Somewhere in the Universe, All of This Is True

I was late because I overslept.

I was late because I was dissolving in tears.

I was late to protest the tyranny of time.

I was late because I was sucked into a Black Hole. Fortunately it didn’t like the taste of my deodorant, so it spit me back out.

I was late because I was smelling every flower and petting every dog

I was late because I fell asleep on the couch by the fire, covered in a mauve wool blanket, one dog snuggled against me and two more on the rug beside me, and when the alarm went off—I’d set it because I had to meet you—I thought I hit snooze, but I accidentally hit stop. That’s why I’m still asleep, and what you see here is not me but a holographic projection. The real me is still asleep on the couch by the fire and will sleep there for a hundred years, until awakened by True Love’s Kiss.

I was late because I was deciding whether to jump from a bridge into the choppy silver waves and let the fish feast on my flesh.

I was late because I was frolicking in the autumn leaves.

I was late because I’m genetically coded for lateness.

I was late because of the rain.

Because of the traffic.

Because of the traffic caused by the rain.

Because a woman with a walker was crossing the street in slow motion, and I had to wait for her to pass.

Because I was standing at the tippy-top of the world, wondering what would happen if there were no gravity and I were lifted off into space to float around the universe. Would I find another planet with life on it? Would they accept me? Love me? Would I finally feel at home?

The Breath of Love

*Inspired by the poem “Gratitude List,” by Laura Foley

Praise be to cold water, sliding down my throat

Praise be to the moments when my younger son smiles at me, no device in hand

Eyes meeting each other across clear thin air

Praise be to the moments when I see my older son fully

in all his sweetness, bravado, and vulnerability, unobscured by his fears or mine

PoetryTanya ShafferApril 8, 2022poetry, poem, gratitude, spirituality, creativity Comments

The Woman Beneath My Skin

The woman beneath my skin is alternately ravenous, elated, grief-stricken, bored.

The woman beneath my skin is sometimes at peace and sometimes dissatisfied with everything, thinking, what else, what else, what else??

She wants company, she wants solitude. She wants to write, she wants to simply be. She is bursting with stories, she has nothing to say.

She is profoundly selfish, she would do anything for her kids. She tries to be kind to everyone, always. Sometimes she fails.

She wants a new relationship. She wants to get back together with her wasband*. She starts conversations with strangers on dating apps, gets excited, loses interest, all within a couple of days, or hours, or minutes.

She determines to invest more in her friendships, then fails to return calls.

Sometimes I get so sick of her.

The Silver Revolution

When I was in preschool, I asked my mom how old she was. Over twenty-one, she said. Intrigued by the mystery, I kept asking, but no matter how many times I repeated the question, that was all the answer I could get. Finally, when I was six, she told me: She was forty years old. I had no idea why this was such a big secret, but I felt very grown-up to be entrusted with it.

Almost three decades later, I was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle about my solo show Let My Enemy Live Long!, which was playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The article revealed that I was thirty-three years old. When I showed it to R, a fellow solo performer who was about to launch her own show off-Broadway, she responded with horror, Never tell a reporter your age!

Why not? I started to ask, but her look stopped me cold. Did she really have to tell me about our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty? Obviously a woman in our industry had everything to lose by revealing her age.

The Intimate Realm of I Don't Know

A few months ago, I had a discussion with a dear friend that turned into an argument. It started when he told me he was an atheist, and I told him I was an agnostic.

Same thing, he said.

Is not, said I.

Is too, said he. You don’t believe in a deity; therefore you are not a theist, which makes you an a-theist.

I neither believe nor disbelieve, said I, which makes me an agnostic.

From there things got a bit heated, which seems kind of silly in retrospect, but that’s the way we roll.

Reflecting on the conversation later, I asked myself why this was important to me.

More than twenty years ago I heard the Theravadan Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro speak in Golden Gate Park. He said something that struck me so deeply I wrote it down and have thought of it often over the years: Not knowing is most intimate.

Although I’ve been turning those words over within myself for decades, I never thought to research them until after my friend and I had this argument. With little memory of the context in which Ajahn Amaro used them, I’d always assumed he’d come up with them himself. But when I searched the phrase, I learned that it is foundational to many Buddhist thinkers. It comes from an ancient Chinese story in which a monk named Fayan goes on a pilgrimage and stays at a stranger’s monastery. The master at that monatery, Dizang, asks him why he’s making the pilgrimage. I don’t know, says Fayan, to which Dizang nods approvingly and responds, Good.Not knowing is most intimate.

The sentence strikes a powerful intuitive chord, but what does it mean?

When I think of the word intimacy, the first thing that springs to mind is sexuality. Nakedness. Trusting someone enough to reveal yourself, literally and figuratively. Showing the parts of yourself that others don’t see — the tender, delicate parts — and facing down the fear that your most exposed, vulnerable self might not meet with acceptance or approval. (Which isn’t to say you can’t have sexuality without intimacy. You can approach sex — as you can approach anything in life, really — from such a great emotional distance that your innermost self barely feels a thing. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

Buddhism, Memoir/Personal EssayTanya ShafferSeptember 5, 2021Buddhism, spirituality, agnosticism, religion Comments

Off-Leash Writing