Sugarcoating and Sanitizing

A new edition of Mark Twain’s classic, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” will be out next month from NewSouth Books. It will not use the N-word. All 219 times it was used by the author, it is being replaced by “runaway slave.” Political correctness, just like with this past week’s reading of the Constitution, is being extended into the past.

How distressing. As if we can’t admit that we were what we once were.

Is it because we can’t admit what we now are?

There are all kinds of reasons, to me, for finding this distressing, some of them literary. But my main response to this is a feeling of shock and disbelief. Where will this sort of trend take us? What happens when you sugarcoat and sanitize? What are you trying to hide? Is it an avoidance of taking the time needed to place situations in their correct context? An avoidance of understanding? Is it a disavowal that we’re smart enough to read Mark Twain for what he said rather than the words he used?

I don’t know. It just gets to me.

In the literary sense, I can tell you that from the small amount of publishing I’ve done, I have desired at times to reach back and make changes that would grant me to seem less obtuse or more kindly than I was feeling at the time.

When The Given Self came out, one of my friends wrote me that he took the first chapters like the “ding ding ding” at the start of a boxing match. He thought I was picking a fight. Well, hell, sometimes you can’t point things out that are concerning you without placing them in context.

Are there some things you wish you might feel free to change as an author? Sure. Would you want anyone else sanitizing your words? Certainly not. It smacks of sinister stuff to me, no matter how well intentioned, and of the generally dumbing-down of the American public.

And again it strikes me as leaving out those things that we see, perhaps, as mistakes of the past, our fear of the imperfection of human beings. Of wanting to take the good without the bad. Of believing that we can protect the children rather than educate them. Of believing that we can whitewash the American way, or maybe even our souls.

The gift of shared experience

Have been making bread machine bread for a week or so. The first one – Henry said it was the best bread he ever had – then what could I do? He’s also loved decorating and tells me how pretty things look. He’s so excited about Christmas – the tree, the lights, the little fawn that sits on the wine table beside a ceramic tree with a garland of snow. He dances around in his excitement.

I know it’s the season to be jolly, but for some reason that felt like cellular memory as it began, I dug out the writing I did during my dad’s illness and death. I say cellular memory because it was as if my body just did it without me thinking about it. And then some of the first scenes, being as I was re-reading the tales of October and November days in October and November, were eerily the same. Like the nice fall giving way quickly to winter and a bright sunny day that followed when the trees had gone bare from the wind and all the leaves were piled against the curbs and rustled and stirred and followed my car along as I drove.

We had a notebook going during Dad’s final days – one of those where people can sign in like a guest book and write notes. Initially I wanted to record the gifts people brought, thinking I’d do thank you notes, which I never did. Later it became a way to let the other shifts know what had gone on during the day. I typed it up after Dad died because it was so amazing to me – all the people who had visited and the short comments they left. Some of it boring as peas but other parts sweet, and as a whole it became one of those treasures that says more than the individual parts.

It’s like when I was a kid and we’d get Christmas cards by the dozens and tape them over the archway that separated the living room from the hallway. My Uncle Jack and Aunt June always sent one that listed each family member: Jack, June, Judy, Jeff, Jill, Joy, JoEllen, Jan, and Jackie. I memorized that list of names as if it was a ditty. It never left me. My mom, who sees the cousins rarely, will ask, “Which one is that?” and I never hesitate.

There’s things like that in the notebook.

Dad died in 2007 and in 2008 I put the notebook and my journal entries of the same period together. I don’t know if I ever had a real purpose in mind for it. It was likely just part of processing my grief. But I got that call back to it a month or so ago and started thinking of giving it to family for Christmas, and then maybe sharing it as a book. But I began to question who, other than family (if even them) would want to read it.

Anne Lamott wanted to write a funny book about cancer because there wasn’t one when she needed it. You wouldn’t think of a thing like that unless you needed it. I wrote about my life with my dad as it happened because I needed to.

William Stafford has said that his writing style is his plight as a human being. That’s the way it is for some of us.

I don’t know why you’d want to read anything on death and dying before it shows up in your life, or how you could read anything during the experience, which only leaves “after.” Here it is for me, almost four years later, and I don’t know why I’m doing it and keep wanting to put it away, and can’t quite. I can tell it affects my mood and I don’t honestly need a darn thing extra to affect my mood and yet it’s kind of like Henry and the bread. Once you get started you can’t stop.

But again it struck me today, as it did when I was writing The Given Self, that the full immersion into the experience of death and dying (no matter that it comes with meds and bedpans and nebulizers and family fights) is about the closest thing to spiritual experience that I’ve ever come across. It came of thinking of sharing and deciding there’s no way anyone could read something like this compilation while in the midst of the experience.

Hospice workers give you things like short verses of poems, scripture, or prayer. You might be able to read that much, focus that long. There’s no comfort that can be had (at least not for long) from anything that comes apart from the experience. A smile from your loved one is comfort. A moment of peace in your day is comfort. Meds coming on time is comfort. It all feels like emotional overload but there’s so much more going on, such a rich depth of feeling, such profound change.

So it’s after – after – when you want to know what hit you. It’s after, when you feel the let down from that immersion, that fully focused presence of experience. It’s afterwards that you begin the decompression and maybe want some kind of company.

I couldn’t read as I received A Course of Love. Couldn’t hardly read anything else when I first discovered A Course in Miracles either. It’s that total immersion that can let you know that so much more is going on. And in the same way as after a death – that’s when I, at least, needed the companionship, the people with a similar experience to talk it over with, or just some feeling of solidarity of the type that says, “This is what it’s like.”

I don’t know what I’d do without friends and authors and correspondence from people who share their experience. Sharing our experience can be a gift…and I guess you have to trust that somewhere within yourself you’ll know when the time is right to give it.

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.

Book group

Last night I was a guest at my sister’s book group. They read The Given Self. “They” were her friends from high school. I had memories of each one of them and, of the six gathered – Mary Pat, Char, Chris, Barb, Maureen and Janie – five of them had siblings who were friends of mine: a brother who’d car pooled to the U of M with me, a sister who was my first friend (they lived two-doors up), a brother who was in the same school from 5th through 10th grade, a sister who was a best friend for a year or two, and another who I hung out with in the 7th-8th grade years. The one who knew me least (not having a sibling who gave us a little more knowledge of each other), asked for a little of my history and that of the books I speak so much about within The Given Self.

Because of who they were, I began this history from when I was a teen, talking about how much things changed between when they were teens and when I was. I spoke of the difference in the spacing of our family. My two older brothers are ten and twelve years older than me, my sister Susan five years older, and my younger brother eight years younger. I told of how I admired my hippie brother who was graduating from college in the pivotal 1968 while I was graduating from grade school, and how I watched my sister go to a dozen proms, thinking I’d have the same fairytale-like experience. And then how I didn’t have either.

I do think it made a difference. Seeing the whole changing of the culture play out in my brother’s life and my sister sort of missing it and living the version of the teenage years you see on TV. I felt my draws to both but didn’t really want to admit that things like proms held any attraction. I openly coveted my brother’s experience and secretly could have gone in for a little more of my sister’s.

As far as I know, they were all “good girls.” My sister was up for homecoming queen and Janie won the title. You get my drift.

So there I am, the little sister sitting in on the gathering of the big sisters, separated by five years, but feeling pretty comfortable. In a certain sense, having your story “out there” gives you the freedom of not trying to hide anything.

So I spoke of how, by the time I was a teen, dating wasn’t much in style. The free love of the sixties had caught on but the meaning factor separated my brother and his generation from mine, and the innocence factor my sister and me. I spoke of being a rebel in the sense of always wanting to escape expectations and being somewhat adamant about not wanting to fit in.

Later in the evening my sister said, “I don’t know if this book was written for us.”

One of her friends lightly told me, “This is the way we talk,” as they discussed ailments, jobs, lawn-cutting, pets, parents, children and grandchildren. I believe I made a few disparaging remarks about this sort of conversation in the book, but I asked after my old friends and was interested in the details. It was sincere and pleasant conversation and some of the best of it came before we sat down to “discuss the book” as always seems to happen.

One of the women said, “Everything happens for a reason,” and later in the evening I brought that up and said, “Sometimes I feel as if my rebellious nature is my nature for a reason.”

Another of the women said she thought my husband and me were brave to live an alternative kind of life. One nodded her head at certain sentiments as if she shared them. You get a sense sometimes that more could be said but that the “more” is held in check by the group.

Maureen actually told a hilarious story about sitting on an airplane where the most horrid noise was scaring all those in her section and how none of them said anything. “I was thinking,” she said, “that if the plane went down, I was going to be sorry.” She’s a nurse, and went on to speak of the training they get – so often someone, she said, is uneasy or fears a mistake is being made and doesn’t say anything. I knew she “got” the underlying theme (of sorts), the one that’s about stopping with the reticence we have about saying what we really want to say (and living the way we want to live). Giving ourselves that freedom.

When I left, I felt as if the others might be happy to get back to the comfortable conversation.

This was all okay. I didn’t fret over any of it for a minute – not before or after.

The friendship among them was evident. They’ll be there for each other. And the book wasn’t written for them as far as I know. But you never really know, do you?

Addicted to...?

I’ve gotten a little addicted to technology lately, I think. Or maybe it’s an addiction to “connection.” If you know me, you know this isn’t unusual. I love being obsessive and haven’t much of a yen for balance. I haven’t got it now.

My addiction got me thinking about the two light-hearted movies that portray writing though: “Julia & Julia,” and “You’ve Got Mail.” I loved those scenes in “Mail” where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan jump up, as soon as their partners leave the premises, look around, tiptoe, and then almost dance to the computer. And I loved almost as much the portrayal in “Julia” of when the writing project the young Julia has set for herself, her thrill at the response, and her compulsion to post daily, get her a little goofy and in hot water with her partner.

I subscribed to a blog a while ago. The woman who wrote it had left a comment on mine and was just starting hers. She had kids and was caring for her mother and writing, in a funny way, about “the sandwich generation.” After about a half dozen posts…the first close together…the latter more widely space, she was gone. I didn’t really wonder too much about it. Her theme made the likelihood of her keeping up with the thing pretty unlikely.

There was another one, the postings of a long-distance friend that was more of an interactive blog, with group members who responded regularly. I’d taken part in it sporadically for maybe a year before I started seeing the postings arrive and thinking “I’ll look at that later,” and then never getting back to them. After a while of that I quit getting them and figured I’d been kicked out for lack of responsiveness. I felt a little guilty.

Then I heard from my friend the other day. He was apologizing for his six-month absence. I wrote him and said, “I bet there’s a story behind that.” So he wrote me of financial difficulties and working two jobs for a while, and just not having the time to write.

In my own case, I started my new website for The Given Self (http://www.thegivenself.com) with a Guest Page on it and a forum that I never did get to work. After about a month I had two “good luck” sort of posts on the Guest Page and decided to get rid of the thing. The forum went the way of those good ideas that only seem like good ideas for a day or two.

I can’t say that any of this has kept me from wondering if there’s a way to make this technology “work” for some purpose, but every time I get to feeling tied to it, I get the desire to run in the other direction, and I get a sense that more and more people are feeling this way – not wanting to commit or feel obligated even it we only obligate ourselves (when there’s no need to at all). Who cares if I post on this blog once a week or several times, or not at all? Who’d read them if they felt like they had to, or had to reply if they did? I’m still startled each time someone mentions them and I remember that they are being read here and there.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, really, because I started out to say I’m going to take a little break, and then that had a feeling of arbitrariness and assumption that I didn’t want to make. I guess I’ve just discovered that I haven’t been hanging too loose with technology lately and that the only person making me uptight is me.

Our Deepest Fear

My friend Susannah Azzaro did a rewrite (inspired by The Given Self) of a Marianne Williamson quote that a lot of people are familiar with. I'm sharing it below. It's only the second time since I started my blogs that I posted the same thing in two places. I've done that with this because I find it pretty wild and inspiring and funny and deep, and because it's about the kind of radical acceptance that she and I, and maybe a few of you, are cultivating and struggling over. To me, it's the kind of acceptance that sometimes causes us to fall down and sometimes to rise up...and to not always know which it is we've done, and...to begin to be okay with it in our own quirky, worried, or fiesty ways.

Marianne's Version:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3 (Pg. 190-191).

Susannah's Version:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear comes from our belief that the crazy goofy shit that comes up for us isn't part of our light. We ask ourselves, What if the feelings I'm having are wrong? Actually, who are you not to have whatever feelings do come up? You are a child of God. Your discounting of your Given Self does not serve the world. There is nothing more enlightened than sharing your funny, goofy, neurotic, radical self with the world. We are all meant to shine in this way, just as children do. The problem is that we discount our feelings, impressions, and experiences if they don't fit in with what we perceive to be the status quo. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us -- and the glory of God can be pretty messy and painful and hilarious sometimes. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own messy, painful, and hilarious light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”