Monday, June 27, 2011

Some stuff I want to share

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--
I keep it, staying at Home--
Within a Bobolink for a Chorister--
And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice--
I, just wear my Wings--
And instead of tolling the bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton--sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman--

And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last--
I'm going, all along.
                  --Emily Dickinson

"Prayer"
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
                  --Galway Kinnell

"An Invisible Bee"
Look how desire has changed in you,
how light and colorless it is,
with the world growing new marvels
because of your changing.

Your soul has become an invisible bee.
We don't see it working,
but there's the full honeycomb.

Your body's height, six feet or so,
but your soul rises through nine levels of sky.

A barrel corked with earth
and a raw wooden spile
keeps the oldest vinyard's wine inside.

When I see you,
it is not so much your physical form,
but the company of two riders,
your pure-fire devotion and your love
for the one who teaches you.

Then the sun and moon on foot behind those.
                              --Rumi

     "For this open-air sanctuary that a lot of us live in, without buildings, or doctrine, or clergy, without silsila (lineage), or heirarchy, in an experiment to live not so much without religion as in friendship with all three hundred of them, and all literatures too. It is a brave try for openness and fresh inspiration.
     It is what sent Whitman out walking around Brooklyn. His mother said, He goes out and he comes back in: that's all he does. It is what prompted Thoreau's rambling retreat to Walden Pond. It is Huck floating on the river at night. Melville looks out his study window in the Berkshires and writes the ocean of Moby Dick. Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises slips into an old Spanish church to listen to his thoughts. Wallace Stevens speaks from inside the intensest redezvous, where God and the imagination are one. Joseph Campbell follows his bliss, researching myth and symbol in the New York Public Library. Gary Snyder works on an axe handle in the high Sierra. Annie Dillard stares down into Tinker Creek. REM's Michael Stipe stands on stage, Losing my religion. Iris DeMent suggests that we Let the mystery be. All are participating in this global amateur production. We are lucky to have so many luminous figures in this country, but this lineage is not American. It comes down through such varied innumerable strands that it cannot be called a lineage at all.
     The records of wandering kept by Basho, Cervantes, Homer, and Allan Ginsberg. Mary Oliver's faithful early morning walks with a rainproof surveyors notebook in her hip pocket. John Muir and Audubon. Anyone who heads out to see what happens, just to enjoy the trip. Needn't go far, needn't leave town. Rumi says that merely being in a body and sentient is a state of pure rapture. Form is ecstatic. Those who know that are the ones I'm talking about, and to. Those photographers who love wilderness and the depths of a human facde. The radiant noticing of animals that shows in the cave drawings. It comes through Van Gogh and Cezanne, the way they saw splendor transpiring through what appears. Dutch light. Through Blake. All religions are one, saith Willy, and energy is eternal delight. Hopkins. It comes through south India and the Sufis. Indigenous rock art. Tibet. Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Bodhidarma, Rinzai, and that homely flower Mahakashyap was handed by his friend Gautama. That theology flower of suchness might be a logo for it. No, no names. No flag. Dreamtime drawings. Chekhov's holy chuckle, Dostoyevsky's vivid seekers. The great Greeks and their love of impossible human conversation. Socrates and Plato are saints in this tradition. Saint Francis and my grandson Tuck, too, he will be suprised to know. All children. Gurdjieff. Ramakrishna. Camus and Beckett. Plotinus. Neitzsche prancing naked."
                                           --Coleman Barks, introduction to A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings.

So, I hope you guys enjoy the above. I'm stuck in a building with internet (oh no!) waiting out a wave of back pain, and I found this book.  Normally I don't go in for intro's. Usually I decide I'm only interested in the subject of the book, not some editor's discussion thereof. At best, they're often boring, and at worst, they color your ability to innocently approach the real content.  However, I decided to look at this intro, and MAN!! The poems are from the intro (except the Rumi, which is today's reading), and the excerpt... that was a hard choice. Frankly I thought about putting the whole intro on here. It's exstatic poetry in itself, in my opinion.  Anyway, I highly suggest, if you see a copy of this collection of Rumi, that you read the intro for yourself.  Lovely. :)

Nothing new to report here. It's hot. Thinking about splurging for a hotel and the end of this trip just to spend a day on ice (aaaaaair conditioniiiiiiiing......) Generally, all is well here. Grateful for a wonderful morning ascension and then finding this book. Grateful for the grace given to allow me to see this world through unveiled innocent eyes. Grateful for the mystery and the intimacy of "being in a body and sentient." Somehow grateful for pain and fear, as gifts... but I can't figure out how to explain what I mean by that.  Grateful for faith and the immaculate Presence of God. Grateful for the big oneness, of these trees and sunbeams and all the people mentioned above. "Sticks and stones are both made of energy, like love and language. Eddington says the universe is less like a thing than it is like a thought." (Again, Barks) Eddington isn't the only one to say this... what a thing!! That all this is but a though of the One Great Mind, and that there is no such thing as "me" and "that"...  Yummmmmmmmm....

Monday, June 20, 2011

Two-fer

Don’t look at the bones
We had goat for dinner!! It was sooo good.  Mind you, there wasn’t much of it, but it was de-licious.  My body was pretty excited.  By the way, I actually eat pretty well here.  We have ceeb u jen every day for lunch, which means I get my fill of eggplant, carrot, cabbage, sweet-potatoes (there’s are much tastier than ours, but white, so probably not as good for you), turnips, and fish. I just have to try not to eat too much rice with it, because dinner is almost always almost all rice.  Usually this mash of rice called mbaxkal, or something close to that.  So, the reason for the title is because of the last time we had mbaxkal. There was meat in it, which is not usually the case, so like tonight, I jumped on it.  Unfortunately the meat isn’t cut the same here and you never know if what you’re putting in your mouth is actually meat, or a strange conglomeration of fat and bone with unidentifiable chewy stuff… So, last time we apparently ate something’s head.  Most bites of meat I got were mostly fat and weird stuff, but I persevered hoping for some protein.  One bite had a large piece of bone in it.  Everyone here sucks the marrow out of bones (this is actually not a good idea for me, I mean, I think it’s mostly fat), still, when in Rome and all that. So I sucked on this big chunk of bone for a minute before spitting it out into my left hand. It was a piece of jaw. I wasn’t sucking on marrow; I was basically sucking on cow plaque. Forcing my churning stomach to settle I ate a bit more rice and called it a night. Frankly I’m sure even that meal was pretty patron. A lot of my friends in other villages claim to mostly eat plain rice or millet, so I seem to have hugely lucked out. 
And I still seem to be losing a bit of weight. Just a little. Probably just related to the daily walking, fetching water, cleaning stuff in my room, general living stuff.  I’m good with that though.  Of course people here think it’s a good thing to “am yerem” (literally to have a body), and seem confused that I do yoga not to “dolli sama yerem” (add to my body), but to do the opposite (oversimplification, but my simple language skills cause me to do a lot of that.)
I’ve gotten down to actually doing a little work, finally.  I’ve been here a month tomorrow, so I’m really right on track as far as Peace Corps are concerned.  I’m painting a map of the world on the wall in my counterpart’s classroom (something like 5th grade). They have maps of Senegal in every classroom, but not of the world. To me, it’s obvious why this is a good idea. And to him too. But there are people in my village who don’t seem to get it. In fact one woman seemed actually opposed to it. … I’ll stop there with that train of though.  Anyway, I’ll finish it Sunday, Inshallah (God willing). Coming up on the 24th I’ll be helping transplant some trees the students planted with my ancien (the volunteer before me) into the school yard. I am the lorax, I speak for the trees! No. Maybe a little. What else… I’ve spent the last week getting ready to start my base-line survey. I used my ancien’s close-of-service report to get a feel for what’s happening here and learn the demographics, and then I used the Peace Corps guidelines and what I do know to brainstorm the questions for the survey.  I’ll be going house to house talking about water, sanitation, health-care, environmental stuff (what is this? It’s so amorphous…), trying to figure out how I can best help in the two years I have here.
Two years, yeah. Sometimes when I think about that it’s still overwhelming and I get a tiny urge to cut and run. But really, I can totally see living here for two years. No problem. It’s become completely comfortable, and I’m so excited to continue building relationships with the people here. And to keep learning Wolof! It’s so Fun for me, learning this language. Speaking in Wolof, thinking in Wolof, and it’s still super exciting when I make a joke in Wolof that actually works.
Hmm… all for now, I guess.  Oh! Just a quick note about kids. I love my brothers two year old Djibi. He’s taken to mobbing me. As in, he smiles, starts running his little wobbly bow-legged two-year old run, straight for me, and then hurls himself on me laughing. It’s nice getting these wild hugs occasionally. However, yesterday as I was walking to the other family house, I found him out in the clearing crying.  I didn’t know why, and he wouldn’t walk with me back to where his mom was. So, I picked him up to carry him.  Bad idea. He was crying because he pooped his pants. Which meant I had poop on my shirt… Not my favorite Djibi moment, but, hey, what are you gonna do. He’s two. Today he actually pooped on the floor in my room… His mom cleaned it up with bleach, so, … yeah. Yummy. If he wasn’t so flipping cute… 

Okay, theres a good reason for this:
I’m really bothered by the fact that science consistently ignores the fact that all the “laws” of reality are based on our observations of this reality.  We’re constantly projecting this reality on theoretical other realities.  I just finished “the Big Bang” by Simon Singh.  Really good. Really interesting. But in the epilogue, after acknowledging that we’re constantly revising our understanding of reality because of previously assumed to be impossible or just never thought of data, and after acknowledging that the Big Bang Was the Start of space and time, this very reality did not exist before it, and in fact the phrase “before the big bang” has no meaning for the same reason, … so, after all that, he says that if we’re just one universe within a multi-verse, then the other universes therein would be non-viable or even rapidly self destructing if they varied even slightly on the six criteria on which we can measure our universe (including gravitational constants, the way molecules form, etc.) Now, I’m no physicist, but how can we assume that atoms form the same way in a different universe that we have No data for? We literally cannot conceive of something so foreign.  How do we even know that in these theoretical multiverses atoms are the building blocks of matter? Or that matter is even a thing there? Why the obsession with formulas that we can plug things into to figure them out?  There is a different kind of understanding that is possible, and in my experience more meaningful, but impossible to describe. Like this thing I’m saying right now. It could be easily written off for any number of reasons. I mean, it’s entirely theoretical and I have no formal education in the subject matter. But I know this to be true.
Similarly, what’s with the dichotomizing? Like the claim that science and religion can “live side by side.” That you can Either look at the universe as random and view our existence thereby as a happy coincidence, OR look at the universe as divinely created to support our existence.  Or at best that you can believe a mélange of the two?  Why are these things viewed as paradoxical? Maybe the universe was constructed scientifically with the joyous consequence of our existence, full in every molecule, every sub-atomic particle of GOD, just joyously dancing through this wild energy-matter?
Hopefully that’s not too rambly. I won’t blame anyone for not getting through this, but as you can imagine, this is far beyond my grasp to discuss in Wolof. Though I very much want to try and just might later tonight.  That said, PLEASE comment on this for me!! I desperately miss conversations like this.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Is this worth blogging?

I’m in Saint-Louis, and there are all kinds of food options here.  But today I made my own lunch. What is it? Cheesy peas!! Aka, a can of peas cooked with two pieces of laughing cow cheese mixed in. A classic! This was sometimes dinner in Springfield and even once or twice back in Eureka.  So, why did I turn down an outing to get hamburgers or pizza?  Because last night I literally dreamed about eating vegetables.  It was a giant bowl of soup with large chunks of eggplant, carrot, broccoli, cauliflower, there was even blue broccoli. Definitely my body trying to tell me something. 
So, Cheesy Peas!!!!  And Fanta, which I’ve developed a love for.
Should I say something slightly more substantive? So, I’m here in the city for two and a half days, approximately.  Right now it’s the start of the second day. And I just already miss my village. It’s nice here, and there are great creature comforts, but on the island (the seriously touristy part of town), it’s all Africans selling touristy things to toubabs, or serving them their food and drinks for God knows how little money. And at night, it’s just one big part for the toubabs, and frankly, that scene largely just makes me tired anymore.  Nothing wrong with it, just I can’t seem to muster up any interest. I guess this is a good thing, but it just adds to the sense of isolation of being here. Which, don’t worry, is not a problem. It’s wonderful to truly experience the calm of just being okay inside yourself in new situation, and letting all the changing forms of emotion pass through. Feeling them, letting them go, all that.  So last night we were sitting at a bar called the Sputnik, this awkward Russian themed bar with a painting of Jimi Hendrix on the wall that almost looked like Michael Jackson, and more and more toubabs kept coming in, passing the Senegalese bouncers to do so. Strangely, there were several times where a Senegalese man would walk a girl in only to turn around and leave. It was tripping me out a little, wondering, “what’s going on here?” Then I saw a man walk up to the two guards with a tray of attaya glasses.  Such a lovely gesture! They must do that every night. Everyone here drinks attaya several times a day, including at about 10:00 PM. That’s Senegal. That’s where I want to be, not in a weird tourist bar. 
So, I’m here ‘til tomorrow, and I am excited to go to the Jazz Fest tonight and hopefully hear some lovely music.  But I’ll be glad to get back to the simple life of the village. Back to speaking Wolof and greeting everyone I pass. Back to the sheep and the chickens and the children who call me “Lama” (classic L-R phoneme jumble.) Back to my friends there. How lovely is it that this is already happening?  It’s lovely J

Monday, June 6, 2011

Settling in...

Returning to my village was like showing up at a camp site. You realize how quiet it is, how much better the air is, how pretty it is, and you’re legitimately happy that there’s a bit of work ahead of you related, simply, to the business of living.  I like getting my water from the well.  I like doing my laundry by hand sitting in the shade of a tree. I love how peaceful it is here.  Definitely glad they put me in a little village now that I’m over the initial shock and trepidation. 
Nothing new really to report.  Jazz fest is coming up in a few days. This is an international music festival held here in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and I’m super psyched to spend a night there. I will also try to upload my newest photos while I’m at the regional apartment for that.
Today. Not much to say. I actually spent the better part of the day in my room resting to get over a strange combination of biir bun daw (stomach that runs) and dizziness.  Which may or may not have been related. I tend to get dizzy spells associated with spiritual movement, so maybe that’s all that was. I think it’s over…? I was super glad I left my room when I did. The women were having their Sunday gathering, and it was lovely to see some friends there.  Even if I still mostly sit and listen. Also, the kids here are a saving grace.  I think I’m far more amused by them that the other women simply because I don’t have any, so I’m not constantly dealing with their shenanigans.  I can always use more playing with kids in my day.  Their innocent goofiness is so lovely! When I came home, my brothers two-year old son was crazy.  He was interested in the keys attached to the strap of my backpack, and would chase them as I turned in circles where I stood. For some reason, this was hilarious to me, and we both just laughed and spun until he fell over from the dizziness. Adorable.  THEN I saw KITTENS!!! There are four baby baby kittens living in my family’s shed that my host sister-in-law takes care of.  ADORABLE!! The people here don’t play with their animals. They don’t hold them or pet them. They throw things at them when they get too close.  So the animals don’t exactly trust people. But these kittens are sooo young, I have hope that we can be friends J Pictures to follow.  Adorable!!
Dinner time!