Letting go of our artifacts
Someone once told the anecdote of the woman who inherited her great grandmother’s roast pans along with her recipe. Take a large rump roast and cut it in half, put one half in each pan, and season well then cook. No one knew why the great grandmother had split the roast but each generation kept doing it because it was so delicious. Turns out the grandmother only had two small pans and not one large enough to hold the roast and so began the tradition.
And so it is that I’m reading J. Krishnamurti’s Inward Revolution and his explanation of training the mind to see everything anew. Remember that fight you had with your partner: try to envision them as they are in this moment, not as the accumulation of all the hurts you have given each other over the years. It’s very eastern, very zen, very much that you can’t change the way of the world, but you can change yourself and with that comes a complete revolution. Krishnamurti says:
To understand the mind you cannot interpret it according to somebody else’s idea, but you must observe how your own total mind works. When you know the whole process of it, how it reasons, its desires, motives, ambitions, pursuits, its envy, greed and fear; then the mind can go beyond itself, and when it does there is the discovery of something totally new. That quality of newness gives an extraordinary passion, a tremendous enthusiasm, which brings about a deep inward revolution: and it is this inward revolution which alone can transform the world not any political or economic system.
This is not for pussies – take it from me – reorienting your mind away from its grasp of memories, joy and sorrow, and the ruts that have been grooved into your brain from experience are hard to just shake off. But you must, in order to see things as they are rather than stuck in time. For instance, what if I went back to my ex husband and said I love to feel the wind on my face. He would think you, you never loved the wind, you hate wind, that’s what you always told me. But he wouldn’t know that now that I have no hair, that my facial hair, nose hair, ear hair, wisps of hair, are all gone, I love the wind. He would not know me now and I would be stuck in time to him.
Right now the world seems so out of control – the government is shut down, no one’s food stamp cards worked at the grocery stores today, threats of war, secret killings and missions are being carried out as I type, and yet, you can work inwardly on your own framework and re-see the world with a different lens. If we could set free most of the imprint in our mind, we could also shake loose of resentment, fear, sorrow, and disappointment.
Tin and I walked down the street to get some milk this morning. We passed a house with a gabled roof over an invisible entry and made me think that a lot of times things remain that have no purpose and we hold onto them because they were so meaningful at one time.
Tonight, we walked Heidi around the block after sundown and passed some people on the porch. I asked them if the house next door (which is directly in back of me) had sold at the sheriff’s auction – this couple bought it – the ones on the porch – Andy and Andrea – and I thought about all the people who live on the edge in this neighborhood – the ones my yoga teacher at Swan River was worrying about this morning – the ones that will get edged out of the transition that is underway here – Whole Food going up down the block, a new school going up next door, the Bio Med center already under construction – and the infill of all these old and charming New Orleans houses that will be bought up by those who can afford to buy, to renovate, and to reinvigorate.
Is it a loss that all of these have nots will be ousted? Is it a gain that all these houses will be fixed up? Is trying to make things not change right, wrong, indifferent? I passed the house where the squatter lives with the mangy dog – the guy who showers with my faucet outside – the one I told in no uncertain terms to stop. I even called the police and then I felt bad. This guy doesn’t have running water because he’s squatting. And yet I do. If tomorrow the world flipped upside down, would he give me water if I needed it?
October 14th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Good questions? The larger issue–the changing urban environment–reminds me of a new way of looking at urban planning I experienced after a lecture we attended last weekend by Nan Ellin who is the Chair of Dept of City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah. I look at places and people and things in a different way now. We all must review how holding on to our “artifacts” as you express it, can be so detrimental to our personal and physical betterment. You are right to question. If interested, much more (on urban planning or sustainability) can be found at http://www.nanellin.com/
October 14th, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Thanks Alice – I was married for 16 years to an architect whose entire family seemed to have something involved with urban planning. His uncle (Jack Dangermond) started ESRI – mapping graphic interface. I checked out Ellin’s site – very interesting. I’m in the midst of watching entire city blocks being re-imagined and it’s fascinating to watch. I just spoke with my neighbor who raised his three sons here on this blocks and he was talking about how the neighborhood has changed over the years. Although he insists that the perpendicular staircase leading up to our houses is historical, I can see the outline of the parallel staircase that used to be my stoop. And every day I’m designing my stoop anew – I envision something very different from what was here, what is here – a modern, porch/stoop combo that enables you to come straight into the front door while having a place to sit and stoop outside in lieu of a front porch.