Dark days of the year.

At the end of the afternoon yesterday, I learned that the poet and scholar Jake Adam York had suffered a severe stroke and was in critical condition. He was 40, and so obviously (since I'm 36) I believed that he would recuperate. Maybe, because he was in critical condition, it would take awhile. But the worst I feared was that his brain's language centers would be damaged and he wouldn't be able to return to his poetry very soon, or ever.

We went to dinner to celebrate one of my friends' birthdays, and we talked about where we'd spent various past birthdays. I didn't think to talk about my thirty-third birthday, which I spent with Jake, picking him up at the airport for his visit to campus and then having a barbecue dinner with him on the way home.

We finished our dinner and came home. I fed the monastery cat, who's my responsibility while his regular caretaker is out of town for the week. I sat by the wood stove and read a book for a few minutes, helped string the Christmas tree up to the ceiling (since we'd suddenly realized that it was listing seriously to the east--a problem given that the tree is 9' tall), contributed to a general clamor that we get the wireless connection in the dining hall working again. Then I logged back on to my e-mail and learned that Jake had died.

He was a great poet and a good man. I was looking forward to seeing him in Colorado this spring, and now I won't. I am hoping that his family's suffering is bearable in some way today, though that's hard for me to imagine.

Someone else in the dining hall was just talking about how her grandfather, who's in his 80s, had a stroke and is recuperating. For me, one measure of how this place is is that I can feel frustration and even the first lick of anger at life's randomness--why this life and not that life?--and then I can let it keep going, without feeling guilty at having felt it in the first place.

In the monastery garden, we have this statue of Jizo, the bodhisattva who is present at and for the suffering of all sentient beings, and is particularly a guardian of women, children, and travellers. On a hard morning last week, when I had planned to do something altogether different, the statue's frosted head caught my eye from outside the garden, and I grabbed my camera and spent time with the statue instead of what I had originally planned. In Japan, I now learn, some monasteries offer Jizo ceremonies for the benefit of women whose children have died. 

One of the hard things about Jake's death, for me, is realizing how little I knew his life. I only know that his wife's first name is my first name; I don't know her last name, or where they lived, or what his brother's name is, or what else he was hoping to do with his life other than to continue his good, good, ethically necessary and aesthetically beautiful poetry project. (And now, as I write here, my e-mail yields up his wife's full name, and their address.) I want to reread all his poetry, and my books are packed in boxes three states away. So it is good that he is here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

I am so grateful he lived, and worked, and lived, all the way to the hilt. And I am so grateful that I knew him while he did, and I hope that he was not afraid when he died.

* * *

And now, later, the tributes are piling up, and I remember--how did it take this long?--when Amanda Davis died and McSweeney's did that huge tribute to her. I hope that Jake knew how much everybody loved him while he was still here.

The world on fire.

I never mean to be away for a full month when I'm away for a full month. But a strong wind is blowing through here these days: the colors are changing, and I am paying attention. And sometimes this machine is the last thing I want to be touching in the midst of it all.

Some of what I've seen since last I wrote:

Non-stop change.

Only hours after I wrote last week, the Abbot said, "Can you see me after dinner? It will only take two minutes." It turns out that our Registrar has to have a surgery this week and will be convalescing for several weeks, and it was decided that I could, and thus would, be fast-track trained to take over--as of tomorrow afternoon.

The next day, my first day of training for the registrar's job, was also my first day of training for two service positions more substantial (and visible) than anything I've done here: altar usher and altar attendant. By the end of last Wednesday, I was a bit of a jumped-up mess, feeling no small degree of cognitive overload. 

But in subsequent days, aided partly by some exceptionally skillful teaching, I've been settling into all three positions, realizing where my competencies lie and where I feel less comfortable--and realizing that even when I feel less than comfortable, I have competencies that can and should be more important now than any personal preference I might have thought I had. So, perhaps most importantly, after several days on the job, I'm not shying away from the main telephone when it rings (the fact that we have caller ID is also helpful). I've learned that doing a job as swiftly as possible is not always desirable. (Is this something I'd ever learned before?) I've begun learning how to check my speed and register whether it's coming from full presence and following my body or whether it's coming from an unacknowledged desire to stay one step (or more) ahead of everyone around me. Or whether it's coming out of blind panic. I've begun learning all over again how to see variations and mistakes in a job as proof that I'm a learning human, rather than proof that I'm doomed to failure. My body has learned (again) that we're okay here and that we're staying around and that it knows how to do the jobs that I've been asked to do: long sticks of incense no longer wave all over the place in my shaky hands because my hands aren't shaking as much anymore.

Really, I'm learning all over again how to be with people--to be eye to eye not with people the way I think they should be but with people as they are.

Across the dining hall from me, my fellow residents are discussing variations of love, and one has just posed to another a question about why he has claimed that eating another human being cannot be a manifestation of love, despite his earlier declaration that love is culturally defined and variable.

We have four more hours before our Sunday-Monday-Tuesday morning weekend comes to a close--in a ceremony in which I now play a specific, foregrounded role.

In another time zone.

It's been an intense seven weeks. (I could say that every seven weeks, it seems.) I've come from England back to the U.S. and have ricocheted from home to home to home to home to home: Topsham home to Gambier home to Columbus home to Gambier home to monastery home. And it's at monastery home that I've come to be still for the next several months.

Catching up.

Yesterday morning, I awoke in my own bed, alone in my house, for the first time since June 29. First there was the trip to Iceland with my beloved Clevelander former-student-now-friend; then there was a stay in London with said beloved Clevelander, concluded by a night in London with my beloved Brooklynite; then there was time in Topsham with both of those excellent women; then there was time in Topsham with my excellent Utica friends and their daughter, my mighty little goddaughter. When the alarm rang yesterday, I silenced it and then, instinctively, waited to hear the large voice of a small person crying out, "Mama! Mama! Is it morning yet?!" And I realized that my body was also preparing itself for a quiet creep out to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and a creep back to my bed and books. The return to silence and solitude was both welcome and monstrous.

I am out of here in just over a week now. Yesterday, my new packing boxes arrived, and I promptly taped them into performance mode and began filling them: one for quilts and pictures and my winter coat; the first of many book boxes; the box of fragile things that soon included my large Buddha and nearly all the objects from my main altar. That last was the tipping point: now the house begins coming apart, and now my year here is really coming to an end. Now the books that I'm still fantasizing I'll read before I go home should also go into boxes. Now the essay revisions and article reviewing and report-writing that I do need to do before I go home will need to happen in amongst sorting, discarding, wrapping, taping, phone-calling, cleaning. Now I will close down utility accounts, learn how to steam-clean carpets, eat my way through what's left in the refrigerator. Now I will try not to think about the fact that I will re-enter central London, with at least some of my possessions, on the day after the opening ceremonies of the Olympics (about which we've been warned, repeatedly, not least through this website, about which the Mayor of London himself now informs us ad nauseum, via the PA system, in every tube stop and train station).

The various things I need and want to do stack up against each other in interesting ways: packing keeps me from revising; posting here keeps me from packing; revising will keep me from having to go deal with the bank or with shipping companies. But the up-side of all this playing-off-against-each-other is that these things are starting to get done--including catch-up posts here, which I will put up in back-fill fashion so that you can see some of where I've been and what I've done this month. Among what's to come: road trips, icebergs, black sand beaches, lupins, shingle beaches, and sea tractors.

But probably not too much more of this small person, highly photogenic though she is, so here she is on the beach at Budleigh Salterton: