It's a Long, Long Trail: Some Thoughts on Spiritual Practice

This is a popular quote, and there are a lot of images of it on Google.  I like this one, which shows a woman who is experiencing some "negative" emotion.  Negative emotions are those the culture doesn't want women to have, like being royally pissed off.  Men are allowed to have those; in fact, they're the hallmark of a Real Man, the kind who beats his wife, then apologizes abjectly, blubbering, drunk, of course, then beats her again and again and so on until something gets her to a safe house.  It should be called Rage Disorder, but the women could not get that into the DSM-IV.  There's a whole book about that.

Or maybe she's experiencing the astonishment of realizing what she's been put through because she was born with a vagina.  Not leaving out you men; there are victims among you, too.  But in my category - intractable PTSD caused by childhood sexual-and-emotional abuse, it seems that more of the victims are women. This is usually not diagnosed.  Instead, the locked-off pain manifests as chronic depression or bipolar disorder or fibromyalgia or underachievement, or all of these with anorexia and psychosomatic ailments thrown in.  Don't leave out the alcoholism.  Girls Wine and Whine.  And then, Smile!  There are no effective medications for any of these effects of abuse.  How could there be?

Here's the truth that pisses me off: the quote is true.  Reality is sometimes hard to face.  That would be why a lot of people don't.

What you think when you start meditating is that it will cure you, relieve your stress, make you happy, and also nice.  Yes, it does allow a space for healing, it will relieve stress for a while, maybe even for a few hours afterward.  But that just gives you fresh eyes on your condition, your life.  After a while, little unwelcome insights will start creeping into the meditation itself, Yow!  The mind clamps down on that, and the meditation becomes boring.  You get restless.  You think, This isn't doing a thing for me.  You decide to try something else.

The road to realization is less traveled for a damn good reason, in other words.  There are passages on the Way that are subject to avalanches of unwelcome memories, tears, rage.  Most people - even those who've had a chance to work with  genuine teachers - quit the Buddha way.  From where I live, it looks like half the Buddhist Teachers in America are in California, but you wouldn't believe how many unenlightened people are lying around beached out there.  People with opportunity.  Some of them - most of them, I bet - tried meditation.  My (estranged) sister once told me she went to hear Thich Nhat Hahn.  Shrug.  "It didn't do anything for me."  Well, neither did the desert in bloom (a wonderful metaphor and fact.)


If you are practicing outside an authentic system, if you don't have a teacher who's actually walked the whole damn path, you haven't got a chance.  Facing life will scare you to look for another self-styled Life Coach or Guru, another cheery book, another sweet quote, a great new recipe, oh, of course, new shoes! - in short, another way to escape reality.  That's the road more taken.

You wouldn't believe how I had to search to find a version of this as I remembered it.  Thank you, Kenneth Moody-Arndt.   I especially like this verse:
You must go and stand your trials.
You have to stand them by yourself.

Small talk, and being small

Seems demeaning when you do it to a dog

I've been intrigued by this subject for a long time, since Leslie offered, "I hate small talk!"  Why? I wondered.  I thought small talk was as defined in the dictionaries---
-casual or trivial conversation.
-light conversation for social occasions
-unimportant subjects of conversation, as opposed to serious or weighty ones.
or in Tolstoy---
"Do tell me something amusing but not spiteful," said the ambassador's wife, a great proficient in the art of that elegant conversation called by the English, small talk."  But I also find synonyms, like babble, prattle that have a negative cast.

Personally, I love the small talk I have with people most Sundays after the service. Maybe it's because we have been quiet and turned toward the spiritual and are not drinking (it's been a while since I was at a cocktail party, but I remember the talk as deadly dull, as it usually seems to be at any event when I'm not drinking and other people are.) It's as if, after church, we touch down for a few moments and talk about what's important instead of circling it with that "babble"  It's my favorite social time.

Maybe what Leslie hated was that other kind of small talk, the prattle instilled in girls, thus in women.  Because it has turned out that she wanted to be someone other than the role defined for her by her mother's life, and she has done some brave things. Maybe she resented her lifelong roles as wife and mother and very good housekeeper.

Yesterday I wrote about good housekeeping, and how the preoccupation with it does not seem congruent with being an artist. No, because it implies a lot of attention given to something other than art, thought, creativity.  Being a girl excludes more than that---it calls for fluffy indecisiveness; lack of interest in world events or, indeed, in ideas; lack of personal ambition.  For girls, life resides in relationships or the lack of them, usually meaning relationship with a man.  So it is about being cute, lovable.

Why do I bother to write?  You can go to Wikipedia on cuteness in Japanese culture and there is so much there, or check out the other nearly four million entries on this subject.  Cuteness is about women, sometimes men, being docile, about looking like children, including maintaining the slender body of a barely pubescent teen, if it kills you.  And it is well-known that it does; anorexia has become one of our standing social problems.

I seem to have known where to begin with this, but not where it would take me.  I just read a report on patriarchy and female subordination that lays out clearly what some of us started talking about in the late sixties. It's from a study done in Zimbabwe, but it strikes very close to home.  A good place for anyone to start who doesn't feel like dressing up as a Princess for Halloween.