feminish

I’ve spent the best part of the last year in a monastery.

I had with me Irigaray’s The Way of Love and Attwood’s Oryx and Crake - and that was it. They sat and sat (stiller than I ever could) on the dusty shelf/table I’d boshed together next to my bed. Neither made it off for any more than a few page-flicks - they just seemed too full, too sticky and too stodgy…

This worried me. Irigaray was my meditation - or at least, she had been in London (when reading her To Be Two I once remember being genuinely reluctant to get off the public skip that was the Hackney Downs train). So, on a cold winter afternoon I sacrificed my one 20-minute window for a shower and scuffled around in the temple library - a funny little room, with ramshackle books 90% in Vietnamese and, I kid you not, almost entirely classified by size and colour.

By sheer fluke, I found a little book called The First Buddhist Women, and was amazed to read that there still survives (on palm-leaf manuscripts) a collection of poems composed by enlightened women ascetics in India no less than two and a half-thousand years ago.

Now un-retreated, I still haven’t read Oryx and I still haven’t finished The Way of Love, but I know a bit more about these Psalms of the Sisters. As Caroline Rhys-Davids, the British feminist who made the first translation in 1909, says, every poem captures a woman’s quest for two things:

liberty or emancipation, and the expansion of her essential nature as a human being apart from her feminine.

My immediate thought was - awesome. To me those words capture a feminist life.

Here is the nun Soma (from the modern translation in First Buddhist Women):

What harm is it
to be a woman
when the mind is concentrated
and the insight is clear?

If I asked myself:
“Am I a woman
or a man in this?”
then I would be speaking the Evil One’s language.

Everywhere the love of pleasure is destroyed,
the great dark is torn apart,
and Death,
you too
are destroyed.

…Pretty feminish if you ask me.

p.s. the CR-D quote is from her Preface to I.B. Horner’s Women Under Primitive Buddhism, Bombay 1930.

Sometimes I think thoughts like: Thank Heavens my life has had such and such a feeling in it, or such and such a beautiful view, or such and such laughter with friends. Surprisingly often I think: I would like to walk alone across the world (or some part of it) before I die.

But I wonder, were I not to do or feel these things before I die, Who would it be then, who hasn’t done them?

…

Perhaps it doesn’t matter if I don’t do them because I won’t be there to know that I never did them. Once I’m dead, it won’t maybe matter what I did or didn’t do for myself (who’ll no longer be around anyway). In fact, the only thing that will matter will be the ripples of my thoughts, words, actions and experience which will remain resonating among the still-living… every week, month and year a little softer, a little dimmer. It’s like when you think the bell has stopped ringing, but in fact, if you went up really really really close to the bell, perhaps even with a very sensitive instrument, you’d still perceive it vibrating.

SISTER COMPASSION, my Dharma Teacher mentor at the Immanent Grove, took me aside to say she thought my feminism would melt away with the practice. She could understand if I wanted to do a PhD in philosophy, or history, or English Literature even - but feminist theory, No!

I said that Yes, I thought my anger might melt away; but not this gut thing I have - this visceral commitment to (somehow or other) improve the opportunities, rights and capacities for women to realise their potential. And to do that, I said, I think I need to understand it all more deeply - theoretically, philosophically. She replied that perhaps I should think about social work, or activism somewhere in the globe where women’s suffering is immediate, tangible, desperate. “But being in a stuffy library Natasha, just thinking about it? No! That won’t help.”

This was hard to hear and I’m still digesting, Or, as Sister Ji would say, ‘integrating’ it.

SO, I’VE UNRETREATED once more, and it feels funny. Reading The Week is confusing, folding blankets is delightful, and doing one and a half things at once a disorientating old habit.

There are the tomatoes in the garden, despite a month’s neglect, and swallows roosting en bas. My overdraft has grown, and there are more unanswered emails in my inbox. The vine has green grapes and there are wild strawberries nestling up the outside steps. It’s also hot, and difficult to be inside from 11 to 5 (one day I’ll learn to close the shutters in time). Two days ago the alteia began to bloom and we learnt that it’s its own kind of purple.

Sometimes I find my breath, perhaps after an hour of frog-ness, and experience disappointment in myself. Othertimes my breath wells up to my awareness of its own accord, to say hello, like clean water refilling the toilet after a flush - surprisingly fresh.

Into the Immanent Grove for 21days.

Laters…