philosophy

Knock it down, revise your life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March, northern Vermont, the long dragged-out amorphousness where winter drags its slushy sulkiness into sodden spring. I long for a few hours of blistering sun. This season was the weather my mother despised most, all those New Hampshire years of my childhood. One afternoon, she pulled over on a back road and instructed my siblings and me to run through a farmer’s soaked pasture, patchily emerged from a winter of snow, and head for the woods at the far end. We did not know who owned the field and argued. Go, she insisted, go. You kids need to run. So we ran.

My novel, Call It Madness, which will be out in at the end of June, in a month when I intend to swim, is about the unvarnished craziness of family, of fiercely knotted threads of desire and thwarted passion, how the stories that shape and mold our lives are buried generationally. The novel is not about my mother, but it’s for my mother, the woman now dead nearly two years. She was mercurial, passionate about love and destruction. In the long-beyond-time stretch of recent cancer treatments, those endless months on the couch, I often thought of her; she was the only family member who had endured the triple violence of cancer-and-chemotherapy-and-surgery, sheer survival tenuous as a snowdrop. My mother surprised me until the very end of her life, the whole range of the unexpected, from sorrow to contentment. As her youngest daughter, how little I knew her, and yet I carry her with me, in my own might and fallibility.

In these months of remission, I’ve learned from yoga that inquiry is a force, a variation of that impossible Socratic dictum, know thyself. Healing, I plot a venture into transforming my kitchen, my home’s heart, and hire a carpenter to take down a wall, open an exterior wall with windows. Am I crazy, I wonder. At the edges at least of madness, recklessly heady with survival, with the raw knowledge of mortality clenched in one fist.

When the vinyl flooring is ripped up, the carpenter and I ponder the hardwood boards, stained and blackened and scraped. The lives of previous occupants rises like mist, mesmerizing, unknowable. What remains are their scars. My cat and I sit on the dusty floor and share a bowl of arugula. Wet snow slides from the roof in the flowerbeds. I planted the gold compass flowers. Who planted the pink roses I’ll never know.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house…

Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. — Robert Frost, “Directive”

Vermont Town Meeting Day, Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a village with a single blinking yellow light at its intersection. In all those multiple trips to Dartmouth for consultation, treatment, medication, we drove out of town, over the hills, along the Connecticut River, all the way to the Hanover, New Hampshire exit. There, a traffic light greeted us.

For a few months, the village will be rerouted through temporary lights while a crew rebuilds walls to keep the town out of the river and replace a footbridge over the river. For drivers, something to complain about. For walkers, a point of interest.

On town meeting day, in the historic town house, a day of voting, hot emotions, decisions of material import. A school budget voted down.

March is the season of fluctuation between mud and ice. One afternoon, the blowing snow drives bitterly into my eyes; I huddle in my coat. The next afternoon, I tie my coat around my waist, let the breeze push through my hair.

The sun beams with real heat. The earth reveals her immense size. Meanwhile, the humans, with all our passion and fury. I seek both the companionship of people around me — how dearly I treasure this, more and more — and seek solace in solitude, in the chitter of chickadees, the clouds rushing over the sky, the full moon hung over a forested ridgeline, gleaming.

“What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”
― Gary Snyder

Oatmeal Chat, Vultures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Vermont sends its swiftwater team to North Carolina, repaying a favor when Vermont was in need. Word comes of similar terrain and climate causes, but far worse devastation. We send them our empathy, our skilled folks, certainly money, to their world broken apart….

In Vermont, these weeks have been tepid, the foliage gently rotating to gold, the sun warm in the afternoons. This year, the purple asters decorate the landscape everywhere, pallets of brushiness.

Thursday afternoon, I take my laptop to our picnic table, the bluejays creeping near, curious, my bent-over sunflowers in the garden shaking with feathered gleaners. I’m stuck on this notion of impermanence my father and sister and I have been kicking around, when we connect in our disparate parts of the country via our laptops. Autumn in Vermont personifies impermanence. Stepping out for firewood in the early morning, geese clack over my porch roof, getting their V formation together, out of here for warmer waters.

In the co-op, I round an aisle and meet an old friend filling a paper bag with oatmeal. You can imagine me, he tells me, standing at my back door, just staring at the mountainside. What perfection today. From there, our conversation quickly bends into small town democracy, how each of these three adjacent towns are different. We step to the aisle’s side and dig into the grittier details of a legal letter circulating on email. My friend, thinking like me, asks about motivation. Who’s desiring what? Why? What’s the intent, for what human footing?

Fascinating questions. Vermont Selectboard meetings are generally unfettered democracy. Anyone can show up and speak their piece, ask questions.

Later, I step outside with my pound of coffee and pound of butter. The turkey vultures are circling, swooping low over this section of highway and co-op and river. In my wool sweater, barefoot in Danskos, I stand watching for the longest time, the sun falling behind the hillside.

A passerby, walking in, glances up, too, and shudders. “Them. Those birds.”

I start up the hillside, under the gyrating vultures.

 Even  in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
 I long for Kyoto.

— Bashō

Finding a Thread.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

On my way home, I stop at Number Ten Pond. The water temperature is at that sweet spot, exactly perfect — and how often do you touch perfect? — and I wade right in. A woman stands in the pond, two children splashing around her. She laughs when the minnows bite her toes.

I swim far. In the pond’s center, I float on my back. With my eyes closed, my mind’s eye turns red, with blood or sunlight, who knows, and I’m no longer sure which way is up or down, water or sky. I’m distant enough from shore that only the loon call reaches me. By the summer’s end, these swims will add up to an invisible chain of experience: of water and weather, of whatever language drifts my way. July here, just a handful of fleeting days. 

"Everything Is Made Of Labor"
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.

The sound of one hand clapping, revisited.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This week, I unexpectedly find myself waiting for someone I don’t really know and end up reading a copy of Ken Wilber’s collected writings. Winter has finally come. The purest and loveliest of snowfalls fills up our world. I wait much longer than I had guessed. A woman comes in to sweep the floor, and we talk for a bit. Sunlight pours through enormous windows.

Here’s some Ken Wilber I soaked in:

You know the Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Usually, of course, we need two hands to clap – and that is the structure of typical experience. We have a sense of ourselves as a subject in here, and the world as an object out there. We have these “two hands” of experience, the subject and the object. And typical experience is a smashing of these two hands together to make a commotion, a sound. The object out there smashes into me as a subject, and I have an experience – the two hands clap together and experience emerges.

And so the typical structure of experience is like a punch in the face. The ordinary self is the battered self – it is utterly battered by the universe “out there.” The ordinary self is a series of bruises, of scars, the results of these two hands of experience smashing together. This bruising is called “dukkha,” suffering. As Krishnamurti used to say, in that gap between the subject and the object lies the entire misery of humankind.

On my way home, I do something I’ve never done in the winter. I park along the edge of an unfamiliar road. I’ve forgotten my hat. The wind is wild, as if I’m on a stormy sea. My hair tangles over my eyes. Oh sun, oh wind, oh endless snow.

Midwinter, here.

Talking Past Dark.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

A friend comes to visits, heads to my picnic table, and we commence talking. Hours later, a dewy dusk has descended. I’m shivering, my sweater cuffs pulled all the way over my hands. Inside, my cats are grousing for a fire in the wood stove.

I remember my friend’s oldest son sitting on my couch, about an eon ago. The boy was so small his legs didn’t reach the end of the couch. Now, he’s thinking of heading into a PhD program.

I haven’t seen this friend in months, since before I traveled to Europe and decided I was born on a continent that mismatches me. Yet, we start talking as though I was a young mother again, walking along the dirt road with a toddler, my hair unbrushed for days.

It’s a cliche of course, how the world changes and how it remains the same, that one long Heraclitus river — always the stream, never the same.

The foxes didn’t return to den behind my house this year. A few stray lilacs bloomed in late September. The harvest moon sails up in the sky. All our hours of talking and we solve absolutely nothing, not a single problem, except this, perhaps: a fattening of our friendship, this woman who assured me I would survive my divorce, that my life would continue. The sun heads down, and we keep on talking.