“At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves.”

A Hope Elder Speaks

It’s okay.

You can call me depressed if you like, though depressed people do not usually run, write, work, and make music like I do.

You can call me morose. Gloomy. Moody. Oversensitive. Forlorn. Dour. Nervous. Fearful. Whatever. Lor’ knows I’ve heard it all before.

I understand. It can be frightening, to see someone bleeding in public. You don’t know how to respond. It looks messy. And it can remind you of your own wounds.

But you don’t need to face your own woundedness. Not on my account.

You don’t have to become conscious of how you project your own inner lives onto the people around you.

You don’t have to understand me. You don’t have to believe what I believe. You don’t have to know what I know.

And you don’t have to remember what I’ve already explained, even though I’ve told you in words so copious they would bury the Twin Towers, had those iconic structures not been so neatly dismantled; even though I’ve told you in metaphors as thick and creamy as melted cheese; even though I’ve told you in images that smell of magic markers and beef stroganoff, that sound like water dripping from a tap, that feel like wax on a coffee table…

 …I’m grieving, and have been for a very long time.

It’s okay that you do not remember this. That’s the way with humans, it seems. In our fear, in our pain, in our own grief, our memories tend to grow dim and hazy, our focus turns inward, our skills with others diminish.

There is blood on the sidewalk. Quickly, we step around and make our way briskly beyond.

It’s probably a big mystery to you, after all; why have I stumbled into town to bleed? Here, where bleeding is done behind closed doors whenever possible? Here, where blood is so unwelcome? Here, where we would deny that we have blood at all, if only we could? Why?

I can tell you why: I have experience that tells me that it’s a way to find real healing. Maybe it’s a way that others can find the same. Maybe even you.

It’s a way I have found with Sally. When I tell her the truth of my woundedness, my losses, my grief, and she truly hears me – in that simple act (nothing else is required on her part… nothing…) the wounds begin to close.

It’s as if healing is naturally inside of me. All I must do is tell the truth of my wounds. The reason I must speak it to Sally is this: I need to see, to know, to feel, that even in my woundedness, I am still loved and accepted.

This is the same reason I tell you.

I know you have good intentions. I really do. But advice simply does not help. Neither does distraction. And neither does any attempt to “cheer me up.”  Grief must run its course, you see. There’s no way through it but through it. My healing is inside of me. You don’t have to provide the bandages.

Which is a good thing to know, since we’ve all been born into a world where there is so much to grieve.

Perhaps we could get better at it.

Listen. The thing that helps the most is listening and hearing.

Which can be the hardest thing to remember to do, when you are caught in the fear and pain of seeing blood on the sidewalk.

But please, I beg you, do not try to take my grief away, or interrupt its progress.

Do you not understand? Grief is precious to me. It’s how I know what love is. It’s the only way I can know and trust that I do love. Grief is praise, as the shaman Martin Prechtel says. Grief is love.

So let’s make it easier for ourselves. Instead of hurrying past, stop and sit on the sidewalk next to me.

“You’re grieving today,” you can say, noticing the blood on the concrete below me.

“Yes,” I will answer.

You’ll nod your head in understanding, because you know grief as well.

I’ll smile, to see that you have not gone away, to know that I am not alone, even with my grief.

Already a bit of healing has begun. Already the bleeding has stopped. I can feel it. Can you? And with that, we can begin to notice the way the sun shines on Campobello Island, and how the crows seem to dance sometimes, and don’t the lilacs smell wonderful?

Grief and woundedness is not all there is, you see. We’ve also been born into a world where there is much to celebrate with gratitude and thanksgiving, where there is power and joy and communion. Grief is just a part of what is.

But it’s a part that, for me, must be tended regularly, like placing flowers against a headstone. If I try to go on with my life without acknowledging that it’s there, I will just bleed internally, and it will kill me.  It almost did kill me.

Say what you will. Do what you must. It’s okay. I’ll do the same.

However it goes, we’ll be okay.

Think of that.

T

Thanks to Cabot O’Callaghan for the inspiration.

I feel a bit strange, sometimes, pondering these “personal” things in such momentous times. The Doomers™, bless their hearts, are now batting about the acronym NTE – near-term extinction – and not without reason, when one looks at the climate, resource™, and environmental data and analyses. Whether or not we are headed the way of the dodo, we are certainly headed the way of the “Doh!,” the mass deathbed epiphany that what We™ have been doing has not been working, that We™ are not really in control here, and that Our™ chickens, coming home to roost, are now going to have to compete for every last scrap of feed.

But for me, my personal healing journey and the global predicament are intricately connected. It’s not just “What happened to me?” but “What happened to US?,” and the answers and insights can reveal not only cause and explanation for our present predicament, but a possible path forward, ahead, and even through and beyond. We are where we are. It is what it is. “This is water.” So how do we, even in this end of days, even if it’s just a small number of us, even as the present systems twist and writhe and unravel at our feet, learn what there is to learn, do what we came here to do, step into consciousness, clarity, awareness, maturity, and freedom, and find what David Foster Wallace, in this beautiful, moving speech, below, calls “sacred”? Is the greatest affront of death, and extinction, to those of us raised in this crazy world, that it comes to us before we’ve had a chance to fully live? Is it possible, even now, to find our “life before death”? And if we do, what might that mean?

Please go watch this video.

I sometimes joke that I wish my parents had beat me, so that I could at least understand why I feel so fucked up. Not really a joke, of course. A great part of my pain lies in the self-judgment that, having been raised in comfort as a little prince, having been born male, white, smart, well-fed, and American, I should not feel the way I do. But I do feel the way I do, and it has taken me long years, constant unraveling, tears and rants, blaming and forgiveness, truth-telling (mostly to myself), and apprenticing myself to Sally as Teacher in the matter of both anger and conflict, to begin to understand why. Apart from the occasional spankings that were a widely-accepted part of Sixties child-rearing, my parents were not overtly physically, emotionally, or psychologically abusive. They were good people, trying to be good, trying to do good, doing the best they could with the tools, beliefs, and stories they’d been handed by the generations preceding them. But when I feel my way back to my early experience of family, I’m stopped short by the realization that, buried in the center of it all, lodged in this happy family, there was a chunk of unacknowledged dissatisfaction, disappointment, and rage that, like Kryptonite, poisoned us all, including the four young supermen that were my brothers and myself.

I do not know, for sure, what that Kryptonite was, or how it became lodged in our lives. My mother wore her rage as exhaustion, irritation, and dramatic sighs of longing, with occasional explosions of fury. My father cloaked his rage in affable okey-dokeys, but it was there inside of him nonetheless. Surely they lived the “day in, day out” lives David Foster Wallace spoke of, but I think it was more than that. The Kryptonite had deeper roots, I believe, that shaped the previous generations of our rural farming family. It revealed itself in the quiet, stolid, unexpressive lives of my uncles, and put the lost, pained, angry grimace on my grandmother’s face. It was handed down from generation to generation, this Kryptonite. It was our family’s view of life, the universe, and everything. It was the limitations, absurdities, and betrayals of that worldview. It was the culture itself. It was nobody’s fault.

We could all feel the Kryptonite, I think, we sensitive little boys, all in our own ways. It manifested, first and foremost, in my opinion, as a bantering, competitive, teasing family system, where joking, baiting, insulting, one-upping, and put-downing, all under the guise of “going for the laugh” and “just in fun,” provided the only safe and approved avenue for the release of tension, the processing of poison, and the expression of our anger. We were all terrified, you see. Terrified of conflict. Terrified of anger. Terrified of love and deep feeling. Terrified of being hurt, and of hurting others. And rightly so, perhaps. Because we knew, we sensed, we felt, that should we pull the cover from that chunk of Kryptonite, it might burn so brightly that it would kill us all. And we knew, deep in our bones but not in our minds, that we’d lost our healing arts, and did not even believe that healing was possible. The Kryptonite was there, tucked into a duffel bag in the back closet in the basement. We could feel its poisoning, irradiating effects. But we could not approach it. We could not move it. And we could not render it harmless. We did not know how.

“It feels impossible to counter,” I said to Sally this morning, tears welling up in my eyes. “I was raised in an intermittent reinforcement schedule, the most difficult type of conditioning to extinguish.” Sally knew what I meant. Good people living with Kryptonite in their basement were prone to occasional, unpredictable, and surprising outbursts of anger, blame, and judgment which, erupting up out of the constant, underground, tightly-contained magma of dissatisfaction, would knock me completely out of myself. I lost all trust. If good people could be so bad, if the people who said “I love you” could so betray me, if “mother” could also be “terrifying punisher,” then this little alien visitor would never be safe. Not ever. No matter how long they might appear to be my friends, people could turn on me. And sometimes they did. And so many decades later, I’m still suffering. The trigger for Sally’s and my morning’s conversation was that some good friends had stopped by the day before and hung out to eat their lunch in our front yard while I was building some new porch steps. Far from being unsafe, these friends were actually aware of my avowed “introversion,” and gave voice to knowing how their arrival might throw me off, and tried to actually care for me. It didn’t matter. The alerts sounded, the sirens screamed, the panic rose, and I lost myself. And after that loss came shame, feelings of weakness, and upset. “It doesn’t mean anything about you!” I wanted to cry. “I’m just… hurt.” But in such moments of social panic, I am unable to speak the what’s so that might bring me some measure of comfort. All I can feel is the Kryptonite, reaching out from the past and poisoning the present.

I write today because it is my daughter’s birthday. I found out because Facebook told me so, and suggested I buy her a Starbucks gift certificate. I write today because Mother’s Day is coming, which I know because of the spam ads that show up in my in-box. I write because I no longer know how to have a relationship with either my children or my mother, because I have no idea how to make or send or buy or be a gift, because I cannot seem to find a way to be the gift that I am in their lives, because I am so disconnected now that I get my family news from spam email and Facebook. In my faltering attempts to speak the truth of my experience to my family of origin, I have now managed to pretty much alienate them all, save for one brother who keeps hanging on, who seems to understand some portion of my experience simply because he understands some portion of his own, similar experience. I broke the most fundamental rule, you see:  I tried to expose the Kryptonite, even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I tried to speak of the things inside of me that still poisoned me. I tried to interrupt the basic rules of the family system that hurt me, and which hurt me still when I am inside of that system. I set off to face my own terrors and find my own healing. I set off to face the truth of the world we have created for ourselves. I went off to find the water, to see it, to feel it, to know it. I set out to save my own life, because the pain was killing me. But the only way I could find to do that was to walk away from where I’d been.

I write today mostly because I don’t know what else to do. And I write, in the end, with the faint hope and utter certainty that Wallace is right, that love and connection and the sacred can be snatched out of this cold, hard Universe by a simple human choice, even in the face of the NTE. Can I choose to find my own life now, and then live it before I die?  Is it okay now, to do that, even though I was raised with Kryptonite in the basement? Even though I got so poisoned? Even though I’ve made so many, many mistakes? Even though I’ve had to walk away even from my own children in order to save my own life?  Can I pay the fine for the crime of having been born into this insanity, as Jeff Bridges asked in The Fisher King, and go home?  Can I just choose?

I’m certain that I can.  And I have my doubts.

I wonder: did David Foster Wallace find this for himself before he died? He hanged himself, you know, just as we humans seem bent on hanging ourselves in our quest to rule the world. He found his death. But did he find his own life before death? I hear in his voice that he did.

And if he did, can I?

And if I can, can We™?

Well it’s all right, everything’ll work out fine

Well it’s all right, were going to the end of the line

-End of the Line, The Traveling Wilburys

I was splitting wood and heard a bird cry. Just over the old wire fence, maybe ten feet away, a small hawk had snatched a little black songbird from the air and pinned it to the ground. The songbird flailed and struggled for a moment, then went quiet as the hawk, no larger than a mourning dove, held it to the Earth like a parent might hold an upset child. The hawk simply waited, an implacable force, and I, fascinated, rose from the log upon which I sat to get a better view.

Hawk hunting dove (Cooper’s hawks,Accipitercooperii) by Hector Brandan

The hawk, perhaps irritated by my intrusion, took to the air. Immediately the songbird began to flail and cry again, as if sensing an opportunity to break free. The hawk carried the songbird across the road and pinned it to the bare ground of our garden. I followed, stepping out into the street, trying to see. Trying to see. What type of bird? What kind of hawk? I couldn’t tell. It was all happening so quickly, and I could not get a good enough angle. The songbird cried a bit more on the ground, then again fell into silence. The hawk waited. I watched.

I could see Sally inside through our front window and motioned for her to come out. She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch and I motioned toward the birds on the ground. The hawk, as if seeking privacy or respect, took to the air, the songbird crying and flailing in its talons. The hawk lifted the little bird to the neighbor’s yard and went back to ground in the shadows where we could barely see them. “That made me shiver,” said Sally. “Yeah,” I said. We both went back to our work.

“There’s something for me in this,” I wrote later on Facebook. “Do you identify with the hawk or the song bird?” a friend asked in a comment. I didn’t have an answer for him. I’m not sure I do now. But I have thoughts and connections and bits and pieces. Seems I should be able to put them together into something that helps. If not a picture, then at least a sketch, or maybe just an arrow that points in the direction of further exploration.

It has been an extremely taxing time, these past few months, though different in kind and degree for each of us. Sally and I have spent an inordinate amount of time getting her/our new venture, Vejibag, off the ground. Research. Product development. Team building. The construction and launching of our website. Legal, employee, corporate, and business issues. Copywriting. The launching and promotion of a Facebook page. The fulfillment of orders. Finding and fixing up a local workspace. A local Eastport launch party. The design of a CrowdFunding campaign, including shooting and editing a five-minute video. And into all of that we mixed our hopes, our fears, our desires to help, our concerns about the larger global economic and environmental situation, and our entire lifetimes of experience, wounding, expectation, and assumption, and to all of it we brought our ability to step into openness and uncertainty, into courage and vision, and into the vulnerability of needing help. It’s taken long hours and days and weeks at the computer. It’s taken stepping every day into doing things we did not really “know” how to do. It’s taken spending an hour or two every day, drinking coffee and tea, sharing our early morning anxieties, our dreams, our fears, our wants, our hopes, and slowly teasing apart our habituated egoic reactions from who we really are, and the visions that compel us forward into action. And at the end of it all, exhausted, unbalanced, tapped out, in need, we hit the button and took our Indiegogo campaign live and said to the world, “Here we are. Here’s what we’re trying to do. Can you help us? Because we cannot do this alone.”

“It’s a forty-day vision quest,” I said to Sally, early on, and we took that on as a useful lens through which to view things. We would use the campaign as an opportunity to wander off into the wilderness of “asking for help and support” and see where it led us. We would speak our hopes and needs and desires to our fellows, to the gods, to the land, to the Cosmos, and see how it/he/she/they responded. We would go on a fast from “knowing,” from “being in control,” from jumping to hasty conclusions. We would observe, and ponder, and stay open to useful data from unexpected sources, to messages from something greater than our two little human egos. We would put ourselves into the quest, the question, to be led, called, pushed, pulled, thwarted, aided, and gifted, in order that we might find the vision we sought: Who are we now? What should be do next? And would Vejibag find a place in the world that would support us on our journey? Forty days, we’ve given it, with the expectation that by June 1st we will have the useful guidance we need to plan and make our next steps.

But gods, how painful it has been for me. This quest has brought up my oldest and most gut-wrenching shit and laid it on a sunlit table for me to study. How lovely. I’ve been wracked with anxiety and terror. I’ve been smoldering with anger and defensiveness. I’ve pleaded and prayed and cursed and demanded and walked away, only to return the next day to do it again. It has not been a pretty sight, and I’ve retreated as much as possible into my own life, my own house, my own safe spaces, where only Sally could see me suffer. Did you notice that I haven’t written for weeks?

How do I give my gifts in a way that supports me in this physical life? This has been my question for a long time now. What can I do, what can I write, what can I edit, what can I say, what can I create, what can I give, that will be appreciated enough in the “wider village” that others will give support to me in return? How can I be the wizard living at the village’s edge if I am unable to obtain food and firewood in exchange for my spells and potions? How can I act as psychopomp for a dying paradigm if I do not receive a coin at the river’s edge? How can I complete my anthropological study here on Planet Earth when I was sent on this mission without adequate funding from my home planet? I’ve been working on these questions for a very long time.

And so far, my wounded human ego has not much cared for the answers. Isn’t hard work enough? Really? Damn, I’ve been busting my ass for years! The number of hours I put into our documentary, What a Way to Go, have never been adequately compensated. And All of the Above, the sci-fi novel which, in my mind, serves as the movie’s sequel? Over two years writing, editing, editing again, editing again, laying out, designing, researching, doing things I’ve never done before, pinned once again to my chair by the Muse’s talons while I cried and flailed, surrendering, doing it, crying and flailing and surrendering again, over and over, all for a meagre number of sales, a morsel of food and firewood, a single ha’penny at the river’s edge. And then to do it all again with the next book, Rumi’s Field, which is now in a mid-book standstill? And then to do it all again again with Vejibag? Isn’t being good enough? Isn’t wanting to do good enough? Isn’t being smart and dedicated and willing to spend one’s self in service enough? Isn’t doing one’s work to claw through the confusions of ego and culture enough? When the Indiegogo campaign didn’t take off immediately, when that first flurry of website sales slowed to a trickle, when it became clear the amount of work likely still ahead of us as we try to make Vejibag pay us back with support, all with no certainty that it ever will pay off, I was thrust once again into that same “loss of innocence” that crashed down upon me two days after What a Way to Go was released, when someone, a seeming online friend, someone who had been in touch with us in the time before the movie came out, following our news, anticipating our release, put our documentary up on a bit torrent site for anyone to download for free. I sobbed uncontrollably that day. And I sobbed after All of the Above came out, when it became clear that the work we’d done to gain a documentary audience would not easily or automatically translate into creating a novel-reading audience. And I’ve sobbed in the last few days, crying out to the gods, fuming and cursing, feeling alone and unsupported, even betrayed, as my hopes for support have not easily and automatically become reality.

Did I mention that this has not been a pretty sight?

I was told, you see. I was told that I was smart and talented, and that I could do anything I wanted, and that it would all work out for me. It would be “all right,” just as the Wilburys sang. Parents told me. Teachers told me. An entire culture told me that brains and talent and hard work and good intentions would take me where I wanted to go. I was told. Just as were most of you. We were all told. We were told.

But we live in a world where the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology feel as implacable as that hawk’s talons. That, at least, is the collective belief, and that collective belief might actually be a driving force here, and it may be exactly why we came here in the first place. There are so many of us now. Resources™ are tight and getting tighter. Money is disappearing into ravenous maws and gaping pits and hidden vaults as the Natural™ world crumbles underfoot. Jobs are drying up and markets are wavering and competition is increasing and each piece of pie gets smaller and smaller and the ice is melting so quickly now. And there doesn’t seem to be much of anything, in this physical realm, that will interrupt the perfect storm now hitting us. We can cry and flail when it feels like there’s a chance of escape, because that’s what living bodies do, but at some point there’s little else to do but fall into quiet acceptance of what’s so. Fuck.

Human exceptionalism, the cultural notion that we clever monkeys are somehow exempt from the laws of life, has often been named as a fundamental “reason” for why things are as they are. But culture is not something that lies out there, beyond us. It resides inside of us, each and every one of us, in our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and dreams, our expectations and our entitlements. And there is no “coming to grips” with our culture’s exceptionalism, I say, without also, and perhaps first, “coming to grips” with our own sense of personal exemption.  Here’s my coming to grips: no matter how smart I am, no matter how good, no matter how much I wish or try or work to help, the huge forces now at work in the world are going to hit me just as they will hit everyone. They are, in fact, already hitting me. They’ve been hitting me my whole life. And it does not matter, to the hawk, or to the laws of thermodynamics, what anybody told me.

The game we live in now is very different from the game we were told we are playing. The tax forms we now have to complete for living on Planet Earth are not what they used to be. The personal exemption, in particular, seems to be missing from the second page of the new 1040, good buddies. It appears I have little choice but to learn the new rules.

But I find that there is relief in that, as well as pain, as there often is when I finally tell myself (or when Sally tells me) the Truth™. This article, - 10 Reasons To Quit Your Job This Year – and this one - I Have Seven Jobs and I Love It. Here’s Why You Will Too - both look at the whole “making a living” question with new eyes. These articles scare me, as they confront what I’ve been told, but they also excite me, not only with the clarity of their revelations, but with the possibilities that they open up to us, for those of us ready, able, and willing to grab for them. It seems I’m not in control. Damn. But not being in control is not the same thing as being helpless, though it felt like that to the young child I once was. Instead of control, I have to be in conversation with what’s so. I get to say my truth, speak my wants, needs, and desires, and act to bring about what I want. And doing so will no doubt exert an influence in the greater reality. But the whole of the Cosmos is also speaking it’s truth. And that big ol’ goofy world is way bigger than I. But what a relief, to no longer be in charge here. What a burden that has been. I’m glad to just dance for a while, and let the Universe lead.

It may not be “all right” here at the “end of the line,” not in the way we were told it would be. Not inside the confines of the scientific materialist paradigm. But there’s more than one sort of “all right” in this crazy, amazing, uncontrollable Cosmos, I think. My guess is that, in the end, in some way we do not right now expect, the Traveling Wilburys will be proven correct.

More about which later… if I can convince myself that the time and energy I put into blogging is worth it…

Pax-T

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”  -  Ihaleakala Hew Len, Zero Limits

I woke early, thinking of gentleness. I woke early, thinking of our overwhelming life, of to-do lists that seem to grow ever longer, of urgencies and deadlines, of pressures and worries. I woke early, obsessing over taxes and money and marketing and laundry and computer backups, over Sally’s needs and my flaky™ desires, of big rocks and sand and water filling the jar, and how I cannot seem to take my big rocks seriously. I woke early and made the fire and started the coffee, thinking of overwhelm and gentleness. And outside, as if the whole of the Universe could mirror my soul, the western sky grew ever darker.  Soon enough the rain began, warmer than it has been, with little wind. Soft and pattering, a gentle rain. A dark day. A day to stay inside and ponder and clean and reorganize, to listen to great music while I sort through the piles on my desk, and the taller stacks in my heart and mind.

We have to be gentle in these times, I thought, Sally and me. We have to be gentle with ourselves. We have to be gentle with each other. And we have to be gentle with the world. There’s so much urgency in this realm, it seems. So much pain. So much Doom™. So much wounding. So many reactions. So many sharp edges, sharp stories, sharp assumptions, sharp expectations. And our path seems to follow the cliff’s edge, keeping us always at the edge, always near the precipice, always doing things we don’t know how to do, rounding corners around which we cannot see, stepping out onto ledges we cannot know are solid and safe. We have to be gentle.

And perhaps that’s a word to describe what that baby was getting that I did not get. I was raised in a grow up/get tough/learn to cope world, and we could never just sit down in the gentle rain and acknowledge how difficult and scary things could be, and how vulnerable we felt, and how far away our dreams seemed to be in this sharp, waking, rocky world. There was love, but it was almost always the tough kind. Or that’s how it felt to me. I needed more gentleness. More openness. More room for “I’m sad” and “I don’t know” and “I’m afraid.” More time for us, as a family, as a culture, to stop and sort through the piles of our collective life and get clear who we were and what we were here for and what we most deeply wanted and needed.

And so I wake up with worry and fear and pressure, and have to council myself toward gentleness.

I don’t think I’ll write much more than that today. I’ve had so many ideas, so many fascinations, in the weeks since I last wrote, during which we travelled far and wide, and talked of many things. I’ve had so many thoughts to share with you. But this morning, as the rain falls gently on my window, all those things feel sharp and edgy and cold, and I do not wish to handle them.

I will note two things before I end:

-It amazes me, the sensations that arise in my body when I speak of gentleness. It’s “man stuff,” mostly. an inward clench of embarrassment, to be so Weak™, so Vulnerable™, so Needy™, so Soft™. There are so many old wires inside of me, convinced that it is not okay to speak of gentleness. So many wires…

-But the big secret is this: that gruff, curmudgeonly recluse I sometimes profess to be – that’s not the whole of me at all, I think. And of course that’s likely only a secret in my own head.

The gentle rain continues to fall. Part of me loves it, the permission it gives me, to stay inside where it’s warm and slowly face the reality of my life and my work. But part of me is afraid of it. I think, should I step out into it, bare of foot and head, and let the mud caress my toes and the drops spatter my hair and face, I would become part of that rain myself, and fall to the ground as drops of water, forming a small, embracing puddle of exhaustion, gratitude, and grief. There are many days when I long to simply merge back into the Cosmos and leave this fractured human ego behind. I’m so tired of sharp edges. I’m so tired of urgency. I’m so tired of Doom™.

But I am still here. Obviously, my work is not yet finished. So I’ll drip and puddle for a while and then get back to it, stepping around more blind corners and teetering on another unstable rock. The path holds joy and surprise along the way, and there is help to be found.

“And it is done.”

I think it’s time to post this video, which some of you have no doubt already seen. Take a few moments. Watch and listen and soak it up. The rest of this will follow from that experience.

What I want to say today is that it has taken me almost fifty-five years to be able to admit to myself what has felt forbidden to say: I did not get that. The care that baby got? The soft, gentle, loving, respectful regard? I did not get that. Not in the way I needed it. Not when I most needed it. Not from those from whom I most needed it. I did not get that. And not getting it has shaped my life more profoundly than I would ever have guessed.

This is not to say that I never got loving care, or that my parents didn’t “love” me, or that I was not supported as a child. I was well-fed and well-clothed, relatively free, and provided with the many toys and creature comforts a modern, American, middle-class lifestyle afforded these past fifty years. I was well-regarded by teachers and classmates. I was guided and advised and trained and encouraged in all the ways the culture expected I should be. It simply wasn’t enough. Or it wasn’t what I most needed. And somehow, a thick wire got soldiered into place, or perhaps a wire was broken and tossed away, and to this day, I must struggle to regard and value myself in the way that baby is being regarded and valued. This tender, nascent, unsolidified sense of self-regard interferes with my work. It creates misunderstandings and tripping points between myself and Sally. And it forms, in large part, the heavy, clumsy armor of anxiety and fear I don whenever I venture out into the world of “other people.” It can knock me to my knees any day of the week, leaving my body filled with clenched guts and tears piled up behind the lids. And as I’ve walked my healing path, it seems to have only intensified.

But it’s not really the pain and wounding I want to speak of right now. What I want to speak of is the process.

My family is all still alive, you see. Any of them, were they interested, could read this. And I imagine that, should they do so, they would likely conclude that my reason for writing the above is to blame my parents or my ex for my life, to extract some vague revenge, and/or to demand apology and restitution, all in the hopes that this would somehow “solve” my “problem,” and set me free. And none of those conclusions, I think, would be correct. I simply need to speak the reality of my life, and not pretend, even to myself, anything other than the truth of “what happened” and “what is so.”

Again, it’s the hiding, the pretense, that kills me.

I understand, you see, that the members of my family of origin were and are good and well-intentioned people doing their best in the world with what they were given. I understand that, in some real and fundamental way, my parents simply did not know what to do with me – their little alien – and that my family members, by and large, still don’t know what to do with me even now. I understand that my healing is my own work. And I understand that it is proceeding quite nicely. It’s just that this is what the “healed” version of me looks like. The wounds – amputations, mostly, rather than cuts and bruises – are simply a part of who I am now. The missing wires may always be missing.  The wounds may always hurt a bit if I scuff them against a hard surface. But even if my wounds can trip me up on a daily basis, I can regain my footing on a daily basis as well. New wires can be soldiered into place. Prosthetic devices can help me function more fully. And there are people that can help me cross the street.

I don’t need my parents to go back in time and “fix the past.” They can no more do that than I can. I simply need to say what’s so for me, and not hide the truth from myself:  something hurt me so deeply in my past that it still resonates throughout my mind, heart, body, and soul, like a gong still sounding fifty-five years after the mallet blow. When I see that baby in the bathwater, I get a feeling glimpse of what that was:  there was some sort of care or regard or respect that I sorely needed as a child, and which I did not get. It has become my work, as an adult, and with Sally’s help, and others’, to find that regard, and to hold it as my own.

But I cannot find it until I first admit my forbidden truths to myself.

Now stop, and spend a moment getting in touch with your own feeling response to what I’ve so far written. Because I do this shit all the time, right? I reveal my hidden truths. My pains. My stumbling blocks. My feelings. And it never seems to get any easier. And part of the reason for that, I think, lies out there. With you.

Now, when I say “you,” I don’t know who I mean. You understand that, right? I don’t know who’s reading this. I don’t know to whom this applies. You’ll have to sort that out for yourselves. All I know is that I have a great many experiences that tell me that “you” are out there, and that while I have some response-ability in the matter of my own reactions and boundaries in our relationship together, so do “you.” I talk about my own part all the time. Today I’m talking about “you.” And “you” know who you are.

I said, in What a Way to Go, that “our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves.” I said it because I believe it. I said it because it’s my experience. I said it because it had become clear to Sally and me, as we peered over the cliff of our present predicament, that the cultural train now heading toward that cliff is fueled, in great part, by the fact that we “civilized” humans have largely disconnected ourselves from the truth of our own feelings. We do not feel the death, pain, and misery our culture has wrought on the living world around us. We do not feel our own misery here on this planet, as we are born, live, and die inside of a cultural prison that does not serve us, neither our real needs nor our most precious dreams. We do not feel, we do not allow ourselves to feel, how deeply confused, wounded, and bereft we have been rendered in this culture. And because we do not feel these things, most of us, most of the time, seem unable to respond to our collective situation in a mature, adult, human way. We have forgotten who we are, what we want, why we are here, and where we are headed. And having forgotten ourselves, we are left largely powerless in the face of our unraveling world.

Sally and I are surely not the only ones to have come to this conclusion. But we may be some of the very few who have taken the work of reconnection as deeply as we have. Feeling what one is feeling seems like an obvious and important response to our current crisis. And speaking one’s feelings, as part of a larger community discussion regarding how to meet our predicament, has felt like our work for some time. But I gotta tell ya, I surely do understand why people do not and will not take this step. Venturing into “feeling out loud”  can feel like stepping onto a bloody minefield.  Or a courtroom…

You know how it goes. We all do, don’t we? You put a “bad” feeling out there –  ”I’m afraid.”  ”I’m in pain.”  ”I’m filled with anxiety.”  - and what do you hear in response?  Well, Johnny, tell ‘em what they’ve won…

-”Cheer up, dude. It ain’t that bad.” Not only does this response convey that your feelings are not okay and that you need to stop showing them, they call into question their validity. It’s not so bad. You are mistaken about your own feelings.

-”Yeah, lots of people feel that way.” While an attempt is being made, perhaps, to let you know you’re not alone, there is often a dark undercurrent of “so why do you get to complain about it?”

-”You need to go outside and get some fresh air.” Advice of all kinds can convey, first, that your feelings are easily “solve-able,” and second, that you are simply not smart enough to have thought of the solution yourself, or that you’ve done little or nothing to solve things on your own and return to the right, proper, and culturally approved emotional state, which is Happy™. Advice operates on the assumption that there is something to be done to make your bad feelings go away, which conveys that it’s not okay for you to have these feelings in the first place.

-”Did you see Game of Thrones last night?” There are a million ways to divert and distract you when you “break the rules” and express a feeling. Jokes. Non-sequitors. Stories about somebody else’s situation. The message is that your expression of feeling is so unwelcome that they are just going to go on as if it hadn’t happened.

There are surely other items that belong on this list. I invite you to add them.

Now, many people, upon reading this, might call foul. “Surely people are just trying to help,” they might say. “They only want what’s best for you.” Perhaps those people are correct. I do observe that most people are trying to be and do good in the world, and are doing the best they can with what they have. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all of these responses to your expression of “bad” feeling arise from the listener’s own discomfort with feeling, and are informed by deep cultural stories that no longer serve us. And I’m going to be so bold as to just say outright that, when somebody shares feelings of pain or grief or fear or anger or anxiety or helplessness or despair with you, maybe the only thing you need do in response, and perhaps the only thing that will ever really help, is to simply listen to them and reflect what they’ve said, so that they have the experience of having been heard. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to make it go away. You don’t have to make it better. You don’t have to know what to do. None of that is your job. Your job is simply to hear what they say, because having the truth of our lives seen and heard and known by other human beings lies at the heart of our healing and reconnection.

All that other stuff? Stop it. Just stop it. It does not help. And, in fact, it’s what makes people ever more hesitant to express out loud the truths of their lives. Stop with the deflection, the advice, the jokes, the cheering up. Stop, and learn to just listen and reflect. Let people’s feelings simply be what they are. Let your own feelings simply be what they are. Let the expression of feeling emerge into an ever safer environment. Dig up the mines and toss them away. Clear the courtroom.  Create an open meadow into which feeling can venture out into the light. Join in as the community learns to tell itself the truth. And see where that leads.

I say it will lead to healing and connection. I say it will lead to reclamation and reconciliation, to growth and maturity and evolution. I say it will take us somewhere we want to go, even as the old forms, and the life of this world, unravel around us. Step onto that swiftest path. Re-member yourself. Help others remember themselves. Let us, in this time, tell the felt truth of our lives. We will never learn to reconnect with the Earth, I think, until we learn to reconnect with our own felt truth.

The truth of my life is that I did not get something that that baby got in that bathwater, and that this lack of regard or valuing has shaped my life in painful and surprising ways. I don’t need my family to fix that, or make me feel better. I simply need to say it, and to be listened to by my village as I say it. That pain has made me who I am today, and who I am is a wonderful man. I do not need that pain turned into Happy-ness™. I simply need to stop hiding it, so that I can put the energy it takes me to do so to other uses.

Ironic, perhaps, coming from a non-empath, but there it is.  Please understand that this is learned behavior on my part, gathered painfully over the course of many years.  I’m still learning it, perhaps now more than ever. True empaths probably don’t need to be told any of this. And know that I will have more to say to this.  The opposite of a great truth is usually another great truth, as Neils Bohr said.  I want to remember that.  For now, this will suffice.

Time to turn out the lights.

Pax, T

PS:  I’ll be traveling in the next week or two, so will be unable to hang out in my lab. I invite you to visit your own labs and see what fascinates you. Perhaps you have a guest blog inside of you, just waiting to pop out?

Star Trek: “The Empath”

Those few who know me well know that I sometimes use the term “alien” as a self-descriptor.  I refer to my “home planet,” and how we do things there, and how that world is different from this one.  I joke around about having special powers and the ability to wipe people’s memories, and Sally jokes that my strange and unconscious finger- and wrist-flexing movements are a sort of communication with “the mother ship.”  My clumsy, hunched, and shuffling gait, my stunted, blunted senses and interests, my facial tics and my disinterest in many things physical, leave me feeling like I’ve donned a thick, Tim-shaped deep-sea diving suit in order to sink down to the bottom of the Terran gravity well and explore this ocean of humanity.  I notice my fascination with issues, ideas, assumptions, and beliefs that seem to propel me ever further to the far reaches of the “normal curve” of human culture.  I rarely feel as though I belong here, and my deepest and most lonely longings take me to a world that feels sane and whole, to a land “over the rainbow” where it all makes sense to me.  Home is somewhere far away, it seems, amongst the stars.  Home is Asteroid B-612, and I, a “little prince,” am continually searching for my way back.

I take this on as metaphor, as useful fiction, not knowing or really caring whether there is any objective™ truth to it.  Readers of All of the Above probably suspect that I’m a long-time student of that whole UFO/alien thang, and that I’m openly open to the reality of many things that the mainstream dominant culture ridicules and dismisses.  I have no real objection to the notions that there are levels of reality other than the material, that there is sentient life elsewhere in the physical Cosmos and permeating other levels of existence, and that we humans on Earth are not, and have not been, as isolated as most seem to think.  But I have no clear memory, no undeniable experience, no objective™ evidence that I am “really” from somewhere else.  Lots of people feel out of place right now.  We live inside a global culture that feels almost totally unhinged from Reality™.  I do not need the “alien in a human body” story to explain my experience here.

And yet it suits me, this metaphor.  One story you hear over and over in the “alien abduction” literature is how the “aliens,” and more specifically “the grays,” deeply terrified of humans, are nevertheless interacting surreptitiously with humans because they want something from them, something that they’ve lost, something they want to regain.  And that’s exactly how I feel.  It seems I have a missing piece.

I may have never known this about myself, had I not met up with Sally, for the piece I lack is a piece she has in abundance.  It’s one she craves deeply in her interactions with other human beings, and my lack of it has been a source of pain and grief for a very long time now.  That piece is empathy, the ability to put myself into the emotional space of another and feel what they are feeling.  Sally is a deeply feeling soul, and while I can understand her feelings, and greatly value her passionate approach to life, and while I benefit daily from her ability to empathize with my own feelings, I seem to lack the capacity to return that gift to her.

Please understand that, to my mind, empathy is quite distinct from feeling, caring, sympathy, valuing, or understanding.  I am a deeply feeling man.  I value people, and care for their well-being.  I can feel bad for them, and understand how they work.  I just don’t make that face-to-face, vibratory, resonating, emotional connection with them.  Like an alien observer, I note and analyze and catalog and understand, but there is something about me that is so different, so… other… that I don’t feel them.  A useful analogy might be between kingdoms or phyla of Terran life.  I feel humans’ emotional states no better than I feel the emotional states of fish or ants or cacti.  The chasm is so great between us that I cannot seem to cross it.  I can act in deeply feeling ways.  I can look like I have empathy.  But after ten years of “running the experiment,” I have to face the fact that I do not.

Was I born this way, an alien, a psychopath, a mutant, or an Asperger’s “sufferer”?  Or was this missing piece knocked out of me early on as I lived in the sometimes terrifying presence of an openly angry mother and a covertly angry father?  Was it a soul chunk that fell out of me on that warm, summer afternoon when my mother, furious that her young child would not stop singing that slightly bawdy version of the Popeye song, hauled him into the bathroom and washed his mouth out with soap?  Or is this simply the result we should expect when a sensitive human soul is raised in a culture that denies feeling, truth, and reality at every turn?

Am I wounded, damaged, traumatized…  or simply alien?  And is there any way to know™?  Who’s to say that people with Asperger’s aren’t simply aliens™ in human bodies?

All of this smacked like a fat dragonfly onto the windshield of my life this past week, as yet another “failure to empathize” on my part triggered deep feelings of anger, pain, and grief on Sally’s part.  It was a tough and painful couple of days here, with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but we stayed with it, slowly processing our way through the pain and to new levels of acceptance of “what’s so,” and doing the work of grieving that which is not so.  Much of “the problem” has resided in my own lack of self- acceptance.  Raised in this culture with a steady diet of unconscious assumptions, I was taught to believe that empathy is good™ and the lack thereof bad™.  (How many times did James T. Kirk make the case to alien cultures and beings for the grand goodness and even superiority of human beings in all their wild, messy, creative emotionality?  They even did a whole episode on human empathy and aliens!)  So I’ve expended much time and energy hiding my bad™ and trying to be good™.  Had I simply allowed myself to know out loud the truth of my own experience, I could have sooner, and with calm but loving self-acceptance, explained to Sally how life is for me, and helped her to do the inevitable grieving work she has had to do.  It’s the hiding, the pretense, that has tripped us up.  And this week I let go of a large piece of that pretense.

Strangely, or perhaps obviously, I have felt a great deal of relief since.  I think maybe Sally has as well.  It’s amazing how much energy can get tied up in the denial of what’s so.  And it’s amazing the relief I feel, when I finally tell the forbidden truths of my own experience.  And when we take this vast and basic difference between us, Sally and I, and simply let it be, then new questions, new possibilities, arise almost automatically.  ”Hmm…. interesting,” says Spock.  The empath chose an alien.  The alien chose an empath.  Why did they come together?  What work lies between them?  What do they have to teach each other?  What’s possible here that might not have been possible otherwise?  How do they reach communion and connection of a different sort, this human and this alien?  And how will their achieving this somehow help™?

Isn’t the lack of human empathy with the non-human life of this planet – not just dragonflies and fish and ants and cacti but rocks and air and water and light – somehow at the bottom of things when we consider the havoc our global industrial culture is right now wreaking?  Aren’t some of us, we who are tuned into this culture and it’s life-threatening ways, trying to re-establish a full, loving, and empathic connection with this planet?  Could this meeting of human and alien have some larger significance in the Global Culture, the Great Hologram, the Morphic Field, the Mind of God, or the Absolute?

Not sure.  But I gotta say, I’d much rather we be about the work of new paradigms and next cultures and communion than the work of husband and wife crabbing at each other because “he never talks” and “she just doesn’t understand.”  These are big times we live in.  Our situation is unprecedented, precarious, and wildly, chaotic, to my way of seeing things.  Why not try to be as big as all of that and see what happens?  What could there possibly be to lose?

So that’s what life looks like in our little corner of the world this week:  the empath and the alien, knockin’ ‘em down and settin’ ‘em back up, sometimes smashing like atoms in a collider, other times simply orbiting each other like binary stars, always entangled and forever on our path.  Watch for strange lights flitting about in the night sky over our home.  Listen for sobs, shouts, and laughter as you walk by.  Note the strange things we say and the crazy ideas we explore.  And know that it’s all simply a meeting of worlds going on here, as ambassadors from two vastly different experiences hash it out at the conference table.

We’ve just signed a new treaty.  Here’s to that.

I come in peace,

T

Or can be.  And that has been the key, for me: learning to tease these two types of anger apart.

While my “ranting and raging” has often been about my own unhealed attempts to be understood and wanted by my family of origin, it has also been, to a very great extent, rooted in my grief, shock, and appalled disbelief over the destruction of the living world around me.  Though I can be somewhat indifferent to plants, and to most people whom I do not know, my attention keys in on the land and sea and sky and animals, and my heart breaks to see them in pain.  I walk daily amongst the crows and gulls and skunks and deer, and look to the sea in the summer for signs of whales and seals.  I soak up the clean salt air and stare up at the sky and the stars.  I lean into the wind and tramp through the snow and walk barefoot whenever I can, relishing the feel of grass and mud and ice and gravel between my toes, grounding and connection for my soles.  Having been one of the “last children in the woods,” I grew to love the land and the forests and the sun and the voices of the many “others” who fly and flit and flash about me as I make my way through the world.  And so “God Made a Farmer” evokes my anger not only because modern agriculture is about the control, domination, exploitation, and imprisonment of those whom I love, but because it is a large factor in their death and destruction.  In some very real ways, modern agriculture is a primary fuel for the fire that is burning us toward that “mid-century extinction” I’ve been pondering.  It needs to be deeply questioned.  That Dodge Trucks commercial is full of lies.

These days, my protective energies focus mostly on my wife, Sally.  Those few who have grown to know Sally well over the years know what I have come to know:  Sally is a force of nature herself.  She has her own wounded, reactive ego, to be sure, but she works daily to set that aside, so that she can fully connect with her best, most good and essential self and channel her gifts for healing in the wider world.  She’s creative in the face of need or resistance and able to step fully into acceptance, or charge determinedly into challenge, as the situation warrants.  She finds few things in the world that she cannot figure out and do for herself, but her greatest love is for conversation, connection, and collaboration.  She cares deeply for her fellow humans, the compliment to my own caring energies, and can step into empathy and resonance with practiced ease.  Whether she’s counseling others, partnering with me on my writing or filmmaking, building a greenhouse, reclaiming her body, or starting a business, she approaches every moment of her life as another step on her spiritual journey, as an opportunity to grow, mature, evolve, and transcend.  She’s without a doubt the most conscious human soul I have ever had the privilege to know.  It feels like much of my role now is to protect her.

In part, Sally needs to be protected from her own wounded ego.  She can easily “give it all away,” to the point of harming or undermining herself.  And when attacked or violated, her great power can get channeled through a quick, hot, fierce anger that can cut right to the heart of those who, like me, were raised in “nice,” conflict-avoidance family systems.  Interrupting such reactions and helping her reconnect with her true adult power has become a significant part of my work here.

But she also needs protection from “the other.”  Power, heart, and clarity such as she displays can be both alluring and threatening to those with whom she comes into contact.  Sally’s X-ray gaze can see right into people’s hearts, and her courageous words can shine through pretense and games and beliefs and stories and bring to clear light the truth of their lives in ways that are undeniable.  Many come to Sally seeking exactly this, but for others, this can feel terrifying.  Forced to confront their own woundedness, many people, compelled by the core of shame of which Brene Brown speaks, lash out, project, or blame.  And Sally, wounded deeply in her own childhood, can sometimes get knocked off center for a moment, disempowered, lost, confused, and disheartened.  Watching over Sally as she interfaces with the outer world, and noticing what she may not, constitutes another significant part of my work here.

As Graham Hancock said in a recent post,

I drifted into thoughts about my relationship with my wife Santha, how I am so blessed to have her in my life, how she is in fact a goddess who manifests in human form and how incredibly privileged I am that she permits me to go through this incarnation with her and learn from her how to be a better human being. And I realized how so much of our life together has been very selfishly about ME, about my work, my creativity, my concerns, and it was brought home to me with the force of a revelation that the next stage of our partnership has to be about HER and that my role now is to be of service to her and help her in every way possible to express and manifest her own wonderful creative gifts and to fulfill herself.

Yes.

We speak often, Sally and I, of anger, ranting, truth-telling, expectations and cruelty, triage and investment and our response-ability in these matters.  Every morning finds us drinking coffee for an hour or two, as we “sit in the nest” and speak what’s in our hearts and minds.  While I could go a hundred different directions at this point, I think for now I’ll simply notice a few things and leave it at that…

-It feels to me like protecting Sally and protecting the life of this world are one and the same.  Another way of saying that might be that, in the matter of learning, or relearning, as a culture, to love, cherish, protect, and commune with the planet and its living beings now being destroyed by our out-of-balance lifestyle, that work can be done as easily in our human relationships as it can be done in “the natural world.”  It may be that, if we cannot learn to love, respect, cherish, protect, and serve both ourselves and other humans, we cannot step fully into the sorts of relationships with the rest of the Cosmos that we long for, and which Sustainability™ might require.

-There’s an underlying assumption here that Sally needs protection, which points to the underlying assumption that “the world” needs protection.  I’m not saying these assumptions are true or false.  I’m simply pointing out that they are assumptions worthy of our notice and examination.  Can Sally’s essential self ever really be hurt?  Is it only her overlay of ego/personality/monkey mind/whatever you want to call it that can get hurt?  Does that need to be protected?  And how about “the world”?  These questions deserve long deliberation, in my opinion.

-Beneath these assumptions are assumptions of vulnerability and separation, the idea that we can be hurt, really, or that we are separate from each other.  These point to more foundational assumptions about materialism, time, space, life, death, and everything.  Again, I put them here only as assumptions, to be held up for examination and worthy of deep dialogue.

-And my interest in examining these assumptions relates back to what I said early on:  I wish to tease apart that aspect of my anger that is unconscious and reactive and that aspect which is clear and conscious and present-based.  My reactive anger feels clouded and childish and dirty, and tends to get me into more trouble.  My clear adult impulses to protect and serve feel clean and whole and mature, and tend to pull me into my most powerful, initiated, adult human self.

In the end, wherever this crazy world is taking me, I intend to meet it as a mature, sane, and empowered adult human soul, rather than a reactive, wounded adolescent hiding out in a grown-up body.  This has been my work since I first awakened to “our present predicament.”  The work continues.  That “work” will likely never be finished.  I hope not.  But that is another story altogether.

I may not make it to the lab next week.  Time will tell.  Tim will tell.  Sally’s Vejibag launch party approaches, and her Kickstarter campaign, and there is so much to do to serve those ends.  I’ll write as that work allows.

Until then, pax,

T

I just go into my lab and see what’s there. And I did, yesterday, my regular blog day. And I actually started writing. But the piece I bit off was way more than I could chew, and trying again this morning to chew it further, I find myself no closer to clarity. I’m wanting to go back to that anger question, that impulse to “rant and rave,” and speak to the other impulses inside of me, beyond the righting of childhood wrongs. But it seems the muse has little interest in what I’m wanting these days. I cannot seem to force it, the clarity I think I want. I can’t make my thinking tidy and whole. I can’t get my words to line up on the page in the correct order. I can only slog through, it feels like, always on the path but never reaching the goal. And I can only chew as quickly as I can chew.

There’s too much. Too many things demanding my time and attention. So it’s hard for me, frightening even, and deeply challenging, to put myself into this uncontrollable, unknowable space of looking and seeing and feeling and writing and sharing. Some days in the lab I feel moments of joy and fascination. But some days I feel only confusion and haziness. I feel lost. Gray and disinterested. Flummoxed. And all I can think to do is flick off the lights and go back home.

None of that would be a problem, save for the fact that I’ve created an expectation. I have my own expectation, that I write every Tuesday. But that I can deal with. I’m actually pretty gentle with my own expectations. But as Lindy’s question makes clear, there’s an expectation “out there” as well. And when the expectation is “out there,” the whole game changes. Expectation brings the possibility of disappointment. And one of my most tender and uninsulated bits of wiring is about disappointing people.

At some point in my young life, it was made very clear to me that somebody important and powerful was unhappy, and that I was the cause. I could recall and recount people and incidents and events as “the cause,” but it’s difficult to really be sure that I’m seeing clearly. The window into my own past has always been pretty fogged and dirty, and the glass wavy and slumped, leaving me to cobble together my story with thick layers of guesswork for mortar. Perhaps none of that really matters. Whomever it was, or what it was that happened, I had disappointed someone greatly, or so I was told. Perhaps many times, with multiple people, over many years. And some part of me vowed never to do that again.

And those childhood moments were so soul-searing, and my resultant vow so powerful, that I can now, and still, spend life energy worrying about the fact that I didn’t blog on Tuesday like I said I would, and that now, even though I’m cranking something out, it’s not the “deep and meaningful” stuff my ego seems to think is somehow the most “real.” It can feel crazy making, and the only way to “dis-spell” it, I find, is to speak it out loud so that it cannot hide, trusting that, once in the open, whatever it is will crumble away in the light of consciousness. It’s like psychological cloud-busting, perhaps. It’s like lighting a fire to warm a cold room. It’s like naming the elephant in the room, with the room being my own body, heart, and mind, and the elephant being some story, belief, or assumption stomping around inside of me, tearing up the green grass of my best self and leaving footprints on my soul.

So today is not the day to write more about ranting and raging, or to sit further with the “mid-century extinction meme.” Today is a day to name elephants and flick off the lights and step out into the sun to honor the muse, rather than my ego. I can no longer live up to that childhood vow. No amount of present-day keeping of agreements and meeting of expectations will ever go back in time and heal those old “failures to be.” And there are too many big things out there in the here and now that call me to service, for me to waste my life energy clinging to such old and bankrupt strategies.

Begone, elephant. Out, fear of disappointing. Away with ye, childhood vow. Come, sun, and burn away the fog.

I’ll be back next time.

T

One thing I try to intentionally interrupt is my White Guy™ need or training to “sew it all up.”  My days of pretending that I can wrap it all tightly with a bow, that I can present the unassailable case, that I can know and teach and be Right™, have largely ended, crossed off my life’s calendar with a thick permanent marker.  I go slowly here.  I leave loose ends dangling.  I stop before I am finished because I no longer think there is a finished.  I make connections, proffer suggestions, raise questions, and log reactions.  I let things slide and ride and glide, leaving them to sit on my lab tables and gather dust when something else arises to demand my attention.  As an otter, I’m more interested in slipping playfully down the river than in stopping on the shore to build an edifice.  As a pure research man, I allow myself to walk without knowing where I am headed.  My intention, simply, is to notice what I am noticing, feel what I am feeling, think what I am thinking, and speak what is in my mouth to speak, trusting that, as I move through time, my weaving will form a fabric of some sort, that the bits of broken tile will one day form the picture of my being here.

My intention this morning is to continue my exploration of “ranting and raging,” but only by adding more bits for the bricolage, bits only to be gathered together and pondered, with no hope for resolution, whatever that is.

-It has been notable to me, to see how many, in response to my recent explorations, have felt the need to defend the rightfulness or utility of “ranting and raging,” as though I were questioning their right to be angry, or to express their anger.

-It has also been interesting, as I’ve walked the streets of Facebook City and ventured weekly into Blogland, how peoples’ responses fall into predictable categories, and how I react to those responses.  I find myself largely disinterested in anything that feels like a) advice, b) cheering up, or c) sympathy.  Responses that fall into these categories tend to confuse me.  I do find, however, that I’m really digging responses that fall into a fourth category:  empathy and resonance.

-There are a few people I bump into regularly in Facebook City who seem to be always cussing and judging, muttering complaint, displeasure, or anger in short and sometimes indecipherable bursts.  I find myself walking away from these people as quickly as I can.

-This came across my radar this week and has stuck to the glass:

The Holy Longing by Goethe

Tell a wise person or else keep silent
For the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
And what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love nights
Where you were begotten,
Where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in this obsession with darkness
And a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
And now, arriving in magic, flying
and finally, insane for the light
You are the butterfly.
And you are gone.

And so long as you haven’t experienced this,
To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.

-This also came across my radar, and resonates deeply:

There is Nothing Wrong by Jeff Foster

Sadness is not wrong. Fear is not wrong.
Confusion is not wrong.
Our pain is not wrong.
Resisting our pain is what makes everything seem wrong.
And yet here is a deeper truth, for those who are open:
Even our resistance of pain is not wrong.
If that’s what’s happening, it cannot be wrong.
It is a valid expression of life in the moment.
Beyond ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
This love even embraces resistance.
This Now is vast, and forgiving.

Yet even ‘resistance’ is just another concept.
Another judgement.
Another way to make ourselves wrong.
“Resistance bad. Acceptance good.” That’s what we learn.

It’s not that we “resist” our pain.
We just never learned how to be with it.
How to sit with it. Stay with it. Have a cup of tea with it.
See it as a beloved friend, at home in the vastness.
Our ignorance is our innocence.
We just never learned.

Our pain is not wrong.
It is an invitation.
An ancient teaching.
Universal. Free.

Life invites us to come closer…

Falling through imagined layers…
Into great mystery…

-This feels like an important piece, a poster taped to a wall in Facebook City, attributed to Courtney A. Walsh:

“Dear Human:  You’ve got it all wrong.  You didn’t come here to master unconditional love.  That is where you came from and where you’ll return.  You came here to learn personal love.  Universal love.  Messy love.  Sweaty love.  Crazy love.  Broken love.  Whole love.  Infused with divinity.  Lived through the grace of stumbling.  Demonstrated through the beauty of … messing up.  Often.  You didn’t come here to be perfect.  You already are.  You came here to be gorgeously human.  Flawed and fabulous.  And then to rise again into remembering.”

-And this Eckhart Tolle quote feels important to hold:  ”Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.”

-As does this article about Sinead O’Connor and the Magdalene laundry.

-And this graphic:

Enough.  Flotsam and jetsam.  Bric-a-brac and bricolage.  Widgets and tracings and hailstones.  Perhaps one day the picture will emerge.  For now, the sun shines.  The crow calls.  And I’ve a trip to the post office to make.

Pax, all,
T