dangerous compassions

I call you / from the comet's cradle

Friday, November 07, 2008

disoriented

Today I got into a sort of argument with an old friend. I say sort of because it was very brief--it was more of a small explosion on my part. It left me crying about prop 8--the whole thing was over prop 8. I'm still feeling raw and fragile.

But I'm comforting myself with The Decemberists' "Red Right Ankle" and drowning my sorrows in apple crisp with pretend vanilla ice cream--I made the apple crisp over the course of a few days, coring, peeling, and chopping the apples two at a time. They're the Braeburns that we got at the apple farm near San Luis--they went soft, so I thought I should bake with them. We didn't have the pretend vanilla ice cream, and we needed groceries anyway, so I made a Trader Joe's run.

There I saw some Indian people--an old mother in a sari, a young mother in western clothes, and a little child. I recognized the old woman from Vedanta. Her daughter said hi to me. Then I heard her tell her mom, "She's a Vedanta person." The old woman looked at me. She had a tikala on her forehead and didn't seem to recognize me. I felt embarrassed.

Tomorrow is Jagaddhatri puja. That's our center's biggest event, maybe. I think of Krishna puja as the biggest, but really, Jagaddhatri puja probably is. Sixty people are expected to come just from San Francisco and Berkeley. We have our puja: our choir sings, the men's choir sings, the nun's choir sings. Worship is performed. Then we serve lunch. I'm on the lunch-serving crew. Erik's upset about me going at all. I won't be able to work tomorrow morning. But I'm going to try to do some work in the afternoon and evening to make some of that up.

What I like best about Jagaddhatri puja is something Swami said a couple years ago: that Jagaddhatri is gravity, what holds everything together. So we have a day to worship gravity, which is my favorite thing. Hinduism doesn't suit me perfectly, but it's facts like these that make me stay.

Today I got a letter from my friend J in New York. She's been in the hospital for almost three weeks now. She's had to spend more time in the seclusion room for having a crisis. She thought she might get out for Halloween, then thought she might get out for election day. Anyway, she was able to vote absentee ballot. I'll write back to her tonight.

Yesterday I saw my friend P. She's playing a Mozart sonata at a recital on the 22nd, and I'm going to turn the pages. So we practiced. I made a couple mistakes, and she made mistakes too. We'll practice again Thursday. After that she wanted to see if I could help her do something on the computer, but I wasn't able to help. She told me that just knowing I couldn't help helped. Then we sat in her livingroom and talked for a long time. She told me stories about the past. Some of them I had already heard, but I didn't remember all the details, so it was good to hear them again. She told me about her first job at a terrible nursing home where she got fired for getting one of the residents an ice cream cone. P is 72, so she has a lot of memories. We talk quietly and let silence fill the room, sometimes. We like to sit quietly together.

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