“Have you murdered anyone in the last day, week, month, year, decade? Probably not. Then don’t worry about it. Give yourself a break. You’re probably a really fine person.”
I sought out meditation under duress. I married young and a couple months after the wedding, Tom left for training in Georgia and was shipped off to Iraq with the rest of the Parachute Infantry Division. This was 2006. I stopped sleeping. When Tom came home for R&R I stopped eating and couldn’t leave the house for fear I’d vomit whatever empty space I had left in my belly. I didn’t want kids. I loved Tom but hated the army, hated the other officers’ wives even more. I wrote garbage. I moved to Alaska, moved to Vancouver, back to Alaska; I worked in a women’s gym, a cat shelter, chiropractic college, bookstore, and a school for children whose severe behavioral issues were treated with medication and two white padded rooms with doorknobs on the outsides only.
Some of Tom’s friends were killed during his first tour, but when Colby hit an IED it was different. Tom flew to Dover to collect Colby’s body and bring him to Pennsylvania, to give his mother a hug. I’ve watched Tom hug people who aren’t me. He’s terrible at it. When he came home he said it could have been worse. Another guy at the hotel bar was waiting to pick up the hand of a guy he’d already buried. Just the hand. In a wooden box with a metal handle.
My mom flew to Alaska one Christmas and asked me if I shouldn’t go back to school and study something I loved. I could list my loves: my violin, my cat, poetry. I’m a decent Suzuki method violin teacher but don’t enjoy performing, and I don’t have the scientific background for veterinary training. So I went to Pacific University for my MFA and worked with Dorianne Laux, Peter Sears, Joe Millar and Marvin Bell. In the two years it took me to complete the degree, I changed my address six times. At lunch one afternoon, beneath the gorgeous oak trees in Forest Grove, Marvin asked me what Tom’s MOS was and I shrugged. “He doesn’t make you know any of this, does he?” Tom makes me know plenty.
Poetry made me feel good, but the more time I spent with poets the more I realized the deep vulnerability we rely on for our craft is kept entirely separate from the way we pursue success. Poems are acts of compassion but poets are often cruel to one another. Our work may reach the most tender or well-hidden emotions of others, but our practice is cutthroat and often embeds our poems in subtle shades of anger and fear that are visible to the observant reader. Meditation has allowed me to practice poetry freely and protect myself from the negative thoughts and behaviors that seem to come with the territory of publishing and academia.
When I began studying poetry in earnest and didn’t know anything about meditation, I decided not to write about what was real because I didn’t want to risk my vulnerability. I read James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys and learned that I could effectively disguise myself in the imaginary. It worked! Pretty well, actually, and it was more fun than writing was real, which left me more directly exposed on the page. I avoided appearing in my own stories and resolutely kept my feet out of the poetry pool. But even this became exhausting and I had to rethink my strategy. I didn’t yet know how to best marry the real and the imaginary in my poems, and I would never have guessed that it involved meditation, a practice outside the basic applications of poetry.
I didn’t want to write about the colonel’s wife, her desperate phone calls to Tom in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to write about the captain’s wife, how her husband smashed a champagne bottle with his sword at a military ball and her wrists caught the tiny green shards of glass. How she giggled when I put bandages on her skinny arms. I didn’t want to write about the forced coffee dates, the required tea parties, the FRG meetings, the wives who called me dyke, the colonel who called me woman, the major who begged to deploy to Afghanistan when his wife got pregnant. Some poet friends marveled at how I tolerated military life, but it is remarkably similar to the academic one. I may write about the ugly side of the army, but selfishness, sexism, opportunism and desperation are hardly foreign to a poet’s experience.
Did I tell you I’m the daughter of a yoga instructor? My mother has been telling me to pay attention to my breath for decades, and she says it more often each time Tom is promoted, when new strings of officers’ wives thread their way into my life. Each time I hear poets cut one another down, rip their poems apart or exclude them, I am told to return to my breath. My mother’s been telling me to be kind, be patient, be mindful. To put myself always in another’s shoes, to understand my critics, to see both sides. As a teenager, it was awful. By the time I was twenty I had meditation completely backwards and questioned the validity of my own “shoes,” degraded my own side, doubted my worth. I thought meditation was oppressive until I got married, until Tom went to war and I couldn’t breathe and poems weren’t enough.
I couldn’t keep working against my mind and the way it sulked and hated, the way it dripped with doubt and regret. Because I could not shake poetry and knew I’d have to live both the creative and professional lives it required in order to forge bonds with other writers and readers, I sought out meditation. I meditate because I know the poets and soldiers who are cruel are also wounded. Eight years ago, I looked at meditation as a last resort before drowning in Tom’s career and mine. Today, a meditative approach is the only way I can rationally embrace poetry – as a writer, instructor, wife, mother, as a PhD student, nonprofit director, editor, violinist.
This week, I’ll be posting a few short essays about some fundamental components of meditation and how they continue to impact my life in poetry (and, I suppose, my life as it indirectly relates to war and the military). I’ll discuss compassion & nonviolence, the concept of success, mindfulness and physical practices. And I am so glad you're here.