Alana's Dharma Blog

Last night I was in bed in my Manhattan loft fuming  — the neighbors had lit an illegal fire, in a condemned chimney, and smoke was pouring into my apartment. For me, this type of situation is my worst fear, a reflection of my greatest sense of injustice; people being inconsiderate and breaking the rules, resulting in an affront to my personal safety.

This situation felt particularly affronting because it is on the tail of my asthma flare due to recently being caught breathing wildfire air on my last trip to SF. The smell of smoke in my apartment was a flashback to the panicking feeling I had as smoke filled the air in SF, and my breathing became labored, just a few weeks ago.

This sense of dread that I could stop breathing, fear that the situation wouldn’t be rectified, indignation at the neighbors’ blatant disregard for the rules…it triggered several contemplations, but here I’ll share just one about making SF ‘un-mine’:

The recent fires in CA have already made me really rethink any goal/fantasy to go back West when Eric and I retire. I have a respiratory disease and the fires are getting worse each year. But I noticed it hasn’t just effected my long-term fantasy; I don’t even feel like going back for work or visits in the short term either. The idea of more back and forth is exhausting, the time away from Eric, feeling unsettled in my life. This past time I was on the East Coast (right after the fires) I started thinking maybe I hadn’t given Greenwich a fair chance, maybe I could build a better life in Connecticut after all.

Laying in a smoky house, fear and anger making my focus extra sharp, I realized what has changed: SF isn’t mine anymore. When I said it in my head, my heart knew for sure it was true. And though practice has taught my mind to try and refuse my belongings and my identities before, this has to be the first time my heart really really felt it as well.

When I started poking around to see what has changed, I realized the biggest thing is my imagination that I have a certain future in SF (or Cali, or anywhere out in the West Coast fire country), that it can be my “forever home”. I just can’t reconcile the fires/air quality with a belief that I can mold both the home, and the home-shaped void in my heart, to fit each other. Without this sense of hope and permanence, my heart rejects the West Coast, I am ready to move on.

Before, I looked at the city, and my situation, with such soft eyes. Sure, I saw the needles on the streets, the cost of living, the strain of going back and forth, but these things were worth it. I also saw the city changing, the people, the places, the weather even, but it was still similar enough, familiar enough that I could literally, watch my imagination fill-in the gaps, smooth over the changes by focusing on the familiar. Now, in the wake of disillusionment, I feel the weight of the commitments I have made, my duties, that keep me bound to travel to SF, for right now, so much more strongly.

It really stuns me, I have spent so much energy and desire fixated on how to leave NY and go back to the West Coast: Seattle, Portland, Denver, Cali, pushing Eric into countless job interviews at companies in all these places, so that I could align my heart home with my full time home. So I could align my location with my identity: A West Coast Gal. But 1 new piece of information is all it took to kill this hope.

Recently I sent a whole bunch of clothing to consign and before I did I assessed the “story of impermanence that each item tells”; there was a whole category of items that I was disposing of because I got new information –down is warmer than wool, I have a nickle allergy, silk is too hard to clean, etc. It dawned on me that I am constantly getting new information and with it my needs and wants are also constantly changing. In other words, there is literally no end to my desire and there is also no possible way that I can satisfy it. I am on an endless treadmill!

My big question now is how do I get off the treadmill? As I started divorcing myself from Fire Country, new imaginary homes began to stew in my brain. Maybe CT is a forever home, maybe Vermont is the perfect place to retire.  And so the treadmill keeps rolling…

Of course, this isn’t the first time  I have unmade something as mine: Once the ugliness or untenability of something hits my heart, disillusionment sets-in. Just take my still smoke filled NY Loft for example: This thing was ‘un-mined’ almost as soon as I bought it. Like the West Coast, there was an evolution in my understanding that I didn’t control the place (too small, lot line window, noise, maintenance issues and ultimately a city I hate), I can’t shape it to my imagination. I can’t force it to bend to my will. I bought it because I thought it was one thing, a cozy new nest for Eric and I to build an exciting life, and it quickly became a massive failure and financial mistake. Now it is up for sale, us hoping to cut our losses.

Once an object strays too far from my imagination of what it is/will do/will make me, I purge it from my identity. Even if, like the NY loft, it remains with me physically, it is gone from my heart. Once my heart, my sense of self, strays too far from what I imagine an object to be, like countless fashion looks I have cycled through and left behind, I purge it from my belongings. If all it takes is a change of object or a change of heart to make something not mine, how can I believe it was ever really mine to begin with? I cling so tightly, endure so much suffering in the name of that clinging, to things I will eventually let go of –by choice or force. I suffer not even for the objects, but for some duration where I can fool myself into thinking they are mine.

It was November 2018 and I had managed, by coincidence, to escape smoke from the fires raging in Northern California by a single day. My flight back to New York from an important event I had been working out in San Francisco departed early in the morning, by afternoon fires had created all kinds of delays and cancelations. Smoke filled the skies of San Francisco, air quality went to the danger zone, friends were texting me pictures of orange and black skies, complaining it was impossible to breathe.  A part of me felt relief that my asthmatic self hadn’t been caught in the fires. But another part of me felt ‘survivor’s guilt’; as the fires raged on, I started feeling bad that I had escaped when I had so many friends and co-workers stuck and suffering.

A few days later, I went to have coffee with a friend in NY and told her of my guilt. In my mind, my guilt was a sign of my compassion, my deep empathy for friends. So, you can imagine my surprise when my coffee companion told me to get over myself and quit being so egotistical. “Egotistical, WTF?” I thought. “Everyone finds their own way” she explained.

After we talked, I thought more about what she said: Everyone does find  their own way, i.e. each person has their own karma. As I wondered and worried about why everyone else couldn’t just leave, or find a way to be spared, what I was really doing was wondering why everyone wasn’t just like me. I was assuming everyone would be as effected as me. Everyone would have priorities like me. Everyone would  have the same causes and effects as me. I was being egotistical, missing the differences that exist amongst people who are, well, not me.

But, in my self-centered assumptions, I was making a more subtle , but equally egotistical error — I was missing the sameness between me and everyone else. This time, I may have been spared suffering. This time, I watched from afar as the skies turned black, and with distance felt pity mixed with superiority: I was spared after all. But what about times before and times after? In one instant, one situation, I can count myself advantaged –my karma allowed escape; but like everyone, I am subject to my karma, my turn at suffering has happened before and it inevitably will again.

Eric and I were watching one of those reality home building shows today; a couple had worked hard, had long and successful careers, and were now building their dream home, on their dream plot of land.

Only the land they chose was the top of a cliff, overhanging the ocean, with sandy earth that was sliding away. When the engineer came to make a first assessment, he told them the dangers and difficulties of building there – the erosion was so pervasive, extreme measures would need to be taken to keep it at bay, and even then, the house was unlikely to make it more than a few decades before sliding into the ocean.

Knowing the dangers, knowing the effort, knowing the risk, the couple chose to build anyway: This was the spot they imagined spending their golden years, a place they had vacationed many times, that they had built their fantasy retirement around. They simply couldn’t give it up, they figured it would remain standing till at least the end of their lives. And so, the house building project began. Afterall, from imagination springs hope eternal.

The trials and tribulations were countless. First, a special sea wall had to be built out of huge boulders to keep the erosion at bay – only the first big storm threatened to sweep away the wall, and the couple had to go out in the storm and try to secure the boulders with netting.  Then there were issues getting government permits for the home and lawyers had to get involved. Then there were issues getting building materials up the cliff and a new road had to be built. The costs became so high that the husband had to return to work in order to afford completing the home. Only work was in the city hours away, so the commute was unsustainable, and the husband decided to build his own business, from scratch, so he could work from home. Then there were fights between husband and wife about materials and layout and design. All this before a house was even built.

All that stress for a house. As I watched them build, heard their story, all I could think is, “not fucking worth it.” For 50 minutes, of the hour-long show, I just kept muttering under my breath, “So, so, so not worth it. They are being idiots.”

But then, in the end, they showed the home all done and it was stunningly beautiful. The narrator asked the couple if the years of stress building it had been worth it, and without hesitation they said “yes.” Even I, suddenly forgetting the last 50 minutes worth of vicarious stress, thought “Yes! Worth it.” Suddenly something I had been contemplating for years became very clear to me – THIS IS HOW DESIRE FOOLS ME.

Years ago, I had been flipping through a calendar from the Wat with quotes from LP Thoon. One of them had really haunted me; I can’t remember word for word, but the sentiment was, “can you identify how desire fools you?”

As this finished, beautiful house, flashed across my TV, I saw I was tempted by a single moment in time. My mind seized upon that glorious, peak house moment, and the siren song of desire drowned out all the thoughts of the eroding coastline, or the struggles to build, or the coming out of retirement, or the stress of potentially losing the home in old age, or its final future resting place at the bottom of the sea.

Desire tricks me through the dark powers of my imagination. My imagination, that clings to/hopes for a still picture, a particular moment in time. An imagination that lulls me into forgetting the past, and ignoring the future, with the false promise of achieving that peak moment, and keeping it forever, or at least for a duration that satisfies me. An imagination, that minimizes suffering; or makes me think, “I am special, I can magically avoid the suffering I watch others endure”; or that, even if I can’t avoid suffering altogether, it will be measured, on my terms, an acceptable and ‘fair’ trade-off for that beautiful, perfect peak.

I, a slave to my desires, cycle through nightmares of effort, stress, risk and loss hoping to achieve, and hold onto, my dreams. Ignoring the reality of a world were everything, always, changes.