I have been taught by a whole variety of experts how to meditate, but, rather than sit calmly, noticing my thoughts, I usually have an internal meditation monologue that goes something like this: You’re thinking again. You can’t even shut off your mind for five minutes. Now you’re thinking about thinking. Stop berating yourself for thinking! Why are you so full of self-loathing, so inept and incompetent, that all you can do is criticize yourself when you meditate? What the fuck is wrong with you? And on and on until the timer finally goes off.
One of the very few things I can say with confidence about the practice of meditation is that no one’s guru has ever given them the mantra “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Whenever I manage to meditate more than three days in a row, I consider attending one of Green Gulch’s Sundays. Once, I even explored the possibility of going there for a three-day retreat. However, Green Gulch is a “scent-free community,” and I have curly hair. I am, apparently, not so desperate for equanimity that I am willing to tolerate a day without my regular leave-in conditioner.
Also? The city in which I live is full of meditators of all shapes and kinds. In my experience, though the vast majority of them are models of empathy and equipoise, there is nobody as hostile as a hostile Berkeley Buddhist. He may brim over with bodhisattva spirit, but he’ll still snake your parking spot in the lot of the Berkeley Bowl.
Still. Here is a practice that claims it can help me achieve what I seek. Wouldn’t it be more admirable to commit to that practice, scent- (though hardly odor-) free as it may be, than seek equanimity in a medicine dropper full of Schedule I? Perhaps I should do both. I will try for the rest of the month of the protocol to meditate for ten minutes every day. On my own. Just me and my conditioner.
Day 13
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: About ninety minutes after dosing felt nauseated. Diarrhea. Passed (ha!) in a couple of hours.
Mood: Happy.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Woke up super early, got up and read, then fell back asleep and slept in.
Work: Productive, though never lost track of time.
Pain: No improvement, but no worse either.
This morning I woke up with a calm appreciation for my life. What is this feeling? It feels too placid for joy, too serene for bliss. Is it contentment?
For the first time since I began the protocol, I slept late, waking only when my husband did. The fog had already burned off when he flung open the blackout curtains and opened the bedroom window. Sun filled the room, and I could smell the earthy musk of the massive redwood tree outside our window. This tree is why we bought this house, or, rather, the ancient rosebush that once twined itself around the trunk and bloomed high in its branches, its white blossoms like fairy lights amidst the dark-green needles.
When I was five months pregnant with our second child, we moved to Berkeley from Los Angeles. We rented a house from a pair of academics on sabbatical in China, figuring that it would take us no more than a couple of months to find a house to buy. The rental house was up the block from where we live now, and the morning after we arrived we wandered down the street and saw the tree. I’d never seen such a thing, flowers blooming hundreds of feet in the air. The rose’s gnarled vine was covered in peely bark and as thick around as my arm, and before climbing the redwood, it swooped over the path to the porch, dipping down so that it almost brushed the top of the head of anyone who walked up the steps. The rest of the yard was wild, thick with undergrowth and piles of dirt.
The house, an old Berkeley brown shingle in the Arts and Crafts style, was under construction. As we stood, staring up at the tree, a workman came out of the front door.
“Excuse me!” I called to him. “Is this house for sale?”
He shook his head and pointed across the street. The man who lived there, he explained, was renovating the house for his sister-in-law.
We continued on our way, only slightly disappointed. Berkeley is full of beautiful old bungalows, redwood trees, and wild rosebushes. We were sure we’d find another one easily enough.
Unfortunately, we arrived in town at the beginning of what became a permanent real-estate boom. We saw dozens of houses, and made three or four offers, our price range creeping higher and higher, into a zone so unrealistic that it seemed pointless to worry about it. We were so far above what we could afford, what difference did another ten thousand make? And yet every house we bid on ended up selling for an amount far more than the ridiculous figure we’d offered.
Meanwhile, my belly was growing, and the professors were due back from China. We were getting desperate. So desperate that we made a flyer, begging for a place to live. We took a photograph of ourselves, me with my big belly, my husband looking pensive, our two-year-old daughter with her mop of ringlets. “Sell us your house!” we scrawled on the photo. We made a hundred copies and slipped them under doors, hung them on the community bulletin boards of taquerías and cafés, and pinned them to lampposts. My husband’s brother, humiliated (their last name is an uncommon one, and he’s popular around town), called us and asked, “Have you two completely lost your minds?” A few years later, when he found himself with a pregnant wife and a rental about to expire, he behaved no less irrationally. Bay Area real estate is far more likely than a bad LSD trip to drive you to psychosis.
All that time, we watched as the renovation of the house down the block progressed. Old plumbing was torn out. Electricians’ vans came and went. Then, one day, our real-estate agent called to tell us that there might be a house in the neighborhood for sale. A man had been renovating a house for his sister-in-law, but she had just been forced to take a job in another city. We met our Realtor at his office, and he walked us around the corner to the house with the crazy rose vine.
When our Realtor called him, the owner of the house wasn’t ready to sell. He wanted to finish the renovation first—call back in a few months, he said. But we didn’t have a few months. We offered more than he asked, more than we could afford. Still he said no. And then, one day, I stood beneath the blooming redwood tree, my shirt riding up over my bulging belly, and burst into tears. I begged him to sell us the house right away, as it was, unfinished. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, he gazed up at the white roses peeking through the needles of the redwood tree, and then, finally, he shrugged his shoulders and agreed. It was hormones that made me cry (and panic), not manipulation, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad that the tears worked.
We immediately set about finishing the renovation so that we could move in before the professors’ return. The work was supposed to be done before I gave birth, but even though our very considerate baby held on for a full two weeks beyond his due date, the contractors were still finishing the kitchen when I went into labor. In the early stages, my midwife told me and my husband to take a walk to move things along, and we wandered down to the house. I stepped into the kitchen and saw that the workmen had installed not the slab of dark-green granite countertop we’d spent an afternoon carefully selecting at the warehouse but instead something pink and speckled.
“What’re you gonna do?” the contractor said with a shrug. “It’s already in. You’ll get used to it.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. Then a contraction hit. I crouched down, my belly rippling. I moaned, rocking back and forth. The contractor and his men stared. The contraction passed and I stood up.
“Pink!” I shrieked. Another contraction followed hard on the first, and I crouched down again, groaning.
“Go to the hospital!” the contractor said, not realizing that I was about to put him in the hospital.
Through my contraction, I gasped, “I will never get used to pink granite!”
The contractor begged me to leave. He promised that by the time the baby was out of my womb the mistake would be rectified. Fortunately for him, it took a full two days and a C-section for my son to move out of his rental in my uterus. When I wandered back into the construction
site, the baby hanging from a sling, the offending pink granite had been replaced with dark green. Like tears, sometimes being scary will get the job done. Rocking back and forth to keep the baby asleep, I gazed around the kitchen and shrugged. Granite is granite, I thought. Eight years later we tore it out, recycled it, and replaced it with zinc.
The spring after we bought the house, we waited for the roses in the redwood to bloom. April passed, then May, then June. In July we called a tree surgeon, who climbed into the tree and told us that the rose vine was dead. It was an ancient rose, planted alongside the redwood in 1907, when the house was built, but it had bloomed for the last time the previous spring.
Though I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in fate, I am superstitious. I knock on wood; I don’t walk under ladders. I have no explanation for this behavior. It overtook me relatively late in life, after I met my husband, who, despite being an eternal optimist, is the one who taught me to throw salt over my shoulder and mutter the phrase “kene-ahora” to avert the evil eye. Neither of us really believes in this stuff, but we’re both uncomfortable if we forget to utter the magic words. I think in my case the simple fact is that I have no confidence in the permanence of my good fortune. I don’t believe I deserve it, so I’m terrified it will be taken away.
Given this, how could I see the death of the very thing that had attracted us to the house as anything but a harbinger of bad luck?
“It’s an omen,” I moaned, staring up at the dead vine.
You won’t be surprised to hear that my husband was unperturbed. It means something, he said, just not what you think. The rose attracted our attention. It drew us to the house where we were meant to raise our family. There’s no reason for it to bloom anymore. It’s done its job, and now it can die.
We planted another rose, but we haven’t let it take over the redwood. It turns out that the vine was choking the tree. Once the tree surgeons had cut the dead rose loose, the redwood began to thrive, growing new and healthier branches, reaching ever higher into the sky. Today the needles shimmer in the late-morning light, and because I am seeing things in a new way, I notice what I have missed on virtually every other morning of the last eighteen years. It is beautiful.
Day 14
Transition Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Woke up crabby, then everything changed.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: No more than six hours, despite trying hard to sleep for longer.
Work: Not as productive as yesterday, but not too bad.
Pain: A little bit in the night.
Today’s epiphany: What if mood is a choice? What if I’ve just been too lazy to be nice to my family? I know this is simplistic. I know that over the course of my life I’ve felt no more able to control my storms of irritability than I’ve been to control the weather, but today it feels possible. When I first woke up, I was my usual pre-microdosing self: grouchy and tired, resentful of a world designed for people who like nothing better than to spring ecstatically out of bed, meditate for an hour, and salute the sun as it rises. If I had my druthers, I would loll in bed until noon with only the newspaper and a cup of tea for company. (Oh, to be a resident of Downton Abbey, with a silver bell to summon servants in whispering slippers bearing trays of tea and buttered toast!) After a few predictable moments of grumbling and longing (married ladies are meant to breakfast abed), I thought to myself, It’s really not that hard to be nice, even at six-thirty in the morning.
My tread was light as I came downstairs. When my kids straggled in from their bedrooms, their faces creased with sleep, their noses buried in their phones, I greeted them with affection and good humor. This is bare-bones parenting; it should be the norm. And yet generally in the morning, if I even manage to haul my ass out of bed, all I can manage is a periodic grunt from my perch at the kitchen table, hunched over my tea and The New York Times. But today, as I placed my children’s (serially prepared, because God forbid people in the same house should eat the same thing in the morning) breakfasts before them with a cheerful clatter, I told them each how much I loved them. I cracked a few jokes. I reminded one that because we both had restless nights we needed to be on alert for low moods caused by sleeplessness.
As I attempted to weave a French braid into my teenage daughter’s hair, and planted a kiss on her cheek, she said, “Oh my God, who even are you today?”
When I was seven years old, I had a recurring dream that featured a bucolic glen in the woods populated by sweet-tempered animals, including a fawn. (I think I might recently have seen Bambi.) Everything about the dream was lovely: The flowers bloomed; the sun filtered prettily through the canopy of trees. The animals’ fur was soft, and they were all eager to be petted. The velvet-nosed fawn was the gentle leader, beloved by the other animals, admired by visitors to the glen. Only I knew that the fawn was actually evil, a demon hiding behind thickly lashed chocolate eyes.
Night after night, I woke up from this dream crying and calling for my mother. Half asleep, she would stagger into my room, comfort me, and settle me back to sleep, the way I do with my own children when they have night terrors. One night, on her way out of my bedroom, she walked into the door, hit her head, and fell to the ground with a crash. My father came running, there was noise and confusion, and then they were gone. I assume he whisked her back to their bedroom. I lay in my bed convinced that the fawn had attacked my mother, knocking her soul out of her body and taking its place.
Who even are you? I would think when I looked at my mother. But I knew who she was. She was the fawn.
I can’t remember if it was days, weeks, or months that I lived with the grim certainty that my mother was not my mother at all, but really just the evil fawn in human form. I do remember that I wasn’t always afraid or worried about the changeling. Sometimes it could even be a comfort. My mother would yell and I would think, “Oh, that terrible, terrible fawn,” and recall with longing my real, true mother. Missing her allowed me to be less wounded by the angry fawn who sometimes took her place.
As I skipped around the kitchen this morning, dispensing kisses and cracking jokes in silly voices, the thought crossed my mind that my children might wonder if some mystical or extraterrestrial creature had not invaded their mother’s body and replaced the moody bitch who normally dwelled inside it.
My daughter, after I’d planted yet another noisy kiss on her cheek, rubbed her face and said, “You are being so annoying! What is wrong with you? Did you put, like, LSD in your tea?”
Day 15
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Good at first, but then it all went to hell.
Conflict: It definitely feels like some people are more annoying than they need to be, and some of those people live in my house.
Sleep: Eight solid hours. Overslept.
Work: My first unproductive day.
Pain: Moderate discomfort.
Even though it happened nearly two weeks ago, even though last week I achieved some real peace by boxing up and putting away the few things I kept in his studio, and even though my husband and I had been getting along so well since his return, we used our hour in couples therapy this week to rehash our argument about his studio. At least, that’s how things started. But after more than twenty years of marriage, our arguments inevitably devolve into the meta. We might begin by arguing about whether or not I should rent my own office, but almost immediately we find ourselves fighting about whose fault it is that we are fighting, who fights fair and who doesn’t, whether this fight is the same as those that came before, what’s really going on underneath it all.
This time was no different. Almost as soon as we described our argument to the therapist, I told her that the real problem wasn’t whether or not we should share the studio.
“The real problem,” I said, “is that he’s angry at me.”
“I am not!” my husband insisted.
I ignored him, and continued talking to the
therapist. “He’s sick of dealing with my moods. And who can blame him? It’s my fault things have been so hard between us recently.”
He said, “I wish you’d stop saying that.”
“It’s okay. You’re right to blame me. I blame myself.”
My husband turned to the therapist. “I don’t blame her. Can you please help her understand that?”
“Do you love your husband?” the therapist asked me.
“Do I love him?” I said. I couldn’t believe she’d asked such a stupid question.
“Yes. Do you love him?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“So why do you threaten to leave me when we fight?” my husband said. “Why do you pack your bags every time we have an argument?”
It’s true. If an argument becomes intense, I will often start flinging clothes into a bag. Sometimes I’ll even walk out the door and drive around for a while, before coming home chastened and sorry. Not so different from the child who puts a sandwich in her backpack before loudly announcing that she’s running away forever. Having watched my parents struggle within the confines of their marital strife, I respond to crisis with a desperate, if fleeting, desire to escape. This behavior drives my husband wild. A child of divorce, he cannot bear to be left, even if he should know by now that I always come back. It triggers his fears of abandonment.
“You can’t do that anymore,” the therapist told me. “You can’t threaten to leave. It’s cruel.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “It’s because I love him that I should do him the favor of leaving him. He’d be better off without me.”
My husband flinched.
“I should leave him, but I won’t,” I continued, speaking to the therapist, not to my husband.
“Are you saying you want to leave him?” she asked.
“Of course not! It would make me absolutely miserable to be without him. I’ll never leave him.”
A Really Good Day Page 11