our own face in the same glass someone else saw her face in? Or do we connect because we see her face, and it looks hurt. I have no idea. I’d like to think it’s the latter. But how well do we really see people? How long must we travel through ourselves before we get to something like compassion?
In the introduction to my college writing thesis I wrote about the stretching that happens in fiction-making. It feels good to scrounge around in my life, hold up old costumes, lost and new-found convictions, the stuff that pinned my core, and then take someone else’s measurements, remake these experiences of self on them. Sometimes, even if just for a second, I get behind that person’s eyes and I feel as close to myself, and, simultaneously, as far away from myself as I’ve ever been.
And so it’s for this good reason, and other’s too, that I want to keep up with this writing even as I put to bed most of what I’ve written so far in Taiwan. In fact, I’ve written very little lately and I choose to be okay with that. I choose to be a part of all kinds of good happening all around me.
You might remember that I felt myself leaning back into life when I first got here, “This feeling reminds me of making risotto, and of scenes in Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist, a pensive man, walked around the empty ally behind his row house in search of his wife's cat. Physically, it feels like the overly anxious parts of me sit back in a rocker with a drink, letting the five senses do all the heavy lifting (living). These old traits are just sort of watching the new world pass by fast and hot and bright and crowded and overwhelmingly kind, helpful. It's a general sense of reserve that appeals to me now (and might make me lonely for home later). I don't feel pressure to "make more" of the minute/I'm not pressuring myself to "make more" of the minute (to clarify: for me, this sense of duty too often derives from negative, artificial things). I'm letting each minute be itself. It's not so much a resigned to fate attitude as a resigned to time one, or a refreshing lack of control. "We have nothing to gain. We have nothing to lose," Max tells me.” The funny thing is, after several months now, that sounds about right again.
I think I’ll write more soon, but before that I'll look out. I'll take a scooter trip around the island of Taiwan, listen to firecrackers and good tidings, get a little smelly and wet, take pictures and live some "it could only happen in Taiwan" stories to share with you all when I return to Xiamen Je.
On a totally unrelated note, I just saw a woman feeding french fries to her pet pig.
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