Metacentricities

It’s the end of Day 2 of orientation. The sun has set, I’m sitting outside, because I can get wireless that way (DSL tomorrow!) I feel a little less disoriented, but way more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things I have to do. I have to deal with financial aid, pay my bill (or part of it,) see my advisor, register for classes, get a parking permit, etc., etc. That doesn’t even include the other, sorta unrelated stuff I have to do - like the clock is ticking on getting my car registered in CA, register to vote, etc.

But there is more. There is a whole layer of other stuff to deal with. A friend asked me today whether I felt culture shock. On one hand, no, not in the least. This is a community that is, in many respects, very much what I’m used to being around - politically progressive, open, queer and queer-friendly, the class is a lot more diverse than I’m used to, which is fabulous. Not only is there a significant presence of domestic people of color, but there are a lot of international students of all stripes. But it is, very decidely Christian, which is something I’m not at all used to. I’m actually enjoying it. I do have my moments of "what on earth…" but they have only been moments. And I think the "what on earth" is more a reaction to my comfortableness with it all than anything else.

The people I’ve met have been fabulous - friendly, inquisitive, interesting. Hearing their stories and their perspectives has been really enriching, and I can’t quite believe I get at least 3 years of this. It’s an amazing gift.

I’ve decided on my courses. Part of it was easy - I have three required courses, and I only get one elective. I’m taking The Bible in the Near East - a huge, 4.5 credit course. Spiritual Disciplines for Leadership, a mini-course, 1.5 credits. Art and Religion - sounds like it’s going to be very interesting. I’m going to sign up (as long as my advisor agrees) for 2 courses, and pick one. My first choice is Christian Contemplation and Action - it’s a study of some of the primary Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Ignatuis, and others. My second (by a hair) choice is Buddhist-Christian Dialogue. You can take it either as a 3.0 or a 1.5 credit course - so I might stick with it as an extra 1.5 credit course, if I think I can handle it.

So, two more very intense days of this (Friday doesn’t have much going on, thankfully.) I do feel a bit like I’m drowning. But I do get Labor Day weekend to rest, relax, explore the Bay Area a bit, and regroup before classes start next Tuesday.

Remember my post about my drive from Berkeley down to Santa Barbara? Well, the drive up from Idyllwild back to Berkeley was even more instructive in the ‘where we get food’ department.

First, my image of the San Fernando Valley, as this lush, garden of eden like place where all our vegetables come from has been utterly shattered. I don’t know where I got that image, but I guess I must have figured if all this great stuff comes from there, then it must be like a garden of eden.

I was travelling through during probably what is the driest part of the year, but there is no doubt in my mind that at least the landscape that route 5 goes through is naturally very dry. Brown scrub grass and little desert plants were on both sides of the highway, and on the west side were often these hills that were totally brown. On the east side, were large swaths of green fields, clearly irrigated, surrounded by brown. Where there were trees (citrus, I think), the ground was mostly brown (some green grass) in between. There were large patches of burned grass next to the highway (I suspect the result of someone’s flicked cigarette.)  Where there were brown fields, they were growing hay, which seemed like a very natural crop for the climate.

As I drove further north, these huge aquaducts came into view. Miles and miles and miles of aqueduct - concrete rivers bringing water to the valley.

Now I fully, completely understand the price we pay to have grapes and lemons and lettuce and strawberries and tomatoes in November and January. It was actually kinda scary - understanding how much these fields depended on that water, and how much we depend on that food.

The second part was that like my drive down to Santa Barbara, in my drive up the valley, it was really clear who was working the fields. And, in my scanning of the radio stations, the majority of the stations I found were actually spanish language stations, which surprised the heck out of me.

I feel like the drive peeled away another layer of understanding of the way we’ve chosen to construct our society, and both the precariousness of it, as well as the way we hide from ourselves it’s true nature.

Sitting in my room (pictures soon, I promise - my DSL will be installed on Wed.) and looking about at my stuff (the stuff I have left, that is,) I’m struck by how big a change I made in my life. I’ve gone from being a "householder" - living a regular life, in a regular house, with a (relatively) regular job, to being a student again, living in a single room, sharing a bathroom, kitchen, laundry, etc., entering into a different relationship with the people around me. My days will be utterly different - in a different geographic location, a different time zone, with (mostly) different people and different contacts each day.

On the other hand, I’m struck by how little has changed. I’m still Michelle, still carrying about my varied idiosyncrasies and baggage, living in the same body I’ve always inhabited, with it’s set of issues, and my complicated relationship with it. I still have the same habits of mind, the same strange and wonderful thought processes, the same ways of thinking. No matter how radical the change in my everyday life (and this change is on the radical end, although I guess I could have been a little more radical,) I’m still the same person, and I’m dragging around the same virtual stuff along with me, wherever I go. I still look at the same person in the mirror in the morning (yes, I still have a mirror.)

Tomorrow, I will enter into a new process, with a bunch of other people who’ve made similar changes in their lives, to come to this place. We all have had, I expect, a lot of different reasons to follow the paths we are following, and I imagine that this is less of a change for some than for others.

I don’t know exactly what lessons I will eventually learn from this process (I suspect there are many,) but one thing I’ve learned already is that we are who we are, no matter where we are. We can change everything, and nothing will change. And, at the same time, change can force us to see that elemental us - those things that we have to drag along with us, no matter what.

I was sitting having dinner this evening with a group of folks in my dorm. Very nice group, nice conversation. One of them, someone who’d been around a while, said "when I was in your position I was panicked." I said "I’m close, but not there yet."

Well, just a few minutes later, thinking about the whole conversation (we went everywhere from what courses everyone is taking, to someone’s upcoming ordination, to internships, to what one of the D.Min students is doing for a thesis….), I’m getting panicked. Seriously.

I’m beginning to realize just how much I don’t know. I’m pretty used to understanding how much I don’t know- that’s a hallmark of a good academic. But to not know things in an academic sense is very different than not knowing things in a practical sense.

And, further, I haven’t finished reading the packet of readings I am supposed to have
done by Monday for orientation. Considering I’ve had them in hand for 2
months, I hardly have much excuse.

So maybe I should go do that now, while my laundry is going….

While I was driving down the road in California, I heard the snippet of Pat Robertson’s comment about the democratically elected Venezuelan president. As you might imagine, there is both a media and blog storm about this.

Pat Robertson gets my "People who are out of their minds" award for the week. But I have more to say.

The more I re-learn, and re-connect with my Christian roots, and the more I understand what Jesus really had to say, the more I think that it’s time we stopped calling these people Christians. How is it that one of the primary spokespersons for the "religious" right is advocating the assasination of a democratically elected head of state? Hugo Chavez is doing exactly what Jesus was really talking about, caring about the poor in his country. And Pat Robertson wants him dead? And further, they have actually prayed for more openings on the Supreme Court! How are there openings? The justices (or their spouses) die or get very sick. So they are praying to God for people to get sick and die.

Bruce Bawer, in Stealing Jesus, said it quite eloquently. The book is in a box somewhere, so I can’t quote it. But the gist of what he said is that the God that these people worship, and the Jesus they proclaim to follow, is evil. From my perspective, their religion is an evil corruption of the theology and philosophy of the book they claim to follow literally (hmmm, is that part of the problem?) Anyway, it’s time we stopped calling them Christians. 

The National Council of Churches has a good statement. I don’t have time to go through the various blogs that have responded to this right now, but Technorati is a good place to start - and lots of the blogs on my blogroll have responded.

I have several words of advice for those of you out there who decide, like me, to abandon your householder life, to live in a single dorm room.

1) Don’t have the room on the second floor of a building that is built on a hill, thus forcing you to drag all of your stuff up two flights of stairs.

2) Don’t expect to actually fit anything in a 12×14 room. Remember how much stuff you had as a college student. Bring that, and ONLY that. It is astonishing the fraction of the room that a bottle of shampoo takes.

3) You do get a great deal on phone service - $5/month! (yes, that means I’m getting an actual real phone number. I didn’t have a choice if I wanted DSL.)

4) The closets are smaller than you think.

5) The bed is smaller than you think.

6) Bring bubbles with you for a calmness interlude between the stress.

OK, you get the picture. I have arrived, after wonderful visits with friends, and a long, long drive (more on the drive in anonther post.) Some of my stuff is in my room, some still in my car, and the 16 boxes that were shipped are still sitting in storage room of the basement of the dorm.

One of the things that was on my agenda was how best to set up an exercise program once I moved. First week, CHECK.

But the truth of the matter, is that even though I’m a bit overwhelmed by how much stuff to do and deal with, I’m completely ecstatic.

Someone had asked me why I have said in my blog, on many occasions, "a friend of mine," without identifying them. This made me realize that some people reading this blog might not realize that this is completely deliberate. Since I rarely ask for permission to post things about people, and I am almost always posting about events and experiences from my point of view, it is my policy never to identify people, even by first name, unless there is a specific reason to identify them (basically because they have a blog/website/other public thing of their own I am referencing.) And I choose not to directly blog about my family, because it’s pretty obvious/easy to find out who they are.

This is a public blog. Many people in my life are private, and don’t have their own blogs/websites, etc. I’d rather not drag them into my own public sphere, unless they want me to.

I’m now at the house of my friends who live in Idyllwild, CA. Idyllwild is a small town in the mountains of Southern California - southeast of LA, and northeast of San Diego. It’s incredibly beautiful - although very dry. I hadn’t known about how dry it is in the summer, as I’ve only been up here in February, my prior traditional visit month. That’s the rainy season.

I had a short mini-sesshin at Zen Mountain Center - I arrived mid-day on Saturday, the second to last day of their 7 day sesshin. It was really nice - nice to have that short time to stop and sit. Nice to be in a wonderful community of practitioners. It was a little daunting, though, since Zen is so formal - lots of chants I didn’t know, and bows to take at moments I wasn’t used to, etc. I had my first (and, I expect last) experience with Oryoki, the formal way of dining. But I was still glad to be there.

Later in the day, a group of us were at my friends’ house for dinner, and we had really interesting discussions about different Buddhist traditions, how IMS and ZMC were different, and veering into conversations about Buddhism and Christianity. I heard lots of stories about the summer training period at ZMC, and life as a head trainee (one of the dinner group had served that role for the past 3 months.)

It was a great discussion, and made me so excited about what’s happening for me next. Tomorrow morning, early, I drive up to Berkeley, to settle in to my dorm room, and I have a few days to get stuff arranged, etc., before orientation starts on Monday.

And I thought I wouldn’t be cat blogging for a while, since I don’t have any cats! I’ve been visiting a friend of mine in California, who is very active in cat and dog rescue, and she is in the process of fostering many (there are now a total of 13) kittens. One is nibbling on my toe right now…

She’s a volunteer with an organization in Santa Barbara called ASAP. Anyway, the kittens are all incredibly cute, but the one who’s nibbling I want to take with me. Her name is Trixie.

She’s just too too cute for many words.

Two others have been taken to be spayed, then adopted. These are Barbie and Stacy.

Now that the cross country trip is done, I finally have uploaded some more photos in the Travels photo album. PSR photos will be coming sometime in the next couple of weeks.