The Itch

The funny thing about stepping outside of your “regular” life for a while, even a period as short as a few days, is that it feels like stepping outside of your regular life. I’ve felt a little schitzoid since getting back from Colorado – all mixed up inside with these different views – sort of a “life on the mountain top” view, and a “life at gound-level” view.

It felt, for a while…these two views, like the life I’ve got…and the life I want to have. But it is all one piece now that I’ve settled a little. This life here – sitting in my cabin – getting my quiet hours in before I go out to the old church where my dad was an altar boy as a kid and where I touched his stiff hair for the last time (and regretted it), and before I go to the cemetery where just three years ago I ran like a crazy woman and cried out my grief, and where the year before that Dad led the Memorial Day ceremony as he had for forty years – this life here, and that life there – they’re the same life.

And I was thinking – maybe in life you can treat everyone like you’re in the emergency room together (an Anne Lamott idea that I like), but in writing you’ve got to treat yourself like the patient who is there to get some relief – and let yourself scream or cry, rant or bellow. You describe your symptoms – whatever they are. “Hey, is there anyone out there? I’ve got this itch I can’t reach. Haven’t you got some cream I can put on? Could you scratch my back? Could you listen to me complain?”

After a while, the itch that was making you feel like pulling your hair out feels adequately attended to. You didn’t ignore it and pretend it wasn’t there and you didn’t scratch till you bled. It’s been relieved to the point where you can sit with it, attend to it, and still be present in your day, feeling the cool morning starting to warm to full day.

And you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else at all.

The Possible

From a slow and very hazy place, I realize that the life I’ve had is the life I’ve asked for. I don’t mean this in some cosmic sort of “before I was born” way, but in an ordinary, slogging my way through life way.

One of my most fervent prayers has been for my work and my life to be one. I hated the feeling of working for the man, the work that had me setting my life aside to go spend half my day in the employ of someone who had the right to tell me what to do.

I didn’t always feel this way but began to with the first great work experience I had…one that didn’t feel that way…one full of friendship and collaboration and spirit. “This is the way to live,” I told myself. “I want to live without that separation of work and life. I want it all to be of one piece.” I didn’t think of it as being what I needed to be happy. I merely saw that it was possible. And if it was possible once, then it had to be possible again, right?

Fast forward to twelve years after leaving the great job where work and life were one and I got paid for it – paid to get up and go there, to be exactly where I wanted to be – not in terms of place (University of Minnesota) or the work, which wasn’t exactly of my heart and soul but was at least from someone’s (my boss, Vernon Weckwerth, was passionate about his work and the program he created).

Character sketch here: Vernon is a self-proclaimed maverick, a pain-in-the-neck or worse to his faculty colleagues, ahead of his time, brilliant (a bio-med statistician), always out for the people in the field doing the thing and a melding of the theoretical with the experiential. A great role model/mentor who’d say, “If you’ve got lemons make lemonade” and ask you to “make it happen” without telling you what to do, and who didn’t care if you “made it happen” in twenty minutes or two weeks as long as you got it done competently.

His person fit his role and he had no concerns for prestige or advancement at the cost of staying within the system, and so he morphed into looking the part he played in his own way – no 50 year old turned hippie stuff for Vern, just a wearing of the same old polyester pants for 20 years, and the same tired wife-beater-t-shirts, under the same dingy white shirts and jacket that belonged with the pants, or in summer, over his Hawaiian shirts.

He had a bump in the middle of his forehead that we called his extra brains, thinning hair he combed around in a circle, a lurching kind of walk that after my grandson started walking I saw as the full-bodied, throwing yourself forward walk of the toddler, and he wrote screaming notes on post-its in capital letters and could sputter and bellow with the best of us.

Vernon’s program was where I wanted to be because there was that certain freedom that allowed something else to go on between me and my colleagues, Mary and Julie. We’d begun our spiritual journey and it had given each day and our every encounter the feel of possibility and of something essential happening. We could do a mailing and just by the act of being together our time still had that feel. I felt as if I was growing into my life. As if suddenly, at age forty, I’d begun to find myself, and my life was taking on some meaning, some significance, and some joy.

So when I left that job, I began to pray to live in such a way that work and life was of one piece, and at a certain point I thought it was the writing life, and at another thought I could create it with my own coffee shop, and finally, after years of non-wage earning grueling work and failure, thought it was what I found by caring for my grandson after his birth and my dad as he died (for no wage) and moved into eldercare (for a small wage) when a wage became absolutely necessary (after a foray back into short-term “desperate for the money” corporate, soul-killing work).

Then one day I began to wonder.

I began to wonder if this prayer had created this life where my work and my life are one in such a way that I have no life that isn’t work, and no work that is supportive of any life apart from it. I began to wonder if work and life are meant to be separated, at least a little, so that you know the difference between them, and so that the part of your life called “work” actually does provide for the rest of it that is “not work.”

That’s how I began to explore the possibility that I get what I ask for.

Floating and Fabulous

It is such a lovely, lovely day. I have some unexpected hours free and as much as I’d like to feel inspired just now, I don’t feel as if I have a creative bone in my body. Sometimes I feel like that’s the way it all works out best. With no intention, no striving, no wondering about what creation is, or who I am, or what I ought to do. Letting it all come as it comes. Or not even letting. Not even a single feeling of allowance. Floating on the wind.

I’m in the cabin. Henry runs for it, and me, every afternoon when he comes in from school. Yesterday we had a Tootsie Roll while we sat on the stoop and agreed it was a wonderful thing to sit on a cabin stoop and eat a Tootsie Roll. He’s worn shorts the last week and Grandpa decided we needed a path through the woods considering his little legs. He got the lawn mower out here and made one. Then Ian came for a talk and Henry cried at being kept away.

How often I forget what “the little children” are actually like. They’re so easily disappointed…and not always easily distracted…especially from routine.

And a Tootsie Roll is a fabulous treat.

Shock Waves

It’s 5:46 and the sun’s topping the fence. As I walked out the cabin was glowing red, and I had to look back and see – is there something special making her glow “red?” But it was / is an ordinary looking sun, blinding if I look into it, beautiful shadows getting created against the back cabin wall. I’ve already thought of Tone and Storker (my Oslo visitors coming next month) and what special sweet thing I might do for them -- like leaving a welcoming gift in their rooms.

It would be truly frightening (I think) how well someone would have to take care of me, and then I think, “my God, how well I was taken care of in Colorado!” Did I create that (in that weird way that I’m wondering if I created “a life where work and life are one”)? Did I set the conditions for it with who I am now? Have my desires go out and meet the desires to host so generously that I found?

Man, I’m stuck on this creating business. If there was a “theme,” represented in a dozen different synchronistic ways, that was it. I’d guess I’m just so full of everything I’ve experienced that I can’t quite get to my quiet space. (So maybe it’s not meant to be just yet?) I’ve got one thing just behind me and another coming up and they’re good, out-of-the-ordinary things. It’s not so bad that I’m thinking of Tone and Storker in my early morning hours. Or of creation. Why is it that I want to quit and get back to “normal?” A norm I think of as “free” mind if not quiet mind. I feel a bit as if my mind’s been taken over by all the ideas that have touched on mine from the people I’ve met. They’ve influenced me. I’m excited with these embodied ideas. I went somewhere new and everyone I met informed me in some way. I’m still full with it.

There were these artists “living the life” (the artistic life), in community, in the mountains…with spirit! Meeting them and seeing them interact with one another in their own environment, a place they’re used to, comfortable with, it was like getting a view into another way of life. And not just a view – an experience of it. I was invited “in.” It was a simple gathering, hosted impeccably, and yet without the feel of formality for not being so different than the way they gather weekly. My hosts and I were the strangers invited into their midst. I love that whole feeling. It was the general feeling of the weekend. I was invited into the midst of something already happening and became a part of it. What a wonder. I was let “in.” And being “let in” I was touched. And here I sit with that part of me that was touched still reverberating. It’s like shock waves being sent out into my own little environment in a somewhat gentle way – coming home to roost in my space, being “let in” here, where I’ll sit with them.

It’s hard to imagine that anything I gave might be having the same sort of effect, but what if it is? What if, a part of me has remained there, setting off similar shock waves? I am amazed still, awash with the feeling of these possibilities…of what can happen when people join together in a real way.

Getting Serious

Me and one of my new friends, Colorado ACIM/ACOL teacher, Earl Purdy

I’m less than a week home from Colorado. Tomorrow night it will be a week strictly speaking. Since getting back, I’ve been having to deal with the feeling of “getting serious.” I can’t exactly tell you what I’m getting serious about. I wrote a friend eight pages in two emails trying to answer that question for myself. I spent the day today pondering it in my cabin in between the hot spells that I spent cleaning.

Before I left for Colorado it was about 40 degrees in the morning, 60 by mid day if we were really lucky. Today the high’s in the 80’s and the low in the 70’s. And I picked today to clean my office and the patio it empties onto. It’s one of those things you do when you get serious. You start cleaning up.

You always have to do it after a big creative push anyway, or at least I do, and at least one of my friends is the same way. While you’re creating you let it rip. Books and newspapers and the crusts from peanut butter sandwiches and coffee cups and water jugs and pop cans and pens all pile up. The stack of papers near the printer starts to look like a ream. The dust gets thick.

On top of one of my bookshelves I’ve got a memory box. On top of it is a bamboo plant and a P E A C E thing made from nails. You could hang it or mount it, but I never did. It just sits there. When I cleaned today, the word P E A C E was clearly etched in the dust. I thought of taking a picture of it. Before and after pictures of cleaning would be a kick at such times. But I didn’t take the picture and I’m not done cleaning yet.

Two cockatiels sit in the corner of my room – it’s a four-season sun porch with windows on three sides. Any of you who have, or ever have had birds know they create a bit of bird fuzz. I’m not sure what the proper name for that is, but it added to the dust. The rags still sit on the floor. I got too hot to keep at it and went down in the basement to get the fan and stayed to watch the end of “The Breakfast Club” with Donny. Now I’m back in my semi-clean room and it’s still hot, and I still don’t know what I’m feeling so serious about.

I really stopped the clean-up because of the filing though. I shoved everything from my trip in an expandable file (a used one – also from the basement – I think the heading I crossed out said “Election 92” but I can’t tell for sure anymore). Then I looked at the rest of the paperwork and left the room. I did throw away a lot of paper, but the stuff I’ve got left is that annoying – “What should I do with this?” kind.

When you get serious you start thinking of all those things you don’t do, like file stuff away so that when you need it you can find it. You start thinking that kind of thing is important. It’s as good a reason as any for retreating from “serious.”

But I want to write about the feeling because it’s so damn paradoxical or something. If you’re somewhat aware and listening you get these feelings once in a while that tell you something like, “This is important.” Such feelings are never straight-forward. You can hardly ever answer the question about just what it is that is so important. You can ask and pray and get still and ponder, and still not have a clue. There’s no proof. No evidence. Oh, you could say my gathering was a success if you wanted to, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not a feeling like that – none of that – “Oh this was so great I should get a few more talks scheduled” kind of thing. No. It was broader than that, and at the same time more personal. It’s got that thrilling, sort of excited, sort of confused feeling energy…an… “I don’t know what’s coming but I’d better get ready” feeling. Cleaning your office is what you do when you don’t know what you’re readying yourself for.

It’s a fine feeling, though. It really is. Sort of like stepping off of a cliff. That kind of fine. A tolerable, weak-kneed, mystery-in-the-making. The unknown.

I’m an advocate for letting ourselves feel the big deal nature of things when that’s the way they feel. Again…the big deal wasn’t the event. It’s the feeling itself. Not a thing, not a circumstance, not a culmination of things. It’s nothing more than a subjective feeling…well…with a few ideas attached that haven’t formed up yet.

One of the things I’ve gathered keep us from calling our feelings what they are, especially in times like this, is “What if I’m wrong?” What if this intuition, gut instinct, sense that I’ve got, is not the real deal? You don’t want to disappoint yourself. Or don’t want to share the “getting serious” feeling because you imagine you’ll disappoint someone else if they expect something to come of it. Or you just think you’re making too much of the whole deal – a mountain out of a molehill.

I got this journal as a gift while I was in Colorado. I don’t know what it is about me and journals that I get as gifts. It’s like I take “them” seriously. They get to me. Make me put pen to paper. This one has three words on the cover. It says, “Make something happen.”

I just don’t know if you’d ever do that, if you’d ever create, in any of the many ways we do, if you didn’t get a sense every now and then, that it’s important that you do.

On the Mountain

Boulder, Colorado

It’s amazing that humanity can be so still – so still that I can sit here in the mountains with the sunrise and for as much as 30 seconds at a time hear not a sound of the man-made. The sky is a different blue above the mountain ridge. Over on the horizon it’s doing that ground-white I so often watch at home, as if the blue is taking on its color from the ground up, and on the mountain it is already there as if it came from on high.

I came to Colorado as if something was going to happen.

I gave a talk. Met so many living human beings in the flesh. I was filmed. The young man filming asked about duality. I spoke of paradox. I feel it again, so funnily aware for the first time this morning of having come to the mountain in the flesh.

In my Course of Love we go to the mountain. There’s also a lot of talk about both/and. Someone asked me about that once too:

“Aren’t “both & and” the same thing?”

I said, “And” is like there’s “this” and “that.” "Both" is different – like the two existing together.”

That’s the paradox of my morning sitting on my mountain perch looking down on the valley.

Something is happening.

I was nervous as all get out about coming here. Some of it was “speaker nerves.” Could I be real, be “me,” have heart, and still express those words and ideas that allow us to share.

And then there was a “we” that formed. Heart energy filled the room. There was ease.

Some of my “nerves” was the nervous excitement of feeling “something is happening.”

I talked a lot about the change to our way of knowing that comes with our spiritual experiences. But it became clear to me again…this time sitting one-on-one with a new friend:

It’s not about what we know but who we are.

A way of knowing isn’t about “what” we know, so I’m not saying I talked about the wrong thing, only that of all the profound insights and deep feelings that were shared – that’s the one.

It’s not about what we know but about who we are.

Later today I go home. On the schedule for tomorrow, in the work I do there, my elderly companion will be having her carpet cleaned. I will move the small things. Set up fans. Put elastic socks on swollen feet. Continue what was begun here in a different way. It’s not all from the ground up or from the top down.

This is the new I’m seeing. It’s in us.

I suppose now that it might have been a good thing if I’d blogged my way through this – the preparations for coming – everything from choosing my clothes around the factor of comfortable shoes, to borrowing my daughter’s big purse for a carry-on, to fretting over what I would say and how I would say it. I maybe could have shown the whole dichotomy between something big coming and something big having occurred.

I’m not sure how to recognize that something big did occur while at the same time acknowledging there’s not really much in this life that is either big or little and that it’s all of one piece.

The only real comparison I can make of it is birth. So much is already done before the birth takes place. But the birth is the manifesting of new life.

That is how this feels – how I feel this day on the mountain.

Contentment

It’s getting pretty hard to get up before it’s light out. I woke at 5:00 so happily this morning, so glad it was dark. Then I kept lying there. I had some kind of idea about how I’m always trying to express something that can’t be expressed as if it was something new—a new idea. But shoot, maybe it was. I was so happy. Then that crowd of less and less happy thoughts and finally getting up about 5:30.

6:04 now and the sky is white below, blue above. Walking to the cabin the smell and sounds are so intense. Coming in, shutting the door, the Fahreheat on, all noise is drowned out. Sensory deprivation and over stimulation. No really, the Fahrenheat has its own rhythm like a heavy breather or a snorer. Two ducks flew through the high light blue wilderness where they appear like two black beetles whizzing through the trees.

I just stood up to get lip balm from the desk and standing, noticed the yellow glow and shadows against the far wall and turning back toward the window, the sun where it’s risen but not yet visible when I was sitting.

Oh this is joy, even if it’s not dark out. A robin and a blue jay hop the ground nearby. There’s a yellow flower, probably a weed, but a lone one, and pretty, on dad’s mound.

Yesterday I visited Aunt Mary Ann at the nursing home. Uncle Owen and Dee were there too. We’d arranged to meet. He called ahead to see if he could wear dad’s hat, the black cowboy hat I’d given him with the flag pin on it. He said Kitty always said that when she entered a room she always looked for Dad’s hat, and when she saw it she knew she had a friend. He was like a little boy in the innocence of his pleasure over thinking of it; shy and proud.

Mary Ann held my hand a long time. Us three older women were all touched by Owen’s sweetness and his nervous pacing, and the way dad’s hat didn’t exactly fit his head. Dee said, “Your dad’s the only guy I knew who could wear a cowboy hat.” As they left, Owen had the tilt wrong and she adjusted it.

Mia was along and sat on the floor that was dotted with cat food and let Mary Ann’s tabby cat Binky rub against her sleek black pants and shirt and hair. She was like an exotic bird, one of those black ones with the long bills and bright splashes of color, the aliveness of her unmatched and out-of-place in the room; both welcome and jarring. She entertained Henry, who was first shy and then ready to explore the halls, and yet not out-of-place.

Mary Ann says she is content. She doesn’t lie and you can see that she’s not now. She’s cocooned in the little room. Lilacs are blooming and she has a bouquet: lavender, purple and white. Photos of grandkids dot every surface. A pile of newspaper and mail sits in a chair. The oxygen tank gurgles. The hat and these little things remind me of Dad’s final days but no longer of his death. I can’t draw up a feeling of grief. The room is alive with his presence. Mary Ann says she talks to him all the time.

Instantly, as the sun tops the fence, the floor of the woods darkens. The fence-top-level leafs glow translucently

I crack the window and bird song spills in, light spills over the fence in a narrow strip. It makes light appear to be rising from the ground up, as if leaving the ground and returning to the sky.

As I walk back into the house for more coffee, it seems as if everyone should be awake, the day is so bright. But they’re not. And the sleeping family fills me with contentment.