painting

Is this real life or a Movie?

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Is this Real or a Movie?At Oakland’s Art Murmur, Steve and I were watching the plentiful people walk by The Wall, and he asked me if I thought this was all real or if it was maya, an illusion.

Without hesitation I replied that I thought most certainly it was all made up somehow and not the truth.

He agreed and then asked if I thought other people felt “all this” was a facade of sorts, as well.

I responded firmly that I thought most people were very invested in what was going on here as all and everything.

He smiled and said that almost all the people he has asked have responded the same way; to both questions

He says he has asked lots of different types of people.

The Teacher

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For close to three decades
I sat in his class
Once a week, off and on,
Mostly on
And
Even when I wasn’t there
I was there

Even though I knew
It was never about him

This teaching where I sat for years being told I didn’t exist
And that it is
all
Interconnected with no separate such

Even having seen the box lowered into the ground and I throwing my dirt on that box

Him having passed and
I knowing the teaching was never about him

Still
It’s so comforting
now more than
ever to hear his voice

Flies

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So, I’m a nice enough guy usually: certainly not a murderer or anything, but would I hurt a fly? Well, that’s where it can get tricky.

One fly comes and I’m cool. Ditto for two and three. Four flies starts to get worrisome. By the time there are seven flies in my kitchen, I am crazy with disgust for them and luckily it is time to go to bed.

I leave the kitchen door open, hoping to not find them there tomorrow. Hoping that they will somehow develop brains in the night that will lead them away from the closed window.

I get up earlier than usual the next morning, before the sun is up. All seven flies are asleep on the ceiling. Unmoving on the ceiling.I feel for them being asleep. I relate to them. I drink my tea and write some notes and they are still unmoving on the ceiling. I feel differently about them.

I leave to go to a cafe and come back to moving flies and, even worse, sitting flies on food left out.

Normally, I start killing at this many flies, but now, I don’t. I’ve seen them sleeping. Upside down.

Finger Prints

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In Oakland,to teach after school classes you need to be finger printed. The law is there to protect kids from sex offenders. From kids who might find themselves alone with such a teacher. Even though fingerprints don’t change, they take prints every year in case your criminal record has changed. Irregardless of my moral behavior, I teach a chaotic class of twenty kids in a public area of the school.

This is expensive at $100. a year. The woman in charge of this is inaptly named Angelica. She emails me and gives me a half hour window on a certain day to come down to an unpleasant neighborhood and put my hands on the screen to be recorded. I email back and tell her that I can not come then and ask if I can (please) have this done at a convenient time at my usual place.

I receive no answer for weeks, after which she emails me again with another half hour slot I can’t make. She signs her email “waiting for your response”. I email back as previously. Again, I recieve no response for weeks. When I call I get a swift short recording in almost broken english.

After a month of teaching I start to feel like I really do have to get this yearly request fulfilled as I am supposedly breaking the law, although I’m feeling that I’d have a case to argue otherwise.

I go to my usual place run by a chinese couple. They also speak broken english. The wife is her usual unfriendly self and the husband is warmer and helpful.

There are three people before me in line for this process. Their IDs are mexican passports and they speak no english at all. I translate for them. The woman in charge of this group is beautiful and young; dressed in dark pinks with thick hair easily flopped atop her head. The young man has on one of the best beaded Guadalupe hats I’ve ever seen. I compliment him on it. Initially, I am unsure whether he is her mate or her son but the way she then brushes his hair (also thick) away from his face, tells me that he is her son. The other one is maybe her cousin.

They clean one of the schools. She is carefully handing over three hundred dollars! in cash. The most important part of what she wants to know, and what I am translating, is about the line with the 6 digit government number which will get her a partial reimbursement for this process. It’s only $25 but she is adamant about getting it.

When it is my turn, the wife, in her slightly sour self,  asks me “So, you’re going to be a teacher?”  I say, “I already am a teacher” in a tired way because I am sick of being in a room without windows. “What do you teach?”, she counters dryly.  When I say “ceramics”  she lights up like a bulb. “Really?!  Can you teach me?  Can I make this?”,  she says as she touches a four inch light green ceramic pot housing a small fake tree. “Yes”, and for a few minutes we talk ceramics and it is the first time I have seen her look alive in all the years I’ve been there.

Then I go with him into the closet like area with the machine. I am amazed (again) at the comfortable and easy way he takes each finger and rolls it around on the screen. I think of how many hands he has held and how he does it with nothing extra and it is somehow actually enjoyable.

When I get home, I scan and send the fingerprints and form to Angelica.

Five minutes later I get three emails from her. The first two are auto-response explanations about how is she out of the office until some unforseen time. The third one is actually from her. She says that under no circumstamnces whatsoever will they accept fingerprints done anywhere else but the Oakland Unified School District office and that she is there from 8 to 5 every day and that I need to come down there, pay again, and have them done again.

She is waiting for my response.

She won’t get one.

What’s gone

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I look at the framed photograph on the window sill of my mother with my daughter and all of a sudden my mind jumps to “she’s gone” and for a moment I wonder “who?”

The sure side comes in and says “Mom died”  but somehow my daughter in the picture as a three year old is gone as well. An almost seventeen year old is not a three year old.

Still part of the three year old remains, just as part of my mother remains.

Here and not here. Like most of existence; here and not here. Partly somewhere else but where?

In Another’s shoes

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I notice a tourist couple, with their map, disagreeing sort of, but not quite enough to be decisive. Then one makes a move away down the street toward the tunnel and the other begins to hasten after.
The tunnel is dingy and dark while (on their map) one street over is the more exciting and unusual. Who would willingly walk through that tunnel? is what I’m thinking. In all the years I’ve lived here… is what I’m thinking.

So I try to help. I say, “Do you need help?” thinking I will now tell them how to walk through the grand gate guarded by dragons, one block over (on their map).

They ignore me. They do not understand english and are speaking a language I don’t understand but am guessing is eastern european by the way they look.

At first I am irritated and mumble to myself, “They don’t think they need help but they do.”

Then I see that they need to walk through the tunnel and I need to return to my own business.

Waking Up

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After watching the digital clock for a while, she decides on getting up at four in the morning rather than lying in the darkness any longer. It’s the darkness in her mind keeping her up anyway. Better to turn on the lights.

She almost falls asleep on the train going to her morning class and almost asleep again coming home. So when she gets home, she lies down and goes to sleep.

She wakes up in the dark. This is rain dark, not night dark. Wondering why hunger follows afternoon naps, she opens the frig to find it mostly empty.

After the cashier has rung up the grocery cart with two hundred dollars worth of selected items, she realizes her wallet is on the kitchen table at home. She explains. She goes home. She comes back.

The cashier is kind, and he says, “No worries, You are not alone”, meaning this happens all the time.

Confused at the payment keypad between “CLEAR” and “ACCEPT”, she decides on “ACCEPT” because it’s green and likes that he has told her she is not alone.

Outside, near the entrance to the grocery store, someone has permanently written in once wet cement “The Dali Lama” under an also permanent sentence.

The sentence says, “Find hope in the darkness and focus on the light”.

Tonglen Practice

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3/4 million (750,000) people can soon die of starvation in Somalia. There is a drought in Africa which has left the people without food.

there is food being given but

the pirate type controlling the country won’t let aid in

the big boats can’t get to the ports
even if they could, on shore
it is beyond food
some now need care before they can eat.
These Somalian people.
What now to do with the awareness of them and it’s effect on me
?
The tonglen buddhist practice is the only real thing
that helps.

Breathing in and breathing out with
attention
toward another with well-wishing

helps.

To feel better…

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Because of you I got on my bike later today. I rode and I felt better in the saturated light of dinnertime September. The golden yellow of uncut dried grass made me pretend for a moment that I was in southern California where, if I took a left, I’d go into the desert and drive and drive, roadkill cafes and all, until I came to a creek amidst the boulders in somewhere, say Arizona, and unroll my bag and go to sleep under zillions of stars waking up the next morning not reading email.

Instead I contented myself with curving my bike  into Temescal Lake Park where a lone mother and child were ending the day slowly.

It was enough just to get on my bike.
Just enough because you suggested the obvious thing I’d been missing.
To feel better you have to do things that make you feel better.