The Rosetta Stone of the Feminine — From Inside of Prison

Nicole Daedone has been in federal custody for fifteen months. This is new writing from inside, for Ride or Fly, the book she is still writing there. She sent it out as one piece; we are running it in three parts. This is the last of them.

I care about one and only one thing. I care about it so much that I care about everything and that is getting out of suffering, eliminating the causes of suffering, and getting everyone else out of suffering, too.

I utilize religions like libraries. I try the ideas out on loan. I met a pastor. When I said I’d had an encounter with Christ in dream yoga but that I am not fond of the conventions of Christianity, he had a genius response. At the time of Christ there was no bible and there were no Christians. Same really, for the Buddha, there was no Buddhism. Call it defiance or a calling, I knew that my path was to journey as a woman along the not-so-well-paved path of the feminine. And as it has been said, “The left-handed path is best never commenced but if it is it must be finished.”

I relinquished a lot of boons; a certain protection or refuge, a certain recognition, a certain certainty. I did it, as Obama said about Hillary, backwards in heels. The way a woman must dance if she is to have her own. Mine is a dual path. And it’s a good thing I have eternity to complete it. I want the conventional enlightenment. The stamp of approval that comes from a bona fide tradition. But it is not enough for me, as a woman, to merely conform to or rest in a male tradition. I must use that ground to then raise up the feminine mysticism as it were. Like those communes by women for women. But not as a feminist endeavor, as a human endeavor. For until woman has her own, on her own terms, she can never be a true ally to men, to other women, to herself.

This life, then, is a translation. To take the teachings, to find what realization I can, and then to put it through the Rosetta Stone of the feminine. In the spirit of Miles Davis, to know the rules not as well but better than the classical musician so that you know precisely how to break them well, to not merely play music but create from your unique position.

It’s slow going. And humbling. To be more practiced than those who are smart or know it all as they zoom past me laboriously trying to figure out the translation. To be dismissed or denigrated when I know that place as well or better than the authority that dismissed. Well, that is the obstacle I use to soften the one who needs to know, be recognized, or understood. Because at the end of the day, in the places that can’t be fooled, it’s just me. And I either wake up in the dream or I don’t.

The good news is that all of the extra, trying to get approval from authority, the artifice of position and performative devotion that make me a little ill, are not needed here; wouldn’t work if I tried. Which leaves a lot of room for the real McCoy. I like the expression

You will know them by their fruits.

You will know my relationship with energy and light by the creative forms that emerge. I can just keep my focus there and pop those little babies out. I don’t need to concern myself with anything beyond that.

I make love to the light and from that expressions are born: books, a path, programs that feed, programs that free. People seem to like the programs even if they don’t like the sexual woman who birthed them.

Mantras are like a security blanket for the mind — safety, refuge, and comfort. The trail that leads to a light that is what is always sought here. In Buddhism there is a light beyond obscuration or identity called Mother Clear Light. I find that expression to be so beautiful, the arms we yearn to crawl back into. And rest. Finally rest. This notion that we are frozen light and the ways we can be melted back like butter.

There is a fundamental yearning. Zen has a penetrating ability to describe it. The part that seeks, that aches for. A homesickness for a home we sense but do not know. Suzuki Roshi said that we must move through life feeling our way as if in the dark if we are to be sensory enough to find our way. I can sense when I am close. When the veil is thin.

Real. Authentic. Naked. Real cuts through and across all lines like a hot knife in butter.

Last night I dreamed flashes of a life, a “my life flashed before my eyes” kind of dream. Images of the pain this woman has moved through. In the conventional sense, I was born into an extremely difficult and painful life. The pain throbbed as image after image passed. A prayer to Manjushri, a plea described as the color of a heap of crystals, and the next images were of being immersed in a sea of milk, the words “break through,” an invisible membrane. The takeaway — this woman that I am has overcome extreme obstacles. It was a dream of hope and strength. My friend Amy once said of a woman who had gotten sober, that she would understand Tibetan Buddhism. Because in a sense that is what it is: again and again getting sober from that which binds us to pain.

But also, that through it all there was my own mother who regardless of the scene was love, shelter, and refuge. That is my wealth: to be a woman with a mother whose love is pervasive and mothers such that when a friend had a break from her own mother, mine drew her in. Because mothering is a verb, it is a way of being, not a role.

That prepared me well to trust this Mother Clear Light, that no matter what there is a home. Something that after the fracture will draw me back in, enfold and absorb me.

A few years back I saw a story about a woman who’d done mantra in a hut for 40 years. Little to no human contact. She opened the door, emerged from relative candlelit darkness as light itself, repeating again and again. “Om Mani Padme Hum.” That’s all you need. She’d chanted Om Mani Padme Hum — the jewel in the lotus — for 40 years straight and appeared to have gotten real results. I wondered at the time. I feel I understand now.

I said to Rach that it’s a lot like OM training. During my final years of practice prior to “graduation,” I was so heated from practice that the only time I got relief from karmas being loosened and released in the mindstream was during practice itself, which in turn heated me more. It’s great incentive to get to the point where the waters run fairly clear. To go the distance. If you stop, it’s the garbage that keeps piling up, nowhere to go. Or as my Roshi Ed says: it’s like turning on a faucet that had not been turned on in a while. At first rust comes out, but then it runs clear.

The dorm is a constantly shifting environment. Overnight alliances shift. Overnight someone you were more or less communing with does something unthinkable. It’s a living breathing ethics exam. What do you do here? And here? The vows speak of equanimity and yet they speak of not mixing with those who are causing harm.

Rach and I meditate.

That’s the through line that, in our year here, many who have walked with us have fallen off.

Like Ram Dass said, we are just walking each other home — “like drunken sailors,” my Lama added. And we walk that throughline like it’s a DUI test.

The first two parts:

The Two Names That Stopped a Prison Fight

They Are Writing a Book About My Work. I Found Out in Prison.

Nicole Daedone’s Jailbirds in Flight, written during her first six months inside, is out now at jailbirdsinflight.com.