Awe Studies: From “The querent”
This piece is part of a series that responds to the theme of the 2024 Cleveland Humanities Festival: “Awe.”
The querent | #2
At no time at no time did i
did i look at the lama lama
rod owens i gave my body like
he said my body like he said to
the earth it meant to the earth
it meant for me to feel the pressure
against my heels the pressure against
my heels and the spread from tail
to skull the tail the skull the spread
upon the cushion pile gave my body
into earth and my gratitudes my
gratitudes even for my broken
heartedness like his defined by
broken heartedness by disappointment
disappointment to have been born
into this deep deep into this dis-
appointment it isn’t another way
another way to say he said that which
abhors my freedom he said that
which abhors my freedom to take care
of broken heartedness broken heartedness
like anything to tend is in practice to
in practice to make space for it
like anything at no time could i
like he like lama rod owens
transform my disappointment into
a flower a flower to float off
onto the sea the sea that is my mind
to give the thought back to the mind
at no time could i however
could i however let drift
the drift i know was real because
real because when he next spoke i returned
i returned alert to having left
grateful for the pleasure the pleasure i knew was rest
was rest a rinse is being here
a rinse of having left left grateful
•
Another way to say he said
2020, if I bring it into hindsight, is a year not improved by perspective. The worst of it returns to me in gestures, almost gifs, American kinemes meaningful for confirming just how broken greater-good democracy was, how poorly equipped the US was and is for any crisis that might require our interdependency. You know the ones. The most horrific, Derek Chauvin’s glaring expression mounted and slow-swiveling atop his callous, heedless murder of George Floyd; the limp cock of Mrs. McCloskey’s elbow raising her silver pistol on BLM protestors in gated suburbia; Mitch McConnell in his mask, giving double thumbs up, leading the “capstone” of his career, Amy Coney Barrett, from her Senate confirmation; the effortful lips and nostrils of Donald Trump, sucking petulant air top of the White House portico steps, back from Walter Reed, having survived Covid with the medical protocol none of his constituents could then attain—
This last, his hospitalization and prematurely showy recovery, happened over the weekend my partner and I had left our pressurized little Idaho college town for the first time in the pandemic. We’d found a simple airbnb not far from the south shore of Coeur d’Alene Lake, lined by an epic bike path we’d heard about, gloriously sunny that autumn weekend, a path which runs there through the watershed many miles in each direction. The spot was only an hour and change from Moscow, where we lived. So we didn’t go far. And—even with wifi off—there was much we couldn’t leave. To add to the inventory of gestures (the local ones haunt me even more): I remember well seeing over John’s shoulder the curdling malice on the face of an older man riding the other way on the path in his recumbent tricycle, just before he lurched from his vehicle and coughed ostentatiously toward John’s face. We’d been raising our masks from chin to mouth before each oncoming encounter, a courtesy almost second nature by October that year. Idahoans who abhorred us on sight were proliferating like a cancer. The sight of our coupledom plus our CDC compliance was too much for many, and we grew to expect expectoration, and to fear worse than that. This guy was not the first who frightened us; but it was his interruption of our freedom feeling that leveled us.
Back at the rented house we each took some time to ourselves. John found a dappled place in the woods and wrote in one fell swoop one of my favorite pieces of his (published in Baest soon after), and I turned my airport on, deciding at last to try my friend Mary Ann’s suggestion, the dharma talks and guided meditations of Lama Rod Owens. I found a beam in the canopy on the little deck and a bar or two of bandwidth. I selected a recording online she’d recommended, stilled myself, found my breath, and did as he said, as best I could.
A lot of people, many spiritual beginners like me, found Lama Rod Owens during the Trump years, the Covid crisis, the racial reckoning. He is a unique figure, I have learned, in contemporary Buddhist practices. Black, queer, and southern—in his practice and his presence are his lineages in Tibetan Buddhism, Kali Natha Yoga (embodiment practice sourced in the Divine Feminine), Black Southern Liberation Theology, and Queer Theory. To hear and register his authentic self was to welcome mine. The light in him seems indeed to see the light in me. Parts of me I needn’t separate are interpellated by namaste, by girl, by your’n, and that October by the come ye disconsolate beneath his teaching, accessing my oldest roots, long ago severed, in the Primitive Baptist church, (also spinning on side B of my Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway record on high rotation always).
What was circulating widely by 2020 were Lama Rod’s uncommonly realist talks and guided meditations on what he calls “brokenheartedness”: deep betrayal and disappointment that a quality of belonging that you deserve is withheld, that your freedom is abhorred by followers of the leader of your country, putative custodian of its history and promise and your place in it. You could join him there, and learn to hold space for the brokenheartedness, like anything else: to let it come in and be noticed and felt, and to practice at transforming it, experiencing its transitoriness and yours.
It didn’t take, not exactly, not for me—as the poem suggests. Perhaps because my distress was too active to start. Perhaps some part of the invitation felt close to abandoning action, when (as now) we are left to our own devices, a state ever on my mind then. But something shifted. I went somewhere in the surrender and returned refreshed with something like an understanding. His turning locutions still turning in me, way down where I needed words for it, where limitless infinitive met the present perfect grounded from the get: (disappointment) to have been born into this deep (disappointment). I wrote for a while after, attempting to reproduce the incremental immersion, the portals made by repetitions and gentle apposites, and the keyturns and locks at the doorways there. John and I read aloud what we’d made that evening, then gave in, opened the laptop, and caught up on just how ill the president was reported to be, to have been. He reached the top of the stone steps. He stuffed his mask in his suit pocket. He sniffed the night air. There was a little pain or discomfort betrayed at the rictus of his mouth. He saluted Marine One, propeller blades whirring. He went into the White House unmasked. I wanted him to die. I felt, still feel, it would have been just. That too is a feeling to notice and make space for. “The querent” is a series of poems, itself rather halting, manifesting just how much I have to learn, how far from acceptance or loving detachment I am, how accustomed to beginning again it is best to be.
This one, this iteration, I sometimes save for the end of a reading—memorably last spring in Montana on the night of a rally, a rally which most of us joined immediately afterward, for our trans state congressperson, Zooey Zephyr, banned from the session by her colleagues in the supermajority House for personalizing her opposition to anti-trans legislation. I read the poem when I myself need to feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.
for Mary Ann Judge
Missoula, MT | March 2024