Sites for meditation, sites for living, sites for having stuff

A friend years ago had a crush on this girl named Stephanie. I was seventeen at the time and Stephanie was twenty-two, and although both my friend and I felt very mature, I could still tell there was something very different about this twenty-two year old’s life. I thought my friend’s crush on this woman was a little ridiculous - a little too earnest considering the situation. Stephanie did not really seem interested in dating my friend. Stephanie confessed she was having a difficult time with her own relationship. Stephanie had a job other than going to school everyday. So I couldn’t worry that much about my friend’s infatuation with this woman; my friend’s constant pining and concern about what Stephanie thought about her.

I was not impressed by Stephanie. I thought she probably did not return any of my friend’s affection, that perhaps she was even annoyed by it, but tried to protect my friend from any heartbreak even when I thought it would probably be best for everyone if she just came out and said, you’re sixteen and it’s just not going to happen.

However Stephanie’s apartment always impressed me. Its aesthetic affects me still. The apartment was always clean. Small, its walls were white and unpainted. The hardwood floors were a light, honey colored brown. Worn down, they could have used some refinishing. Stephanie owned very little furniture and there were very few decorations. There was a couch, a chair, and a bed with a white cover. She’d hung no paintings on the walls, but there were a few plants set around the apartment, healthy and green, tendrils rappelling down from the top shelf to collect the light from a window overlooking downtown Birmingham.

I always knew that my apartment needed to look like this: simple, white, and clean. 

It never has.

I have too many things. Even now as I look around I see things that I should get rid of. Treasures on tables that I should clear to feel happier, calmer. These things come to me unbidden and I can’t escape them. At work, I have a stuffed monkey and a small spongy purple alien on my desk, gifts from coworkers. And because they’re gifts I can’t get rid of them. They just sit there taking up space and staring at me as I stare at my computer screen. But even the thought of dumping them or stuffing them in a drawer makes me sad, as if the secret world of things had desires and needs for attention and love like animals in a shelter.

I don’t make a lot of trash at all, which sometimes becomes a problem when something starts to stink though the trash bag isn’t a quarter full. But there’s still too much. And there’s still too much stuff here. Just things. Just too many things in my apartment. But I never know what to give or throw away.

There’s always more to get rid of and there’s more to buy. We all have those mental lists of things that we would like, things that would make our lives easier. I dream of new speakers and a new pannier for my bicycle. I need a spray bottle to keep some of the plants moist and a shoe rack to organize the space by the door. I want to finish building this small aquarium to fill with duckweed and Marimo moss balls. I have no idea where I would even put it. There is no more room left for plants. There’s no room for anything. And I don’t need more things. I need fewer.

I saw an advertisement for Amazon’s “Cyber Monday” specials and clicked on the link. I don’t think I knew just what to expect and most of it was uninspiring, the odds and ends of Americana. A thermos. A trampoline. A sale on fleece tops. A set of golf clubs made from plush material for infants. These are the things we could do without, the things we could buy for ourselves when we need them, on a whim, in the grocery store. There are no dreams behind these gifts. They don’t need to be on sale. They are novelties and trivialities.

And then there was the best, most bizarre item being offered up on sale on Amazon’s Cyber Monday. I said, which of these things is not like the others? It’s billed as a “Meditation Grotto of Sorrento.” Within a faux envelope of rock “carved” with roses, a statue of Jesus frowns out, the sacred heart aflame in his chest, his upturned palms punctured and bleeding. 

In the photo it looks as if the statue could be fairly large standing on this lawn, but at thirty-six inches tall, the statue actually seems awkwardly sized, as least to be out in a great open space like this. The seller describes the piece as a, “timeless, European-style grotto… [a] "destination spot" for meditation.” It’s always nice to be able to bring a little bit of classic European meditation inspiration to the United States. I can’t find any reference to a Grotto of Sorrento like this actually existing in Europe.

If I had a lawn, what would be in it? How much more crap would I have? Lawn gnomes and those shiny balls on pedestals. Cheap water fountains lined in black plastic with koi fish swimming for raccoons to eat. A garden overrun with herbs and flowers and plants growing tangle that discourages tending. A compost heap smelly and overflowing. A resin Jesus tucked away by some tree near a concrete bench. You know, for meditation.

excerpt from "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become."

I think so many of those who move away for whatever reason and return "home" experience something like this.

visions in birmingham

everything could have been different. i can feel it. 

i’m sitting at a coffeeshop in birmingham, alabama, across from a park on highland avenue, a coffeehouse that didn’t exist when i lived here half a decade ago. i walked down the hill from my sister’s apartment for a cup of coffee. sitting out on the sidewalk, i take off my jacket. nine in the morning and the day is warming up. i had expected a snow storm, more of the unusually extreme cold weather the south has experienced this year. instead, the sun shines, the temperature approaches 70. bare trees have not deterred the happy chirping of birds, and i can feel spring fast defrosting on the second of march.

two women on the far side of the patio talk of running and biking. they discuss their friend from california.

a middle-aged couple, dressed warmly in fleece north face jackets over work out clothes finished with running shoes. two australian shepherds with kind brown eyes snuffle for crumbs around their feet. i drink coffee and crease my brow at my computer screen. the dogs notice i have a muffin.

the young cashier might be homosexual. evenly dressed in a t-shirt and khakhis. he wears a hemp bracelet colored red and dark red. a display for bible bars sits next to the register - they contain 18 biblically approved ingredients as found in dueteronomy. his eyes are dark brown and worried like the australian shepherds’ on the sidewalk. he’s polite, but not friendly. maybe he mistrusts me, wonders why he doesn’t recognize me. it’s birmingham and all gays know each other.

a young man approaches quickly on the sidewalk and sits down amidst a scrabble of aussies and smiles at the older couple in front of him. he asks for their debit card, explaining that he left his in a bar last night, grinning mischievously. his parents acquiesce.

fair haired, weak chinned, blemishless, when the young man returns to the table, he explains to his parents that the reason a few of the men at the bar have not been talking to him is because some “tranny” had been talking shit about him behind his back. dressed in workout clothes like his parents, he waves flamboyantly at two girls passing on the sidewalk.

the parents look happily at their son, indulgently in love with him. the son seems comfortable with himself. this is a young southern man who came out to his parents what must seem to him years ago. his father probably said nothing. his father was probably still disappointed to hear it from his son’s lips, but had been expecting this for years. at this point, retired, his parents just want to enjoy their lives, their vacations, their coffee, their dogs. they find themselves disappointed only when their son asks for money. they always indulge.

the fair haired faggot enjoys his life in birmingham. he’s completing a nursing degree and spends weekend nights at a gay bar, living on vodka diet sprite and gossip. he only has safe sex with other young gay men his age. to his friends, he sometimes laments the fact that he hasn’t found a new boyfriend yet. he has more fun making fun of the old queens who have been struggling with hiv since he was in diapers.

when i lived in birmingham i knew boys like this. their lives, their concerns always seemed so remote from my own.

i close my computer and start back up the hill, walking toward my sister’s house with the rest of my coffee.

freezing fog

a freezing fog had come and gone before i woke, leaving white footprints over the morning: grass that crunched under foot, solid white car windows, a spider web thickly crystalized on the railing. it didn’t smell like snow, but almost. it could. it could be soon. even in oregon, even in alabama.

 

and i remember a morning in bed, back in birmingham, watching the snow fall, the window directly in front of us full of static. cold, we stayed wrapped up under the covers. i read the paper and he flipped through a book filled with pictures of paris.

 

clear skies with a chance of snow. i want one of those mornings with adam. i want to wake up with him and see flurries, to decide it’s too dangerous to go into work, to drink coffee and stay in bed. i want the day to be so quiet, the city stopped by magic. i want to re-live all these memories with this man who i now love.

 

having dated adam for a while, memories that were once cherished and meaningful and beautiful to me have changed. moments that i once lamented as lost, times i would have gladly lived again, i now want to re-edit with adam in that picture. these reminiscences have turned sour and i question how happy i had been, how much i loved any moment. i wonder if i had just been delusional or naive.

 

this is unfair to my memories and to the people that i loved. adam and i won’t eat sesame tofu at my favorite chinese restaurant in birmingham. i’m not even vegetarian anymore! but we do search portland for good chinese restaurants and authentic chinese dishes. recently adam introduced me to dan dan mien, thick spicy ground beef over noodles like spaghetti. adam can’t coo in french with me but teaches me mandarin, the tones awkward and stilted as they come out of my mouth, my throat hoarse from strangling the 3rd tone.

 

adam and i might miss the snow. the weather report threatens snow tomorrow but we won’t wake up together. tonight, i’ll sleep at my house, take care of my cat who has become listless and sad because of the cold weather. we’ll wake up separately and go to work. and tomorrow after work we might warm ourselves with whiskey, bundles up against the un-snowy cold.

first movements

i usually can’t even remember a fraction of a refrain.

 

those first few notes are warming. and i think, “oh, yes. exactly. this is exactly it.” and the rest of the music is memory after memory as the progression folds out before me, as each modulation of the melody returns to me.

 

don’t let me pretend i really know anything about the history of music, but i’ve had a very long love affair with tchaikovsky’s first violin concerto in d. at sixteen i listened to the first movement every afternoon. after having come home from school, i watched the sun set in the west from my bedroom window and i listened to tchaikovsky.

 

even if you can only remember a few bars from swan lake, you know tchaikovsky can be dramatic. sentimental and sweet then suddenly tragic. this concerto swings back and forth, walking a fine line between each. the reach of the sweetest arpeggio suddenly turns into a minor chord, a saddest underscoring it all. petite violin solos puff and swell into the full-throated rejoinder of an orchestra.

 

maybe that’s why i liked it as a teenager: i liked how dramatic it was. i liked how the darker side of the melody could match my melancholy and then suddenly stand at odds with my mood all together. i liked that the loneliness i felt in that music, undertones of sadness despite the plucky phrases that supported the composition. i liked loosing myself in thought, sitting on a stool by the the window, the sun setting in line with my bedroom window. i liked thinking about myself listening to this music every afternoon; i liked building this image and ritual for myself.

 

now, this music functions on a different level for me. the concerto is precious to me. when i hear it again, not only does the long walk through the movement’s architecture map itself in front of me, but all these teenage emotions and memories compound themselves up, turrets and walls and great halls and hidden passages. i recognize the melodrama of the composition now. more mature, my relationship to the emotion of the movement has changed. i can take a step back from its swelling emotion, its bipolar shifts. i can think about it more objectively.

 

lovely, i can leave this for a while, then come back for its key, press play, and let the music construct again my memory.

jordan, never down and out

i said, “good morning.  how are you?”

she said, “fine.  but it’s evening here.”

morning in portland, oregon, i was just beginning the day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper.  jordan, in england, was drinking wine in a library.

jordan reminded me this morning that it has been ten years since we first met.

that first fall together in college, jordan and i spent hungover mornings on the steps to the new men’s dormitory with coffee and black & mild cigarillos we had obtained from the anxiety inducing gas station down arkadelphia road.  happy groups of students and families strolled across the quad, avoiding eye contact, worried by our troubled languor.

i met jordan one night when my friend ryan took me to her dorm room.  jordan stood over her bed, looking at a dress laid out over the covers, a contemplative frown on her face as if she wondered whether she could bear to put it on or not.

jordan always maintained an easy elegance.  she did not like to be seen where her sweatpants.  she did not want to be caught with her hair down.  she liked shirts and a nice pair of flats.  she wore large sunglasses, like a starlet from the fifties.  

on friday night she seemed at home greeting the owner of our favorite restaurant, bottega favorita, as if he were an old friend.  the young college going friend to an established chef with three restaurants.  

while not a sister herself, all the sorority sisters loved jordan’s company, her attention, and she floated between all the social groups as a freelancer.

we were nineteen then and twenty-nine now, but jordan always seemed a little older than so many of our peers at college.

jordan could keep up with the parties and the twittering of sorority socialites, the flirtations of fraternity boys.  she could act like the perfect hostess, a veritable madame de guermantes of young birmingham-southern society.

jordan stayed with me at my apartment for thanksgiving our sophomore year.  we made dinner together.  drank wine.  watched movies.  sighed at how exhausting our classmates could be.  laughed about how much we loved our art  history professor, dr. spies.  frigid that year, we opened a window, dressed in sweats, our throats wrapped in scarves, and blew cigarette smoke at the screen in the window.  as adverse to the cold as we were, the smoke refused to drift out the window.

i loved our downtime together.  i love how snarky she could be.  and then with a flip of a switch, a smile, and some grace, she’d be clever and lovely.  a hostess.