The last couple of weeks of practice have passed like a slow train bumping along on a rickety old track: though the ride has been bumpy, with a few herks and jerks along the way, it has proceeded steadily enough, with slow insistence and strong momentum.
More and more I realize this practice is not about me or the mindstate I want to cultivate or have at any given moment. It is not about judging, controlling, or mastering the mind. It is about noticing. The subtle power of noticing is that you cannot be in unwitting complicity with what you notice. Once seen, thoughts lose their power to drive behavior, and slowly, over time, even lose their power to mold and limit perception. If you see a thought popping up, and notice its impact on subjective reality, it becomes clear that reality is not reality in our naive sense of it. "Reality" is more of a half-assed collage with some beautiful pieces but a lot of junk too, that "junk" being the inane self-centered thought reactivity going on in the background almost constantly.
It has been difficult to maintain discipline and focus these last two weeks, likely due to the dissolution of my normal routine as I have transitioned out of work. I have found myself more restless and uncomfortable on the cushion, and more than one night, my usual sitting period of 30 minutes has been pushed back to 25 or even 20 minutes. I missed sitting altogether on Days 41 (10/7) and 44 (10/10) of the Ango. However, for the most part, I'm finding it more difficult to allow myself to miss a day of zazen. The impact on the flow of my day is too notable to shrug off a day's zazen with the careless indifference I've felt about it in the past.
On Day 36 of the Ango, I "made up" one of the 1.5 hour "zazenkai" (I think it would be more accurate to refer to these "zazenkai" as "double sits" as they consist of two zazen periods, plus some chanting, bowing, and movement practice) I had previously missed. And as if the gods were playing a joke on me, and making a mockery of my momentarily devout feeling, five minutes after the first period began, a loud post-punk noise band started an outdoor set at a location I would later find out was only a couple of blocks away from my apartment. A more challenging sonic backdrop for zazen could hardly be imagined. However, it was a worthwhile experience to sit through. I could clearly notice and watch my mind reacting to the sounds, which it was quick to label as a "disturbance."
As I sat with No Pasaran! playing in the background, I was able to clearly watch the process unfold by which the mind labels something as "bad" or "other" and sets itself up against it (to be fair to the band, I like their style of music when I am not sitting zazen and do not think of it as "bad"). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the mind tries to cleave itself from it. Once the mind has satisfactorily "peeled" itself "off" of the object it dislikes, it sets itself in opposition and readies itself for conflict. It was so clear how all of this was just a production of the mind. The sound itself lacks the qualities that the mind attributes to it, as a pacified mind (which I increasingly experienced over the course of the "double sit") experiences the sound as neutral. The music becomes part of a soundscape along with sirens and passing cars, people shouting to each other on the street, and is perceived similarly to the chorus of different natural sounds one encounters when sitting in the middle of the woods.
In addition to making up that "double sit," I sat the four hour monthly zazenkai live with Jundo and other Treeleafers on Day 37 (10/3) of the Ango. It was a wonderfully intimate experience of connection with the sangha, and with the extra zazen period of the day before, made for a weekend of strong practice. I missed the live "double sit" with the sangha on Day 43 (10/9) of the Ango but sat that "double sit" today. If I sit the rest of the "double sits" and zazenkai, I will need to only sit one additional "double sit" and one additional four hour zazenkai to make up for the ones I have previously missed.
Now that I am officially out of work, I am hoping to be able to dedicate more of my time in the second half of Ango to strong and focused practice, though I am learning how irrelevant judgments such as "strong" and "focused" are in this practice. The part of the mind that seeks the feeling of control is very wily, and, at least for me, this practice is more about seeing this part of the mind for what it is and letting go of it than playing into it.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Ango Days 27-34
I maintained daily sitting throughout the week, but once again, when the weekend came, despite my promise to myself that I would "get back on track" with the weekly zazenkai, I did not do it, leaving me with three missed zazenkai to "make up." I told myself I would do the zazenkai on Monday... then Tuesday... but I still have not done it.
This struck me powerfully on Monday morning, a rainy, dark day infused with melancholy. I could not escape the striking thought that with all of the enthusiasm and sincere intention with which I'd started the Ango, I had blown off my practice commitments on Sunday to play Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I thought, what kind of Zen Buddhist am I, to have such minimal commitment to the practice? I try my best to live rightly, and be true to my word, but my Ango commitments have been so easily jettisoned, postponed, or forgotten. Where has my enthusiasm gone? My passion? My sincerity?
My life has become so much less "spiritual" than it used to be, so much less pure, so much more given to vice and distraction than awareness and discipline. I have become more driven to serve my own desires than to practice kindness toward others. My perspective on people has gotten so warped since I moved to the New York metro area. People on the street, in their cars, or in the supermarket are competitors, people in my way, I must get mine before they get theirs, I must show them my displeasure if they impede my movement in even the slightest way. I have become a gentler driver than I was some months ago, but the trigger-instincts of aggression still lie just underneath the surface.
In my zazen practice there has been a feeling of day-to-day inertia and placid passivity. A period begins, a period ends, and there is nothing in between. Thoughts, emotions, coming and going, noticing, letting go, coming back to awareness of this mind resting in itself. Pleasant enough, but I have started to feel "stuck." My practice isn't "going anywhere." How am I ever going to wake up at this rate? How am I ever going to have a kensho? I lack the fire or will to even have much curiosity about what is going on in my mind, much less to break through to the awakened state! Maybe as a Zen student, I am useless: lazy and aggressive, undisciplined, incapable of kensho. So it went with my thoughts on Monday morning.
Fortuitously, I picked up the Fall 2010 issue of Buddhadharma and noticed it contained an article addressing the feeling of being "stuck" in practice. The article is titled "Feeling Stuck? Good!" by Ajahn Sucitto (pp. 43-47). The article has had a profound impact on my attitude and frame of mind. In it, Ajahn Sucitto writes,
"From time to time we come to a stuck place in our dhamma practice... After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice... we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...
We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an 'edge.' We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can't quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
It's not a comfortable place, but it is a piece of the journey. It is supposed to happen; the edge is the place where the self-vehicle gets overhauled. Because of that, the wheels have to come off. But there's a vital opening for anyone who gets to their edge and manages to feel their way past it. It's there that holding on to one's 'self' at the level of personality unravels.
Generally, to get off that edge of uncertainty we grasp on to all that's left: the uncertainty itself, and whatever it brings up. Often the mind moves away from the edge so quickly that we either shift into doing something, or otherwise displace the uncomfortable feeling... Restlessness builds up until we have to do something to make ourselves feel capable and comfortable again. All this activity intensifies the real obstacle, which is self-orientation...
Notice what takes you to the edge of feeling you're on solid ground. It may be part of your daily routine. Routine acts of service can be testing grounds, places where we no longer feel spontaneous, or on top, or seem to develop much. 'Surely all this humdrum stuff isn't going to take me to the bright gates of the Deathless!' So the wobble begins. Then again, taking responsibility may lead us to an edge of uncertainty about our own worth... This sense of being is so compulsive that if it can't lean on a positive sense of self, it adopts a negative one. Because of this, the stuckness is more difficult than any particular flaw, because the doubt that it stimulates corrodes our faith in the path and the practice.
At this place, all the teachings sound like platitudes we've heard a thousand times (and 'we still haven't become enlightened'), and although we should have gotten rid of our defilements by now, we haven't--and sometimes they even seem more authentic than our virtues. Our unconscious attachment to the teachings... presents its down side, and the romance looks like it's heading for divorce. It's all highly emotive, and emotion creates credibility, because whatever is emotive has vitality to it.
The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind... [but] if we can see them for what they are... these energies won't stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of sankhara energies that we weren't fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities."
The article could not have more perfectly captured and illuminated the movements of my mind over the past week. I realized: "This practice has nothing to do with my personality." The virtue of sitting daily is not in the extent to which it fuels some desired-for change or state, but in the extent to which it throws the changeability and insubstantiality of the self and personality into relief. This practice isn't about me, or what it says about me. So maybe I'm not what I wish I was, but that is exactly the point. The definitions of the self, the thoughts of the self about itself, are completely irrelevant to this practice.
The self is strikingly subtle and deceptive. There it was, coiled at the heart of my practice, and I could not see it, camouflaged as it was by a leaf-litter of distracting thoughts and powerful emotions. And the sense of relief I feel now that it has been seen is immense. In a reverse of the Buddha's famous simile, I have seen that what lies coiled in the shadows is not a rope, but a snake; not a useful tool, but a poisonous foe. The self-measurements, the spiritual spoils my ego wants to obtain, are tricks and fantasies to keep me from looking at the thing itself.
The strange thing about the disciplines of Zen practice in general and Ango in particular is that they are easier to maintain when there is a sense of ease and calm, when the pressure to maintain them is lifted--when they become disentangled from the self that wants to define itself through them.
This struck me powerfully on Monday morning, a rainy, dark day infused with melancholy. I could not escape the striking thought that with all of the enthusiasm and sincere intention with which I'd started the Ango, I had blown off my practice commitments on Sunday to play Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I thought, what kind of Zen Buddhist am I, to have such minimal commitment to the practice? I try my best to live rightly, and be true to my word, but my Ango commitments have been so easily jettisoned, postponed, or forgotten. Where has my enthusiasm gone? My passion? My sincerity?
My life has become so much less "spiritual" than it used to be, so much less pure, so much more given to vice and distraction than awareness and discipline. I have become more driven to serve my own desires than to practice kindness toward others. My perspective on people has gotten so warped since I moved to the New York metro area. People on the street, in their cars, or in the supermarket are competitors, people in my way, I must get mine before they get theirs, I must show them my displeasure if they impede my movement in even the slightest way. I have become a gentler driver than I was some months ago, but the trigger-instincts of aggression still lie just underneath the surface.
In my zazen practice there has been a feeling of day-to-day inertia and placid passivity. A period begins, a period ends, and there is nothing in between. Thoughts, emotions, coming and going, noticing, letting go, coming back to awareness of this mind resting in itself. Pleasant enough, but I have started to feel "stuck." My practice isn't "going anywhere." How am I ever going to wake up at this rate? How am I ever going to have a kensho? I lack the fire or will to even have much curiosity about what is going on in my mind, much less to break through to the awakened state! Maybe as a Zen student, I am useless: lazy and aggressive, undisciplined, incapable of kensho. So it went with my thoughts on Monday morning.
Fortuitously, I picked up the Fall 2010 issue of Buddhadharma and noticed it contained an article addressing the feeling of being "stuck" in practice. The article is titled "Feeling Stuck? Good!" by Ajahn Sucitto (pp. 43-47). The article has had a profound impact on my attitude and frame of mind. In it, Ajahn Sucitto writes,
"From time to time we come to a stuck place in our dhamma practice... After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice... we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...
We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an 'edge.' We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can't quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
It's not a comfortable place, but it is a piece of the journey. It is supposed to happen; the edge is the place where the self-vehicle gets overhauled. Because of that, the wheels have to come off. But there's a vital opening for anyone who gets to their edge and manages to feel their way past it. It's there that holding on to one's 'self' at the level of personality unravels.
Generally, to get off that edge of uncertainty we grasp on to all that's left: the uncertainty itself, and whatever it brings up. Often the mind moves away from the edge so quickly that we either shift into doing something, or otherwise displace the uncomfortable feeling... Restlessness builds up until we have to do something to make ourselves feel capable and comfortable again. All this activity intensifies the real obstacle, which is self-orientation...
Notice what takes you to the edge of feeling you're on solid ground. It may be part of your daily routine. Routine acts of service can be testing grounds, places where we no longer feel spontaneous, or on top, or seem to develop much. 'Surely all this humdrum stuff isn't going to take me to the bright gates of the Deathless!' So the wobble begins. Then again, taking responsibility may lead us to an edge of uncertainty about our own worth... This sense of being is so compulsive that if it can't lean on a positive sense of self, it adopts a negative one. Because of this, the stuckness is more difficult than any particular flaw, because the doubt that it stimulates corrodes our faith in the path and the practice.
At this place, all the teachings sound like platitudes we've heard a thousand times (and 'we still haven't become enlightened'), and although we should have gotten rid of our defilements by now, we haven't--and sometimes they even seem more authentic than our virtues. Our unconscious attachment to the teachings... presents its down side, and the romance looks like it's heading for divorce. It's all highly emotive, and emotion creates credibility, because whatever is emotive has vitality to it.
The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind... [but] if we can see them for what they are... these energies won't stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of sankhara energies that we weren't fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities."
The article could not have more perfectly captured and illuminated the movements of my mind over the past week. I realized: "This practice has nothing to do with my personality." The virtue of sitting daily is not in the extent to which it fuels some desired-for change or state, but in the extent to which it throws the changeability and insubstantiality of the self and personality into relief. This practice isn't about me, or what it says about me. So maybe I'm not what I wish I was, but that is exactly the point. The definitions of the self, the thoughts of the self about itself, are completely irrelevant to this practice.
The self is strikingly subtle and deceptive. There it was, coiled at the heart of my practice, and I could not see it, camouflaged as it was by a leaf-litter of distracting thoughts and powerful emotions. And the sense of relief I feel now that it has been seen is immense. In a reverse of the Buddha's famous simile, I have seen that what lies coiled in the shadows is not a rope, but a snake; not a useful tool, but a poisonous foe. The self-measurements, the spiritual spoils my ego wants to obtain, are tricks and fantasies to keep me from looking at the thing itself.
The strange thing about the disciplines of Zen practice in general and Ango in particular is that they are easier to maintain when there is a sense of ease and calm, when the pressure to maintain them is lifted--when they become disentangled from the self that wants to define itself through them.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Ango Days 19-26
The strongest part of my Ango practice continues to be my renewed commitment to zazen. This past week, I sat every day except Day 21 (Friday 17) and Day 25 (Tuesday 21). On Day 21, I fully intended to sit, but sleep overtook me. I came through my front door intensely hungry and made myself a meal of instant pierogies, salad greens, and sautéed vegetables. Perhaps it was eating a large meal after a period of intense hunger, or the amount of energy required to digest a fiber-heavy meal, but I immediately became sleepy. I lay down on the couch for "a minute" and woke up two hours later, ready to go to bed and sleep for the rest of the night. But the next day, the first thing I did was sit. I have continued to do morning rather than evening sits from that day onward. Yesterday, Day 25, was the first day of the Ango that I said to myself, "I am not going to sit today." There is a time around my period where the tenderness in my abdomen and jaggedness in my head makes me averse to sitting. But this morning, once again, I started my day with zazen.
Though I continue to miss an occasional day of sitting, I am always ready to resume sitting the next day, without any struggle. Zazen is once again becoming an integral part of my day. It has gotten easier, with less resistance and struggle from my mind against the practice. But with the reduced struggle, there is now a vague sense of anxiety and a feeling of being "stuck." I feel like my practice is "going nowhere" and like my mind is a stagnant pool. The old hunger for kensho is there and where some months ago I felt I was in the borderlands of waking up, now I feel walled off from the possibility. Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shikantaza is too passive, without the energy of holding a question, but at other times, what seems to be going on is a struggle with the part of me that wants to be in control and to feel like it is accomplishing something, the part that blocks awakening. So I continue to sit.
All other Ango commitments are on tottering steps these days, stumbling, but not abandoned. I have met with Jundo on Skype once for interview, and though Daibh and I have not done either of the formal Practice Partner exercises, we continue to support one another's practice. I have missed the last two Saturday intensive sits, which to me is the second most important commitment of the Ango next to daily zazen. I intend to "make them up" when I can, but for now, just focus on not missing any more of them.
I am trying, and struggling, with my commitment to kind speech and thought, and mindful work with the spirit of samu. I now have two and a half weeks left at my current job, and it is bringing up many conflicting feelings. I feel sadness and loss over the friends and comrades I will leave behind, the humor and drama and compassion in action I experience there. I also feel a huge sense of relief and an increasing flow of joy. I know I am at a major transition point in my life; a long journey has come to an end, and I am ready for it.
Yet somehow it is still difficult to maintain a joyful mind and avoid wrong thought and speech at work, much less approach each work day with the humility and discipline of samu. Resentments that have festered for the 1.5 years I have worked there are bubbling to the surface, as well as anger, fear, and concern for my fellow staff members due to the ongoing management problems there. I want to leave the job with a positive and grateful attitude; despite my frustrations, the experience has been more positive than negative. But perhaps it is hard to so easily let go of the frustrations that build when you have been required to submit in silence to people with more power over you even when you wanted to question or speak out. Whatever it is, my workday is characterized more by a desire to get through the day as quickly as possible and an almost conscious desire not to be mentally present to it.
It is the same with the massive weekend of house chores I completed on Sunday. There was a sense of aggression, anxiety, and urgency, to get it all done in time. It is hard to enjoy the simple act of cleaning when so much has to be done in so little time. I used to find house chores a very easy venue for mindfulness. I enjoy the simple physical motions of cleaning, and the process of watching dirty and messy areas become neat and ordered. I think the lack of mindfulness comes from a lack of energy and having to push oneself through a seemingly endless stream of "work."
I am so grateful that my mother and stepfather are allowing me to stay with them for the holidays with no need to pay rent or work, only to help out with food expenses, which I should be able to do with savings from my last paycheck, returned security deposit on my apartment, and small but significant dividend check from a family business. The drain of my work and daily commute, and the demands of caring for a home as a solitary breadwinner and homemaker, have left me feeling out of touch with myself for an extended period of time. What do I believe? What are my motivations in my practice and anything else? What do I really want in life? I do not know the answers to these questions, and am hopeful a 2-3 month "sabbatical" will allow me to rest and renew and come to a clear sense of direction.
I am also hopeful the sabbatical will allow me to commit myself more fully to this Ango. Because while I am doing the practices, if somewhat inconsistently, my mind and heart are not focused. My daily life has no sense of the sacred or the focus that was there in the first few days of the Ango. And this too goes back to my motivation in practice being unclear. I do not know what I want or why I am still practicing; I want to wake up, to experience kensho, but what is that? My ego wants something it does not understand, for reasons I cannot even clarify.
It is my plan when I am back home to replace the time and structure currently provided by my work with samu and other formal practice periods. One thing I would really like to do to help my mom and stepdad, and at the same time help my practice, is to every day spend a set amount of time focused on one particular domestic task. Perhaps one day I will dust surfaces, another day clean windows, another day clean bathrooms, another day clean floors. I will be able to enjoy these acts without the exhaustion and stress that come with working full time and having to do all the cleaning oneself in a designated and limited frame of time, after a work week has already depleted one's energies. I will also be able to help my mom and stepdad have more time to enjoy their weekends after their work weeks, by not having to spend so much of their time cleaning the house. I look forward being able to connect my actions to a community I feel part of, the microcommunity of an immediate family. I am hopeful now that I am moving back home where my family is that I will never again have to experience the isolation and alienation I have experienced up here.
Though I continue to miss an occasional day of sitting, I am always ready to resume sitting the next day, without any struggle. Zazen is once again becoming an integral part of my day. It has gotten easier, with less resistance and struggle from my mind against the practice. But with the reduced struggle, there is now a vague sense of anxiety and a feeling of being "stuck." I feel like my practice is "going nowhere" and like my mind is a stagnant pool. The old hunger for kensho is there and where some months ago I felt I was in the borderlands of waking up, now I feel walled off from the possibility. Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shikantaza is too passive, without the energy of holding a question, but at other times, what seems to be going on is a struggle with the part of me that wants to be in control and to feel like it is accomplishing something, the part that blocks awakening. So I continue to sit.
All other Ango commitments are on tottering steps these days, stumbling, but not abandoned. I have met with Jundo on Skype once for interview, and though Daibh and I have not done either of the formal Practice Partner exercises, we continue to support one another's practice. I have missed the last two Saturday intensive sits, which to me is the second most important commitment of the Ango next to daily zazen. I intend to "make them up" when I can, but for now, just focus on not missing any more of them.
I am trying, and struggling, with my commitment to kind speech and thought, and mindful work with the spirit of samu. I now have two and a half weeks left at my current job, and it is bringing up many conflicting feelings. I feel sadness and loss over the friends and comrades I will leave behind, the humor and drama and compassion in action I experience there. I also feel a huge sense of relief and an increasing flow of joy. I know I am at a major transition point in my life; a long journey has come to an end, and I am ready for it.
Yet somehow it is still difficult to maintain a joyful mind and avoid wrong thought and speech at work, much less approach each work day with the humility and discipline of samu. Resentments that have festered for the 1.5 years I have worked there are bubbling to the surface, as well as anger, fear, and concern for my fellow staff members due to the ongoing management problems there. I want to leave the job with a positive and grateful attitude; despite my frustrations, the experience has been more positive than negative. But perhaps it is hard to so easily let go of the frustrations that build when you have been required to submit in silence to people with more power over you even when you wanted to question or speak out. Whatever it is, my workday is characterized more by a desire to get through the day as quickly as possible and an almost conscious desire not to be mentally present to it.
It is the same with the massive weekend of house chores I completed on Sunday. There was a sense of aggression, anxiety, and urgency, to get it all done in time. It is hard to enjoy the simple act of cleaning when so much has to be done in so little time. I used to find house chores a very easy venue for mindfulness. I enjoy the simple physical motions of cleaning, and the process of watching dirty and messy areas become neat and ordered. I think the lack of mindfulness comes from a lack of energy and having to push oneself through a seemingly endless stream of "work."
I am so grateful that my mother and stepfather are allowing me to stay with them for the holidays with no need to pay rent or work, only to help out with food expenses, which I should be able to do with savings from my last paycheck, returned security deposit on my apartment, and small but significant dividend check from a family business. The drain of my work and daily commute, and the demands of caring for a home as a solitary breadwinner and homemaker, have left me feeling out of touch with myself for an extended period of time. What do I believe? What are my motivations in my practice and anything else? What do I really want in life? I do not know the answers to these questions, and am hopeful a 2-3 month "sabbatical" will allow me to rest and renew and come to a clear sense of direction.
I am also hopeful the sabbatical will allow me to commit myself more fully to this Ango. Because while I am doing the practices, if somewhat inconsistently, my mind and heart are not focused. My daily life has no sense of the sacred or the focus that was there in the first few days of the Ango. And this too goes back to my motivation in practice being unclear. I do not know what I want or why I am still practicing; I want to wake up, to experience kensho, but what is that? My ego wants something it does not understand, for reasons I cannot even clarify.
It is my plan when I am back home to replace the time and structure currently provided by my work with samu and other formal practice periods. One thing I would really like to do to help my mom and stepdad, and at the same time help my practice, is to every day spend a set amount of time focused on one particular domestic task. Perhaps one day I will dust surfaces, another day clean windows, another day clean bathrooms, another day clean floors. I will be able to enjoy these acts without the exhaustion and stress that come with working full time and having to do all the cleaning oneself in a designated and limited frame of time, after a work week has already depleted one's energies. I will also be able to help my mom and stepdad have more time to enjoy their weekends after their work weeks, by not having to spend so much of their time cleaning the house. I look forward being able to connect my actions to a community I feel part of, the microcommunity of an immediate family. I am hopeful now that I am moving back home where my family is that I will never again have to experience the isolation and alienation I have experienced up here.
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