Monday, August 18, 2008

becoming a bit buddhist

Today was the first day of orientation. We got a travel coffee mug that says "Naropa", and breakfast for free! Or, as my father would say, "it was included in the tuition". Perhaps as an undergrad I would have found this kind of thing boring, but I was quite moved to hear the president of the university and others speak about what makes Naropa special. Most of the faculty and administrators who work at Naropa came from other colleges, where they were dissatisfied with the approach to education. Apparently Naropa was the first choice for 95% of the incoming students, so there was an appreciation and excitement all around for this place we will journey through together. I met a nice transpersonal counseling grad student who is from Portland and we sat together for a while. I think it was a relief to both of us to be able to talk about our beloved city--just to be able to say the name of a breakfast restaurant and be greeted with recognition was oddly satisfying.
Most exciting was my departmental meeting, where I met the 12 other students who I will be working so closely with for the next two years. We spent most of the time listening to Wendell (our teacher) talk about the program and I remembered why I have put myself through this heartache. He is a beautiful and articulate speaker, with a kind and gentle presence. He told us that in Buddhism there are 4 kinds of suffering, one of which is "alternateness", the pain of alternating. He explained that when he was first setting up the program at Naropa, he would travel back and forth between New York and Boulder, and it struck him when he was in Boulder that he experienced this pain of alternateness, because of the contrast between the intensity of the theater work and the freedom and easiness of the surrounding natural landscape. He would go out into the mountains after work and feel this in a way that he never did in New York. He encouraged us to go into the mountains anyway. I think perhaps I am experiencing this suffering of alternateness now; for everything wonderful that I find in Boulder there is something wonderful I am missing in Portland. Somehow I can't stop associating everything that is with something that was. I suppose this is the nature of homesickness, or experiencing extreme change.
I went to a show at the Shambhala Center(a mecca for American Buddhists, located in downtown Boulder) that was created by one of my faculty, and ran into a classmate -- a woman named Anna who just moved here from Greece to attend the program. We went out for beer and got along quite well. It was so nice to hang out with somebody my own age and converse, and I loved comparing cultures with her and hearing her observations on America. She says "the problem with Americans is that they are stuck in their image of themselves", but she says it in slightly broken English with a charming accent, and it is the most profound thing ever.