It’s my sister Susan’s birthday and so cold in the cabin already (I say already because it’s not yet even October—okay, it’s only shy by a day, but still…) that I want to go in! Can’t quite yet because the sun’s casting this really cool golden square of light on the back of the cabin’s wall, and besides that, it’s moved already, so that it’s not shining in my eyes and, with the heater pointed at my neck, and sitting on the chair beside me as if we’re not just friends but lovers, I can survive an hour. I actually love my life. Love it. I love sitting here in the cold; in the morning; by my heater. Sometimes I love grousing about it.
It snowed once on Susan’s birthday. It was probably in the early 1960’s because I remember it as a mad rush to find boots before school. Usually we get our first dusting of snow mid-October. When the snow comes early you grouse you about it. Then you remember it with a kind of glee.
I’ve got to quit feeling that I complain. I grouse. I grouse about this life I love. That’s another expression of my dad’s, one that, as far as I know is pretty unfrequented these days. It actually means to complain or grumble. Grumble’s good too. Grouse and grumble have a silliness about them, a lightness. Much better than complain.
As Dad got older, the grousing fell away. But one Christmas, about nine years ago, I noticed it, and all the words that my mom (who when I was 17 divorced my dad), used to use for him, came back to me. “Bullheaded” and “ornery” were her words. He had this way of setting his jaw that I’ve inherited. You set your jaw and your lips disappear. Even if you don’t say a word, all a person has to do is look at you and they know you’re feeling bullheaded and that you probably won’t be cheered up. Sometimes Christmas and all the hoopla can do that to a person. Sometimes it’s about something else.
I remember that Christmas fondly, I really do, and how we (my siblings and I) carried on around it – as if – yeap, that’s Dad too, a side of him we’d forgotten but that’s still there, and remembering it was kind of pleasant in a weird way, the going back to childhood memories, having those old words spring up again: bullheaded, ornery, grouse.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Moon Yet
It’s that time of the year again—time to adjust around the cold. A huge wind blew in late in the day yesterday and kept up all night. I good sized tree limb, although not large enough to have done any real damage had it hit the cabin, and that looks a fine and hardy fellow except for being rather pale, landed between the fire pit and the cabin. As I look out the window, it sits as if pointing to St. Francis, who sits beneath my window, part of an idea (like so many I have that don’t come with a plan), of creating a shrine.
It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).
I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.
My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).
Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”
Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.
St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”
You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.
That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.
Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”
I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”
It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).
I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.
My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).
Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”
Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.
St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”
You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.
That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.
Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”
I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”
Sunday, September 27, 2009
What Does Freedom Feel Like?
I’m up…finally…before the sun. It’s because of Maxie. He got left out all night. He was crying so loud right outside my window about 6:20 that Donny and I both flew out of bed with that “what’s wrong” feeling. Max came in like a scared teenager out past his bedtime. He is a well-trained yard cat in the daytime. If he gets forgotten or accidentally left out after dark, he returns to his untrained nature. He roams. Then he comes back to the door puzzled to find it closed. Who knows how long it took him to bring his sorrowful and desperate cries to the bedroom window.
Max came in. I came out to the cabin.
It took me 20 minutes to do it though, to get out here, part of that time spent sitting on the bed. I wasn’t really debating whether or not to come, just waking up. Max’s cries had made me do one of those jump-start wake ups. Now I know there’s not all that long left before sunrise. The difference between 6:20 and 6:40 is extreme. Along the freeway side of the fence the trees are silhouettes of black jiggling shapes against a white sky with a little color along the edge, and in front of me there’s some distinction growing out of the darkness on the ground, but there’s other places the light hasn’t reached, and this is what I love. I feel thrilled. There’s just something about it – about me being here at this hour – that feels so fantastic, as if I’m in sync with this time of day and free.
The day hasn’t gotten going yet, it’s not fully formed, there’s nobody else up and there’s no expectations. No one’s missing me. I’m not missing out on being with Henry in his own cuddly waking-up hour. Not missing breakfast.
But it’s more than that – something about the change – the way the day comes alive around me that makes me feel part of it, and with the world, that one-with-it-all feeling.
I just started setting my alarm for 5 again. (It went off this morning and I somehow managed to shut it off without waking up as I have for about three or four days in a row.) I didn’t used to have to do that. I’d wake up early on my own. Then my rhythm got all screwed up by the job. Why is it that when you’ve got a job you have to use an alarm and when you don’t you get up naturally? The job’s behind me by two months now, the next one not yet here, and still my body hasn’t found it’s way back to what’s natural. Part of it is that I get the same kind of feeling at night that I get in the early morning. I’m ready to go to bed. So is everyone else. The house quiets down. Then I want to stay up even though I’m bleary eyed.
You’ve got to find your quiet hours. And sometimes they’re one’s like Max finds when he’s out on the prowl at night, when he turns into that untrained cat that doesn’t follow the rules. They’re the one’s you’re desperate to find even if it means you sometimes stay out too late and find some door closed when you’re ready to come back from wherever it is you’ve wandered. It’s why you go there; part of the thrill. What’s out there? What will you discover?
What does freedom feel like?
And if it feels so good you can’t hardly stand it, you don’t mind getting scared once in a while.
Max came in. I came out to the cabin.
It took me 20 minutes to do it though, to get out here, part of that time spent sitting on the bed. I wasn’t really debating whether or not to come, just waking up. Max’s cries had made me do one of those jump-start wake ups. Now I know there’s not all that long left before sunrise. The difference between 6:20 and 6:40 is extreme. Along the freeway side of the fence the trees are silhouettes of black jiggling shapes against a white sky with a little color along the edge, and in front of me there’s some distinction growing out of the darkness on the ground, but there’s other places the light hasn’t reached, and this is what I love. I feel thrilled. There’s just something about it – about me being here at this hour – that feels so fantastic, as if I’m in sync with this time of day and free.
The day hasn’t gotten going yet, it’s not fully formed, there’s nobody else up and there’s no expectations. No one’s missing me. I’m not missing out on being with Henry in his own cuddly waking-up hour. Not missing breakfast.
But it’s more than that – something about the change – the way the day comes alive around me that makes me feel part of it, and with the world, that one-with-it-all feeling.
I just started setting my alarm for 5 again. (It went off this morning and I somehow managed to shut it off without waking up as I have for about three or four days in a row.) I didn’t used to have to do that. I’d wake up early on my own. Then my rhythm got all screwed up by the job. Why is it that when you’ve got a job you have to use an alarm and when you don’t you get up naturally? The job’s behind me by two months now, the next one not yet here, and still my body hasn’t found it’s way back to what’s natural. Part of it is that I get the same kind of feeling at night that I get in the early morning. I’m ready to go to bed. So is everyone else. The house quiets down. Then I want to stay up even though I’m bleary eyed.
You’ve got to find your quiet hours. And sometimes they’re one’s like Max finds when he’s out on the prowl at night, when he turns into that untrained cat that doesn’t follow the rules. They’re the one’s you’re desperate to find even if it means you sometimes stay out too late and find some door closed when you’re ready to come back from wherever it is you’ve wandered. It’s why you go there; part of the thrill. What’s out there? What will you discover?
What does freedom feel like?
And if it feels so good you can’t hardly stand it, you don’t mind getting scared once in a while.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Sacred Activism
Three years ago, almost to the day, I discovered Andrew Harvey anew after having read and loved the opening section of his book “The Direct Path,” and becoming frustrated with the second. “The Direct Path” was published in 2000 and I’m unsure when between 2000 and 2006 I read it, or if it might have been in the phase I went through of wanting to throw all teaching books against the wall. I got it out again today and it looks pretty good. Until getting reacquainted with Andrew Harvey in 2006, I know I’d mentioned several times that I hated books like his where the author draws you in with a first chapter that tells a personal story and then, just when he’s got you, launches into whatever it is he/she thinks you need to know.
Anne Lamott put it really distinctly in an interview once when she talked of books that were helpful being neither honest or dishonest (like guidebooks for parents full of facts). She, personally, was always looking for the honest rather than the helpful and it was why she wrote a few of her books – there were plenty of helpful ones out there but none with that feel of one person’s experience: the good/bad, sad/crazy, horrible/beautiful kind that makes you laugh and cry, feel not so alone, and even at times, gives you a clue as to how to proceed with some grace.
My re-acquaintance with Harvey was a stunning one. I’d been out with my friend Mary the night before. We started off to go to a book signing I wanted to attend and that she was obviously half-hearted about, and had it turn out, for no explainable reason, to simply not exist. I’d seen it in the paper but the bookstore employee didn’t know a thing about it, not one other anxious, book-toting attendee was in sight, and the store didn’t even carry the book. Mary perked up right away and we went across the street for a beer. Sitting outside feeling provincial as we St. Paulites watched the Minneapolis passers by, we talked.
In the morning she called me; breathless. “Did you see the new issue of “Spirituality and Health?”
I said, “No.”
She said, “You’ve got to see this. I’m coming over.”
I’ve got a backyard cabin that my husband built for me, an acceptance of a yearning I had for about a thousand times more solitude than I could get. Mary and I headed there. We sat on the floor. She read me practically the whole article.
“I thought for sure you had to have seen this,” she said, “it’s everything you were talking about last night.”
Over the years since sitting on the floor with Mary, getting as excited as she about what she was reading, I’ve thought of Harvey often. But my brain’s been fuzzy since some mystical experiences of my own. I got, and then lost the journal, my dad died, my grandson was born, I wrote a book and pretty soon I couldn’t remember if it was Andrew Harvey or Andrew Cohen whom I’d so briefly fallen in love with and remembered so fondly.
It was, as far as I know, Harvey’s first public pitch for sacred activism, a vision that is now coming to fruition. I found this out on-line by accident (as seems to be the way I’m finding everything these days). He has a new book and a busy speaking schedule. The book is called “The Hope.” I ordered it, even though I’ve been on a strict no book-buying budget lately. But I hope it’s not a repeat of “The Direct Path.” There’s a point when all the teaching/organizing/institutionalizing begins to wear on you, no matter how spot-on or well meant.
I just want to know more about Andrew Harvey. I want to hear about his vision and what he feels but not have him map out the path for me. I don’t know why. I feel that if I knew why I could probably make a ton of money talking about it, because I think it’s the change that’s in the midst of happening. It’s my version of the Anne Lamott yen for honesty over fact and information.
I’ll let you know what I find when the book arrives, but I know one thing already: Harvey and I share the same feeling of whatever is coming being brought on by the broken heart. The broken, or at least open heart, is the antidote to the world’s deadness, the same-old, same-old, inability, or unwillingness to change that gets us all battered and bruised like old boats tied to a dock in the storm. It’s our hearts we have to follow out to open sea.
Anne Lamott put it really distinctly in an interview once when she talked of books that were helpful being neither honest or dishonest (like guidebooks for parents full of facts). She, personally, was always looking for the honest rather than the helpful and it was why she wrote a few of her books – there were plenty of helpful ones out there but none with that feel of one person’s experience: the good/bad, sad/crazy, horrible/beautiful kind that makes you laugh and cry, feel not so alone, and even at times, gives you a clue as to how to proceed with some grace.
My re-acquaintance with Harvey was a stunning one. I’d been out with my friend Mary the night before. We started off to go to a book signing I wanted to attend and that she was obviously half-hearted about, and had it turn out, for no explainable reason, to simply not exist. I’d seen it in the paper but the bookstore employee didn’t know a thing about it, not one other anxious, book-toting attendee was in sight, and the store didn’t even carry the book. Mary perked up right away and we went across the street for a beer. Sitting outside feeling provincial as we St. Paulites watched the Minneapolis passers by, we talked.
In the morning she called me; breathless. “Did you see the new issue of “Spirituality and Health?”
I said, “No.”
She said, “You’ve got to see this. I’m coming over.”
I’ve got a backyard cabin that my husband built for me, an acceptance of a yearning I had for about a thousand times more solitude than I could get. Mary and I headed there. We sat on the floor. She read me practically the whole article.
“I thought for sure you had to have seen this,” she said, “it’s everything you were talking about last night.”
Over the years since sitting on the floor with Mary, getting as excited as she about what she was reading, I’ve thought of Harvey often. But my brain’s been fuzzy since some mystical experiences of my own. I got, and then lost the journal, my dad died, my grandson was born, I wrote a book and pretty soon I couldn’t remember if it was Andrew Harvey or Andrew Cohen whom I’d so briefly fallen in love with and remembered so fondly.
It was, as far as I know, Harvey’s first public pitch for sacred activism, a vision that is now coming to fruition. I found this out on-line by accident (as seems to be the way I’m finding everything these days). He has a new book and a busy speaking schedule. The book is called “The Hope.” I ordered it, even though I’ve been on a strict no book-buying budget lately. But I hope it’s not a repeat of “The Direct Path.” There’s a point when all the teaching/organizing/institutionalizing begins to wear on you, no matter how spot-on or well meant.
I just want to know more about Andrew Harvey. I want to hear about his vision and what he feels but not have him map out the path for me. I don’t know why. I feel that if I knew why I could probably make a ton of money talking about it, because I think it’s the change that’s in the midst of happening. It’s my version of the Anne Lamott yen for honesty over fact and information.
I’ll let you know what I find when the book arrives, but I know one thing already: Harvey and I share the same feeling of whatever is coming being brought on by the broken heart. The broken, or at least open heart, is the antidote to the world’s deadness, the same-old, same-old, inability, or unwillingness to change that gets us all battered and bruised like old boats tied to a dock in the storm. It’s our hearts we have to follow out to open sea.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Revelation
I was lying on the couch with the television on mute and a book in my hand when I fell asleep in one of those really exhausted stupor kind of sleeps – both really deep and light at the same time, and that you wake from disbelieving that only a couple of hours have gone by, because you know something you didn’t know before. You open your eyes wishing you had a pen before this new thing you know fades – and you open them and there’s a pen right in front of them, on the TV table, at eye-level. On the floor, but still in reach, is a book marker that fell out of the book, and you take the pen and the paper and you write it down and wonder why it felt so life-changingly profound and yet you’ve already got a vision of tacking it up on your mirror or your computer even as you’re scrawling it, and you like the way the scrawl looks, almost indecipherable like an M.D.’s prescription, the kind you used to get before they printed them out, and that feels just right too.
The scrawl said, You can’t bring the thing with you fully formed.
I don’t know what it means…and I do…which is what all the great realizations are like. In “The Dialogues,” there’s this expression: Carry it with you as a pregnant woman carries her child. This editor friend of mind is always asking What’s the antecedent? What’s the it? In the sentence, “carry it with you,” he’d ask what’s the it? I’d say something like “the vision,” and he’d ask, What vision? Well, that’s the fill-in-the-blank nature of the thing…what’s your antecedent? What’s your it; what’s your vision? I always thought of that “carrying” thing as no separation, you don’t carry this new knowing like information or a book you can pull from a bag. It’s you. It’s in you. This was like a second piece of that. You can’t bring anything with you fully formed. … like you’re the carrier of an incompleteness that finds completion…like you have the answer without the question. What the revelation refers to remains unknown, there’s no logical progression of things.
You’re not exactly meant to “get it.” You dwell with the ungraspable. That’s pretty much what it’s all about. You don’t know “stuff.” I met this one guy I thought was pretty admirable one time and mentioned him to a friend. My friend said, “Oh, Tom? He just likes to know stuff.” It’s not that kind of thing – not that way. Not a bunch of information or right answers. The heart “stuff” isn’t definable. It might be describable but not definable. That’s its beauty. It gets you living with description rather than definition. That’s a little kid kind of thing…that’s being like the little children. Seeing something or knowing something as a describable event of feelings or senses and not as a concrete answer. There’s no concrete answer or definition for love…you know?
The scrawl said, You can’t bring the thing with you fully formed.
I don’t know what it means…and I do…which is what all the great realizations are like. In “The Dialogues,” there’s this expression: Carry it with you as a pregnant woman carries her child. This editor friend of mind is always asking What’s the antecedent? What’s the it? In the sentence, “carry it with you,” he’d ask what’s the it? I’d say something like “the vision,” and he’d ask, What vision? Well, that’s the fill-in-the-blank nature of the thing…what’s your antecedent? What’s your it; what’s your vision? I always thought of that “carrying” thing as no separation, you don’t carry this new knowing like information or a book you can pull from a bag. It’s you. It’s in you. This was like a second piece of that. You can’t bring anything with you fully formed. … like you’re the carrier of an incompleteness that finds completion…like you have the answer without the question. What the revelation refers to remains unknown, there’s no logical progression of things.
You’re not exactly meant to “get it.” You dwell with the ungraspable. That’s pretty much what it’s all about. You don’t know “stuff.” I met this one guy I thought was pretty admirable one time and mentioned him to a friend. My friend said, “Oh, Tom? He just likes to know stuff.” It’s not that kind of thing – not that way. Not a bunch of information or right answers. The heart “stuff” isn’t definable. It might be describable but not definable. That’s its beauty. It gets you living with description rather than definition. That’s a little kid kind of thing…that’s being like the little children. Seeing something or knowing something as a describable event of feelings or senses and not as a concrete answer. There’s no concrete answer or definition for love…you know?
Friday, September 18, 2009
It's About Character
I had a near meltdown yesterday. It had to do, on the surface, with my search for new employment. It makes me want to ask, “Is anybody else out there having a hard time of it?” Come on, you can admit to it. It’s about time poverty quit being something we’re embarrassed about, isn’t it? And how do we admit to that search for vocation if we don’t ever admit our discomfort with the options that seem to present themselves.
So – the option that seemed to present itself.
It was the first job possibility I’d gotten since my last temp-job ended. It was at the same horrible corporate place but a much worse job. One of those where you’re on the phone all the time harassing people for money. Being a dutiful member of a struggling family I was set to take this job (if it was offered) until I got the “job consideration” questionnaire, a 155-question personality test. I’d only answered the first five questions when I started to get teary eyed and then laid down on the couch, covered my face with a pillow, and wailed. I felt like I was about to sell my soul. How can they ask you this stuff for a measly little low-paying temp job (or any job)? How can they ask you to give your permission for them to check everything from your credit to your urine? What is going in America?
I hit the cancel button on the personality test and agonized the rest of the day over my idea that I just had to turn down this job. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, just moped around with a sorrowful look on my face and started crying again when I went to pick up my grandson at daycare and the chatty helper asked me how things were going. Of all the days to ask! There wasn’t another day he would have had to suffer through the awkwardness of leaking tears and a red nose.
I dropped my daughter and grandson off and went for a walk – or walked the trails at my favorite park until I found a semi-private place to sit and muse. I didn’t really make a decision, just drank in a little solitude in the midst of the chaos of my frustrations.
This morning I made the call, saying, “I just don’t think that job is right for me,” and was told there might be some others that would be a better fit. I felt vindicated in my decision. It wasn’t the end of the world. Another job would come along. But it was more than that. There was something about making that decision on my own, about choosing not to discuss it with my husband first, about deciding for myself what I could not do, that made me feel my spit and vinegar and got my energy flowing again.
I guess it made me feel too, the reasons I started this blog. Those reasons of the helplessness you can get to feeling with the “way things are” – the “way things are” being that ability of the corporation to big brother you right out of your integrity as a human being. I know there’s a move afoot to block the credit rating check – not really for reasons of recognizing it’s none of an employer’s business – but for reasons cited as fairness: maybe your credit has been adversely affected by the activities of your spouse. Or maybe your credit has been adversely affected by you not having a job! It’s crazy!
And you can’t tell me this state of affairs doesn’t have to do with the spiritual nature of us as people or as a nation. As Obama said about the healthcare debate – it’s about character.
So – the option that seemed to present itself.
It was the first job possibility I’d gotten since my last temp-job ended. It was at the same horrible corporate place but a much worse job. One of those where you’re on the phone all the time harassing people for money. Being a dutiful member of a struggling family I was set to take this job (if it was offered) until I got the “job consideration” questionnaire, a 155-question personality test. I’d only answered the first five questions when I started to get teary eyed and then laid down on the couch, covered my face with a pillow, and wailed. I felt like I was about to sell my soul. How can they ask you this stuff for a measly little low-paying temp job (or any job)? How can they ask you to give your permission for them to check everything from your credit to your urine? What is going in America?
I hit the cancel button on the personality test and agonized the rest of the day over my idea that I just had to turn down this job. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, just moped around with a sorrowful look on my face and started crying again when I went to pick up my grandson at daycare and the chatty helper asked me how things were going. Of all the days to ask! There wasn’t another day he would have had to suffer through the awkwardness of leaking tears and a red nose.
I dropped my daughter and grandson off and went for a walk – or walked the trails at my favorite park until I found a semi-private place to sit and muse. I didn’t really make a decision, just drank in a little solitude in the midst of the chaos of my frustrations.
This morning I made the call, saying, “I just don’t think that job is right for me,” and was told there might be some others that would be a better fit. I felt vindicated in my decision. It wasn’t the end of the world. Another job would come along. But it was more than that. There was something about making that decision on my own, about choosing not to discuss it with my husband first, about deciding for myself what I could not do, that made me feel my spit and vinegar and got my energy flowing again.
I guess it made me feel too, the reasons I started this blog. Those reasons of the helplessness you can get to feeling with the “way things are” – the “way things are” being that ability of the corporation to big brother you right out of your integrity as a human being. I know there’s a move afoot to block the credit rating check – not really for reasons of recognizing it’s none of an employer’s business – but for reasons cited as fairness: maybe your credit has been adversely affected by the activities of your spouse. Or maybe your credit has been adversely affected by you not having a job! It’s crazy!
And you can’t tell me this state of affairs doesn’t have to do with the spiritual nature of us as people or as a nation. As Obama said about the healthcare debate – it’s about character.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Zeitgeist and the Human Whole
Counter-cultural movements have been called “a social manifestation of zeitgeist.”
Zeitgeist is an originally German expression that means “the spirit of the age.” In the Netherlands zeitgeist literally refers to the mind of the time. If there is a word for the heart of a time, I do not know it, although movements like the Romantic Movement of the 18th and early 19th century or the Existentialists might have captured it. Or how about the Renaissance?
I left out one mention of counter-culture written by a student talking about both rap music/culture and Jesus. It was several years old but I liked it.
I don’t generally do internet searches. I’m a daily paper reader. My local paper, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, has seen better days. There was once a religion or faith columnist (it’s been gone so long I don’t remember the exact title of the column but I remember fondly the columnist, Clark Morphew, now deceased). There still is a book columnist/reviewer, Mary Ann Grossman, although the book page (seen only on Sunday) has shrunk from two pages to one and she appears less and less. And there’s a relatively new guy named Dominic P. Papatola who writes on “Culture in Context,” mainly as a reviewer of theater and the arts.
I like columnists with voices with which I get familiar and who have views I begin to trust as being their own. And I like editorialists, especially Leonard Pitts who appears in my paper often courtesy of “The Miami Herald.” I tend to like embodied information and insights.
Dominic wrote recently on the techno culture, saying “Anyone who has communicated via e-mail or test message has suffered from the occasional outbreak of misconstritus. You know the syndrome: The words you type and send into the ether somehow take on a different meaning, or gravity or tone somewhere on the way from your outbox to your recipient’s inbox. The message you intended to be a wry joke comes off as a caustic put-down…. A brief acknowledgment of a message is taken as a curt brush-off. Light becomes heavy. Light becomes dark. And then, you spend a good part of the day undoing damage you never intended to inflict in the first place.” He concludes, “For all the efficient ways our virtual new world of social media links us, it leaves out some important things.” (From the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 3E, Sunday, 9/6/09) Being a theater critic he invites his readers to view live performances even if it’s not “real life” or a “substitute for the lessons learned in the face-to-face interactions we all need to master for the less digital- friendly moments of our lives.” See Twitter.com/papatola
You get something like “culture” on your brain and pretty soon you see it pop up. It came before me next on the following Wednesday in a SPPP reprint of an editorial by David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. The headline, “Where policy meets culture” drew me. He spoke of the demise of the magazine The Public Interest and the birth of National Affairs. He cites an article by Leon R. Kass that he says nicely summarizes the spirit of the magazine – “the fierce desire to see the human whole, to be aware of people as spiritual beings and not economic units or cogs in a technocratic policy machine.” Brooks then says, “In a world of fever swamp politics and arid, overly specialized expertise, National Affairs arrives at just the right time.”
Specialization is an interesting word choice and a possible culprit in the inability of a movement that has no feet to launch.
Beginning this foray into blogging, I visited a bunch of spiritual sites. I looked in a lot of categories: spirituality (general), self-realization (choose your Eastern teacher), self-awareness (not much). Christianity seems to have a big following. There’s Women’s Spirituality, and Spirituality book clubs. All of which would be fine if there were cross-over topics, but I didn’t see many.
You’ve got to know where to look is one answer to the problem that comes to mind, but I’ve got to ask:
Where do you see the human whole?
My answer so far, and it’s really kind of heartening, is that you see it in individual people who simply share who they are in places like blogs, as well as in the occasional editorial and column where the person isn’t hiding their views or themselves. “Ramblings of the Bearded One” which was highlighted here as a blog of note, kimayres.blogspot.com, is one such view of a whole human being. What else is there?
Zeitgeist is an originally German expression that means “the spirit of the age.” In the Netherlands zeitgeist literally refers to the mind of the time. If there is a word for the heart of a time, I do not know it, although movements like the Romantic Movement of the 18th and early 19th century or the Existentialists might have captured it. Or how about the Renaissance?
I left out one mention of counter-culture written by a student talking about both rap music/culture and Jesus. It was several years old but I liked it.
I don’t generally do internet searches. I’m a daily paper reader. My local paper, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, has seen better days. There was once a religion or faith columnist (it’s been gone so long I don’t remember the exact title of the column but I remember fondly the columnist, Clark Morphew, now deceased). There still is a book columnist/reviewer, Mary Ann Grossman, although the book page (seen only on Sunday) has shrunk from two pages to one and she appears less and less. And there’s a relatively new guy named Dominic P. Papatola who writes on “Culture in Context,” mainly as a reviewer of theater and the arts.
I like columnists with voices with which I get familiar and who have views I begin to trust as being their own. And I like editorialists, especially Leonard Pitts who appears in my paper often courtesy of “The Miami Herald.” I tend to like embodied information and insights.
Dominic wrote recently on the techno culture, saying “Anyone who has communicated via e-mail or test message has suffered from the occasional outbreak of misconstritus. You know the syndrome: The words you type and send into the ether somehow take on a different meaning, or gravity or tone somewhere on the way from your outbox to your recipient’s inbox. The message you intended to be a wry joke comes off as a caustic put-down…. A brief acknowledgment of a message is taken as a curt brush-off. Light becomes heavy. Light becomes dark. And then, you spend a good part of the day undoing damage you never intended to inflict in the first place.” He concludes, “For all the efficient ways our virtual new world of social media links us, it leaves out some important things.” (From the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 3E, Sunday, 9/6/09) Being a theater critic he invites his readers to view live performances even if it’s not “real life” or a “substitute for the lessons learned in the face-to-face interactions we all need to master for the less digital- friendly moments of our lives.” See Twitter.com/papatola
You get something like “culture” on your brain and pretty soon you see it pop up. It came before me next on the following Wednesday in a SPPP reprint of an editorial by David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. The headline, “Where policy meets culture” drew me. He spoke of the demise of the magazine The Public Interest and the birth of National Affairs. He cites an article by Leon R. Kass that he says nicely summarizes the spirit of the magazine – “the fierce desire to see the human whole, to be aware of people as spiritual beings and not economic units or cogs in a technocratic policy machine.” Brooks then says, “In a world of fever swamp politics and arid, overly specialized expertise, National Affairs arrives at just the right time.”
Specialization is an interesting word choice and a possible culprit in the inability of a movement that has no feet to launch.
Beginning this foray into blogging, I visited a bunch of spiritual sites. I looked in a lot of categories: spirituality (general), self-realization (choose your Eastern teacher), self-awareness (not much). Christianity seems to have a big following. There’s Women’s Spirituality, and Spirituality book clubs. All of which would be fine if there were cross-over topics, but I didn’t see many.
You’ve got to know where to look is one answer to the problem that comes to mind, but I’ve got to ask:
Where do you see the human whole?
My answer so far, and it’s really kind of heartening, is that you see it in individual people who simply share who they are in places like blogs, as well as in the occasional editorial and column where the person isn’t hiding their views or themselves. “Ramblings of the Bearded One” which was highlighted here as a blog of note, kimayres.blogspot.com, is one such view of a whole human being. What else is there?
Monday, September 14, 2009
A Counter-Cultural Movement?
I find it interesting that there’s no defined counter-cultural movement at the moment, especially amidst such great change. I’ve been waiting and wondering. Is one going to arise?
I’m really knew to all things technological. I’ve thought of doing this kind of thing (it’s still weird to me to even use the word “blog”) before but I’d get on a page talking about my RSS feed and go to the help desk to find out what that was, and it wouldn’t be there – as if everyone ought to already know. That’ll give you an idea of my ignorance. I’d also looked at a bunch of sights and couldn’t really find a place where I thought I’d fit, and it took me a while to see how that’s an old way of looking at it, but I’m just saying….
I bring it up because what finally got me to set up my blog was having done a search on “counter-cultural” movements. The only thing I found besides the 1960’s just about was an academic article on dentistry (sorry I didn’t read it to figure out how counter-cultural that could be) and one on the internet.
I guess if this is the new counter-cultural movement I want to be part of it. I haven’t been a good fit in the “spiritual” culture, and that’s where I’ve been for a number of years. It’s kind of like hating the specialization. That’s what drives me nuts when I attempt internet searches. It could be that I don’t know where to look, or the right words or something, but there seems to be these divisions all over the place. You’ve got spirituality over here, and religion over there, and self-realization in another place, and social justice in another, and cultural stuff that’s all about celebs, and on and on.
One of my own most beloved writers is Abraham Heschel, and while I was doing my research and seeking under the category of “interfaith” I found, via a link to the magazine Cross Currents, one that exalted him. It spoke not only of his teaching, writing and mysticism but of his activism. During Heschel’s participation in the 1963 National Conference of Religion and Race in Chicago (a herald to the later march on Washington), he said, “Equality is a good thing … what is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.”
What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.
That’s the value in being “counter” to the culture. Being counter has gone out of favor with those who want to bring change in new (mainly liberal) ways – the idea now being to be “for” change in positive ways rather than “counter to.” The implication is that opposition is a negative action. But when you don’t have opposition you don’t see the monstrosity. You don’t get your heart broken.
The 1960’s were about young people manifesting a lifestyle that opposed the prevailing culture. That’s how the hippies got named a “counter culture.” Nope – don’t want my parent’s lifestyle, or values or war. Thanks but no thanks. The movement had teeth and it didn’t stay confined to hair and music and drugs. It jumped lines and entered politics and started all the seeking with the Eastern religions, and well…all kinds of stuff…I’m no scholar or historian, I’m just musing.
But I like this writer and religious person Walter Bruggemann who calls for a prophetic ministry that is about being contrary to the dominant culture. I went to hear a monk speak once, drawn by the title of his talk: Solitude as Counter-cultural. Parker Palmer, writer, Quaker, and educational reformist speaks of resistance as a starting point.
The thing is, the dominant view, simply by virtue of being dominant, exerts an influence, often a controlling influence, and it is this influence that being counter to the dominant view addresses. Without a recognition of this influence, there is no counter weight that keeps it in check. It runs amuck. You spend half your life (or all of it) trying to fit in.
Thomas Merton said it was part of his solitude to see what the “man of the moment” couldn’t see. Without a “counter” movement, the men and women of the moment aren’t aware of the influence – of the pressures being exerted – pressures to be and to live a certain way. Freedom and choice appear to be present, but the freedom to choose has been narrowed substantially. The new arises, becomes a trend, and then conforming to the new trend is seen as having a choice.
There’s a great line in the movie, “The Big Chill,” where the former activists, sitting around the dinner table, are asked by one of their own, “Was it only fashion?” Fashion may be a choice, but it isn’t a substantial or significant choice.
To simply be “against” the dominant view seems a little silly. A question that could be asked is What’s the alternative? What better idea do you have? What’s better than getting what you want (spiritual abundance/consumer culture)? Where are there any greater freedoms than in this country? (So don’t knock it.) Where is there any better health care? (If you think you have an answer, keep it to yourself.) This is the influence of the dominant…the power of it. If you don’t have a policy for it you’re just dreaming. Makes you wonder how Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech would be received now. It wasn’t exactly “reality” then. It only pointed in the direction of a new reality that could be.
A politics and spirituality of being “for” a new way without a corresponding counter-cultural movement, seems to me like what is happening, and I feel it is a movement with no teeth, a movement that can’t quite get it’s legs underneath itself. The value of a counter-cultural movement is in its ability to draw attention to the influence of the dominant. I think it’s kind of cool that blogs are leveling the playing field, making it easier for more voices to be heard, and that it’s a place where it is not unseemly to be against the mistaken attitudes of one’s own time, like greed, or deception, or war.
Artists are almost always counter-cultural simply by nature of expressing a singular vision.
I like the idea of solitude as counter-cultural. It says that even though solitude is not valued by the culture – the busy and productive life being seen as the life of value – it has value. It’s not a choice made of anger or negativity but is one of orientation. It is a protest through non participation and, even if it isn’t chosen for that reason, it does oppose the values of the busy life and the influences that you can’t see while you’re under them.
Another gem of Bruggemann’s is a call to criticize and energize. You can’t only criticize; you can’t only energize. There is a need for both.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Opening the Conversation
What Can One Person Do?
I was working on web updates the other day. This kind of thing often gets me thinking those “I’m just one person” thoughts that so many of us get…you know, “I’m just one person. What can I do?” From there it’s such an easy road to… “I’m merely one tremendously flawed person with so little to offer. What the heck do I think I’m doing?” These kinds of feelings might, if you’re anything like me, anything like about 95% of the people alive on the planet right now, be compounded by additional economic stresses, the kind that don’t stay confined to paying the bills, but seep out into every decision you make, and touch every cobwebby corner of your life. Maybe these are feelings of the kind you haven’t felt in a while. Or you might be personally doing okay, but affected by stresses the economy has put on friends or family (or the world family) and that leave you feeling unsettled. It’s a time you can so easily fall into “What can one person do” feelings.
This one person (me) had to go back to work. Now, for those of you who’ve worked all your lives this will not sound like a big deal. You will not feel sorry for me or see it as evidence that my life is falling apart. Even if you are living the easy life, and wouldn’t want to have to do it yourself, you are unlikely to see it as a catastrophe. A few of you might be thinking I’m lucky to have found a job. Some of you are probably in the same boat as me. You’ve had to do something to get a little more cash flowing through your fingers, and you are grateful, and irritated, and strapped for time, and hoping it all ends sooner rather than later so that life gets back to some semblance of what it was before. You’re praying it doesn’t get worse. Your survival instincts have kicked in and you have to do what you have to do.
Just doing it is enough, but you might, if you’re anything like me, be trying to “do it all” with some kind of grace, and hoping you’ve actually got some spiritual graces that will carry you through. It’s one of those times when people say, “We’re all feeling it.” Maybe anything that gets us feeling we’re all in it together has its place. Maybe, as some are saying, and I tend to agree for the most part, the “old” way is collapsing so that the new can come, and it’s time to prepare ourselves for a crazy ride, hide a few greenbacks under the mattress, and give ourselves a little space and freedom to imagine what the “new” might look like or if we can have anything to do with it.
I tried accepting my new “temp” job with grace for a few weeks. It didn’t work. Oh, I didn’t look like a raving maniac. I’d calmly get up hours before reporting for duty, make my coffee and my peanut butter sandwiches, and take myself to my room or my cabin for a little “me” time before the day got going. I’d leave in plenty of time so as not to be unnerved by the traffic. I picked a spot on fourth floor of the parking ramp where I could face my car’s nose at the sky. I’d look okay and work with accuracy, even while doing an inadequate amount of work. I won’t bore you with the details of how every small task is attached to a time, or how this “big brother” of a place knows every piece of paper your hands touch.
I stashed teddy grahams (the chocolate ones) in my desk drawer along with Fig Newtons, bread sticks, a can of nuts, a sweater and an extra pair of shoes. A travel kit in a zip lock bag found its way to the floor of my car so I’d have hand lotion and a toothbrush at the ready for those days I needed some kind of infusion but would have to settle for freshening up.
I had one of those days when I met a friend at a Mexican place down the street from the corporate “campus” fifteen minutes after leaving my desk. A soap opera was on loud in Spanish and another speaker blasted Mexican music but it was welcome noise after the office, which I compare to having all the atmosphere of an airplane. When I learned the café was out of lemonade I ordered wine, which was probably my first mistake of the night.
I don’t know about you, but I have certain people I call friends who I don’t really know all that well. You’ve shared some experiences and it seems as if you ought to be good friends, but something’s never quite jelled and you don’t know what it is. When you get together, you’re so genuinely glad to see each other that at first you just spill your guts (if you’re a spiller) and blabber on about dozens of things, expecting to be fully understood. Take for instance, the story I tell this friend about a recent email I’d gotten at work. It was about the dress code. More specifically, it was about flip-flops. The email said that any employee who continued to ignore the flip-flop restriction would be sent home to change. I said, “It is so high school.” He laughed. I laughed.
Now a really good friend knows that what you’re really saying is, “I hated high school. I hate this job. I don’t want to go back there. Give me a bottle of wine,” and that it might lead into a conversation about various unfair-nesses that you’re feeling, like between the haves and have nots.
One of the reasons this friend and I were getting together was a gathering I’ve been wanting to have. I was telling him how I wanted these people (A Course of Love readers who’ve become friends over the years) to come and just talk, just get together. But I couldn’t help feel it would be totally unfair that my friend in Florida could never afford it, nonetheless my friend in Vietnam, or my buddy in England. Most of my really good friends are like me – in that collapsing stage of life. I do, though, have this one friend from Norway, a retired architect who must have at least a little money, who swears he’s eager, and all I have to do is set a date.
I’ve got three handwritten, stamped letters from this Norwegian friend in my purse that I pull out. I’m so excited by them that I tell my friend at the table, “You’ve got to read these letters. This is what I’m talking about. Why I want to get people together.” Well…he doesn’t have his reading glasses, and after struggling through two of the letters I just tell him what’s in the longer, third one, and by then I’m getting around to, “How do you do things newly? Without it costing a ton of money, or being structured and organized?” From there I went off on my now common rant about expensive workshops and said, probably my second big mistake, that it’s pretty easy for rich people to act spiritual. Okay, you’re probably saying “Whoa,” right there, but what I was expressing was a tad of irritation with the sort of self-congratulatory “I must be doing something right” some seem to exude like expensive perfume.
It was at this point that my friend, who I’ve forgotten really doesn’t know me any better than I know him, calls me cynical. The wind gets knocked out of my sails and things progress poorly from there. I’d kind of thought he might help me get my gathering off the ground, but it’s clear after that, that he doesn’t really want to do anything with a cynical person like me. He’s got some other really interesting things going – interesting people he’s meeting with – stuff he’s doing and planning to do. Neat stuff.
Oh, he wasn’t unkind about it. He told me, “You have a lot to offer,” and I said “I know,” but by this time I’m feeling condescended to, and as if what he’s really saying is “Have a nice nervous breakdown, I’ll be carrying on without out you.” I’m feeling flushed and like I might burst out in tears and luckily he gets a call on his cell phone and I compose myself. I wonder if I’m over-reacting or under-reacting. Am I so crestfallen because I feel, about then, not much different than the drone I appear to be at work? Has it got anything to do with him, or is it all an inside job? Have I become a little jealous peon of a person? While I was spilling my guts, what did I look like, sound like? What did he hear? Was his “You’ve got a lot to offer,” really as condescending as it sounded?
At this job where hardly anyone even makes eye contact, I smile and say good morning now and again and talk to one lady down at the end of my row of cubes. She’s working for a car and a house and a man, in that order. I wonder how she’d feel if I told her, “You’ve got a lot to offer.” She’s a black woman, by the way. Somehow the fact that she’s black makes it sound even worse. Like something she wouldn’t already know, and believe me, she knows. She’s a gorgeous human being inside and out and I’m so grateful that she talks to me that I’d like to kiss her feet. We share stories about what wakes us up in the night and about our cars that have seen better days and she makes me remember that I’ve got a house and a man and feel grateful for what I’ve got.
I can’t help it that I think things are a little unfair out there in the “real world” and that I don’t want to bring that unfairness or that “no flip-flop” order into anything I do.
Most people, men especially in my experience, aren’t too keen on talking about their economic hard times. This friend I was with dropped a hint or two that he’s not exactly sitting on top of a financial empire either. I admitted to him that I see the “we’re in it together” atmosphere arising out of all of this, and that I don’t see it as half bad, but I do it without adding (by this time I know better) that it bugs me sometimes. Some of the fears that people who make really good money are displaying right now rub me the wrong way.
The house I’ve got and am working to keep is a suburban house and I tell my friend how touched I am by the real poverty I see. While waiting to get on the freeway and spend my first hour off of work in traffic, I see this big Mexican guy getting home from work. He’s got about ten kids who run out the door to greet him (okay, only five) and after all the bigger ones have spilled out this baby in a diaper and bare feet comes through the door and puts her little hands around his thick neck. I swear it makes me want to weep. My friend says, “You need to get out more.”
Nah. I think sometimes that it’s all of this being new to me that makes me feel it in the extreme way that I do. Seriously, no one’s told me how to dress since high school, and even then I challenged the rules. And it’s not as if I don’t think kids in suburbia greet their dad’s, it’s just that you don’t see it. Dad’s use their automatic garage door openers and the kids are inside watching TV where it’s air conditioned.
I don’t have the slightest intention to glamorize poverty or wealth, but I would like to state the obvious. It is different. It is harder to be poor. Harder to have peace of mind. Harder to carry on with grace. And as spiritually aware people, harder, at least in my case, to keep your mouth shut about it. I swear I want to expose the horror of the corporate world (I’ll save that for another time), and I want to have a gathering so that I can talk to people about some things that matter to me even more than the house and car (if not the man), but that don’t exclude the troubles of life or the fragile and hopeful ways we go about trying to accept them with guts and spirit.
My friend at the table talked about a guy he knew who’d been teaching meditation at a prison for years. He was saying, “If you feel so strongly about it – go do something like that.” I’ve got nothing against meditation in prisons but it seemed to miss the point somehow.
At the end of the day, this friend about whom I am still fond said one other thing that stayed with me. He said, “Start the conversation.” Sometime between then and now I heard someone on the radio (sorry I can’t remember who it was) say, “Those who are shaping the conversation are shaping the future.”
There are so many conversations I want to start that I don’t know where to begin, but since I’m already on this rant, why not start with that: with the need to rant, and to be listened to, and to not be seen, when you are, as one step away from needing to be restrained and spoon fed Prozac. Life is not a bowl of cherries, but it’s as beautiful as that scene of the Mexican dad coming home from work. It’s real, and it’s got us in its grips, and living it with authenticity and a little spit and vinegar (as my dad would say), seems as much a spiritual grace to me as anything. What keeps us going? What drains us? What inspires us? What do we really want and need to talk about?
Here’s the bit that can be missed when you’re into a rant and I don’t want to inadvertently leave it out. I honestly don’t begrudge wealthy people their wealth or see anyone as being immune to the bigger perils of life – like feelings of emptiness – but I mind it when abundance becomes the latest spiritual virtue and when people I love who can’t quite manage start feeling they’re doing something wrong. I mind it when I show anyone what I consider the normal messiness and concerns of an ordinary life and the person I’m talking to shares only the words that indicate life isn’t all that grand. I want a little show of vulnerability, that’s all. A little crack in the eggshell so that I can see in. That’s when you know you’re not alone and that we’re all subject to the troubles as well as the joys of life and spirit.
When I’m noodling an idea like how a gathering can be done differently, it’s okay by me if someone wants to ask me questions and help me see what my vision really is, or what it’s not, but I prefer it when such things become a common question and you noodle it together.
I always end up adoring people who help me see a little farther behind my own shell, and even behind my own vulnerability. I’ve faced again and again the strength that is back there. In fact old brother Jesus even says that it’s in our vulnerability that our invulnerability is found.
There are so many ways to be vulnerable. I was listening to Mona Lisa Schultz on the radio one day (this is what you do if you’re going crazy at your desk) and she mentions how she and her co-host met. They’d been at a big Hay House deal and one of the big Hay House authors had left their luggage in this room where she and the other big wheels were waiting for their rides. It made her nervous and she cracked a joke about stuffing the luggage with bottles of water and getting the person in trouble at the airport. All the folks looked at her blankly except the woman she joined on the radio. That woman told her, “We could get in a lot of trouble together.” Mona Lisa said, “I knew right then we had chemistry.”
I kind of like that idea of chemistry. Some call it energy or vibration these days. I guess when people talk from the distance of their position in life, or whatever the heck it is, I don’t feel the chemistry…just like when people have all the right words intellectually and mistake that for knowing what they mean. And so, when I speak of having a gathering where people just talk I’m trying to get at that talking you do when you’re with the kinds of friends who know you really well. Otherwise it’s like being around people who only say (or eat) the right things. One of the most spirited people I know practically lives on Taco Bell, and I figure you’ve got to have about the strongest connection around to exist on that stuff.
I look at it this way. It’s kind of like retirement. You can read all the latest wisdom on living a long, happy life, and prepare well for it, and the day you get off of work start living by somebody else’s book of life. You figure you’ve got to exercise, and volunteer a little, and join a social club and pretty soon your life is as regimented as it was when you were working and you call it healthy and balanced. You’re pretty content but you never took the time to find your own rhythm; your words, ideas, art; to know your deeper feelings.
The years I spent getting as much solitude as I could (the years I credit with making the job so damn hard) weren’t the happiest years of my life but they were close in a quiet way once I found my rhythm. Don’t even ask me how long that took. It takes a long time to get everybody else’s thoughts out of your head but once you do it gets kind of peaceful in there. I was driven to the place (of needing solitude) and you don’t get driven somewhere by spirit if you don’t need it – don’t need to step outside of the ways you know and what the experts are saying and find your own heartbeat and those thoughts that are deeper than chatter. And then when you peak your head back out into the world you bumble around a lot because you know how you can’t do things anymore and are searching for a new way (not to mention spilling your guts every time you get a chance).
I’m not calling it a virtue, I’m just saying that I believe there’s a chemistry and an alchemy in people being real and vulnerable together and giving one another some space to be messy and incoherent. I suspect that really new ways of being don’t happen without it. Creation is always going to look a lot more like chaos than serenity.
I’m talking about dialogue, about a way of sharing that inner revolution so many of us are undergoing, and about seeing what comes of the mess. There’s a quote from Rumi that goes something like “Give up cleverness for befuddlement.”
I’m officially opening the conversation. You never know, once you put yourself out there, what you, as one person can do.
I was working on web updates the other day. This kind of thing often gets me thinking those “I’m just one person” thoughts that so many of us get…you know, “I’m just one person. What can I do?” From there it’s such an easy road to… “I’m merely one tremendously flawed person with so little to offer. What the heck do I think I’m doing?” These kinds of feelings might, if you’re anything like me, anything like about 95% of the people alive on the planet right now, be compounded by additional economic stresses, the kind that don’t stay confined to paying the bills, but seep out into every decision you make, and touch every cobwebby corner of your life. Maybe these are feelings of the kind you haven’t felt in a while. Or you might be personally doing okay, but affected by stresses the economy has put on friends or family (or the world family) and that leave you feeling unsettled. It’s a time you can so easily fall into “What can one person do” feelings.
This one person (me) had to go back to work. Now, for those of you who’ve worked all your lives this will not sound like a big deal. You will not feel sorry for me or see it as evidence that my life is falling apart. Even if you are living the easy life, and wouldn’t want to have to do it yourself, you are unlikely to see it as a catastrophe. A few of you might be thinking I’m lucky to have found a job. Some of you are probably in the same boat as me. You’ve had to do something to get a little more cash flowing through your fingers, and you are grateful, and irritated, and strapped for time, and hoping it all ends sooner rather than later so that life gets back to some semblance of what it was before. You’re praying it doesn’t get worse. Your survival instincts have kicked in and you have to do what you have to do.
Just doing it is enough, but you might, if you’re anything like me, be trying to “do it all” with some kind of grace, and hoping you’ve actually got some spiritual graces that will carry you through. It’s one of those times when people say, “We’re all feeling it.” Maybe anything that gets us feeling we’re all in it together has its place. Maybe, as some are saying, and I tend to agree for the most part, the “old” way is collapsing so that the new can come, and it’s time to prepare ourselves for a crazy ride, hide a few greenbacks under the mattress, and give ourselves a little space and freedom to imagine what the “new” might look like or if we can have anything to do with it.
I tried accepting my new “temp” job with grace for a few weeks. It didn’t work. Oh, I didn’t look like a raving maniac. I’d calmly get up hours before reporting for duty, make my coffee and my peanut butter sandwiches, and take myself to my room or my cabin for a little “me” time before the day got going. I’d leave in plenty of time so as not to be unnerved by the traffic. I picked a spot on fourth floor of the parking ramp where I could face my car’s nose at the sky. I’d look okay and work with accuracy, even while doing an inadequate amount of work. I won’t bore you with the details of how every small task is attached to a time, or how this “big brother” of a place knows every piece of paper your hands touch.
I stashed teddy grahams (the chocolate ones) in my desk drawer along with Fig Newtons, bread sticks, a can of nuts, a sweater and an extra pair of shoes. A travel kit in a zip lock bag found its way to the floor of my car so I’d have hand lotion and a toothbrush at the ready for those days I needed some kind of infusion but would have to settle for freshening up.
I had one of those days when I met a friend at a Mexican place down the street from the corporate “campus” fifteen minutes after leaving my desk. A soap opera was on loud in Spanish and another speaker blasted Mexican music but it was welcome noise after the office, which I compare to having all the atmosphere of an airplane. When I learned the café was out of lemonade I ordered wine, which was probably my first mistake of the night.
I don’t know about you, but I have certain people I call friends who I don’t really know all that well. You’ve shared some experiences and it seems as if you ought to be good friends, but something’s never quite jelled and you don’t know what it is. When you get together, you’re so genuinely glad to see each other that at first you just spill your guts (if you’re a spiller) and blabber on about dozens of things, expecting to be fully understood. Take for instance, the story I tell this friend about a recent email I’d gotten at work. It was about the dress code. More specifically, it was about flip-flops. The email said that any employee who continued to ignore the flip-flop restriction would be sent home to change. I said, “It is so high school.” He laughed. I laughed.
Now a really good friend knows that what you’re really saying is, “I hated high school. I hate this job. I don’t want to go back there. Give me a bottle of wine,” and that it might lead into a conversation about various unfair-nesses that you’re feeling, like between the haves and have nots.
One of the reasons this friend and I were getting together was a gathering I’ve been wanting to have. I was telling him how I wanted these people (A Course of Love readers who’ve become friends over the years) to come and just talk, just get together. But I couldn’t help feel it would be totally unfair that my friend in Florida could never afford it, nonetheless my friend in Vietnam, or my buddy in England. Most of my really good friends are like me – in that collapsing stage of life. I do, though, have this one friend from Norway, a retired architect who must have at least a little money, who swears he’s eager, and all I have to do is set a date.
I’ve got three handwritten, stamped letters from this Norwegian friend in my purse that I pull out. I’m so excited by them that I tell my friend at the table, “You’ve got to read these letters. This is what I’m talking about. Why I want to get people together.” Well…he doesn’t have his reading glasses, and after struggling through two of the letters I just tell him what’s in the longer, third one, and by then I’m getting around to, “How do you do things newly? Without it costing a ton of money, or being structured and organized?” From there I went off on my now common rant about expensive workshops and said, probably my second big mistake, that it’s pretty easy for rich people to act spiritual. Okay, you’re probably saying “Whoa,” right there, but what I was expressing was a tad of irritation with the sort of self-congratulatory “I must be doing something right” some seem to exude like expensive perfume.
It was at this point that my friend, who I’ve forgotten really doesn’t know me any better than I know him, calls me cynical. The wind gets knocked out of my sails and things progress poorly from there. I’d kind of thought he might help me get my gathering off the ground, but it’s clear after that, that he doesn’t really want to do anything with a cynical person like me. He’s got some other really interesting things going – interesting people he’s meeting with – stuff he’s doing and planning to do. Neat stuff.
Oh, he wasn’t unkind about it. He told me, “You have a lot to offer,” and I said “I know,” but by this time I’m feeling condescended to, and as if what he’s really saying is “Have a nice nervous breakdown, I’ll be carrying on without out you.” I’m feeling flushed and like I might burst out in tears and luckily he gets a call on his cell phone and I compose myself. I wonder if I’m over-reacting or under-reacting. Am I so crestfallen because I feel, about then, not much different than the drone I appear to be at work? Has it got anything to do with him, or is it all an inside job? Have I become a little jealous peon of a person? While I was spilling my guts, what did I look like, sound like? What did he hear? Was his “You’ve got a lot to offer,” really as condescending as it sounded?
At this job where hardly anyone even makes eye contact, I smile and say good morning now and again and talk to one lady down at the end of my row of cubes. She’s working for a car and a house and a man, in that order. I wonder how she’d feel if I told her, “You’ve got a lot to offer.” She’s a black woman, by the way. Somehow the fact that she’s black makes it sound even worse. Like something she wouldn’t already know, and believe me, she knows. She’s a gorgeous human being inside and out and I’m so grateful that she talks to me that I’d like to kiss her feet. We share stories about what wakes us up in the night and about our cars that have seen better days and she makes me remember that I’ve got a house and a man and feel grateful for what I’ve got.
I can’t help it that I think things are a little unfair out there in the “real world” and that I don’t want to bring that unfairness or that “no flip-flop” order into anything I do.
Most people, men especially in my experience, aren’t too keen on talking about their economic hard times. This friend I was with dropped a hint or two that he’s not exactly sitting on top of a financial empire either. I admitted to him that I see the “we’re in it together” atmosphere arising out of all of this, and that I don’t see it as half bad, but I do it without adding (by this time I know better) that it bugs me sometimes. Some of the fears that people who make really good money are displaying right now rub me the wrong way.
The house I’ve got and am working to keep is a suburban house and I tell my friend how touched I am by the real poverty I see. While waiting to get on the freeway and spend my first hour off of work in traffic, I see this big Mexican guy getting home from work. He’s got about ten kids who run out the door to greet him (okay, only five) and after all the bigger ones have spilled out this baby in a diaper and bare feet comes through the door and puts her little hands around his thick neck. I swear it makes me want to weep. My friend says, “You need to get out more.”
Nah. I think sometimes that it’s all of this being new to me that makes me feel it in the extreme way that I do. Seriously, no one’s told me how to dress since high school, and even then I challenged the rules. And it’s not as if I don’t think kids in suburbia greet their dad’s, it’s just that you don’t see it. Dad’s use their automatic garage door openers and the kids are inside watching TV where it’s air conditioned.
I don’t have the slightest intention to glamorize poverty or wealth, but I would like to state the obvious. It is different. It is harder to be poor. Harder to have peace of mind. Harder to carry on with grace. And as spiritually aware people, harder, at least in my case, to keep your mouth shut about it. I swear I want to expose the horror of the corporate world (I’ll save that for another time), and I want to have a gathering so that I can talk to people about some things that matter to me even more than the house and car (if not the man), but that don’t exclude the troubles of life or the fragile and hopeful ways we go about trying to accept them with guts and spirit.
My friend at the table talked about a guy he knew who’d been teaching meditation at a prison for years. He was saying, “If you feel so strongly about it – go do something like that.” I’ve got nothing against meditation in prisons but it seemed to miss the point somehow.
At the end of the day, this friend about whom I am still fond said one other thing that stayed with me. He said, “Start the conversation.” Sometime between then and now I heard someone on the radio (sorry I can’t remember who it was) say, “Those who are shaping the conversation are shaping the future.”
The Value of the Rant
There are so many conversations I want to start that I don’t know where to begin, but since I’m already on this rant, why not start with that: with the need to rant, and to be listened to, and to not be seen, when you are, as one step away from needing to be restrained and spoon fed Prozac. Life is not a bowl of cherries, but it’s as beautiful as that scene of the Mexican dad coming home from work. It’s real, and it’s got us in its grips, and living it with authenticity and a little spit and vinegar (as my dad would say), seems as much a spiritual grace to me as anything. What keeps us going? What drains us? What inspires us? What do we really want and need to talk about?
Here’s the bit that can be missed when you’re into a rant and I don’t want to inadvertently leave it out. I honestly don’t begrudge wealthy people their wealth or see anyone as being immune to the bigger perils of life – like feelings of emptiness – but I mind it when abundance becomes the latest spiritual virtue and when people I love who can’t quite manage start feeling they’re doing something wrong. I mind it when I show anyone what I consider the normal messiness and concerns of an ordinary life and the person I’m talking to shares only the words that indicate life isn’t all that grand. I want a little show of vulnerability, that’s all. A little crack in the eggshell so that I can see in. That’s when you know you’re not alone and that we’re all subject to the troubles as well as the joys of life and spirit.
When I’m noodling an idea like how a gathering can be done differently, it’s okay by me if someone wants to ask me questions and help me see what my vision really is, or what it’s not, but I prefer it when such things become a common question and you noodle it together.
I always end up adoring people who help me see a little farther behind my own shell, and even behind my own vulnerability. I’ve faced again and again the strength that is back there. In fact old brother Jesus even says that it’s in our vulnerability that our invulnerability is found.
There are so many ways to be vulnerable. I was listening to Mona Lisa Schultz on the radio one day (this is what you do if you’re going crazy at your desk) and she mentions how she and her co-host met. They’d been at a big Hay House deal and one of the big Hay House authors had left their luggage in this room where she and the other big wheels were waiting for their rides. It made her nervous and she cracked a joke about stuffing the luggage with bottles of water and getting the person in trouble at the airport. All the folks looked at her blankly except the woman she joined on the radio. That woman told her, “We could get in a lot of trouble together.” Mona Lisa said, “I knew right then we had chemistry.”
I kind of like that idea of chemistry. Some call it energy or vibration these days. I guess when people talk from the distance of their position in life, or whatever the heck it is, I don’t feel the chemistry…just like when people have all the right words intellectually and mistake that for knowing what they mean. And so, when I speak of having a gathering where people just talk I’m trying to get at that talking you do when you’re with the kinds of friends who know you really well. Otherwise it’s like being around people who only say (or eat) the right things. One of the most spirited people I know practically lives on Taco Bell, and I figure you’ve got to have about the strongest connection around to exist on that stuff.
I look at it this way. It’s kind of like retirement. You can read all the latest wisdom on living a long, happy life, and prepare well for it, and the day you get off of work start living by somebody else’s book of life. You figure you’ve got to exercise, and volunteer a little, and join a social club and pretty soon your life is as regimented as it was when you were working and you call it healthy and balanced. You’re pretty content but you never took the time to find your own rhythm; your words, ideas, art; to know your deeper feelings.
The years I spent getting as much solitude as I could (the years I credit with making the job so damn hard) weren’t the happiest years of my life but they were close in a quiet way once I found my rhythm. Don’t even ask me how long that took. It takes a long time to get everybody else’s thoughts out of your head but once you do it gets kind of peaceful in there. I was driven to the place (of needing solitude) and you don’t get driven somewhere by spirit if you don’t need it – don’t need to step outside of the ways you know and what the experts are saying and find your own heartbeat and those thoughts that are deeper than chatter. And then when you peak your head back out into the world you bumble around a lot because you know how you can’t do things anymore and are searching for a new way (not to mention spilling your guts every time you get a chance).
I’m not calling it a virtue, I’m just saying that I believe there’s a chemistry and an alchemy in people being real and vulnerable together and giving one another some space to be messy and incoherent. I suspect that really new ways of being don’t happen without it. Creation is always going to look a lot more like chaos than serenity.
I’m talking about dialogue, about a way of sharing that inner revolution so many of us are undergoing, and about seeing what comes of the mess. There’s a quote from Rumi that goes something like “Give up cleverness for befuddlement.”
I’m officially opening the conversation. You never know, once you put yourself out there, what you, as one person can do.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
