Category Archives: Academia

Zen wisdom in the middle of the night

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When I can’t sleep, I am glad to find my e-reader on the bedside table. In the middle of the night, I pick it up and read quietly, bathed in soft light, disturbing nobody. Last night, I found treasure after midnight: two books I’d bought in 2021 by Charlotte Joko Beck, my favourite Zen teacher. 

I read for an hour or so, finding many paragraphs I’d highlighted. I savoured her wisdom again. How could I have forgotten you, Joko? I fell asleep calmed by her words. This, I hope, gives the flavour of her teachings:

When expectation fails—when we don’t get what we’re after—at that point, practice can begin. . . . Disappointment is our true friend, our unfailing guide; but of course nobody likes such a friend. 

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it’s the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we’re alert. This gift is always present in anyone’s life, that moment when “It’s not the way I want it!”  

Everyday Zen: Love and Work (1989)

The morning before, I’d quickly sketched on my whiteboard a comic of a little girl disappointed with life, as if it’s life’s fault somehow that we are disappointed. To admit that I’m disappointed feels difficult. Rather, I fake it—everything is fine. And I hate to see disappointment on the face of somebody I love. I want to fix it—to remove the disappointment, find an antidote. This reaction leads to all kinds of fuckery, as you can imagine. 

What strange serendipity to find Joko’s words about disappointment. What if disappointment is a gift? 

I cannot seem to write freely anymore. This change is so disappointing! I feel resistance to my own writing and powerless to give good advice to students about how to overcome writing paralysis. It’s been some months since I wrote freely. Everything I put down seems irrelevant or stupid. I’ve started many blogposts and abandoned them after a paragraph or two. After reading Joko, I said to myself, okay—I am here with my disappointment. Here it is, I feel it, and I’ll write through it, through the obstacle. The obstacle is the path. I pull up the abandoned blogpost from last week. Try again.

My first class as a new graduate student was on September 11, 2001.  After watching the twin towers go down in smoldering ruins on our TV, I left the house, trembling, to attend a class in African American literature. My professor, a young, blond, white man around 10 years my junior, not only didn’t mention his own whiteness in relation to the topic of African American literature, but also didn’t mention the traumatic horror of 9/11 that had just happened that morning. It was as if we were in the mythic, impregnable ivory tower—only abstract ideas are permitted here. No planes can touch us. Real politics, real life, real hatred, real racism, poverty, oppression—stay outside the moat, outside the fly zone. When I think of his omission now, I realize how bizarre it was. He was the teacher; we followed his lead and stayed silent about what had just happened. History happened. I know now that it was fear that stopped him. He didn’t know how to handle the mess of us being angry, scared, facing the horror. So he never mentioned the planes, the smoke, the ash, the buildings collapsing in rubble. 

Twenty-two years later, I’ve experienced three different roles at the university: student, faculty, and staff member. And this semester, I end my sojourn here. I can say that things have changed for the better. We have evolved.

We were blind to our privilege back then (well, we still are, it’s a work in progress). The prof who didn’t acknowledge the significance of his whiteness in relation to the topic of African America and Blackness is only one example. Students were considered brains walking around on legs—not full humans with mutable emotions. Not people with hearts, failing bodies, families, jobs, depression, ADHD, mental illness. We were confused, unhappy, imperfect, terrified to admit our vulnerabilities, worried we weren’t smart enough. I remember one professor (another young white male) saying to us, “When I was a student, I never asked for an extension. I was always able to meet the deadlines. If I could do it, so can you. No extensions will be given in this class.” He had no clue that some of us might be dealing with financial and emotional burdens, children who needed care, challenges to our executive functioning, depression, two or three jobs…. 

I went to a learning and teaching conference during the last week of August. The theme was Accessibility, Relationality and Belonging. The keynote speaker, Jackie Stewart (UBC), talked about how to advance equity in university classes and beyond, at the level of program, institution, and society. She talked about collecting data from the grandmother’s perspective, not from big brother’s top-down perspective. An approach of care—we want to see all students succeed—rather than from power. It was wonderful to attend sessions on why we should teach queer theory in first year, on how to coach your ADHD students in executive functioning. Another session on a new Indigenous-student-only academic writing course. I learned about the hidden curriculum: All of those things we assume students should “already know,” but don’t. 

At the executive functioning workshop, the facilitator told us how to incorporate into our syllabi a request-for-extension form. Students can just complete a digital form and get the extension they need without embarrassment or anxiety. Inform them not just of due dates, but also suggested start dates for assignments. We always just thought, “they should figure it out themselves.” Really?

In the queer theory session, Michael Reed showed us a video that made us cry, made us realize this is why we need to—if not teach queer theory in our first year classes—at least include something in our syllabi to show we are allies. Maybe something as simple as, here’s the location of the closest gender-neutral bathroom. We see you, trans and non-binary students. You belong.

I walked back to my office in the library at the end of the conference, past the Digicasters with their welcoming and inclusive messages: “We have screen readers, ask us!” “We have a respite room if you need to take a nap!” Libraries have evolved. Somewhere along the way, we realized we are here to serve the students. And no, it’s not “hand holding.” 

I feel content with all I’ve learned. It’s too late for me to incorporate these innovations into my teaching, but I’ve enjoyed witnessing the consciousness-raising taking place in higher education.

The pandemic really kickstarted this movement. We admitted we were tired, stressed, and scared—staff, instructors, and students all. We needed to infuse our teaching and learning with kindness, patience, care, and transparency. This is real life, not the ivory tower.

And I come back to Joko Beck, relieved that I’ve made it this far in my writing. Perhaps I just had to walk around the (writer’s) block in my path. Not an obstacle, just a detour. Joko Beck writes in Nothing Special (1993), 

“As we watch the mind over the years, the hopes slowly wear out. And we’re left with what? It may seem gruesome, I know: we’re left with life as it is. … Turning our lives of drama to lives of no drama means turning a life where we’re constantly seeking, analyzing, hoping, and dreaming into one of experiencing life as it appears, right now. The key factor is awareness, just experiencing the pain as it is. Paradoxically, this is joy. There is no other joy on this earth except this.”

I find this so consoling—no other joy on this earth than life / pain as it is. Disappointment? Admit it, feel it. Writer’s block? Write around it, through it. Insomnia? Read Zen wisdom in the middle of the night. 

Hot pink at the centre

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On my bulletin board is a photo from almost 20 years ago. I took the photo down today to examine it, and the more I look at it, the more I wonder why it deserves a place among the special mementos there. 

Arms folded, face glowing, radiant smile, I stand in front of City Lights, the iconic San Francisco bookstore started by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953. I remember we had fun that trip, and I look happy. Yet it’s the portrait of a faker. The fakery is that I am wearing a hot pink button-down shirt under a black jacket. The hot pink cover on a book of love poems in the window display matches the uncharacteristic hot pink of my blouse. 

It’s late May 2004, and my then-husband and I are in San Francisco. We are staying at the Hyatt Regency in the Embarcadero for the 15th Annual American Literature Association conference. I’ve just started my PhD program, and this is my first real conference presentation. What a heady feeling to stay in a fancy hotel, to rub shoulders with people like Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles Johnson, and Arnold Rampersad. To see my name in the printed program: “From the Cultural Margin: Sinclair Lewis’s Quest for Symbolic Goods,” Madeline Walker, University of Victoria, British Columbia.

I wasn’t particularly interested in Sinclair Lewis, writer of early 20th century novels like Main Street and It Can’t Happen Here. But I’d gotten an A on an essay about him and the “literary field” (Pierre Bourdieu)  in one of my PhD seminars, and my professor mentioned there was a Sinclair Lewis Society. Perhaps they were accepting papers for the upcoming conference. At that time in my life, my energy was almost wholly other-directed. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but if somebody else wanted something for me, or thought I should do something, I would do it. Dear professor: You think I’m capable of presenting my ideas at an international conference, even though I’m only one year into my PhD? Okay!  I’ll go for it. I took it as a challenge. 

When I got in touch with the society, the president told me they hadn’t had a Sinclair Lewis panel at the ALA for a while—it seemed interest in Lewis was waning in the aughts. But I pressed on, bothering him with several more emails. And finally, they were able to find one other presenter to join me, and a small panel of two represented the Sinclair Lewis Society at the ALA that year. 

I look back now from the distance of years and see my hunger for attention and approval. An A-hound since grade school, I had continued my quest for excellence, for pats on the head, for being seen as “special.”  When I look back at grad school, sometimes it seems like I dreamed a long dream. Disconnected from my inner self, I was like a robot scanning for other people’s opinions about what I should be and do. 

I don’t remember much about the conference except attending my professor’s presentation on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton. I sat behind his two young children and observed how they stayed very still, hands folded on their laps, watching their father orate in dense language, his glasses glinting under the overhead lights, his fresh young face like a rosy, earnest teenager’s. 

How were those children even possible? I wondered at their unnatural stillness. And I remember my own presentation, scheduled late on the last day of the conference. Only a few diehards were in the audience, and two of them were my husband and my professor. I got through it by riding that ambition, that force that through the green fuse drives the flower. As Dylan Thomas writes, that same force “blasts the roots of trees/ [and] Is my destroyer.”

While my ambition seemed admirable, it was actually self-destructive. A drive for approval propelled me through graduate school.  I chose topics not with my heart (answering the question, What truly matters to me?) but from my head—looking for subjects and trends that interested my (mostly male) professors and supervisors. I was mildly interested in the topic for the conference paper, but in a purely intellectual way, an arms-length kind of way. I pretended Lewis and symbolic capital captivated me, but it was my teacher’s interest rather than mine. My argument—that Sinclair Lewis accrued more symbolic capital by refusing a literary award than by accepting it—seems wholly irrelevant to me now. 

I went on to present at many more conferences on the way to completing the PhD. But I consistently calibrated my ideas to please others—how could I get the most praise from my all-male committee?  The hot pink shirt I wore in that photograph taken near the beginning of my journey was a metaphor for the charade I was acting in, the pretense that this was the real me. 

During a break in the conference, I wandered into a women’s clothing store on the ground floor concourse of the Hyatt Regency. A two-for-one sale was on: I bought two oversized shirts made of silky synthetic fabric, one white and one hot pink. I felt daring, as if I were dressing this new PhD student-version of myself. Perhaps I would stand out in a crowd—stop wearing black so much, start showing off a little. Speak in public, garner attention, express bold ideas. But I rarely wore either shirt, especially the hot pink number. When I put it on, I didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel comfortable. So, I would take it off again. 

The pink shirt is like my pilgrimage in academia. Trying to be pink shirt when I am really black shirt. Searching for the holy out there, but never finding it. Not realizing that it’s in here. 

The weird part is that academia was never the problem. The problem was not trusting and pursuing my own interests. Not pursuing the study of women’s poetry and the body or motherhood or the multiple other threads that pulled me. Not holding my own fascinations with reverence, but instead, trailing after other people’s fascinations, thinking that if I aligned my interests with them, I might get the attention I craved. 

I’m tacking the photo back in its place. I need it to remind me not to wear hot pink, but instead to touch into the hot pink centre of myself, for that’s where my truth lives.

Thomas, Dylan. https://poets.org/poem/force-through-green-fuse-drives-flowe