I Inhaled Marijuana, Dear Reader, Briefly

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Note: Once again, these columns represent part of my continuing series on Iyengar Yoga.

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—I was brought up a Presbyterian. In Pasadena. In the 1950s.

If you’re an anthropologist, just that one sentence, and pair of sentence fragments, tell you almost everything about me.

I was born harnessed to a wagon and, by God, I was going to pull that thing, straight and true, till I dropped in my tracks.

From infancy, since the time I could walk, I was on full academic scholarship at one tony school after another. My father was a lay analyst: there was no money for luxuries. A pair of patent leather pumps; a pair of Keds; a pair of saddle oxfords. No other shoes. No other shoes desired.

What I had in life more than sufficed: the love and loyalty of my extended family; the rigorous demands of my teachers; the California, then Greek, sunshine. I did what I was told, when I was told. I finished high school at 15, entered the university at 16, and never drank a sip of beer, never took a drag on a cigarette, never got beyond what we called heavy petting back then till my last semester of college.

That heavy petting, I’ll admit, nearly took the top of my head off: seems I’d found my one bête noir in life, damn it all, and it would take all those hours in pews and choir rooms and church camp at Balboa to enable me to put the brakes on. But that’s an entirely other, and much longer story.

This story is about drugs. So-called “recreational drugs.” And they, too—homegrown pot, hash, and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine (that latter discovered in the late 70s in Paris—didn’t hold much interest for me, either.

The first time I smoked pot—and it was good stuff, grown by my botanist-neighbor-boyfriend, Dennis—was powerful medicine. I remember sputtering down a couple of tokes while pouring tea from a graceful if hefty, narrow-spouted teapot and, before I knew it, all the tea in the pot was on the table, in my lap, and on the floor.

Watching it flow out translucently was just such a trip.

My Presbyterian soul took me aside, then, for just one moment and said: “You’re in grad school, Idiot, on full scholarship, with a T.A. If you try this stuff again, you are NOT going to get your paper on Victorian Lit finished (or even begun), you’re NOT going to get your students’ essays graded. Hell, you’re not even going to make it out of the kitchen.”

So, I put aside childish things, and got what was left of my Presbyterian nose back on the grindstone.

Dennis went on to drop out of school, set up a marijuana plantation somewhere in Georgia, and work odd jobs till I lost track of him. Sweet boy, but utterly lost to the demon weed. Probably in jail now, alas. NO: probably a billionaire.

Flash forward.

I had a few more isolated encounters with hash and coke and grass, but I still didn’t smoke or drink, and it took me some five decades even to start swearing in earnest (Bush and Cheney will do that to even a Presbyterian). Even four-letter words don’t come easy to a Pasadena-reared Presbyterian.

I still thought, though, a la Elizabeth Taylor, that in order to sleep with a man, he had to marry you, which made for a very colorful marital history. Mine wasn’t a case of sleeping around: it was a strange case of not sleeping around, unless I had a brace of diamonds on one left finger.

I took just about everything that came down the pike—political causes, advanced degrees, book deadlines, teaching; and, then, Reiki Mastership and Iyengar-style Yoga education and teaching—very, very seriously.

I broke no laws. I returned no library books late. Ice cream—Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch—was my one carnal sin, and I repent every time I engulf a pint, which is often. (I often wish I were a Catholic.)

But I did not count on the advent of one wily antagonist into this somewhat orderly life of mine, and that was pain. Pain like I had never known it before (and this is a woman who’s experienced exploding ovarian cysts, abscesses of the jaw, scratched corneas, and one serious encounter with a Portuguese Man O’ War).

The pain I refer to now is lumbar-sacral spinal pain, before and after spinal fusion surgery performed on 20 May of 2010, and the experience was something like being hit across the iliac crest region of my back by . . . my beloved Jose Reyes or David Wright, boys who can really swing a bat.

The initial pain is followed by every muscle in my core seizing up and screaming bloody murder, which is why I’ve been on Dilaudid (to which I’m allergic. Very.), Percocet, and Ambien. These drugs, cheerfully produced and marketed by Big Pharma, are not nice substances. Mother Nature did not have a hand in their provenance. These drugs are addictive, have a s&^%load of side effects, cost big money, and don’t really do the job. You want more and more of them. You wake up crying for more and more of them. And they do not, and never will, have the accuracy of Reyes and Wright.

As palliatives for pain of the sort I had after May 20, these drugs suck.

But they are legal.

They are legal, Dear Reader, in America, where alcohol and cigarettes and big fat cigars, which cause cirrhosis and cancer and emphysema, etc., etc. are for sale, no questions asked, at every corner store, every bodega, every Wal-Mart.

Come one, come all: step right up for Percocet. It’s legal!

I wouldn’t be so incensed, so completely off my nut, so furious, if I had not just recently discovered that a couple of—two or three, to be precise—hits of not very high-grade, homegrown marijuana did not completely remove the clenching, raging lumbar-sacral pain for me.

A friend from a state on the O.C. where grass is legal brought me the tiniest, child’s-water-color-brush slender and not even a quarter-ounce in weight roach (the ones we made in the 70s used to look like cheese sticks by comparison to this little twig). I took two cautious Presbyterian inhalations and, in about five minutes, I was not one tiny bit high, my lumbar musculature had “let go,” and I relaxed back on my 12 prop-pillows in peace. For the first time in weeks.

Houston, we have a problem here.

Percocet and Methodone and Ambien and Clonazepam and Gabapentin are legal. They’re monitored and quality-controlled, and kept out of the hands of kids and maniacs. But pot—simple, homely, ages-old pot—at least in New Jersey, will get you fines and prison time that’ll make your head spin off at the atlas vertebra.

I get it. I understand. Don’t sell pot to kids. Don’t sell booze to kids, either, while you’re at it. Don’t let pot-smokers or booze-drinkers drive. (Or Blackberry texters, while we’re at it, too.) Regulate who grows and sells pot like we regulate who produces and sells booze . . . or spinach or kale or cauliflower.

But, for God’s sake, make this friendly little substance available to people like me, and a couple of my other acquaintances who just happen to have Stage 4 cancer—without calling in the men in blue like those of us who use pot for pain are “Made Men of The Mob.”

I can’t get any more grass now, as it would involve breaking the laws of New York and New Jersey, and purchasing something questionable—oregano, praying mantis dung, bits of hummingbird nest?—from some demented dealer I don’t know from Adam.

I’m a Presbyterian, remember? I’m risk-averse.

So, it’s back to the seizing pain and the narcotics, on which I’m now uselessly hooked; and living in a state where the big fat Governor is dragging his great big feet on legalizing something which it is in our power to regulate and manage. Believe me, we can do this. If we can regulate lottery tickets, the issuance of drivers’ licenses, doling out beauticians’ permits, and assuring the public their sushi isn’t made of salamander feet, we can manage the production and sale of marijuana.

Hell, we should have enough 50-70-year-old Presbyterians around in New Jersey to accomplish this. Let us run the pot emporia.

The Siren Song of the Open, Spiritual Road

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

MYKONOS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—A couple of nights ago, at about three in the morning, the mosquitoes of Ornos Beach, here on Mykonos, finally got my goat, as it were. I leapt up from our bed and, flexible bedroom slipper in hand, went after them, where they had lit—black, blood-filled specks on our white-washed walls—with a vengeance. Like the great goddess, Tara, on the warpath for demons, I slapped into oblivion four little fliers fat with my own crimson DNA.

Then, remorseful, I remembered the Jain nuns of Sravanabelagola, in India, who carry with them always a peacock feather, with which gently to sweep away any tiny living beings from the steps before them. They take ahimsa, the principle of non-violence, very, very seriously, the Jains.

Since 1982, I have been studying Yoga. At first, fitfully, and then, for the past decade, with utter devotion. Yoga as codified and interpreted by B.K.S. Iyengar and, if I have a “guru,” a guide and teacher, it is this old man of Pune, India, who qualifies, though we will, most probably, never meet.

Recovering from back surgery here on a Greek island I’ve been visiting since the age of nine, I am also jump-starting my Yoga practice again, and reading (and re-reading) William Dalrymple’s new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, and pondering the twin urges in the human soul which pull us first towards asceticism, renunciation of the world, a sort of pan-Puritanism (if you will), and its polar opposite, the full, erotic, and hedonistic embrace of life in all its bounty and lush beauty.

Each of our great world religions balances on the beam between these two tropes; each devotee of Spirit must find her or his balance, as well.

To eat meat, or not? To endure the bite of the mosquito, a living being like myself (only thirstier), or to smite her? To join in the ecstatic dance, poetry, and song of the Sufis, or to sit in quiet communion amongst the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the dour northern Europeans of my childhood?

Every autumn, when Dean and I depart for Greece, I pack, well ahead of time, and prepare for every exigency. Really. Every single one. We bring only two suitcases, and not especially big ones, so the packing is a painstaking, careful affair. From our three-storey home in New Jersey, I whittle down the objects, unguents, and accoutrements we will need to the bare necessities. Even those “bare necessities” comprise a goodly number. And, the older we get, the more medicines, flashlights, sun-gear, and lotions there are to carry.

A Jain nun possesses a coconut shell, a white sari, and the aforementioned peacock feather. No shoes, no suitcase, no Advil.

When I’ve left that three-storey house, arrived here and unpacked, I find myself wanting to go even further. Greece seems, somehow, half the way to India, half the way to the life of the mendicant, walking the open road, with no possessions, no plans, no expectations, no “baggage” that cannot be left by the side of the road.

For a Yogini, the siren call of that possessionless life becomes very plaintive in late, late, late middle age. The burdens of the 21^st century, the life (in B.K.S.’s words) of the householder, with all it entails, becomes less and less attractive. Websites, Facebook, the World Series, the midterm elections. Even mirrors and tweezers and shoes and changes of clothes and jewelry and, and, and, and . . . . Wouldn’t it be nice simply to let go, and wander? How much do we really need?

Even for Yoga, I need no mat, no belt, no props, no “Yoga pants”; no teacher, any longer. A patch of level ground will suffice.

My favorite chapter in Dalrymple’s new book has to do with an old woman he calls “The Red Fairy.” Among the Sufi dervishes of Sehwan, in Pakistan, this “huge, dark-skinned, red-clad woman of between 50 and 60,” Lal Peri, dances ecstatically, holding an enormous club aloft in her left hand, the “uncrowned queen” of a shrine holy to a Sufi saint called Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Qalander means “holy fool,” or “unruly friend of god,” and this is the role Lal Shahbaz embraced, dancing his way to Spirit. (St. Francis of Assisi springs to mind: another iconoclast seeking breathing space in a conservative, restrictive, Puritanical rite.)

I find The Red Fairy almost irresistible, and so wish I could go and, with my fused spine and Western mind, dance with her among the Sufis. Just once.

Dalrymple writes: “All religions were one, maintained the Sufi saints, merely different manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque or temple, but to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart—that we all have paradise within us, if we know where to look.

The Sufis believed that this search for God within and the quest for fana—total immersion in the absolute—liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. This allowed the Sufis for the first time to bring together Hindu and Muslim in an accessible and popular movement which spanned the apparently unbridgeable gulf separating the two religions.”

It is so simple, really, every autumn, to reduce what two people need to two smallish suitcases. Why should it not be as simple to reduce those suitcases still further, and head even farther East, where the lines between Christian, Jew, Muslim and Hindu blur and, finally, in Sindh, disappear? Eating meat. Or not. Chanting prayers. Or not. In one language. Or another.

I can just about see us now: Dean, with his trumpet, in a loincloth, baseball cap, and Tevas; me, in a red sari, with a peacock feather . . . and one great big bottle of Advil.