Today is my birthday. I am 28. Hurray!
Two years ago today, when I turned 26, my sweet, loving friends, who cater to my youngest child it’s my BIRTHDAY ridiculousness far more than they should, spent the day with me. We ate fig jam and ricotta and salmon and crème fraische on brown German bread in the metallic morning light of Brooklyn’s Roebling Tea House. I forced them to meditate for twenty minutes before dragging them along to a double feature at the B-Musical festival at Film Forum, in which, surrounded by some of the oldest people to inhabit New York, we watched Donald O’Connor sing love songs to a duck. In the rain we browsed McNally Jackson and I bought a new Kazuo Ishiguro book. Then I took them to what was then my new favorite address:
I, overcome by a wanting to serve something other than the temporal manifestations of my self-gratifying desires, started studying Buddhism about a year and a half before, but it was only that February that I had mustered the courage to attend a real live talk in the real live flesh at IDP. It was frightening as hell, all these adorable people, with all these preexisting relationships, discussing these teachings that had struck an incredibly warm, potent and resonant chord in my body that heretofore I didn’t even know existed. It has remained, for me, frightening, threatening and challenging to attend public classes, workshops and retreats. They make me feel childlike, thin-skinned and vulnerable. I tend to act dumber than I would ever allow in any other circumstance. In the beginning my religious attendance (following that first day in February) felt like a weekly club taken to any firm idea I had of myself being in the least bit cool.
I needed that, and I need it still. Two years ago, on my 26th birthday Ellen led the Monday night class. We talked about the dart teaching, we discussed how it was possible to feel distance from emotion. I talked too much, I always do. My friends were interested but not supremely affected – at the time it bothered me but I’m now grateful for their disconnect – it forces me to discuss Buddhist concepts in laymen’s terms, which I find useful. After, we walked over to eat at the restaurant where my ex-boyfriend was a bartender, as I had a faint hope that he and I might go home together. (He was still my ex then, but we had a let’s-torture-each-other-by-occasionally-sleeping-together-and-ripping-off-the-scab-from-that-which-was-just-starting-to-heal thing going on). It turned out he was seeing someone new (his girlfriend of now two years). We ate dinner and I, practically a Vesuvius of emotion at events like birthdays, cried my eyes out, salting my trout with a deluge of tears. I cried for my ex, for love of my friends, for my feeling of un-deservedness at my Rosé tinted meal. But mostly I cried because during that time when I was first attending the ID Project, in love with the dharma, inspired to surrender, I knew I was losing something. Stepping off a cliff, falling into the abyss. I knew that the more I studied, the more I meditated, the less my identifications that I clung to like a raft whisking down some rushing river would do me any good. I cried for all the solid stories turned transparent, the wantings revealed as an empty grasp at invisible fulfillment.
Today, two years later, I feel the dharma lining my epidermis less than I did that day I turned 26. Not to say I haven’t benefited – I’m far more emotionally skillful and able to subvert suffering, I’m just currently not having those gut rushes of dharmic understanding. I’m patient, knowing now that these feelings go in waves, and that Buddhist verve reinvigorates often when one least expects it. I thank the worldwide sangha for being such good and kind people, patient and supportive and wise and friendly. As scary as public gatherings can be, I’ve learned some of the most profound lessons from my dignified and graceful fellow practitioners. Buddhism still hacks at my raft of self-solidity, but this year I’m dry-eyed, knowing that I can always take refuge on the bank of awesomeness that is the Buddhist community.
Well to be honest, I did tear up a little bit while I was writing this.
But it is, as they say, my party, and it is purported that I am permitted to cry should I desire to.
Saturn rising I remain, respectfully yours,
Julia May Jonas.
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