year of returns
This is how things change. This is how things stay the same. Fascination is key. As is the living body, both in these precisely inhabited forms and in all of our wider godly capacities...
In October of this year, I took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts ceremonies, more formally committing myself to Buddhist practice.
For someone who spent the majority of her life as devoutly anti-religion1, my sudden movement towards Buddhism came as both a wild surprise and truly the most natural movement I feel I’ve ever taken.
I mention it here, at the beginning of this “year of returns,” for a couple of reasons:
as an opening towards you, regardless of beliefs/religions/whatevers and an attempt to continue feeding in myself that which is open2
my Dharma name, received after the ceremonies mentioned above, is 法回 (Fǎ Huí) which translates to “Dharma Return;” the word return has thus gained deeper meaning in my thoughts
my writing has always been an attempt to point towards something — for lack of a better work — true, and I’m fascinated by the ways in which both my autism and my Buddhism made themselves present in my writing long before I had either of those words to frame my thoughts and experiences
These poems will be from a series of collections which I worked diligently on between 2017 and early 2022. Most of them have never been shared outside of attempts at publication and live poetry readings. I held them all-too-preciously near me after one of my favorite poetry publications sent me a generous denial letter3 in 2018, leading me to believe that I would surely get to share my writing through traditional publication routes sometime soon.
About four years later, after my diagnosis, I completely lost trust in writing, and could see only the ways it had allowed me to elude myself.
But I feel differently today. I’ve returned to feeling much like I did when I submitted poems to that favorite publication, though with a new and almost uncanny openness and urge to share, untethered by notions of external validation.
As a start to this year of returns, here is the letter I wrote introducing some of the poems in a submission from 2019:
It is nearly May and the irises are coming out of their skins. Rain is all the sky wants to do, and the new growth on hedges I pruned two short days ago is a green joke that I love. The flushed out mother rat at the post office door. The bloodied foot of a bird left for us by someone else’s cat. Everything is strange and everything is remarkably familiar. The keep-going of it all. Our near-limitless capacity for growth, always chasing its own potential.
Every year that I write, I learn more of what I’m writing towards. Which is to say, I’m gaining comfort with the towards-ness. Sitting next to it. Scooting my chair day after day in patterns with the kinds of mathematical roulette rainbow curves a spirograph might make. This is how things change. This is how things stay the same. Fascination is key. As is the living body, both in these precisely inhabited forms and in all of our wider godly capacities. The godliness of us. The power of our myths when made participatory, readily ratified, understood as such.
Each bulb that makes good on its promise to the spring is a book I can’t stop reading. As I stand in these early days of rain, I am trying in the only way this body knows how, to be both the bulb and the promise. To come cleanly out of my skin, some new and familiar myth.
I’m interested in exploring over the course of this year, how all of these different parts of me speak to one another across time and space.
And of course! A link to Lauren Sonder’s “Different Place Same Time” for your listening enjoyment. As I told her during our collaboration (see image caption above for context), “This piece feels like finding a note I made for myself when things were impossibly hard, promising that it would get better, and finding that note again now that they have.”
I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.
-bad_french
minus the brief phase in which I was so self-righteously dogmatic as a pre-teen that my family referred to me as “Sister Mary-Bailey”
which is to say, I have no intention of using this space to convert people or to claim any sort of moral authority. In my early Buddhist readings, I found this statement from the Dalai Lama incredibly comforting, as I’d never heard a religious leader speak in this way: “In order to live harmoniously, we must make a common effort. It is very important to have mutual respect, rather than trying to propagate your own tradition. Therefore I always emphasize that people from different traditions should keep their own faith and not be in a hurry to change their religion.” - Lama, Dalai . An Introduction to Buddhism (Core Teachings of Dalai Lama Book 1) (p. 1). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
including the immediately memorized words “we have read and re-read your work with genuine interest” - oh the craving for external validation the publication industry fed in me!
that line about the iris coming out of their skins! you never stop wowing me. also, the quote from HHDL, i need to write it down, i love it!
This was so beautiful—and made me hopeful.