What Did T. Read in 2022?

 




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Tamas - Spiritual Inertia

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When I first met my former therapist (Therapy Elsa), I eyeballed her with a great deal of distrust. I had finally been in therapy enough years to understand that the client, too, gets a say in whether or not the fit is right. "Are you one of those therapists who talk about sin a lot and how it's wrong to be gay?" I asked. Therapy Elsa smiled. "That's an interesting question. Why do you ask?" I assumed she was mentally writing down some kind of note like, "Prospective client probably gay." "Because you have diplomas hanging on your wall and one of them is from a seminary," I said. "Also, I know many Christians, and they care a LOT about whether people are gay." "Ah, I see," she said. "Well, to answer your concerns, the seminary I went to was quite open-minded." She went on to tell me how they used gender-neutral references for God, which basically made my head explode. Then I worried maybe she was too liberal ...
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Sneha - Mother Love

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  One of my favorite stories from the OT is what happens after Elijah defeats the prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel. Following his massive and unqualified victory, Elijah is so full of endorphins that he runs 15 miles back to Jezreel, where all his endorphins promptly leave him and he asks God to kill him. (And God is like, "No. Here, eat a sandwich, your blood sugar is low.") I mean,  what?  If this is not a clear case of what we would today define as bi-polar mania and depression, I don't know what is. At the very least, it's mood dysregulation. I feel like that prophet right now. After 15 years of trying to find a high school English position, I quit my job in a massive blaze of glory and took a leap of faith on a one-year-only position that -- I suspect -- I was probably the only person to apply for. This fall I will teach people older than 14 for the first time since the student-teaching days of my 20's. And now I want to die. Yesterday, I taught the first yoga ...
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Karma - Memory + Action

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I hung out with a friend recently at Oktoberfest. I realized exactly how long it had been since I'd seen him when he informed me that he'd been living in the Pacific Northwest for over a year already (which I had failed to notice prior to the request to hang out while he was "in town.") This very drunk guy came up to us in the beer hall tent and asked us if we knew that Jesus and God are the answer to everything that ails the entire world? (I'm not going to lie, it reminded me a teeny tiny bit of several experiences in my yoga class.) "Only in this area," I told the man soberly. Then he wandered off. Appropos of nothing, Theo told me that in his dating adventures, he has discovered that FOBO is a real thing. I had never even heard of this. I'm familiar with FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. But apparently, FOBO (Fear of Better Options) is a malady that particularly affects the newly divorced. Having never been newly divorced, I'd apparently missed out ...
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Häni—loss

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I rarely re-read books, but I'm re-reading The Midnight Library. It's about a woman who tries to kill herself after her cat dies and her job goes south (did I mention that's in trouble, too?) and she realizes she's alone. She winds up in the in-between, not quite alive, not quite dead, in a place called the Midnight Library, where all the decisions she's ever made are housed in a multiverse that looks like a library. By choosing to rescind any given choice, she can open a book and be transported to another universe to see how her life would be different there. I wish I could do that. I'm not doing very well. In the first week of November, Mocha died. In the second week, I gave Graysee to a neighbor and didn't even get to tell her goodbye. I tried texting the neighbor, asking if I could keep her for a few more weeks until I settled from Mocha's death, but didn't get a response. Yesterday, I had to leave school because I wasn't functioning well fro...
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Mud

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I used to read through my friend Stella's essays for her when she was in grad school. This was back when we were working together in Hazelwood. She already had one degree in English and had been teaching literature for at least a decade by this point but insisted she needed feedback before submitting any work. That lunatic would actually write 3 different versions of every essay and ask me to choose which one was the best. She eventually got the degree and left to go work in Clayton, where -- surprise, surprise -- that kind of insanity is rewarded. I remember she showed up on my doorstep one night months later, in tears. She didn't know if she could survive the new job -- she was getting 4 hours of sleep per night and answering 150 emails a day  from middle school students and parents. That was years ago. She's fine now, but that night always stuck with me because I thought, There is no fkking way in hell I could handle that amount of pressure. I would have a nervous breakd...
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Kannadi - Mirror

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In a place some 8,000 miles away, there is a small village called Aranmula. In that tiny corner of the Indian subcontinent, lives a family of alchemists. For hundreds of years, this family has jealously guarded the secret of the kannadi , or mirror, of Truth. It is said that the family was first conscripted -- along with several others -- to create objects for a temple to Krishna. That temple, now over a thousand years old, traces its lineage back to the  Mahābhārata  and is alleged to have been built by the great warrior Prince Arjuna himself. All kannadi  today are descendants of the temple Kannadi in that they follow a carefully-guarded family recipe in a complex series of steps by which tin, copper, and other alloys are alchemized to create a reflective surface that reveals the True Self.  Grab the closest hand mirror you can find and take a look. What you see is a close approximation of what you really look like...but it's not perfect. If you lay the mirror flat...
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Advaita - Non-duality

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  I am teaching a weekly yoga class this month. The problem with this is that I have ZERO spacial awareness and am full of an impending sense of doom. In addition to the millions of hours I spend on lesson plans, I am now also spending evening hours writing sequences and studying yoga manuals.  Jade thinks this is a wonderful opportunity during which I will grow as a human being. That is why I am doing it. I want to grow as a human being. I've never been comfortable being bad at things.  Therapy Elsa insists I stop saying "bad" and instead say "imperfect." More than any other thing she has repeated over the last 4 years is the sentence, "I don't think it's as black and white as all that." She (and Jade) says that I am a perfectionist and that my idea of "bad" is anything at which I do not excel. The black-and-whiteness in me says that if I am not excellent at it, I am bad at it. No one likes to be imperfect at things, but I feel like ...
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