Graduation speech to the class of 2015

So there’s this guy, and he says to another guy: Didn’t I meet you in St Louis?

And the second guy says:  No, I’ve never been to St Louis

And the first guy says, Yeah, me neither. It must have two other guys

It’s important to know where you are, you know? where you’ve been, where you’re going. Presumably, That’s one of the reasons we’re here today. But it’s not so easy to actually figure that out. To find yourself, you really have to actively look for yourself. Track yourself. Become aware of your route, altitude, speed, and direction. Ask yourself: how did I get here? Is this the right road? For that, you’re going to need a really good map.

But teacher, I already have a map. True enough.  I’m pretty sure that you’ve been following a navigational chart in which everything that has come before today, the trek through essays and equations and games and performances, has led you to this solid black line on the map: the border to THE FUTURE. And, the familiar lexicon of graduation ceremonies and Graded mythology says  that “your suitcase is all packed with the knowledge and skills you’ll need to make a successful border crossing .”  In fact, you have actually recited this travel itinerary to me and your other teachers many many times in the past few years: First I’m going to get on  diploma track for 2.0 years, travelling at 95 gpa and add SAT or cursinho prep class fuel so I can cruise into college in the restricted lane where I will study for 4.0 years then take exit to graduate school and stay straight for 3.0 years before that road dumps me right into the road to a job in .01 minutes and then: Arriving at destination.

As if your life could be lived by google driving directions.

As a teacher, I like that map. Your parents love that map. You have internalized that map. But it’s more of an aerial view, you know? Not a map that’s meant to guide you meter by meter. moment by moment.. Not an antique treasure map that you rigidly follow to find a fixed red X. In 2015, I think you know, the map you need is more interactive, more like WAZE, which gives you constant updates, route options, and  doesn’t keep saying:  you missed a turn, you missed a turn, you missed a turn.

So I’d like to change the scale of this map from the very large: your whole life, to the very small: This moment.  I don’t think of this moment as the boundary between your entire past and your entire future any more than I think of any other moment in those terms.

Isn’t every moment a moment between the past and future?

Let’s map this moment right now. right now. Well, it’s actually not right now anymore. It’s now. No, it’s now. As soon as we name it, it’s gone, into the past.  Moments are slippery, hard to chart as you whizz by, hard to notice or remember that we were even there. Because much of the time, we weren’t really there, we were just passing through, tourists in our own lives.

One of the students in my mindfulness study said, after a 5 minute meditation: wow. I never knew I had any other state besides being really busy or being asleep. That’s a state I’m hoping you’ll visit more often. I’m hoping you move there. Most of the time the state of just Being, doesn’t even show up on our maps, which are only the maps of the country of DOING.

So look out the window for a minute. Get your bearings.. Feel yourself breathe. This moment is beautiful, expansive, has its own dimensions, its own value, its own scenic attractions. It’s not just a highway marker on the side of the road to somewhere else.  What’s happening in this moment?: Is your foot asleep? Is your stomach churning? Are you feeling nostalgic? overwhelmed? bored? In the moment the way is fluid.: in the moment you can love fiercely, learn deeply, open your heart to getting it broken, laugh, sweat for something ; you can maneuver in the moment. I want you to be truly happy, which we know comes from living an engaged life, not just a pleasant one. It comes from tuning in and not tuning out. I don’t want you to wonder, when you’ve arrived at that destination that you plugged into your mental GPS years earlier, what happened to those millions of moments along the way.

So, there’s this problem:  you have two different maps, one for the overall journey and one for the moment.  In order to not just be a leaf on the wind, living randomly, in order to get somewhere, you need to plot a destination and move in that direction. But in moving in that direction you collapse the possibilities of other destinations, like electron positions in the quantum world. In plotting that destination, you create a map in which many beautiful places become just flyover country, a bathroom and a pao de queijo on the way to Maresias, not places in themselves.

So, how to balance doing and being, moving forward and appreciating stillness?

As I see it, there are 3 pretty good ways to map out your future while still living in the present.

1) Don’t fear the desvio,

the dreaded orange sign with the big black arrow that pushes you off the main road into winding alleyways or some isolated country track far from the sight of the freeway. There is knowledge off of the main roads too.  In the middle ages, some sailors must not have heeded the warnings to stay within the boundaries of the known world. Although the corners of their maps were filled with menacing drawings of fantastical monsters, labelled “here be dragons”  they went there anyway, found the dragons, classified them, named them manatees, and narwhals, orcas and volcanic islands.

2) Share the road

It’s easy to think that you’re the only one on a journey, the only one following a map,  that somehow everything else is just background highlighting your moving blue dot on the screen. But that background is actually other people, on their own journeys, with their own itineraries.

So next time you’re stuck in traffic, think about it from another perspective. You are not stuck in traffic; you are traffic You might be the obstacle blocking someone else’s journey.

3) Don’t get stuck on a dead end route

Neuroscience tells us loud and clear that whatever thoughts and behaviors you practice will be the thoughts and behaviors your brain defaults to. There is a literal map in your brain of the tracks and roads of your mind. The superhighway of a bad habit gets harder and harder to exit off of.  Use your compass--you have one, inside, built right into your human hardwiring-- Use it in the moment to make a different choice. Update your map. Enter new coordinates, and recalculate.

I guess what I’m trying to say to this crazy, anarchic, frustratingly lovable class, is I hope you can map the overall arc of your journey without losing the freedom of the moment.  And without dragging along a trailer full of toxic cargo that you have clearly outgrown. To really know the landscape, to find the treasure that is your meaningful life, you need to be both the explorer and the cartographer.  If you do this, you will not lose your way. Then, wherever you go, there you are.

Bon voyage!

On Rituals, Sam’s Club, and a not-quite-American holiday in Brazil

I have a complicated relationship with America. There. An AA-style confession which, like that of the alcoholic at rock bottom, comes as a complete surprise to precisely no one. And given this complicated relationship, I should have known better than to engage in the string of events that began Friday afternoon with a profound conversation with a student about finding a common groundwork across disciplines, continued through urging another to delve into the difference between finding and making personal meaning, peaked in a late afternoon yoga practice, and ended with me heading to a Thanksgiving celebration after having a 5-hour migraine that arrived poetically at dawn. 

At 10 AM, once the pain haze and nausea had cleared, comfort food sounded comforting, so I went. Which is strange because I’m a vegetarian and it seems that the big draw at Thanksgiving is the turkey. It probably helped that I had checked with the chef two days earlier and she assured me that everything but the turkey and gravy would be vegan. Who said Thanksgiving’s not about faith? I was prepared to believe in cruelty-free stuffing.

I have a complicated relationship with America, but I knew it was safe to go to the school’s Thanksgiving party once my friend told me that as the emcee he would he delivering Thanksgiving jokes, not homilies. After a particularly patriotic and religious ceremony several years ago I threatened the administration with coming to the day as a dead Indian, which I was prepared to go through with at the sight of flags, hymns, and Korean kids in Pilgrim shoes and headdresses.

The thing is, if you practice yoga you know that the idea that it’s relaxing is as big a lie as Disney’s Pocahontas. Well, lie is a strong word. Let’s say that the extent to which yoga is about relaxation is about the same extent that being a Pilgrim was about loving all of God’s creation. There’s no reliable correlation. Practicing ashtanga messes you up. The yogis of course have kinder names for it, like “shifting” and “growth.” But make no mistake; it messes with you. Rips up your flawed story of self. Picture dropping a cement block off the balcony. Yoga is growth in that same way. The smacking you down and splitting you apart kind of way. Getting yourself cracked open sometimes means that you stay open and then all sorts of things creep in--Or out--Which is apparently good for you. But for me, what sometimes creeps in is migraine. So let’s just say that before I confronted America, there was philosophy, there was yoga, and there was migraine involving head, soul and stomach.

So in this compromised state, I was wary about having a complicated relationship with America at a Thanksgiving celebration on the wrong day in the wrong country, without the comfort of a complicated relationship with my family. A celebration complete with marines, boy scouts, children with braces and clarinets playing Amazing Grace, enormous hormone-filled turkeys, and shopping at our own Black Friday of stalls of Brazilian lace, folk art, and bikinis. And the roughest of all: the pledge of allegiance. I saw it coming. I steeled my broken self. But the wave never hit. I watched the pleasant musical program, laughed at a joke about turkey feathers, ate an American-sized serving of vegetarian stuffing, talked to some reasonable parents, bought a purple journal for my daughter, and went home with a pumpkin pie wrapped in cellophane for later.  Why had I twisted such a simple narrative?  Rituals help us share a common story, and I fell right into the flow of the telling.

But I do have a complicated relationship with America, which I should have remembered. What was I thinking by climbing in to bed to watch a post-meal movie? Why didn’t I go to the Top Picks and give in to the comfort food of predictable cinema? Why not let my easy story end? Why scroll to and select I’m Not There?  Why watch another person, a kid on the run from Minnesota, for goodness sake, well actually 6 people if you believe the director, struggle with a complicated relationship with America?  War-mongering, greed, jealousy, confinement, cynicism, the corruption of art, and the worst—the very worst: the cruel knowledge that a complex message will always be misunderstood.

But it’s a layered story, a collage, really--not an indictment; and an artist is a person, not a movement. Poetry isn't finger pointing. In 120 minutes there was also beauty, freedom, wisdom, and an 11-year-old Black Woody Guthrie troubadour riding the rails singing the story of America to anyone who would listen. 

So: complicated.

Is there a happy ending? For Dylan, I’m not sure. For America? Harder still to say. For the turkeys? Definitely not. For me? Let’s see. Lying in a rolling puddle of weeping soundtrack and credits, I contemplate the power of story and stuffing. I’m stuck. I’m broken open and can’t close myself until I find a believable conclusion. And then, Deus Ex Machina: My phone buzzes. I pick it up, read the message, and explode in a laugh from the bottom of my previously sore but now pumpkin-filled gut. It’s my son, Adam, who has been selected by an American family to also celebrate Thanksgiving on the wrong day. Only, just a few miles from Plymouth Rock, he has a different America to contemplate. In Providence no less.

He texts: “Mom.

I’m standing in a giant parking lot of a Sam’s Club that’s not exactly a Sam’s Club on the edge of a highway, with cart returns, and everything, and I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

I text: “Take a deep breath, say your name, and cite 5 true things.”

“OK,” he texts back.

“I think I’ll take my breath in bulk.”

And there it is. I exhale finally into shavasana. It’s Thanksgiving, sort of, and I’m grateful.

The End. 

Constellation

Here is a coffee table photo of my daughter

toothy smile and soft map of freckles

eyes open as palms

her face a whale’s call

a self-portrait

reminding this me

that moments are coastlines

and she lives there between land and sea

seven forever within her frame

Next to her a photo of my mother

the same age I am now

her eyes like Sirens

success stitched into her dress

The frame can hardly contain her

frozen life expanding like ice

Her voice breaks through the cracks: there is still time

Here is my fault line

where continents slide past each other

like cross country trains in the dark

where a prairie becomes a sudden gorge

revealing layers of sediment past

and the core is forced to the surface.

I hold one picture in each hand

and create a meridian

through my body

to link shores and seas

and torn continents

but each resists the shift

insists on territory

So I close my eyes and make each of us a planet

in a large enough galaxy

but with mutual pull

With my outstretched arms

I draw zodiac lines connecting our lights

And set the picture of our souls against the sky.

The Tiger's Wife

I guess I liked The Tiger's Wife, the bestselling novel by Téa Obreht, most because it reminded me of so many other novels. I don't mean that it's unoriginal, for it's fiercely imaginative and fresh, but rather that it created an intertexuality within my own mind as it spoke to other novels I love: The Deathless Man recalled the Golem in Kavalier and Clay, a wandering phantom that embodies the shadow side of human life and belief, but one who is conscious of his fate, like Melquiades from One Hundred Years of Solitude.. The tiger seemed so much like the tiger in Life of Pi, a reminder of the beast within and the veneer of domestication, of our uneasy relationship with our wild and gentle selves. The post-tragedy setting, the suspicion, the heavy sense of collective loss kept taking me back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reminding me how we often choose weight over escape, even as it causes us pain. At great risk, Natalia sets out to find not so much answers but meaning, not like a detective but more like an innocent, like Kundera's Teresa. The historical context, a cycle of tolerance and destruction among peoples, seems so much like the inevitable demise of the Buendias, though Albrecht's ending is not as brutal as García Márquez'. And the way the magical elements mesh with the realistic and historical narratives reminds me of the stories that speak loudest to me, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, Shakespeare's Tempest, Helprin's Winter's Tale, Borges' Labyrinths, even Wicked. There are many readers and critics who label works like The Tiger's Wife as fables, suggesting that the animal characters and heavy hand of destiny reduce the work to childish moral allegory. Instead, to me it is these features that bring the work into the archetypal, a landscape of the familiar, where our actions and experiences, however strange, make sense.

Origin

The intersections I'm most interested in right now are the growing overlap between cognitive psychology and neurology, the change of the human brain from reading brain to digital brain, common ground between mythology and science, the ways in which language shapes our thinking, and stories (fiction or film) and visual art that feature Jungian elements, folk tales, and myth.