Physics for Artists

At dinner tonight with our good friends Carolyn and John, we were talking about the prospect of Laura going to Governor's School, and the fact that she would still have to take math and science every single year despite the indulgence of the arty little non-math and science inclined students. I said, "Well, they probably have Physics for Artists there. I bet they had it at your fancy-pants college, Hayes."

Hayes says, yes, he took it in college. Carolyn said, "It's too bad these kids don't have your genes," and without a second's pause and totally straightfaced, Hayes says, "I made a D."

It was funnier in person than how it sounds here. :)

Angry Post-It Notes

So I am doing this meditation class with a Buddhist nun. I didn’t know South Carolina even had any Buddhist nuns, much less I’d end up with one for a teacher. But Big City Art Museum is holding a meditation series, and almost every Thursday morning since it started I’ve been sitting right there in the gallery, trying to breath out my delusions as black smoke and breathe in the clear white light of a peaceful mind.

It’s not working so well just yet.

I not only have monkey mind, I have an attention deficient hyperactive monkey on speed mind. One minute I’m there, dutifully breathing, trying to sit still, then I’m making a to-do list and then I’m in the middle of an imaginary conversation at work about an imaginary situation that will never happen. But it could, Ms. Monkey insists, and what will you do then? and I obediently follow her around and around and around entertaining that remote possibilitity.

Last week our teacher started talking about anger—first notice the mind of anger or irritation or annoyance, then gently redirect the mind from this inappropriate attention to a virtuous object. It feels like there are about as many virtuous objects knocking around in my mind as there are Buddhist nuns in South Carolina. Our teacher says all her students claim that anger isn’t a problem for them—they wouldn’t be in a meditation class if they had anger issues!—so the first step is recognizing our anger. Take a Post-It, she suggests, and make a tally mark for each time you notice your mind shifting into that angry mind.

I haven’t actually made it yet through a whole day remembering to keep my tally. My Post-It keeps getting covered up on my desk. And I was afraid I would come home with pages and pages of angry Post-It notes. This is what I imagined:

I will say, though, I have much less angry mind now than I have probably in years. Things that once drove me crazy have begun to seem just not quite so earth shattering, and even when I do get angry, it seems less and shorter. Yesterday’s actually looked like this, and that was getting through lunch, so that was pretty good, actually.

The meditation class has only been going on a couple of months, so I don’t think I can chalk all that up to my teacher, though she’s very good. It’s been a long process, one patient and loving intervention after another with my codependent inner self. The balance between a little self-affirmation and my overly critical inner voice is pretty delicate, I have to say, and I think I only got that little bit of balance by noticing that I was very very hard on myself, far more than I would ever have dreamed of for someone else, and in fact, sometimes just plain mean. I still feel like a fruitcake, a stereotype of white girl in art gallery pretending to meditate (see what I mean about meanness?), and any second now I could break out and start shedding my childhood traumas by running with wild wolves and loving too much, or whatever the new trend might be.

But one morning in class, I lost myself a moment or two or ten in this absolute quiet, a deep purple mandala blooming over and over again in front of my closed eyes, my body gone, I think—I couldn’t feel my hands in my lap, my feet on the floor, the backs of my knees pressing against the titled seat. Only this silence, this still moment of peace that brings me back the next Thursday and the next.

We just got home from church

I’m afraid Kitty doesn’t feel good. I’m not sure how old he is—at least a year older than Will, who’s eight—but lately he’s acting ancient. He looks ungroomed and watery-eyed and sad. He can’t jump up on the bed anymore—he does this terribly painful scrambling up the mountainous side. It’s excruciating to watch. He barely tolerates being petted under the best of circumstances, and he hates to be picked up, but lately he’ll sit all pitiful at the foot of the bed, and I think he’s figured out if he does this Hayes or I will lift him up. We just got home from church, it’s storming, and he’s still curled up on the quilt where we left him this morning. Usually he wants to be under the bed in a storm, even if it means hiding with Sylvie.

It sounds so very odd to say that sentence, we just got home from church, as if it were a perfectly normal thing that people do all the time, people who have kitties and come home and make egg salad sandwiches with Duke’s mayonnaise. It is a perfectly normal thing that people do all the time, except we are not exactly normal people. I think, and it’s certainly not normal for us. “What church do you go to?” is a big question in the South, although I have been surprised by how seldom we’ve been asked that since moving to our little town. Maybe people think it irrelevant here—maybe they think, they’d know if you went to their church, and you don’t, so yours doesn’t matter. In my experience, southerners are usually a lot more evangelical about it, souls lingering out there unsaved and whatnot.

Mine’s among them, alas, unbaptized and lukewarm in my acceptance of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Don’t get me wrong—Jesus rocks. Jesus kicked butt. Jesus kept to the path of righteousness, and I’m sorry, but I think the path of righteousness was a pretty liberal one myself. But I made the mistake of taking Old Testament in college and finding a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible really worked for me, and before that I really wondered why, if miracles could happen, they never seemed to. And then I realized that if you bought the church rhetoric, 77% of the world was going to Hell. Along with me. And later, the kids. And Kitty and Sylvie too, of course. Baptists have a pretty strict party line. But somehow, all those folks who’d been sprinkled or dunked were good to go no matter what they did afterwards. Surely that’s more about the church than about God.

You can always tell around here who’s been to church—they’re the dressed up crowd you see early afternoon. We took Laura and Will to McAllister’s after our new member class the other day, and Laura said with this expression of horrified revelation, “We’re the people going out for lunch after church now!” We don’t dress right, and we’re not going to the “right” church, but yep, that’s us now.

Who’d have thought?

The house is quiet

The house is quiet, an oddity I am still unaccustomed to in daylight. Hayes gets home from work in about another hour, but the kids won’t be back from their week at their dad’s until Monday. I hear the hum of the air conditioner, Sylvie snoring her teeny kitty snores every so often, the soft tapping sound my keyboard makes, but behind it all, the quiet.

Summer days go slow, especially when Laura and Will are gone. I usually wake up with Hayes so I can see him a bit before he leaves and then walk on the dirt road behind the house before it gets too hot. Really, even 8:30 is too hot in South Carolina. I work in this desultory way, caught between the tasks left over from last semester and those coming up next year, trying to write and washing clothes in between attempts so that tonight I can say at least I managed to do something today. Kitty comes in and rubs my leg with his head, I run out of printer paper, I make spinach salad with dried cranberries and mandarin oranges and walnuts and feta, I watch the sun move across the floor, I wish for a Sprite and try not to drink one because of the sugar, the calories. Some bad WNOK song lingers in my head from listening to the radio with Laura in the car last week, but it’s only an echo. I haven’t heard SpongeBob SquarePants’s squeaky voice for days, and I both do and don’t miss him chasing earnestly after jellyfish. Sometimes I wander through the house, beautifully clean and staying that way all week with the kids away, and I wonder if this quiet will be all I hear when they grow up and move out, which is coming sooner than I’d like.

But it’s not an empty quiet—rather one filled with potential. I can play Ella Fitzgerald or Chopin or crank the Black Eyed Peas and no one will complain, though I always feel pretentious listening to the classical music, even when I’m alone. Something about the quiet focuses my attention, and in these long weeks in the summer I can let that attention flit here and there without shame. It feels decadent, lush, fruitful. It is decadent.