Category Archives: Fear

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. 

Enough

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“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?” Emily Dickinson

When I bought a birdhouse from our neighbour Bryan, a retired engineer who makes and sells them, I knew that attaching it to our shed might be distracting. I guess part of me wanted to be distracted by movement, by life. The wooden shed in our backyard that we use for storage is right in my sightline when Michael and I meditate each morning. If I sit facing west I can see the branches of the tall conifers dancing in the wind, the burnt orange of the dying cedar hedge, and the shed with its mossy roof where squirrels scramble to and fro. I can see the marvelous sky beyond, lately grey but today pearly with a swath of violet in the far distance and blue beyond that.

Bryan said the small house was perfect for chickadees, and since we mounted it above the door of the shed about a month ago, I have been waiting. Then today, about 15 minutes into our 30 minute sit, movement pulled my eyes. Two birds had landed, one on the roof of the birdhouse and one on the tiny bamboo twig Bryan had so carefully attached in front of the circular entrance. My heart leapt in joy! The birds were curious. Perhaps they were a couple, looking for a good spot to nest. One peeped into the hole and then examined the sides of the house. The first bird hopped away and the second one hopped down to the twig and made the same examination. Alas, they weren’t interested in the real estate, and my heart sank in disappointment as they flitted off. Note to self—look at my bird book for a picture of a chickadee and make sure those guys were chickadees. Perhaps they were another variety of bird (how can I have gotten to be my age and know so little about birds?) too big to fit through that little hole….

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“Madeline! you are supposed to be meditating!” and I was back to Shamatha, one-pointed meditation, this time with my gaze brought close, fixed on the orange and purple cloth spread across the shrine. Breathe in and breathe out.

I see advertisements for all kinds of events happening around town, but we go to only a few of them. I have some friends, and there are so many people I know, yet days go by when I see nobody but Michael. However, I don’t feel the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) that you hear about. No, I feel dreamily satisfied most days to walk and talk with my husband, marvel at the hummingbirds that visit the front feeder, look at the buds that are already showing up on so many of the trees and bushes after the long rains. The pussy willows appeared suddenly on our neighbour’s willow—a sweet indicator that spring is close.  My neighbour Don has told me February after February to help myself, take some cuttings of the furry silver catkins that stud the elegant stalks like tiny gifts. And each year, I have said “oh thank you, I will,” but I don’t because I am working and by the time I get home in the evenings it’s dark and I’m tired and week-ends go by in a crush of chores and exhaustion and I can’t imagine getting out the long cutters and the ladder.

But this year, I am not working. This, I think, is like living in a beautiful dream, to sleep until I wake up, to tune into the rhythms of my body and the dark winter earth. To have time to look at the birds and cut the pussy willows for our table. To write and to sew and pore over recipe books. To spend so much time in my room, surrounded by fabric scraps, my son’s paintings, Captain Happy the pink monkey, books and arts supplies. To choose to write for a while, make coffee, then work on a scrappy quilt—enjoying laying out colours and patterns next to each other—then to take a walk through the woods to the mall to renew my annual membership to Fabricland.  To have time to read long books—currently Mervyn Bragg’s Cumbrian trilogy—to caress the cat, to sit and do nothing.

And then a thread of anxiety starts to weave itself into my consciousness. What have I accomplished?  What do I have to show for all these months? Really? I have twelve months off work with all of this free time and all I’ve done is sewn some little scraps together? Really?

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It’s interesting how relentlessly the old tapes about achievement and success play in my mind. The endless loop of “not good enough” fades into the background for long periods now, but then when I get too comfortable with myself, just being a nobody, just being, just content, well then the hiss of angry snakes intensifies: “You should be making something substantial, something meaningful, something important—write a novel or do some important research or get GOOD at something, take a class, or do some volunteer work and if you’re not going to do any of that get back to employment, make some money, be useful, stop being lazy. You are turning into a nobody—you need to fight, be somebody, resist the fade into nothingness, get out there and push yourself or you’ll shrivel up and disappear.”

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Not Good Enough

I tune out the irritating hiss and start to spread the colours for the next series of two inch fabric squares on my cutting mat. The snakes start to recede, to slither off to their lair. I look out the window above my work table at the morning sun glinting over the fresh green of February lawns, the long shadows thrown by the boulders in our front yard, the iridescent puddles from last night’s rain.  And I glance at Captain Happy, pinkly presiding over the room that I inhabit so joyfully. Remember, all of this is impermanent. So I will rest in this great pleasure while it lasts.

Captain Happy
Pussy willows at last

 

 

 

 

Moving through fear

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Lit from within is the sole secure way
to traverse dark matter. Some life forms —
certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms —
glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we
emit infrared light from our most lucent selves.
Our tragedy is we can’t see it.

From Robin Morgan’s “The Ghost Light”

As I get older, I am scared to do new things. Sometimes fear sucks the life and juice out of my plans and ideas, drying them in my solar plexus where they rattle around for months, even years. I can feel one or two in there now.  Those husks are like the bone-and-fur pellets—all that remains of their prey—that owls disgorge in the night. But the good news is that when I walk through fear, my plans and ideas can be reconstituted.

For over a year, I contemplated the bike racks on Victoria’s BC Transit buses.  I’d watch a nimble cyclist enter the space in front of a bus, pull down the rack, and lift her bicycle up and into the metal grooves. Her quick hand motion somehow moved a slender, rubber-clad arm up and over the front wheel. There seemed to be some mysterious communication pass between the driver and the cyclist both when the cyclist secured the bike and again when she removed it at her destination. How could I ever hope to know what was going on there? And with such weak arms, how could I possibly lift my bike onto the rack, place the wheels precisely into the grooves? Hopeless.

But I wanted to. Dusk begins before 5 p.m. these days, and I don’t want to ride home in the dark. But the mornings—well the sunrises are spectacular on the commute to work, streets frost-rimed and crisp as my wheels spin down the pavement. Smoky red-violet light blooms in the sky, heralding the sun’s bright burst of glory.  And it’s good exercise, my 45 minute commute, exercise I need. Another selling point: The Galloping Goose and Lochside trails have few riders this time of year.  Wouldn’t it be nice to ride to work in the morning and at the end of the day, pop the bike onto the rack and relax on the bus ride home, watching colourful Christmas lights slide by?

Feeling scared, I procrastinated. I didn’t know how to do it, wasn’t part of the bike rack club, one of the initiated. The bus driver would get annoyed with me. Other riders would feel irritated by my clumsiness. What if I did it wrong and my bike flew off the bus and caused an accident? Oh and the rack would probably already be taken up by other bicycles. Then what?  The list of fears and reasons not to act went on and on, dehydrating my plan until it was just a dry pellet.

One day I’d had just enough of myself, of the dry fear pellet knocking around my middle. I watched the video on BC Transit’s website on how to use the bike racks, then walked my bike over to the bus stop after work. I was lucky that an acquaintance of mine happened to be in the line-up, a philosophy student I’d coached. So I told her about my fear, and she admitted to also feeling paralyzed at the thought of doing new things. I felt less alone.  We chatted and I forgot to be scared.

When the bus arrived, I stepped in front of it and pulled the bike rack down. Just as I had imagined, I found it hard to hold my bike up and away from my body, then navigate its wheels into the grooves. I faltered a couple of times, almost dropping it. A young woman waiting for another bus saw what was happening and came quickly to my side. She helped me manoeuvre the wheels into the spaces, then showed me how to pull the locking bar out and over the wheel, how to test that it was secure.  When I got on the bus, the driver instructed me to give him some notice before my stop. I felt relieved.

I chatted with my philosophy acquaintance about C.S. Lewis and the four loves, about religion and being brought up as atheists—an experience we shared, about Iris Murdoch, and about marking papers. Such a delightful opportunity to discuss ideas and feelings.  Occasionally, I’d look up and see my handlebars through the front window and feel a ping of pleasure. I did it!  When I got off the bus and removed the bike, I flipped the rack up, made eye contact with the driver and gave him a thumb’s up as I moved out of the way. He nodded at me.  I was initiated.

The second time was a little easier—again, someone came to my aid when I faltered. (Oh, the kindness of strangers!) Third time was smooth; I needed no assistance, felt confident. Fourth time, I felt like an old hand, like I’d been doing this forever, what was ever the problem?

Fifth time I had to take the bus both to and from work because my tire deflated 10 minutes into my ride. The tires on this new bike of mine have Presta valves, and I was used to Schrader. I hadn’t paid full attention when Michael showed me how to use the pump on my tires. So when I inflated the back tire because it was feeling soft, I forgot to screw the little nut clockwise on the valve, and the air slowly leaked out as I rode.  When I noticed I was riding on a flat, I said to myself, no problem—I’ll take the bus.

After the workday, I put my bike on the bus home, and the friendly driver commented, “nice bike.”  I agreed it was a great bicycle. Then I mentioned my problem that morning with the deflated tire.  I took a seat near the front and fell into a reverie. After a while, the driver pulled to a stop to let some passengers on, and a big truck swiped the bus, cracking the side mirror. The driver was shaken up, and he announced to us that he’d do his best to fix the mirror with a rubber band, but he wasn’t sure it would hold and we may have to get off and wait for the next bus.

The rubber band held for about seven stops, keeping the glass fragments in their frame.  But then the driver, a kind and patient guy in his fifties, stopped again and announced that the rubber band had snapped, and he’d have to find some kind of replacement. He was pretty upbeat about it—not defeated yet.

“What do you need?” I asked. “Maybe I have something in my purse.”  “Well as a matter of fact,” he smiled, “I’ve been eyeing that bungee cord you’ve got on your bike basket. That would be perfect.” “Oh, that’s a great solution. Take it—it’s yours!” He removed the cord that I keep strapped onto my bike’s wire basket and wrapped it around the mirror until the glass shards, like puzzle pieces, were secure again in their frame.  “Perfect,” he said as he came in from the cold and closed the doors. “We’re legal.”

As I got ready to get off the bus, he thanked me for the bungee cord.  “Hey, if you hadn’t had the problem with your tire deflating this morning, you wouldn’t be here now giving me the bungee cord. You saved the day!” I smiled at him and waved at the passengers. They waved back and a few called out their thanks.  My bungee cord had helped them avoid a long delay in their travels home.

These days, fear seems to loom large over small things, things like putting a bike on a bus rack. But when I go forward and just do those things I fear doing, in the

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“where fear lives/lit from within”

words of Robin Morgan, I feel lit from within. I come forward, out of my safe cocoon. I engage with people—kind strangers, grateful passengers, and a gentle bus driver.  I engage with life.

Note on the illustration:  Credit to Nathaniel Churchill (thanks, Nat). I used one of his paintings behind the cutout in my sketch.  It occurred to me that this piece illustrates not only fear-pellets in the solar plexus, but it can also be interpreted as the experience of feeling “lit from within.”  Life is full of paradoxes.