Meditation: Erica Lazure

By KAROLINA KOZAK, DIYA SANDEEP, and ANNIE ZHU

The sun shone on the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 16, as students shuffled into Phillips Church for the weekly meditation. While people seated themselves, the smooth, jazzy melody of “Glow Worm” by the Mills Brothers wove around the sanctuary. As the drums died down, Instructor of English Erica Plouffe Lazure stepped onto the stage, and began with a quote from Wiradjuri indigenous filmmaker and poet Jazz Money: “The origins and the destination are complex and twisting, but there you are, right in the middle of the world you’ve made with breath and word and story and the unknown, sharing that small world with infinite other worlds.” 

Originally, Lazure’s meditation was supposed to explore her return to Kathmandu, Nepal. However, after digging deeper into her topic, she opted to write about Australia instead—one of many places she visited last year while she was on sabbatical. 

“Australia just happened to be where this particular story unfolded,” Lazure said. “And I wanted my meditation to be approachable to my audience, the students. The perception that you have about a certain place, like Australia—it’s more complicated than just what you get from media or from movies or from even books you read.”

Lazure wanted to emphasize in her meditation the importance of deep connections and how “it’s very easy to see people as ‘others,’ to see things as others. But if you’re willing to look thoughtfully enough, you’re going to see how things connect and that they are all part of each other, each other’s histories, each other’s lives. It’s an invitation to care, to be kinder, to be willing to make those connections. Unity can come through a sense of parallel experiences, even though the experiences are all different.”

Another important idea Lazure shared is that, while people are often overloaded with activities and the busyness of life, it is important to leave space for a “wild card” for the unexpected to arrive in one’s daily ventures. With this in mind, here are some of her personal insights taken from excerpts of the interview:

Q: In your speech, you talked about the approach of the Australian tribes to history, where history is “circular,” rather than chronological. What do you mean by that?

A: I know we live in a linear, time-space continuum, but I also know that as I think back to certain points in time, I can almost feel transported to that moment, and it helps me to understand something now that I didn’t understand then. Being able to go back and find those parallels is incredible. For me, it’s metaphorical, but it also feels like the connections are always present if we allow them to be. If we look for them. While not every First Nations tribe has that particular “circular” view of time and history, I drew from it for this meditation (as it was explained to me) because it captured what I was feeling when all these coincidences surfaced in my travels. 

Q: Your glowworm tour was a symbolic journey of discovery. What was the most surprising thing you learned about yourself during this experience?

A: I learned a lot of surprising things on my travels and on that tour, but speaking just as a tourist (and traveler), I recommend taking the tour, and letting yourself nerd out. I’ve always perceived traveling with an attitude of, I can do this on my own. But there’s really something humbling to let someone guide you through a space, and to accept help or to be taught something new. So I would say, engage and ask the nerdy questions. Do the thing you didn’t expect to do, and you can grow from it in ways you can’t even predict. 

Q: There’s a striking parallel between your life and Cat Power’s journey. How important is it to reflect on your past self in your writing and how do you think that formed the person you are today?

A: This is why I’m a fiction writer. [laughs]. Which is not to say my fiction is autobiographical in any way, shape, or form, but a critique I get from my writer friends about my essays is that, “I’m missing you in this piece. What are you wrestling with?” I tend to hide behind my characters with fiction, and my background is in journalism, so I’m used to writing about other people, not myself. In this piece, I refer generally to my own struggles but I don’t go into it, but Cat Power, Nat, and to some extent, Antoine, the tour guide, were all mirrors reflecting back on me. So I’m hoping somewhere in the negative space, my own journey is demonstrated by how I wrote about their journeys.

Q: In your meditation, you said that to find confidence, you must “get up on the stage,” as Cat Power has done. How have you done that in your life, and how can students do the same?

A: A former student told me recently that a different part of your brain is triggered when you sing or play music than when you speak in public. That makes so much sense, because when I sing a song or play it on guitar, I’m good. But I’m not a great public speaker, and that speaking element always trips me up. But as the Cat Power concerts demonstrated, the only way out is through. And what I took from that is, if you don’t do anything, nothing changes. If you’re not in that uncomfortable spot, you’re not going to want to change. So how do you shift into the next space, where you can feel confident? 

When asked, Lazure commented, “I’m grateful for the meditation program. It’s enlivening to see so many people come each week, because it’s voluntary; they are choosing to spend the time and sit with somebody who’s spent a good number of hours contemplating something that’s meaningful to them. It’s hard here at Exeter to choose to pause for a moment and contemplate someone else’s “big ticket” question. But hopefully those who do are rewarded.”

In her meditation, Lazure concluded, “I can’t help but appreciate the peculiar, dream-like quality of this evening, how simultaneously small and expansive our world feels, how connections can surface in the fissure of a rock, or at a concert venue, or in a garden, or a terrarium, or in a van of glowworm enthusiasts. How readily our worlds can constellate, connect, illuminate if we give them a chance to do so.”

There are no better words to describe the feeling her meditation evoked.