Bare-Bones Meditation by Joan Tollifson

Author:Joan Tollifson [Tollifson, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55451-2
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 1996-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

36

Anne North, the quadriplegic at the Zen center, invites me to breakfast. She is a beautiful woman and turns out to be a lesbian. We talk about all the attitudes we get from other people about disability. People saying things to us like, “I don’t think of you as disabled.” We roll our eyes together and laugh.

She makes pottery. Wonderful asymmetrical forms full of dents and errors that are exquisite and sensual and somehow very erotic. The beauty is in the dents. I feel a deep rapport with her. So much is instantly understood between us, without words. She calls herself a cripple. I like that. Crippled is a negative word. To use it is a kind of aikido move, in which the oppressor’s worst insult is taken on and worn with pride. It’s a strategy whereby you go right into the feared thing (hag, hussy, witch, dyke, spinster, nigger, faggot, bitch, whatever) and you claim it. You claim it and you wear it, you look at it, you pronounce it, you taste it, you chew it, you digest it, and as you do all of that, it loses its sting. It becomes just an empty label.

Anne grew up in Idaho and was a mountain climber before she fell. She is a winsome, wise young woman in her late twenties with wild auburn hair that flies out from her head in tiny curls, and she has the glamorous face of a movie star. She does karate, and dances in her electric wheelchair. She is part of a professional dance company that tours the U.S. and Europe. Anne is doing the very thing you would think that a quadriplegic could not do: dancing. And she is succeeding. Anne lives alone, sits at the Zen center, makes these wonderful erotic pots, gardens and dries flowers, and zips around like the wind in her wheelchair.

“I wanted to be a dancer,” she tells me. “I figured I couldn’t. I mean, I’m a quadriplegic, right?” Her eyes sparkle over the edge of her teacup. “But then I figured, why not?”

It’s a huge joy to be with her, to be understood.

“I hate being a fucking cripple!” she tells me as I am about to leave. Our eyes meet and we laugh wickedly.

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