Writing in the Present
Last Saturday I attended a meditation session at the New Jersey Buddhist Vihara for the first time. I’m new to mediation, having started my practice just a few months ago. The hour long session was a powerful and humbling experience. At times I felt like I was trapped in the jaws of forever (as in, “omg, this shit ain’t never gonna end!”) and nearly panicked. I learned an important lesson about my capacity to be present and that I am still invested in the now as a passing-through or a waiting for something else to happen. One of the monks informed us after the session that it takes years of practice to be able to truly meditate, that is, reining in one’s mind enough to discover its true nature, for even 30 minutes. In the beginning, an hour’s effort might yield only a few minutes of true meditation. As a poet, I’m compelled to ask – what does this mean for my writing?
I was skeptical of meditation for a long time because I misunderstood it as a retreat into the solipsism of the self. In part this might be because meditation was often suggested to me as a self-care/relaxation strategy, rather than a mental and physical discipline that would empower me to be of greater service to those around me. I was afraid it would make me complacent and accepting of the status quo; that it would make me less outraged about the crazy evil shit committed by politicians, bureaucracies, corporations and yes, regular people, too. I couldn’t reconcile the quest for inner peace with the injustices that inflicted such violence, damage and pain in my life and among people more disenfranchised than I was. And I had doubts that contentment would be more fulfilling than the passions which when unleashed, could momentarily transform the drabness of suffering into a brilliant jewel.
But when Jimmy Santiago Baca tells you to meditate, you do it.
After the completion of nomad, I’ve been working on a lot of poems that reckon with the past, with what my family and I survived, what we are making of the histories that were imposed on us. I fell in and out of depression over the past year because in the midst of huge life transitions (getting married after 9 years of single motherhood, moving to another country, going from multiple jobs to unemployment, etc.), I was sifting through dark memories that I had spent most of my adult life burying. I found it difficult to get out of my head and engage with present issues because I felt overwhelmed so much of the time. How do I carry out the task of memory-keeping for “the many lives that have fountained through my own,” as poet Lynda Hull puts it, while continuing to absorb and engage the urgent issues of the present in my writing? The page means different things to different people, but for me it is holy ground. It demands the best of me – the most stripped of pretense, the most vulnerable, the most willing. I didn’t know how to offer that in multiple directions.
I discovered to my surprise, that far from insulating me from the world, meditation has heightened my capacity to relate to the world. It has radically shifted my capacity to return from the realm of memory, to the present. There is now burgeoning scientific evidence on the benefits of meditation for the brain, but as poet, I feel the loosening in my spirit. As though there are streams that have been stopped inside me that are now beginning to flow again, to fertilize valleys of the soul that have lain fallow and abandoned. Meditation certainly has not solved all my problems and I think it’s too early to tell whether it’s made me a better person, but it is empowering me to rise to the poet’s craft with greater confidence. My understanding is this: life happens in the present. Uneven, unpredictable, pulsating life. Life that can take a sudden turn and either fly over the giant pothole or wipe out, like your kid on his new BMX. The past, history, memory made us what we are, but it is the unresolved energy of the present that we need to tap into to become part of the world, to belong to it. Oppression might tell me that it is my exclusions and exiles that define my existence, but that’s a lie. It’s how I breathe, how I take in the light falling through my window at this moment that give me the right to shape my life, to participate in what does and does not take place.
But these days, every time I sit down on the floor and close my eyes, every time I recall the monk’s instruction to “breathe naturally and place your thoughts on the breath,” I am reminded that to breathe is a special privilege. On August 21, 2013, a gas attack near Damascus, Syria, killed 1429 people, including 426 children. Their breaths were killed within them. Responses to the event almost immediately jumped to whether or not the US should intervene (read: bomb Syria, read: Obama posturing as bad-ass savior of mankind, read: bumper crops for the military industrial complex). There are a thousand good reasons why as citizens and residents of Amerika we should voice our critiques given the ravages successive US administrations have already wreaked on the Middle East, but still, I feel like something is missing, something that approaches a way of being present with the loss of these lives, and the lives of many others in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, Yemen…the list goes on.
When I decided to wholeheartedly follow my calling a few years ago, I reorganized my life around the study and craft of poetry. It led me to question the ways in which I was seeing – or rather, not seeing – the world and the people around me. As an activist, there was time when I used poetry solely as a mode of reaction: one more way to fight the system. As a person of color, an immigrant kid, a young single mom, poetry has been indispensable as a testament to survival, an archive of forbidden and silenced lives: one more way of becoming visible. But as a human being, poetry’s incommensurate value to me is its affirmation of the sanctity of the soul and how it restores the individual to the world, to the life of the present.
The other day I started writing a poem to honor the dead in Syria, to carry and not forget this recent chasm that has opened in the world. Here is an excerpt from the draft I’m working on:
…Myths of past and future, cloaked
and bespectacled, warm daggers against your wrists
but they blow away like chaff, leave you with now
which is many, shattered, clinging like wet rags –
the kind Zaynah in Ghouta stuffs against her gums
under the stiffening weight of her father. The night
around her whirls into bits of plaster, gray flesh,
pistons of a thousand bodies that explode the air…
Are we not cast adrift? Rent beyond repair?
Fever that will not pass, will not drown the American
city-lights where it’s so perilous to say how many of us know
survival means terre. Tear. Thread. Like breath:
