Please Happy

With four hours before a long train ride that will end with robed monks beckoning me into a Matrix-less meditation hall for two weeks, my computer died. It just turned off. Black screen.
No whirring, no spinning of the little colorful disc, no nothing. The battery is supposedly charged, the power cord illuminated, but the machine itself is utterly silent.

So this is what it’s going to sound like. Not Plugged In. Eerily quiet.

Of course, I have several pending assignments I need to turn in before the train to tranquility. So, I’m borrowing my sister’s newer Mac. Procrastination craziness at its ironic best on this eve.

I know the monks have a computer in the office for corresponding with lay practitioners, but I’m banning myself right now from sneaking out of my dorm room in the middle of the night to break in to plug in.

The silence will be good, I tell myself. It’ll be like I’m in the mountains, except I’ll be sitting on a hard cushion staring at a wall and listening to my breath, and instead of scampering home to blog about adventures, I’ll walk slowly, mindfully back to my bed and maybe write with a pen on paper. I will be living among beautiful smiling nuns and monks , all of us voluntarily isolated from the wonderful web of the wide, wide world. And, after my initial panic, I have a feeling I will relax* and smile myself.

*If this blog is updated prior to Dec. 15, the Web won.

I’ve purchased Moby Dick two times for myself, four if you count the unabridged CDs I listened to on a college road trip to the NCAA women’s ice hockey championships, and given it as a gift once (the recipient has yet to finish it).

Maybe it’s the comedy, the way Melville seems to make up his own language, the squeamish trance I felt while reading about men literally swimming in the warm spermaceti of the massive mammal or just the sheer research it took to make such a massive book, but I soon became as obsessed as my 19th Century American lit professor Pete Coviello had promised.

And, wandering the streets of damp drizzly Berlin, I felt compelled to buy another copy. I’m taking the tome with me to my two week retreat (where I will have nothing that plugs in).

Moby Dick is to me as the sea is to Ishmael.

I took this photograph of the hole left by Moby Dick on the English fiction shelf. I would say On the Road is a worthy neighbor to Melville’s masterpiece, but Unleash the Night? Haven’t read it, but I’d say that Queequeg could totally take the blue-eyed front cover Fabio. They’d wrestle, shirts off, on the head of a newly dead whale, and then Queequeg would likely toss Fabio into the vast milky Tun and wait until he was good and submerged before plunging in after him to deliver his Fabio foe – held by the hair – to safety.

If that doesn’t convince you, I just learned that Esquire lists MD as one of the Greatest 75 Books Every Man Should Read. I’m working on the list for women.

Haiku after seeing C|O Berlin’s Photographs of the Collection of Agnès b.

Photographed punks, boys.

Limbs vulnerable, naked.

Me lonely, looking.

While in Asia, I learned to let go. You don’t have to see everything in one visit. It took four months to stop feeling guilty about not seeing all the sights and sites!

With that in mind, on my first of two days in Berlin, I (only) visited the highly secured (I got patted down and metal dectectored) Neue Synagoge, then wandered into a monolithic bookstore, then marched back toward the synagogue to a photography show I had noticed earlier curated by a notable politico/photography/film/fashion icon, then took the subway to the Brandenburg Gate, and thought of Reagan, stared at the adjacent American Embassy and thought of Barack Hussein Obama then got completely lost in the glittering shopping district.

Then, I saw part of The Wall, which stands next to a mall and a snow slide, then walked in the cold with my hood up, head down to the Topography of Terror, which was too dark to see. No guidebooks, no itinerary. Just a subway map, a down jacket and several cups of espresso. Bonus: two different people asked me for directions in German. While I was of no use to them whatsoever, it felt nice to be mistaken for a local. Here are some pics from today, shot with my teeny Leica.

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After connecting with some of my brother’s fellow Shambhala Buddhists at a ceremony in Cologne, I find myself in Berlin at a practitioner’s home for two days before my own two-week retreat. I’ve known the woman for one day. She made me dinner (beet and cabbage soup with buttered bread), took me along to meditate at the Berlin Shambhala center for an hour and a half, translated the aprés-sitting tea party and gave me her sleeping bag, Internet connection and couch for the evening. Make that two evenings, possibly three.

As she and her boyfriend headed to bed, I expressed my thanks again for their generosity. She stuck her head out the door from their bedroom.

“Germans don’t like so many Thank-Yous,” she said.

“One or two maybe, but that’s it. We don’t do American friendliness.”

Ouch.

It’s two days before THANKSgiving and three days before a retreat where nuns will show me how to “bow in gratitude” on the earth.

With a lifetime of dad-enforced and society-rewarded manners, I can’t not say thank you.

But, no thank yous here.

The girl’s boyfriend did have one suggestion.

“Try saying ‘Fuck off.’ Works like a charm.”

Walking out of Mark’s work apartment tonight, we saw a father and son throwing snowballs in the cement courtyard of the apartment complex. I think they were the snowpeople builders. Then, as we left the cluster and walked toward the Rhine, we had to pass through a full-on snowball fight. Despite our attempts to take a detour through the wet, crunchy, snowy lawn, we got pummeled by the giggly throwers. I lamely threw one back before darting under the huge elms toward the subway. Heard from some locals that it rarely snows in Cologne, and when it does, the snow doesn’t stick and if it does, it soon turns brown. Tonight was extra ordinary then. Snow makes everything beautiful and everyone happy. And, besides tearing my ACL, every snow memory is magical.