When you're feeling low...

The first edition of The Dialogues.


I have this one friend who, whenever she doesn’t hear from me for a while, checks out my blog. Then she e-mails me and says, “I can’t tell where you’re at.”

I realize that sometimes the blog allows me to just write some little oddity, like the one I last posted about the push lawn mower. That kind of writing relaxes me. It’s like looking at the small stuff. What my friend sees, I suppose, is that “smallness” … too small a picture to tell her what’s going on with me.

I wrote, in The Given Self, about the wisdom that is there right within our hard times. How our hard times aren’t just a bridge to better times. That there’s something deeper in them…something, maybe, for our souls. My own writing prompts me not to hide out, to go ahead and be vulnerable, to seek wisdom (of any sort at all) in what I'm going through...for me...maybe for you too.

I’ve been having a hard time lately.

There. I’ve said it. Do you think poorly of me? Have I become lower in your estimation of me?

I doubt it.

It’s tough, when you’re feeling frazzled and frayed, depressed, or even “not on the top of the world,” to be public about it. It’s so bizarre – all the things that run through your mind – the sort of loop it gets on when you’re feeling low, and how you can get yourself real confused about that. Wonder if you you’re really missing the mark, need to do whatever it takes to get still…or whether there might be something there that you need to listen to.

When you listen, I feel at least, you begin to get clues to how you need to move. But I’ll admit: it’s a different kind of listening.

Here’s one that really got to me. I wasn’t at home, and didn’t have any books with me, and suddenly remembered that I had my old copy of The Dialogues in the trunk of my car. I don’t know how many of you have that version. It’s white, and it has a painting called “Flood of Compassion” on the front. It was the first edition of The Dialogues and I designed it all myself. It’s smaller than the “blue books”…like a trade edition paperback. I’d decided not to put the numbers on the paragraphs or to make it look like the other books, because I felt it was so different. This one, this third volume of A Course of Love, just wasn’t the same. By then we were to be done with studying. What did we need numbers for? By then, it was personal, equal, a dialogue. I didn’t want it to look heavy and scholarly.

Anyway, I went out and got it.

I wrote an introduction in it, and when I went to bed that night I read it. It was the weirdest thing. It sounded like something I could have written now, even though I’d written it eight years ago.

Next morning, I’m reading how my favorite editorialist, Leonard Pitts, is about to turn 53. He’s writing on the first, second and third arcs of life. He claims the first to be finding yourself and getting your education, the second the rat race, and that the third is for “having some fun, trying something new, for being of service, and for doing some of those things you always said you’d do, someday.”

It reminded me of what I was writing at 47 but the arcs would look a little different in that I’d put “finding yourself” in the third arc. I'd written about the change of life during menopause as described by Christiane Northrup:

“Many of the changes she was describing as menopausal mirrored the changes I’d been feeling as a result of The Dialogues. Northrup spoke of menopause as a transformation, as a giving up of illusions, as a crossroads where an old way and a new way merge and must be chosen between, and as a rekindling of youthful fire, spirit, and creative drive.

“She also spoke of menopause as a time marked by impatience and intolerance with “life as usual.” As a forty-seven year old woman, I suddenly became aware that my body, along with my brain, my mind, my heart, and my soul, were all undergoing similar transformations. It was no wonder that my experience of The Dialogues felt so total and all encompassing, as if there wasn’t a corner of my life or psyche that had not only been touched but rewired.”

Change. Transitions. Irritability. I didn’t know whether to see an old pattern, to feel as if I was stuck and hadn’t changed in years, or to feel as if I’d gotten something I needed. But that was my mind talking. My heart felt comforted.

These are the things that can bring me joy when I’m low. Getting up to close the window and spotting a bright crescent moon in the dark 4 a.m. sky, finding an editorial that mirrors my thoughts, reading something surprising.

Then I was on-line, researching something, and found this amazing little paragraph in a blog that I can’t remember how the heck I got to:

House of Prayer Blog

I’ve been thinking about our spiritual work…. There seems to be a kind of shift going on amongst us. A movement into the depths is the way it feels. I know it means letting go of pet beliefs and even "orthodox" ones sometimes. This is often expressed, however, by uneasiness or discontent. This reminds me of what Jesus said about us becoming “as little children” in order to enter into the Kingdom of God. I suspect this is also what Meister Eckhart means when he emphatically teaches that IF we are to come to an experiential knowledge of God, then we also have to come to a place of “unknowing.” How does one do this? How do we go back when we’ve come so far? How do we become “little” again? How do we “unlearn” when we’ve spent so much of our lives seeking intellectually, believing rationally, and holding tightly to our so called “truths”? It feels to me that this is what is being experienced by many of us. We just don’t know things the way we once did. We are no longer clinging so tightly to our belief systems and entrenched positions. There’s a loosening of sorts; a release from the moorings of security. We’re launching out into deeper, unknown waters. And we’re also feeling the cost of that . . . “coming to an unknowing” place.

Ward Bauman, House of Prayer Blog, Episcopal House of Prayer

"Feeling the cost of that." Feeling the "unease and the discontent."

I call this kind of thing intuitive listening, sort of going where you’re led. Getting reminded of what you know. There’s nothing quite like it to make you feel gifted and heard – as if a power greater than your own, or a bigger ear, is listening and even answering.

This is not about heart alone. This is about the combining of mind and heart, and I swear that once in a while, when your heart is feeling in the dumps, your mind can shed a little light on why this is so. You might not want to hear it, but it’s there…rattling around amidst the rubble.

You’ve got to do something else then, to start the movement, and that is, for me, the hardest piece to find when I’m low, and that's what I was feeling tonight when this arrived in my e-mail in-box:

Come to me all you who labor and are burdened
and I will give you rest.
-Matthew 11: 28

"Rest refers to interior quiet, tranquility, peace, rootedness
of being one with the Divine Presence.

Rest is our reassurance at the deepest level that everything is okay.
The ultimate freedom is to rest in God in suffering, as well as in joy.
God was just as present to Jesus on the cross, as on the mountain of the
Transfiguration."

-Thomas Keating, Reawakenings

Sometimes, when you’re low, you’ve just got to rest. Message received.

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?