Kadalmangalam Road Report

chili, joya, and SPD

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:25:22 -0700

It has been a marvelous week so far. Spring is out in full force in Palo Alto and I find it intoxicating.

Monday night we threw a huge Chili cook-off. The idea was to provide a venue that would help unify the FHE groups, and what better venue to do that than a cooking competition? Around here, people take food VERY seriously. We even brought in a professional chef to do the judging. It was a good thing we did, because we had about 150 people show up and I could never have chosen a winner.

Tuesday night was dinner at Joya, a trendy little hipster tapas bar on University. We ate sitting next to a huge window that opened right onto the street at sundown. I haven’t enjoyed a dinner that much in a while - the cuisine, the company, and the conversation were all quite delightful.

Last night was a marvelous institute lesson taught by one of my dearest old friends about a concept we used to talk about often: receiving personal revelation from God. The concept of “going to the mountain” was one that I had forgotten - the idea that sometimes when looking for spiritual direction, we need to physically go to a place where we can be still and really listen. And hear.

I came home to a St. Patrick’s day party in full swing. We just decided to do it on Tuesday, so I was pretty surprised to find that many green people crammed into our little 823. I loved it, though. It reminded me of that scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s when Paul shows up to Holly Golightly’s apartment and discovers a hodgepodge of delightfully mismatched oddballs partying with complete abandon.

An Irish blessing: May your home always be too small to fit all of your friends. And may it always be.

early 2010 playlist

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:43:09 -0700

This Will be Our Year/The Zombies
Be Here Now/Mason Jennings
You Know/JJ
Ripple/The Grateful Dead
Hannah/Freelance Whales
Dream/Priscilla Ahn
Samson/Regina Spektor
Heartbroken/Meaghan Smith
Almost Lover/A Fine Frenzy
Flowers in the Window/Travis
Perfect Day/Lou Reed
Easy Silence/Dixie Chicks
Which Way Your Heart Will Go/Mason Jennings

clean up mode

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:05:36 -0800

The last few months of my life have felt very much like the pictures I’m seeing coming out Haiti right now. An earthquake hit them in January that literally rocked them to their core; so much so that many spent a long time just sitting in the rubble, unable to comprehend what had just happened to them. Now, however, they are finally starting to clean up. Even after the worst disasters, the time comes when it is necessary to stand up and start picking up the pieces.

For me, I guess that time is now.

It began in January with my decision to run every day. It’s hard to explain running to people who don’t do it, but running is an essential part of the way I hope to live the rest of my life. So far I haven’t missed a day, and as a result I’ve been able to watch my daffodils come in with the Spring. Running changes everything.

And then I made some new friends, and I found them in my family home evening group of all places. They are people who I love, and who love me, and it happened accidentally. But they matter a lot.

And then I was accepted to a business school from which I wait daily to receive the letter telling me that my acceptance was an obvious mistake, because there is just no way I belong at a place like that. Barring that letter, come this fall, I’m headed to England to attend the London School of Economics. It is the first school in an alliance of three, so after London I’ll do stints at the HEC in Paris, the NYU Stern School of Business in New York, and two emerging market studies in China and India. It’s going to be a busy 16 months, but I can’t wait. I’m going to get an MBA!

And now, finally, all that extra weight is starting to come off. It is happening slowly, but it is consistent, and I can feel my body starting to shrink back down to its normal size. Every pound feels like such a relief; a reassurance that underneath all the debris I still exist with something to offer.

I still have much to clean up. There are some dear friends whom I have hurt by closing myself down, who I am still not yet brave enough to call and express how much I have missed them, and how sorry I am. Most of my earthly possessions are still packed in boxes in a storage unit because I’ve never been sure that this is where I should be. It’s finally time to make my home here my own. The clean up list goes on and on. Suffice it to say, however, that it is finally shrinking rather than growing.

And, as with Haiti, the disaster is not without some undeniable blessings. I have learned so much during this year of sitting in the rubble. I became acquainted with myself and the things that the Lord needs me to do in this life, and I am much more clear about the type of man I want to have standing next to me while I do those things. I rely on the promise that he will recognize me when it is time.

In the meantime, I continue rebuilding. There is comfort even in the effort.

insomnia

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 22:35:49 -0800

The Times is doing a running piece right now on people who don’t sleep at night. I’m well acquainted. I thought the article today by Lisa Rus Spaar expressed what I experience most nights in a really beautiful way. Care to peek into my nocturnal compatriot’s universe?

For me, sleep has never come easy — perhaps because I’ve never let it. I can trace my reluctance to succumb to unconsciousness as far back as kindergarten, when Mrs. Casterol inked a firm “X” in the box marked “NO” next to “Sleeps at Naptime.”

On the floor, lined up alphabetically on our blankets in the dimmed classroom, I watched with horrified fascination as Bobby Rocca went lax, his eyes rolling slightly back into his skull before the lids came down and a dribble of drool collected at the corner of his mouth, from which emitted, after a brief, sucked intake, a steady, gargling drone.

I was appalled and jealous of the unabashed ease, the rapidity, with which Bobby lost control and fell away from us. I did not want this to happen to me. Instead, as Mrs. C. took a much-deserved respite, sipping water and shuffling through papers at her desk, I’d feign sleep while watching through half-cast eyes the ridge-line of little shoulders and murmuring bellies around me, the hamster spinning restlessly in his caged wheel in a haze of chalk dust and the odor of emptied shoes, a frieze of alphabet letters arrayed above us on the blackboard.

The insomniac is the one who is awake when a power line goes down and the humming house is extinguished to furnace-less cold and dark. Like many insomniacs, I always feel a bit of bully pride in getting by on a few fractured hours each night while others complain if they don’t get a full, conked-out eight. For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called “the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,” meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness. The daily nocturnal rest that presages the ultimate big sleep of mortality was for him a price both vexing and insulting, a “nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

As a poet, I like being the one who is awake while others sleep — the watcher, the one who courts by choice that liminal space between sleep and waking, where “reality” and inner vision blur, and all the big questions loom with heightened clarity.

Being a sleepless watcher, of course, is not all poetry. A mouth-breather and ferocious snorer myself, I have spent many a nocturnal cross-Atlantic flight in rigid discomfort as those around me doze, contorted and cramped under blankets in enviable Ambien-induced oblivion. I’ve stared for hours at the same page of a book until even my own hands become unfamiliar to me in the bedside lamp light. If all the big questions are more acute at night, that includes plenty of anxiety as well. As Philip Larkin wrote on the subject: “In time the curtain-edges will grow light./ Till then I see what’s really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.”

Lying awake, I worry about a daughter’s recent break-up with her boyfriend, the harassing colleague, an aging parent’s accelerating dementia, global warming — a loop of helpless navel gazing as passing headlights sketch the wall in a nada slideshow until dawn.

The insomniac is the one who, as sleet pelts the roof, is awake when, somewhere out there, a power line goes down and the humming house is extinguished to furnace-less cold and dark. She sees a mouse skittering along the baseboard toward the closet. Hears a groan from her child’s room, first signal of a night-long bout of vomiting. The insomniac stares at the ceiling as squirrels mate and scuttle in their mammalian attic lairs. Occasionally she witnesses the instant within herself when a latent suspicion suddenly takes shape as truth, palpable as the urn of light from the bathroom, and the mirror above the sink reveals a face that looks quite a lot like her mother’s.

But the sleepless night can also bring ecstatic visions. Once, standing at a window overlooking a cobbled alleyway in London hours past midnight, I saw two large men, one in a white dress and baby bonnet, holding hands and running, laughing, out into the restive, absolving city. In my own side yard, I once moved among a grazing clutch of moonlit deer undisturbed by my presence. Nursing my first-born in the wee hours of a Texas night, I watched a firefly dart about the room, and then beheld in grateful amazement my daughter arch back in my arms and smile for the first time.

Unlooked for, these gifts suggest to me that a lifelong habit of insomnia might be considered something akin to spiritual practice. Maybe to think so is just justification. True, most of the time, insomnia means hours of what can seem like futile waiting, thinking, listening, squinting into the murk. But sometimes, if I am lucky, I think I glimpse something important and redeeming beyond the self, the body, the light of day. Even if what I see is, simply, the light of day.

lockdown

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 09:58:03 -0800

Friends and Readers,

I’ve made a decision to password protect my blog starting April 1. If you want to continue following me, just click “email me” below and I’ll send you the access info.

With love,
Amy