Today the frost clings on all the branches equally like how fire clings to a log.
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I sit here in the studio. I miss Gay, my dear friend. She’s in Berkley still, and we’ve been out of touch. We met at University of Colorado as choreography students. Our lockers were next to each other, and we shared reading, thinking and talking. We sat on the roof top of the student center and ate salads with cherry tomatoes, and in the beautiful May weather, overlooking the mountains, talked about existentialism, looked at our hands and wondered who am I? We lived together at ten- sixty- nine ninth Street and made phone calls across the street at the payphone at More than a Grocery and made dances and full evening concerts together. She taught me to turn a studio into a performance space, stir fry vegetables, and how to write grants. We watched the film, Deer Hunter during our three day fast of only drinking water and herbal tea, and felt sick, and cried and broke the fast with chocolate macaroons. I walked with her on the cliffs of Point Reyes and we scrambled to the shore and sat with sea lion moms and their cubs, drank Kashya tea out of a small thermos made in Germany with a tiny elephant on it. Walking back to our cottage, elk appeared out of fog like ghosts and stopped, as we carefully walked around the herd. Christmas night, we went to the beach with her friends, drank cherry wine, and all the driftwood we collected burned in about five minutes. “Just get the ticket and once you’re here you don’t have to spend anything.” She said. We visited each other through various boyfriends and houses and apartments. I came back to Colorado from a Zen retreat and watched a person die for my job. I felt lethargic. “Say yes to every yoga teaching job.” Gay said on the phone. “I never want to say yes. I just want to sit here, which is even a little too vertical; I really just want to lie here.” I told her. I ripped a piece of paper into a narrow strip. I wrote: Say yes to every Yoga teaching job no matter what you actually want to do or have planned, and scotch taped it to my telephone and followed that instruction. I went to the Texas hunting camp for her family re-union and when I got married Steve was standing to my left and Gay, my right. We drove around looking for flowers. She pinned corsages on the lapels of parents and aunts, made the bouquet with roses and a fiddlehead fern which I held in my hands. “What do I do with the bouquet when it’s time to hold out my finger for the ring.” I said. “Hand it to me.” she said. Just now, seventeen years later, in the middle of this snowstorm, I toss the dried flowers in the compost bin, say some words and walk away. I go back and grab the sage green ribbon that held them together.
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Sitting here I miss a small tree branch in the half- frozen stream in Arroyo Secco. The low branch dips in the water and comes a little up—more like to the side. Its rhythm, over and over. The branch becomes coated with ice, like how the Plymouth Rock pilgrims dipped candles.
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Sitting, I miss the way Tim Landry in the 8th grade reached for my hand on the way home. I miss sitting in my red tent from Target, in Wyoming, with my dog, Sage, copying pages of the Lotus sutra in my journal. I miss David, on the phone, reading me a poem, and how my teacher, Kobun, says my name, Kattsreen, in his soft Japanese. I miss the way it feels to be backstage, ready to go on, and I miss the relief of performance over. I miss my father’s gloved open hands, gently patting my shoulders before we head down dead man’s hill in the snow, on our wooden toboggan, and I miss the surf. I don’t miss the surf. I miss the certain silence the rhythm of surf belongs too.
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The teachers tell me the world rushes into this particular place where I am. Kobun says that we were flying around and dropped to ground and now we are sitting. That’s what “shikantaza” means, just sitting. Everything I need is here, all around me. And this, here, tells me what is next. The teachers tell me I am sitting for my past too, the ancestors. The teachers say I am being romantic, nostalgic. That the mind invents stories for comfort, so I can have my memories in my special box.
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After the Buddha’s big awakening Mara approached, looked around and saw no one. “Prove it.” he said. Shakyamuni Buddha reached down, fingertips to dirt and said, “the earth is my witness.”
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This morning I wiped a piece of chicken fat off the counter with a blue sponge and when I figured out what it was, I said out loud, “that’s chicken fat.”
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Once a day, in elementary school we lift our hinged desk tops, put our books and papers back inside. We stand, scrape our small pink chairs back underneath our desks and walk, double wide line to the gym. We find our little patch of space where we swing our arms without touching. Our English teacher, Mrs. Rosenthall or sometimes Social Studies teacher, Mr. Scaglione, places the needle down on a 45 and exercises with us. The song, Go you chicken fat, go. * And we all sing along. The teachers, who, just a moment before, were so serious, laugh and shout the chorus, and move with us. The concept of the funny song was that if we don’t exercise, we will become chicken fat. Actually, we already are chicken fat and if we neglect to move our body around like the song says we would be so much more chicken fat.
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I sit, and my practice replaces missing anyone. In minutes it’s all gone, Mrs. Rosenthal, the children, gymnasium floor, and blinking fluorescents. Replaced by the next breath out, and by the robins in the hackberry tree, spreading one wing to slow the descent.
~o~