Foot in the Door

I was talking to my son today and he was suggesting that I do something new.

He asked, “Do you like stained glass?”

I told him that I paint to do something new. I said, “I started doing it to be creative with something I don’t have to be good at.” He laughed liked crazy.

“I like that,” he said. He went back to laughing about it several times in the next few minutes. I eventually laughed too, saying, “I never thought of it as funny.”

The front page photo of the Weekend Life section of my daily paper had approximately 152 of the 5000 pieces of art that were just submitted for an exhibit of work by Minnesota artists – “no matter how famous, no matter how obscure.” The once-every-ten-year event is called “Foot in the Door.” This one is “Foot in the Door4.”

Chris Atkins, coordinator of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, said this about the art that hangs in floor-to-ceiling salon style:

“If you can imagine seeing a crowd and seeing every voice in the crowd – it’s kind of like that. You have all these things swirling around, but you can see the voices. And you can go up to each one and look at them with their different accents or their different languages or their different dialects. It gets you from all sides – it’s a pretty amazing experience."

Now, I can’t tell you exactly why I love that quote so much, and if you love it, you might not know why either, and shoot, most of the time, I can’t tell you why I love a piece of art for that matter. But I do love the quote, and the photos of the art, and the whole thought of all the voices getting a chance to be seen and heard and the way the whole thing shouts.

There are so many ways to have a conversation.

Check it out. artsmia.org, then hit the “more” button and the “artworks” tile on the next page.

Quote from St. Paul Pioneer Press, “Look, Ma, I’m in the MIA!” Amy Carlson Gustafson, p. 5, 2-19-10.

I'm ready. Are you?

In honor of my 55th birthday today, I thought I’d share a word with you from my latest AARP magazine. The word is “conversation.”

The title of the article about the word is, “The Lost Art of Conversation.” It’s not a great article. Those of you under 55 aren’t missing anything. Those of you over 55 undoubtedly have your AARP privileges and have tossed, scanned, or read your copy of this freebee.

It’s nothing new: people are busy, people move around a lot, there are a great deal of things besides technology that are weakening out connections to each other, and a few that are providing them.

The author, David Dudley, quotes Daniel Menaker a lot. Here’s one I like: “The great yearning in human relationships is to stop acting, to become without disguise.”

The article ends with the author paying a visit to a private club in Baltimore. I don’t think he said, but my guess was it was a men’s club. I couldn’t relate real well. But Dudley quoted the friend he’d accompanied, a 30 year member of the club, as saying he’d dropped out for a while, and then was invited back. The club president had called him with a request too compelling to ignore. “Why don’t you come back. We love to hear you talk.”

I’m giving a few talks in coming months, the first to be next week (Wednesday the 24th) at Unity Church – Unitarian on Holly Avenue in St. Paul (7:00 in case you’re interested), and I realized that the word “compelling” was a good one. When someone wants…actually wants…to listen to you, to know something about you and your work and your experience, it is compelling. Something in you rises to it. And I just got to thinking I could extend a few more such compelling invitations.

I’ve got a whole book of the Course of Love series on dialogue. It’s the last book. It’s the last book for the reason. It says, “Put the books away. Be in dialogue. Enter dialogue with one another.”

I’m 55 today, and I’m ready. Are you?

And then you awaken...

A friend and I were both at our wits ends the other day over individual and group conversations that weren’t inclusive. “You and I exchange,” she said, doing this circular movement with her hands. We were sharing our recent situations with that glee you get of knowing you’ll be understood.

Then she told me about an article she’d seen called, “If you feel like you’re going crazy, maybe you’re awakening!” We nodded our heads knowingly. We got the “going crazy” part at least.

I told her how Donny got crabby the night before and then asked me in the morning if I was still crabby.

I said, “I’m not the one. It was you.”

He said, “You didn’t have the day I had.

My heart melted with that and I said, “You didn’t even get a chance to talk about your day, did you?” He’d picked Henry up, and as soon as he got home we were in the throws of dinner with his mom and getting ready to can turnips. Turns out he basically had the same problem, or nearly: too much talk, too little said, too little listening.

So I rubbed his shoulders and neck for a minute and then went about my business. Don’t need a lot of words to explain how too many drive you bonkers.

What is it that makes for the exchange, the dialogue, the conversations that aren’t endless monologues with no connections?

A friend of mine is teaching English in Vietnam. He told me this story about an exercise the children were doing:

"I noticed that question number one remained blank on every workbook. All the pairs had bypassed it and had begun working from question two. The first question was:
While you are standing in line at the checkout do you, (a) get nervous and impatient or, (b) wait patiently. Eventually everyone completed the questionnaire, except for this first question. Finally one of the students raised a hand. "Excuse me teacher, what does this mean?". What had stumped everyone was the phrase "standing in line"! It's a concept that is completely unknown here. I tried to explain that in Western countries we stand in an orderly line at checkouts etc., but they could only shake their heads in wonder at this strange way of doing things."

So maybe “awakening” is like shaking your head in wonder. You didn’t before see the strangeness of this way of doing things. You didn’t notice when the best of your daily conversations became like standing in line: you take your turn; I’ll take mine. The awareness builds slowly. Then it starts to make you feel crazy. And then….

And then it’s morning again, and the sun’s coming up, and the sky is golden along the horizon, and you’re not sure any of it matters.

It’s like the carpet. Got cleaned last Friday. Two days later, Henry walks through the living room shaking his sippy cup of purple juice. We scurry like mad to get up all the miniscule spots before they dry. In the general commotion, Henry stares from his space on the floor between chair and couch, aware that he’s done something wrong (maybe for the first time ever “aware” of it). After the cleanup he follows me to my bedroom doing the toddler version of small talk. I know he needs assurance that I’m not mad at him. I love him up. His mom takes him for a quick walk. When she gets home Donny plays with him.

If you could have seen the look on his face. That “Oh, oh, what’s all the panic about, what did I do, I’m in trouble” look. It makes you think, “What does it matter? Who cares about the carpet? This is crazy.” But you care. We didn’t scream and yell (except for Donny’s initial “Stop!”) but our actions conveyed that we cared. It was just one of those crazy things – after nearly three years of no sippy cup shaking of purple juice in the living room, it happens right after the carpet’s cleaned. What are the chances of that! I said something along those lines to Donny as we cleaned.

He said, “It always happens.”

It does (although usually it’s the dog or cats). It just seems like you can have a hard time sometimes (or I can), sustaining the level of caring. Something is always happening. You think you’re going crazy. Then you awaken (at least to a new day).

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.”

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.