fragments

I.

Saturday Gven Golly and I went to a party at a neighbor's house with people we haven't socialized with before and spent a pleasant evening, a little like tourists in another culture. They were nice folks, every one of them, and I appreciated being invited into the home of the guy I've gotten to know over the back fence, usually talking about trees.

So it was interesting to meet his brothers and their wives, some of their siblings and their spouses, a few co-workers, nieces and nephews. There was food and drink and friendly conversation about education, a recent move to Licking County, hunting and fishing, heating bills, crows, and the coyote that ate the chihuahua. Two of them had recently lost their mothers, lending a certain gravity to the gathering, but everyone maintained an even keel, mostly.

II.

Sunday I meditated as usual at 10:00, and my thoughts strayed to certain periods of my life that seem to show a pattern of integration and fragmentation. My thoughts always stray during meditation - some days more than others - and no, it's not a solid hour of pure white light streaming through my relaxed physical being emptied of all stress and distraction. In fact where my thoughts stray to can provide something to meditate on and can tell me something about what condition my condition is in. For today, let's call it fragmentary.

So I'm sitting on my cushion, minding my own business, letting my breathing regulate itself, remembering times of relative balance during the last 30 years or so, as Gven and I have lived in various places and carried on our usual activities - work, family, friends, this practice, that practice - in places like Oberlin (integating), Greensboro (fragmenting), Atlanta (some of both), Grandview (integrating), Fairhope (fragmenting), Clintonville (lots of both), and good old Methodistville (integrating, mostly), like one long run-on sentence on the verge of making sense.

Integration and fragmentation, after all, are just metaphors that shape the facts to a different mind-set. I could be saying "happy" or "unhappy" but then I would gag and pass out at the keyboard. It's not like my life itself was either magically coalescing into a perfectly seamless whole or literally falling apart at the seams. Maybe it was and I missed it.

Sometimes things fit together so that work and family, for example, co-exist or even support each other rather than being in all-out conflict, or other relationships, health issues, kids and schools, church and taiji, and all those things are more or less compatible. In short, are my several selves getting along with each other?

Let me hasten to add that it's a little arbitrary to call a one-year sojourn somewhere either integrating or fragmentary, much less a ten-year stretch in one place. Call me judgmental. It helps me sort things out if I frame the question in a binary, either/or way, then see how badly the shoe fits. It's always more complicated than that, of course, a little like calling something good news or bad news, as in the story about the farmer whose horse ran away.

Everyone said "bad news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When the horse came back with another horse, everyone said "good news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When his son broke his leg riding the new horse, everyone said "bad news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When the army came drafting soldiers and passed over the son with a broken leg, everyone said "good news" but the farm said he didn't know. And so goes the story. Who can really say? And in the long run, as Keynes famously said, we're all dead.

III.

The new moon last week (on Ash Wednesday) marked the beginning of the Tibetan lunar new year - so happy new year! Since I am neither Tibetan nor Buddhist, there isn't much I can say about it, except as a kind of tourist. Candles were lit at the Buddhist Center, delicious foods were eaten, sweet tea was drunk, prayers were said, and chants were chanted. White scarves were placed on a chair; wheat and barley grains were tossed in the air. I have a tiny scented red silk bag to take with me. Maybe I can take this experience, put it next to other fragments of other traditions I've run into, which I've either bounced off or stuck to, and make something out of it (or not).

A friend's father has been in the hospital for a week, and now he's in hospice care. Apparently he had a stroke several weeks ago, and his only symptoms were in the stomach, so that's where the tests were done, and nothing was found, so the bleeding has done much damage. His family is pulling together to do what they must do in the sad business where everyone wishes they could do more.

IV.

A brisk north wind whips the U.S. and Ohio flags in the schoolyard behind my house. It's March on our Western solar calendar, and it's coming in like a lion. The good news is the woodpile looks like it will last until spring, whenever that is. The bad news is the time I can spend at my desk or reading in the unheated back room of Om Shanty is severely limited, so I will need every stick of firewood in the mean time.