1eclecticwriter

Plenty of Nothin’ is Plenty

August 4, 2013

I wonder if the hardest part of getting older is not the challenges of coping with a failing body and mind, nor the inevitable sorrow of losing friends and peers, but the gradual – or sometimes very sudden – loss of illusions, loss of aspirations, loss of hope. At some point we all face the recognition that a cherished desire or goal is not going to be fulfilled. What then?

Psychologists have given labels to the behavior engendered by some of these confrontations – empty nest syndrome and male menopause being the most prominent. Those two experiences are primarily about accepting transitions in one’s life path rather than about loss of a way forward. It may be hard for a mother to accept that her children are grown and must be allowed to live their own lives while she redefines herself – she will still be a mother, but engaged differently in the lives of her family. And just as business managers must adapt their style when a company transitions from growth to maintenance mode, so some men must accept – at some point in their careers – that they have reached a plateau where they may expect to be for the rest of their working lives.

(Yes I’m aware of the sexist, stereotypical nature of the two above examples. Men may indeed have troubled letting go of a familiar pattern of fathering, and career women also have to recognize the point at which their professional lives plateau.)

Except, of course, that creative men and women reinvent themselves, begin new careers, take up new interests and continue to make contributions to their community, their families and themselves, often to the end of their days. Of what is that creativity made? Is it something more than a stark refusal to concede to lost illusions, lost aspirations, lost hope?

Consider a particular expectation – that of finding someone with whom one can walk life’s path, a partner to share the joys and sorrows, someone to ‘be there’ when support is needed. Some of us are lucky enough to find such a mate. Almost all of us are given the expectation that we will be in that lucky group. We read novels about these ‘good’ marriages and we see – or think we see – examples around us. We may or may not also learn that romantic love doesn’t hold up well to the stresses of married life, but that if again we are lucky, we discover a more stable, enduring form of love that does survive the inevitable losses life brings. Above all, if we are lucky, we find someone with whom we can share (and thereby halve) the pain, and share (and thereby double) the pleasures life brings our way.

But what of those who do not find such a partner? Or who find a partner incapable of sharing in a way meaningful to us? There are many such people, their stories recorded over and over again in country western songs. How do we move past the realization that we have come to a point in life where it is clear there will not ever “be someone to hold me while I cry?”

Those of us who are fortunate enough, wise enough to let go of the demand for a single person to fulfill the human need for companionship often find ourselves with support in unexpected but very meaningful ways. When I cracked my spine in a horseback riding accident, a neighbor showed up daily to do my chores and another took off from her work whenever needed, to drive me to my own work and appointments. And years ago, after the love in my life was yanked away, an acquaintance from the Quakers volunteered herself into my new home to help me unpack and settle, and to hold me while I cried.

My spiritual teacher instructs that attention is food. What we give attention to multiplies. Inversely, the way to remove something unwanted from one’s life is to simply take one’s attention off it. Focusing on what is missing from life (a forever mate for example) will only push the possibility of finding one farther away. Psychologists have used transactional analysis to spell out the emotional dynamics of this truth, and shown how unhealthy, unequal relationships are formed from neediness. Most are unfulfilling and unsustainable. In the end, they rupture and dump the needy person right back where he/she began, in the classic cycle of repetitively marrying an abuser, an alcoholic, a philanderer, et cetera. I love the accuracy of the title of the landmark book in this field, Games People Play.

We have the option not to play games. Creatively fulfilling our needs for companionship, for attention, for support by drawing on a variety of resources – including ourselves – shifts attention away from lack and loss and toward plenty. With attention on plenty, it multiplies in a happy way. Porgy, in the operetta Porgy and Bess, expresses giving attention to sufficiency so well:
I got plenty of nothing,
And nothing’s plenty for me.
I got no car – got no mule,
I got no misery.
Folks with plenty of plenty,
They’ve got a lock on the door,
Afraid somebody’s gonna rob ’em
While they’re out (a) making more – what for?
I got no lock on the door – that’s no way to be.
They can steal the rug from the floor – that’s OK with me.
‘Cause the things that I prize – like the stars in the skies – are all free.

I have so much more than nothing. Most of us do. Whether or not all our dreams are fulfilled, are we not plenty-full?

Plenty

Tags: adages, characterization, generational differences, Happiness, lessons, Philosophy, self-acceptance, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom | 2 Comments »

Solitude

July 28, 2013

I’ve just finished reading Sara Donati’s Fire in the Sky, committing to myself to find the next book in her series about the Bonner family, and life in upstate New York in America’s early years. In an afterward, Donati states that she hopes she has done her work well enough for readers to seek out histories of the period, the War of 1812, which she feels is given short shrift in school history lessons. If my own experience is any indicator, she’s correct. My recollection of what I learned in elementary school about that war is limited to the battle at Fort McHenry and its role in the origin of our national anthem. High school American history class gave me even less about the War of 1812 – undoubtedly because the lesson was taught in a school in Paris, by a British woman who dismissed the entire affair as a “skirmish on the edge” of the important war happening at that time – Britain versus Napoleonic France.

My take-away from Donati’s writing is not, however, an interest in researching the complexities of what U.S. history books also refer to as the ”period between the French and Indian Wars and the settling of the West” (i.e. all the anguish and horror of the Amerindian experience with European intolerance). My take-away from Donati’s well written, engrossing series is far more personal – a profound feeling of loss, and a bone-deep sense of aloneness. Unlike the characters in this novel, who are an extended family with deep interconnections and emotional commitments to one another – unlike these people written into vivid life – I am alone. Profoundly alone. Only child of older parents long deceased, no first cousins, formerly married to a loner whose own small family (one brother and his children) made me welcome but with whom I have too little in common to connect. I have no children of my own, and never had the occasion to adopt any.

Mind you, I am not lonely. I like my own company, indeed find that I need solitude and tire quickly of constant interaction on those occasions when I am in extended social situations. When, with my husband, we went to visit his brother for a weekend, my sister-in-law was first puzzled, then amused to know that if I went missing, she could usually find me settled in the back seat of our car, with a book. Never happy unless surrounded by the noise and chatter of her children, nephews, cousins and visitors, my sister-in-law struggled to understand how overwhelming so many people could be to a person like me. I was raised in a home dominated by the quiet of parents who, because they did not like each other much, spoke little and went their own ways – until my mother would explode in rage. Noisy interaction, to me, means anger, shouting, ugly accusations, slaps, and being punished for non-existent infractions of unstated rules.

I am well aware of other types of noisy, social family dynamics. Adults happy to be together, chattering about their shared past and planned future, children busy with invented games that send them chasing among the adults, teens congregated on the porch giggling and talking (now also texting) their secrets to one another… I see all this around me as a positive experience, but know myself unable, now, to become part of it. Know that I was set onto my solitary path as early as kindergarten, where my tentative efforts to join the other children and make friends were undermined by my mother’s belief that it wasn’t safe for me to visit in any of their homes, or get to know them outside of the classroom. I know, as an adult, that it was her own self-doubt, her own fears that she was projecting outward, creating an environment around me that forbade socializing in groups.

I’m grateful that I’ve learned to enjoy people, and have been blessed over the years with companions and close friends. I’m also blessed with the ability to enjoy life as a single person, not needing to be part of a couple or in anyone’s company to eat at a restaurant, go to a concert or play, take a road trip, or vacation abroad. I have seen how family dynamics can become warped, twisted into lifelong animosities and unforgiven grudges. I know that much of the appeal in Donati’s stories (beyond the fact that she is an excellent writer) lies in becoming engaged with an ideal of family caring. The members support each other through their various trials, remaining in the end united despite distance or even death. The appeal of romances is that they portray an ideal, of love overcoming obstacles, achieved in the end. The appeal of traditional westerns is of clear cut right and wrong, an ideal justice achieved in the end.

The appeal of an ideal… Is there an ideal of solitude?

Not noticeably in fiction, but perhaps in religion or spiritual pursuits. The Buddha, sitting alone in contemplation. The Benedictine brothers at Christ in the Desert, living a vow of silence in their isolated monastery. The occasional lone backwoodsman – Robbie, in Donati’s Lake in the Clouds – an exemplar of a character choosing to live alone. Spiritual practitioners of solitude do carry the qualities of an ideal. The fictional characters do not. They are portrayed, even the most positive of them, as missing some important element of life. They are portrayed as strong enough to live alone, but nonetheless in some way damaged and unable to connect appropriately with society.

Why this disconnect between the positive image of spiritual solitude and the flawed one of social solitude? I am happy to have ample alone time for my spiritual practice, during which I feel embraced and held close in the joy of the Divine’s presence. I only question my aloneness when I encounter – usually in fiction, but occasionally in daily life experiences – the ideal of family, and then my emotional self begins to wonder if I’ve missed something important. A co-worker has been diagnosed with cancer. His family – sister and two adult daughters – have come from across the country to visit with him, provide support, and enjoy his company. Who would come if the same challenge were to arise for me?

I am looked after and cared for most completely by my spiritual Beloved. I know in my bones, in my gut, in my Soul, the certainty that I am not alone, not forgotten, not adrift in a life without purpose or meaning. As life challenges arise, the tools to meet them will be provided to me, in ways and forms I cannot invent nor imagine, as has already been proven true when I review my Path thus far. Indeed, my current querying of my state of aloneness, my curiosity as to whether I’ve missed out in some way by not experiencing the ties of family, my observation of the ideal of those ties as presented in fiction – all this reflection is an example of the process by which I am gifted to acquire whatever tools I will need going forward. It is just my mind, like a little child, tugging at my spiritual skirts and whining, “I want a sister, I want a brother, to talk to, to play and share with.”

Maybe next lifetime?
Careful, there. Remember the adage about being selective in what you ask for!

Tags: adages, balance, Happiness, lessons, My Life, parental conditioning, Paris, Philosophy, Sara Donati, self-acceptance, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom | 5 Comments »

. . . Was the Word

July 20, 2013

I wrote my first poem, in my teens, after standing up to a howling wind blowing across the rim of Les Baux, in southern France. Below me was the Val d’Enfer (Valley of Hell), so named, I was told, because it was the site of attacks on merchant caravans whose masters tried to avoid paying tithe to the lords of Les Baux. My poem sought to express a sense of standing up to challenge.

Now, in my so-called golden years, I live in one of the windiest areas of the USA, the foothills of the Rockies in northeastern New Mexico. As I write, the wind swirls around my home, slamming against the house before fading to a conifer-leached sigh. With my eyes closed, the sounds could be those of the ocean, hitting the Maine coast and splashing me with spray or, from even earlier in my life, the rolling tumult of storm-roiled combers crashing onto Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, below where I stand hanging onto the railing of the boardwalk.

Just last month, the wind lifted tin off the roof of my loafing shed (fortunately no horses were around to be frightened into bolting). I arranged to re-roof the cottage to which the shed is attached, so tonight there is no clatter and rattle, only the almost intelligible language of an ocean of wind, once again attempting to tell me all the truths of the world.

Heavenly Wind

The wind, no matter in what spot in the world I experience it, brings change. Sometimes merely a change in the weather, other times a practical change like the needed, but previously postponed, new roof. The wind, no matter in what spot in the world I experience it, always brings me to inner change.

Awareness of a power beyond my small self, clinging to the boardwalk rail.
Awareness of good and evil across the ages of man’s time on earth as I looked into hell’s valley from the heights where I was sheltered and protected.
Awareness of the power in wind-driven, fragile drops which shattered to spray against mica-rich Maine rocks, before falling back into the sea and rising again to the work of eroding those rocks over eons of time.
Awareness tonight that, living amidst frequent winds, I have placed myself in the perfect outer environment to match the pace of my inner spiritual evolution. Washed by waves of wind-sound, like the Maine rocks, I am inexorably cleansed, my ego eroded to allow the bright mica reflections of Soul to shine forth.

Cleansing started, and will end, with the Word, spoken by the lips of the wind, into the ears of those who wish to hear.

Tags: adages, Delaware, France, Les Baux, Les Baux-de-Provence, lessons, Maine, MasterPath, My Life, New Mexico, Philosophy, Rehoboth Beach, spiritual development, wind, wisdom
Posted in environment, life wisdom | 2 Comments »

Whoooo Are Youoooo?

July 13, 2013

I Dare You…

The neurology course I finished last month on line, through Coursera – and the Cardiac Resuscitation Science one I just finished – both touched briefly on brain phenomena which have been observed to accompany what people describe as near death experiences. By wiring up Hospice patients to study brain patterns as life ends, or monitoring brain activity in the emergency room during CPR and defibrillation, scientists have observed bursts of brain activity which accompany the last moments of life – and which also occur in those who are “brought back”.

I’m not sure where I stand with regard to the effort to explain all cognitive experiences in terms of brain physiology. On one hand, the brain is fascinating in its complexity, flexibility, capability – and in the fact that there is so much we still don’t know about how it functions. On the other hand, I am strongly drawn to a spiritual life that knows phenomena by direct, non-mental, experience. It’s an easy out to say that when we fully understand the brain, we will fully understand transcendental experiences. I am more inclined to maintain that when we fully understand the brain we will fully understand that not all phenomena of experience can be explained by physiology.

How I wish that I could inquire of my three year old Shih Tzu what his experience was when he recently flat-lined and was resuscitated with extended CPR at the vet’s during what should have been a routine, minor surgery. When I picked him up he showed only the usual post-anesthesia grogginess – and his recovery was reasonably normal for what he’d experienced. It took him a few days to regain easy movement after the bruising and soreness from chest compressions, and he slept more than usual for about a week. He now seems his normal self in most activities, but there is a slight yet noticeable change in his personality (okay, his behavior, if you prefer a more rigorous, scientific terminology).

From puppyhood a rousing, adventurous and typical “boy”, Shian Shung would tussle with all comers, chase after rabbits, try to dominate larger dogs at the food bowl and to herd the neighbor’s horses if they came too close to ‘his’ property He manifested an assertive command of his life. He accepted human affection and tolerated my ministrations to his infected eye, but would generally leave people with the impression that, catlike, he was gracing us with only a portion of his attention and that only for a limited amount of time before more pressing demands took him off into the fields or to a game with his peers. (I have four dogs and a cat, while neighbor dogs and cats – including the striped and stinky variety – regularly visit our acreage).

Since his resuscitation, Shian Shung has been seeking out human contact, wanting to spend time on laps or in the house around people. Just today, he tried to climb into the car of a new person coming to our home, rather than standing to one side as he used to do, barking to let her know she was on his turf. He is as energetic as usual, but milder and less dominating of the other dogs. And he has stopped chasing the cat. Because he has “seen the Light?” He was intubated during the CPR and did not suffer oxygen loss to the brain, so cell death in motor or instinctive behavior areas did not occur and thus cannot be invoked as a cause of his behavior change.

Personality is the subtlest of the selves by which we are known and recognized. One might say it is the aspect of oneself closest to one’s real essence, or core reality. Changes in personality do occur with changes in brain function, as often happens with the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. But that does not obviate the possibility that a personality change can occur without any apparent change in brain function. The sense of self we all recognize as part of our being and project through our personality has, as it were, a life of its own. If we suffer brain damage from accident or chemical changes, we may behave differently but we retain – in almost all cases – our ‘selfness’ unaltered.

How I wish I could inquire of Shian Shung whether he recognizes his changed behavior (personality)!

I think I’m on solid ground when I project that he would not be aware that he has changed, just as we humans are rarely aware, until circumstances or another person force the point, that we have begun to respond differently than we did in the past. We think of ourselves as impatient people striving to improve until one or more situations arise which we handle with a consummate patience for which we are praised. “Oh,” we say. And look back at our behavior with some surprise, recognizing that we have indeed been patient, not only in the most recent encounter but also, upon reflection, in those of the past several months as well. The interesting question is whether we then alter our self-concept to include being patient, or continue to cling to the idea that we are impatient but ‘doing better on occasion.’

There so often is a disconnect between so-called reality, and our perceptions of it, especially when the subject of the perception is some aspect of ourselves. Humans are famous for perceiving themselves as fatter or thinner or older or uglier than reality – the consensus of others – dictates. Some of us can feel fat one minute and not-so-fat a few minutes later (when trying on new clothes for example) despite there being no change whatsoever in our actual size. How much more flexible, and divorced from reality, are our perceptions of our personalities.
So who are we, really? A body commanded by a brain to move through time and space? A mind inhabiting and directing a body to move through time and space? A Soul or Spirit temporarily linked to a mind and body and animating it within time and space? Something else altogether?

If Shian Shung could communicate with me about his death and resurrection, would he express it in terms similar to those used by people to describe their own near death experiences? Or would the fact that the canine brain differs significantly from a human brain mandate that the experience be perceived differently? I wish I knew – or do I?

Each advance in science, seeking answers to these ancient questions, seems over the course of recorded history to have only raised new versions of the same questions. Quantum physicists posit abstract entities, the descriptions of which sound a great deal like the energies that mystics have attempted to describe with terms like Soul or spirit. Neurologists use the laws of physics to describe brain function at the level of the neuron. Neuroscientists have completed experiments which purport to show that neurons are activated in support of one option in an either/or choice milliseconds before the subject becomes conscious of deciding to act. From these results, they propose that free will, like the concept of a self which is separate from brain function, is an illusion – a byproduct of brain functioning.

A contrarian argument arises – that the need to believe brain function can explain all aspects of human experience, is itself a brain-generated belief and not the ‘choice’ of a rational, scientific mind. I need to stop at this point. Taking the iterations any farther will land me in the far reaches of hypothetical thinking, and I will have come full circle once more from science to philosophy, from the brain to the Self or Soul – without knowing anything more about the inner experiences of my dog.

For now, I am content that he survived, that he is healthy, and that he enjoys time on my lap.

Tags: Alzheimer's disease, animal awareness, Brain, Coursera, identify, lessons, mind-brain relationships, near-death experiences, personalities, Philosophy, Shih Tzu, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Life Patterns

July 7, 2013

At UWC-USA Graduation 2013

Marker events in our lives – weddings, baptisms, graduations, funerals – don’t just bring us together in community. These rites of passage often also occasion a life review, or at least a review of that part of one’s life affected by the event being marked. Is my child growing in the way I would hope? Has my marriage turned out as I anticipated? Do I need to make changes to my diet, to live longer than friend John there in the casket? It is a natural human behavior, to make comparisons and to consider not just where one stands in relation to others, but where one stands in relation to one’s own life goals.

There is another type of life review, however, that does not arise so easily, nor so obviously. I’m referring to a bout of unsettledness that descends (or creeps up) seemingly out of nowhere. For me, a recent one definitely came as a sneak attack, catching me in the gut, triggering an upset digestive system not related to diet, illness or any other identifiable external cause. Only stress has, in the past, caused me this sort of physical response. There are no apparent stresses in my life just now, at least not recognizable ones off the widely distributed list of events (including happy ones) known for causing this pernicious dis-ease.

Perhaps that’s why it took me awhile to recognize that what was troubling my tummy lay deeper than a ‘bug’, or too much green chili on my tostada.

For much of the past year I have not known in what direction my life would turn. I left a position I’d held for twenty years, and experienced a huge easing of stress. I’ve gone forward with an open mind, following no pre-chosen path, but rather exploring each option that has presented itself, to see where it would lead. All of the possibilities fizzled out, until I came to writing, which is not a new interest but one that I have pursued in fits and starts over the past twenty years, too frequently allowing it to fall to the wayside as paying work and family demands took precedence. Now, however, I find myself able to give the writing precedence – and am very happy to do so.

I have recently recognized that my life pattern has been one of compromise – and of finding validity for my existence in activities that are of service to others. Teaching college in a prison, working for defense attorneys, running a home health agency and providing case management services to clients – worthwhile pursuits from which I gained as much in learning as I offered in care. The compromises lay in choices made regarding how and where I served – in the U.S. rather than in other countries, as I would have wished to do had I been single and free to go where I pleased. The compromises also lay, unrecognized until just recently, in the subtler realm of belief that I had to justify my existence by some form of service. How many of us are driven by an unstated, perhaps unrecognized, belief that we have no worth until we have somehow ‘earned’ our right to existence? I was startled to realize that until very recently, I did not feel entitled to choose a career on the sole basis that it is something I want very much to do!

I was still a young child when I first came across Robert Frost’s “Death of a Hired Man”, and the concept therein (stated by the wife, mind you) that home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” By that criterion, I have been searching for a home most of my life, and am only just beginning to understand to what extent I have carried within me parental strictures about having to measure up, to prove myself, to earn the right to be thought ‘good enough.’ Finding home, and happiness, as I seem to have managed over this past year, means I have – finally – extricated myself from the tentacles of ‘deserving.’

In my former conditioned way of thinking, I could say that I have worked hard, done what was expected and required of me, for enough years that I now deserve to devote myself to the new career I choose – writing. But I recognize with some considerable surprise that the happiness I am feeling arises not from the doing of the writing, but from my freedom from the need to justify the doing of it. I think I have finally found ‘home’ – a state of being which is independent of the concept of deserving, within which whatever I choose to do with my time and energy will prove to be the right thing for me to be doing.

It isn’t surprising that a major shift in how I approach current activities could cause subconscious stress, and hence digestive upset. I do want to be careful that I don’t use my physical state of well-being (or lack thereof) as a measure of my success in making this transition, since I know that the physical takes much longer to change than does the emotional, which in turn takes much longer than the spiritual. What can be grasped in a moment of enlightenment can take years to fully manifest on the physical.

What matters is that first willingness to recognize that a shift is not only necessary but has in fact occurred. And to allow an unexpected welling of emotion, as well as the uncomfortable gripping of pain, to mark a happy transition from a limited state of (earned or deserved) being, to simply Being.

Tags: adages, balance, graduations, Happiness, My Life, parental conditioning, Robert Frost, self-acceptance, spiritual development, UWC-USA
Posted in life wisdom, the writing experience | 4 Comments »

Unlearning

June 30, 2013

For the last twelve months I’ve been taking a Ba Gua class from the wonderfully skilled man who also gives me acupuncture treatments. I’ve used acupuncture as my primary form of medical care for more than 40 years, and have been cared for by a number of able practitioners over that time. Without question, John Mince-Ennis is the best of them all. He’s a gentle and effective teacher as well.

I began my physical-activity life as a dancer, studying both modern and Thai classical styles, with an occasional ballet technique class thrown in for its discipline. I’ve also been a horseback rider, European rather that western-style, and a hiker. In later years, I’ve learned a 27 form Tai Chi pattern, taken a couple years of Tae Kwan Do, and finally found Ba Gua. Also a ‘soft’ martial art, like Tai Chi, Ba Gua works on realigning the fascia, resulting in a suppler yet strengthened body, improved balance, and overall improved health. Used as a fighting form of active martial art, it is both beautiful and effective, with a distinctive circular, coiling and uncoiling movement.
The challenge for me in learning Ba Gua is in fact not learning something new, but unlearning something old. My body has had many decades to practice moving in ways instilled from as long ago as those first dance classes at age 8. Legs turned out from the hips, knees over toes, balance maintained by tight control from the core (abdomen) which is pulled in and up. All movement (including the graceful lifting of an arm) originates from that same central place.

An overlay of how to swing through with a tennis racket, was added during my sojourn in Saigon. I had no language in common with the pro, so he placed himself behind me, reached around and grasped the racket with me, then moved my body through the correct motions. An amazingly effective and enduring type of instruction. I don’t run to meet a ball any longer, but placed where it will bounce, my body still knows the right way to connect with a solid swing.
None of which is of use – indeed all of which must be refuted – as I learn Ba Gua. Instead of pulling my core in and up, I must “hang from the one point” at the crown of my head, sink my lower body into a semi-seated stance and relax the middle, “rotating waist inside of hips”. Toes are slightly pointed inward (a similar slightly pigeon-toed walk is understood to be natural to some Amerindian tribes) in direct contradiction to my ingrained habit of toeing out. A set of twenty-four “gao” – exercises – seem to begin with arm movements, but have the effect of teaching the inner core new ways to move. In other words, where my dance training initiated movement in the belly, from where it moved outward, the beginner’s instruction in Ba Gua initiates movement in the limbs, from where it works inward to retrain the fascia.

My teacher on the MasterPath speaks of a similar, necessary unlearning of all our habits of mind and unconscious ways of believing, thinking, behaving – in order to uncover the truth of Being. Neither process of unlearning the old, to acquire the new, is easy. Both take years of instruction, diligent practice and, above all, the willingness to change. Odd, how persistently we cling to old ways of doing and being, even in the face of ample evidence that our circumstances have changed, and we should change also.

Staying at an acquaintance’s home recently, I looked for silverware in the drawer closest to the sink. Instead I found storage containers. My hostess directed me to a different drawer to find a spoon to stir my tea.
“Why did you look in the drawer by the sink?”
“Because that’s where the silverware would be in my own kitchen.”
After a pause to reflect, I had to add, “That’s where my mother stored the silverware.”
Decades later, I felt disoriented because something as mundane as the location of a silverware drawer was not in accord with my conditioning!

Beliefs about ourselves, about how to relate to others, about what aspects of ourselves we should identify with – these concepts are so ingrained that few of us are required to examine them unless we experience a traumatic shattering of our sense of self from which we must work to find our way back to wholeness. Or perhaps if we start on a path of spiritual exploration.

The challenge, the excitement, the work and the reward of MasterPath lies – for me – in being asked to examine every single assumption, expectation, concept and belief in my life. Most especially, it challenges patterns of being which are buried so far down in the unconscious that I have no recognition of their existence, until some circumstance or life event pushes me to bring the assumption into awareness, to be contemplated and understood for what it is (or is not).

Just as my body is being renewed by the process of unlearning/relearning that is Ba Gua, my essence is being redefined by the unlearning/relearning of what I Am – of what it means to Be, to Know, to See.

On all levels, the unlearning/relearning is hard work, but amazingly rewarding!

Tags: Ba Gua, balance, coordination, lessons, MasterPath, spiritual development
Posted in life wisdom | 4 Comments »

What Do I Know?

June 22, 2013

Many, many years ago when I was young and adventurous and poor, I earned money for my own art classes by modeling for a sculpture class. I took the same pose (stretched out on a sofa, my lower half prone but twisted at the waist so that my upper half was facing sideways, an arm bent to prop my head on my hand) for 90 minutes each week, over a six week period. During breaks (I wasn’t, mercifully, expected to hold the pose for more than 15 minutes at a time) I walked around the class, looking at the students’ interpretations of me. Quite apart from differences in their skill levels as sculptors, I quickly learned that how they saw me was directly influenced by their relationships to their own bodies. Heftier sculptors tended to perceive my body as longer and leaner than I knew it to be. One very slim woman with a boyish figure exaggerated my curves into a Rubens-like voluptuousness. And the male students revealed the areas of the female form most of interest (sexual attraction?) to them – breasts, thighs, buttocks – in the way they emphasized these aspects of their work.

The lesson – that who we are influences what we see – has stayed with me, and been reinforced in a variety of ways since those early days. It has become salient again recently, in the form of critiques I’ve received of my novel, Like Dust Devils Through a Card House. In particular, readers respond to my character Sylvie in ways clearly dictated by their own life experiences. One who has had a hard time overcoming anger was particularly disturbed by the way Sylvie clings to anger as a motivator. Another asked the reasonable – to her – question why Sylvie would seek out sex when she’s in pain or when feeling weak. I myself, writing the first draft, was somewhat dismayed to discover that of the three women in the story, the point of view and main character had to be Sylvie, the one I personally like the least. But I know her, I know too many people like her to not recognize her as a neighbor, a co-worker, a very real example of a set of choices about how to negotiate a life.

I appreciate the thoughtful critiques which question what I’ve created, because they push me to clarify, refine, or broaden my explication of Sylvie’s character. Adding detail that will reveal her motivations and enable these readers to understand (if not agree with or like) Sylvie, strengthens my story. This rewrite also requires that I get ever ‘more real’ with myself about the experiences and observations on which I draw to create character.

“That’s what actors do as well,” stated one of the reviewers whose comments were most helpful between drafts two and three. “We have to put what we know of ourselves into a role, to understand the characters we’re playing and bring them alive.”

Meanwhile, I continue to be amazed, sometimes dismayed, by the characters that appear in my stories. “Where on earth did she come from?” was my question about the lead in my most recent short story. I began with an idea about links in a chain mirroring the phases of a life and ended up with a young woman who experienced ostracism growing up, was orphaned young, now lives alone on a boat and experiences being assaulted. She is no one I’ve ever known, yet in the piling of cause upon effect upon new cause, she is every one of us. What I don’t know is why such challenged, tortured or difficult characters so often ‘take over’ my stories and demand to be heard!

If I reason from my premise above, I am presumably revealing aspects of my own view of the world. But I don’t see myself as having experienced such a painful, twisted life. Yes, there were difficulties, yes my mother had severe emotional problems that made for a dysfunctional childhood, yes I was uprooted and relocated repeatedly until I was in my late twenties – and yes I have read about many types of personality and culture, have studied psychology, worked in prisons, met a great variety of people in quite a wide variety of places. But I don’t see the world as hurtful, something to be afraid of or to fight against, nor as a place that creates and targets victims. So why do these types of characters appear so often in my stories?

I don’t know.

I do know the truth of “what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Especially when that first practice of deception is of ourselves. Unexamined motives, ill-considered actions, un-reviewed decisions, unrepented errors pile upon one another into tangled webs not just of deceit but also of pain and loss. Observing life around me, I have learned that much of this tangle exists just below the surface, and that my choice to look for the good in others, to “seek that of God in every one” as the Quakers phrase it, does not prevent me from seeing the coils of deceit and misrepresentation into which too many people snarl their lives.

How I wish it were not so!

I would far rather live in a world of people who are aware of themselves and their needs, and who feel secure enough to express those needs and seek openly for their fulfillment. I am coming to realize that my choice of mysteries for light, escapist reading is largely the result of my wish for life in a simpler, more straightforward ethical world. And I also realize that my inability, at least up to this point, to write such a mystery is the result of my recognition that the world I live in, the world I know, is neither simple nor straightforward.

When complex, angry, or tangled characters emerge in my writing, I am in fact following the dictate to “write what you know.” Hmmm. Let me contemplate that fact. Because I also know loving and tenderness, and caring people who devote themselves to improving circumstances for others. So I should know, as well, how to write engaging, positive, “good” characters. I do hope one will spring forth the next time I start a story!

Tags: acting, adages, art classes, characterization, critiques, modeling, writing challenges
Posted in life wisdom, the writing experience | Leave a Comment »

Laughing in the Rain

June 18, 2013

I’m told, and I acknowledge, that I tend to be too serious. I do have a sense of humor, but it’s of the subdued rather than the rowdy kind. Word play (though not necessarily puns) can get me laughing until the tears flow, and I chuckle readily at Maxine’s wise pronouncements. None of which has anything really to do with the topic of this post – or does it? I’ve written about the drought, about living with wildfire, and now I want to write about the visible effects of the one hour of rain and hail that came down at my place last week.

Just a short time ago, on the United World College campus nearby, the students put on a show to entertain their parents and friends the evening before graduation. A brief but strong shower began just as the show was ending, and the audience came out of the auditorium to a covered patio overlooking lawns and the parking area. We locals ran out into the rain, laughing and dancing, delighted to get wet, while the visitors stood in huddles and worried about the plans for an outdoor graduation the next morning. We were right to reassure them; the graduation proceeded under sunny skies.
Now as I write, I am looking out my window at pasture land, still mostly brown but streaked here and there with green. New shoots that never made it up in the spring are showing themselves just in time for the summer solstice. There are thunderclouds overhead and storm warnings being broadcast on the evening news.
Meanwhile, on my kitchen windowsill, a small pot contains a sprouting avocado pit whose shoot is growing almost visibly. Each morning the small plant is an inch or more taller. I set three pits in water several months ago, hoping that I’d get one to grow. If you’ve tried to start an avocado, you know it’s not easy to get one to take root. In 1992 I succeeded, ending eventually with a tree that reached to my 8 foot ceiling. About two years ago, the tree succumbed to root rot and died. Now I’m trying again. An optimist, I see my started plant put out its daily inches, and I cheer it on to become a worthy successor to the old tree.
What does growing an avocado tree have to do with humor? The optimism of setting a seed to sprout, knowing maybe one in ten will do so; the optimism of watching for green shoots in a barren landscape after a single hour of rain; and the optimism of expecting blue skies for a graduation all reveal the kind of humor I find funny. Lighthearted commentary on the foibles of nature (human and otherwise), I find funny – like a joke my spiritual teacher told at a seminar. Apparently an older student complained of suffering from furniture disease. My teacher hadn’t heard of such an illness and asked about its symptoms. “That’s when your chest falls into your drawers.”
What I don’t find funny – but apparently many people do – is put-down humor, such as made Don Rickles famous. When I taught inside the New Mexico Penitentiary, I learned a verbal sparring the men called capping – a sort of focused one-upping that depends on witty use of words and images. Like teasing, it is funny so long as it doesn’t cross a line and become mean-spirited. The challenge is to know where that line lies. It moves. It has no more substance than a line in the sand in a windstorm.
There’s a line between drought and wetness. We certainly haven’t crossed it, barely even taken a half step in that direction, although in the last week we’ve received as much moisture as in the past eight months combined. Enough to put us on target for maybe six inches total for the year. Definitely not the end to a drought. There are people who, as soon as we get a rain, are convinced a turning point has arrived. They want to start washing their cars and watering lawns, demanding that water restrictions be lifted. I think of them standing firmly on the wrong side the common sense line. Though why we call good sense common, when it’s as rare as rain in the desert, I’ll never understand.
Some of the experts currently prognosticating are saying we are not in a drought at all but rather returning, after fifty years of abnormally wet weather, to the more usual level of rain and snow fall in this region. They get their information from tree rings and other natural sources. They were already providing this explanation a few years ago, when the pinyon trees around Santa Fe were attacked and destroyed by bark beetle. The trees had moved into lower altitudes than they have historically been found, apparently because of the wetter conditions, and now are subject to stress and attack in the renewed cycle of dryness. I recall the explanation being offered. I don’t recall many people listening. I do have amusing visions of pinyon trees as an army moving across a moonlit terrain, an inch each night so as not to be noticed, until they arrived at those lower altitudes where they set up camp. Sadly, they were not able to retreat back to safety in the same stealthy manner. Their dead copses still litter the landscape.
It isn’t funny to live without water, although such a situation provides ample material for jokes. In Saigon, in my childhood, we had running water for only an hour a day, during which we stored what we’d need in large vats. A shower (of which several were needed daily due to the steamy heat) consisted of pouring a bucket of water over oneself, soaping up, then pouring another bucket to rinse. Unless it was the rainy season. Then we could easily take the soap, strip and go stand in the garden to get a lovely soaking and cleansing. Visitors hearing about a garden shower might ask, “baby or bridal?” Locals (we were kids, remember) would giggle as we replied, “neither.”
I’m convinced a sense of humor is essential to living – with climate extremes, with other people, within society. Without humor, who would have the patience to start ten avocado pits and see only one take root? Who would continue to vote, expecting the next batch of politicians to somehow be different? Who would dance in the rain?
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Ima
Ima who?
Ima doing my best to make you smile.

Tags: climate change, drought, pinyons, plants, Saigon
Posted in environment, humor, life wisdom | 1 Comment »

Finding Balance

June 15, 2013

Recently, two quite different groups have asked me to write articles regarding local events. One project is a report on a fun activity of the local amateur “ham” radio (ARES) community in which, on Sunday, June 23rd similar groups all around the country compete to see which one can make the highest number of successful radio contacts, from a field location and “off the grid” of power supply to the radios. San Miguel ARES will be up in the Rockies, above the village of Pecos, running radios off solar panels. ARES functions as a network of radio operators who provide backup communications in emergencies. The San Miguel group coordinates with the county’s Office of Emergency Management, to assure communications in case of wild fires or other catastrophes, more of which seem all but certain to affect us in the near future. The group provided invaluable communication service already, for the Pecos/Tres Lagunas fire. Its members are part of the county emergency planning effort, addressing in particular the concern that a wildfire in the Gallinas watershed could contaminate the water supply to the City of Las Vegas (NM, not NV!) for years to come. The Pecos wildfire (now close to complete containment) came near enough to cause a separate fire-fighting crew to be assigned to protect the watershed.

My second writing project is an essay about the impact on local farmers of the drought, and the seeming failure by the Las Vegas City Council to respond to the threat of severe water shortage. “We won’t run out of water, we never have,” as one councilman put it. Well, we’ve never been in such a severely depleted water situation at this time of year, either. Less than one inch of moisture (including the rain in early June) since the start of 2013.

The group asking for the water story began as an anti-fracking coalition in San Miguel County. I live a short mile from the border between San Miguel and Mora counties. Mora, one of the poorest counties in the state of New Mexico – one of the poorest, probably, in the nation – has recently made a name for itself by passing an outright ban on all fracking activity within its borders, despite a state law that grants oil and gas exploration extraordinary freedoms.

The San Miguel group has begun to morph into a broader coalition intent on protecting water, air and earth. It includes some of the area’s historic ‘rabble-rousers’ intent on overcoming apathy and implementing needed environmental and social protections. They have a challenging task, given the historical perspective reflected not only by the city councilman, but by the populace of the region as a whole. When you live in an area so poor that economic recession in the larger scope of the nation goes relatively unnoticed (not even the Great Depression had much impact on daily life in this area), a survivor mentality takes hold. Little is perceived as likely to alter ‘how things are’ unless or until the threat becomes so immediate (as with the effects fracking would have on Mora County) that it becomes tangible in enough lives for there to be a protest.

When groups face seeming unconcern, they tend to take a confrontational approach. Understandable, though not necessarily the route with the best chance of success. I spent the better part of a day going line by line through a twenty-plus page document, the proposed Oil and Gas Regulation for San Miguel County, finding every place where the wording was inadequate and needed to be changed in order to prevent fracking from destroying my home environment. I provided appropriate alternate wording in my edit. I handed out written copies of my work, and it took me every second of my allotted fifteen minutes of testimony to the County Commission, to specify all the changes the proposed law needs. It did not feel good to be told, by an anti-fracking group member as I stepped away from the podium, that “all I was doing was rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic.”

That person’s insistence that only an outright ban like the one in Mora County, was an acceptable decision, probably represents her belief that nothing short of blunt confrontation will “work” to bring about change. I, on the other hand, tend to look for a middle ground, a compromise, which achieves protections and feels like a ‘win’ for both sides. I’ve been trained that way, and perhaps – as a Libra – already oriented that way from birth. It remains to be seen, in what is shaping up to be a serious legal battle, whether Mora’s outright ban will be more or less successful than San Miguel’s pending new proposal, similar to Santa Fe County’s enacted ordinance, which tightly regulates fracking. It remains to be seen just how effective confrontational activism can be at overcoming generations – nay centuries – of a “duck your head, go quietly about your life and survive” mentality. And it remains to be seen how quickly the small San Miguel ARES group can again organize itself to be of service in an upcoming crisis.

What is certain is that both groups are addressing a serious threat to the safety and well-being of all of us in this area. I saved my home from wildfire in 2001, when we had our own conflagration, without resources to help us fight it because those resources were all focused on the larger fire around Los Alamos, burning at the same time. With power turned off, so wells were unavailable, all of us neighbors used what we had -two backhoes and a grader, rakes, shovels and huge amounts of energy – to prevent the fire from reaching a 5000 gallon propane tank. Four homes and a barn were lost, but a wider community of twenty or more families was saved.

What is equally certain is that finding a balance between wants and needs, between gaining income and saving a rural lifestyle, between “the big guys and the little guys”, between confrontation and concession, between use of or destruction of the water, air and earth upon which we all depend – finding balance is essential.

Tags: ARES, drought, fracking, wildfire
Posted in environment, life wisdom | 2 Comments »

Harbingers

June 9, 2013

Heading up my driveway, on my way to town, I glanced toward the barn and there, nestled against the weather wood boards, were six glowing dandelion flowers. A small jolt of joy ran through me and I greeted them as I passed – and then laughed to myself as I considered the huge expense of time and money commonly directed, in other areas of the country, to the eradication of these small blossoms I was so happy to see.

Everything is relative! In my deeply drought-stricken area of the high-mountain southwest, anything that manages to flower is a delight, even what some people consider to be a pernicious, pestilential weed. Up to the morning I saw the dandelions, we had had just a smattering of rain – what here we call a six inch rain – six inches between drops when one looks at the ground upon which the moisture has settled. We had a couple of these ‘scattered showers’ over the month of May, but not enough in one place or at one time to seem to have any effect. Certainly the foresters report our mountain trees are at an all-time low level of moisture content, and ripe for continued wildfire explosions. The grasslands remain dun-colored, or silvery, where last year’s dry stems still stand. Much of my pasture, and that uphill from me, is just brown – bare earth with nothing showing. No new spring green. So those six sunny flowers are a welcome hint that the scant raindrops were not totally for naught.

Fire exploded, smoke choked, and then – miraculously – we got dumped on, hail initially, enough to make everything winter white, and then a decent rainstorm two days in a row. Because of the lack of plant life to catch the water, it turned into rivers, cutting channels in the pasture and bringing a load of silt down across my front walk from the hillside behind my house. Mud everywhere. Judging by the reaction of my dogs, glorious mud, to be splashed through and liberally distributed around their sleeping porch. It is drying and apt to become dust once again, as the weather is predicted to be once again hot and dry for the coming weeks. Maybe, just maybe, nonetheless, we may see tenacious wildflowers later in the season.

For now, I have to accept that natural color is mostly limited to what I see on the feathered visitors to my bird feeder. I’m a bit of a bird watcher, but not a bird identifier, so I can’t list the ones that visit, only note when there are new species that I haven’t seen here before. Perhaps because of the drought? At the moment the feeder is dominated by small, familiar, finch-like brown birds with red above their beaks and down their breasts. They make me aware that I have not seen robins so far this year – but have been startled to see bright Baltimore orioles, which are only occasional visitors to this area. Doves and scrub jays routinely fly in and push the smaller birds aside. Now a raven has sent the doves and jays scattering to the ground, to collect what they can find that has dropped over the edge of the feeder.

As I write, clouds are building again, and there’s at least a hint of promise they may coalesce into the dark grey which promises rain. We used to see these clouds, beginning in early July and appearing all summer. They indicated a monsoon pattern that brought us our summer rains. We’d wake to a clear, sunny sky and know we needed to do outdoor activities – go for a horseback ride, weed the garden, get laundry out on the line – finished before lunch time, when the clouds would gather and bless us with moisture. It’s been ten years or more since we’ve had to time activities to the weather. Ten years, instead, of sniffing the air for early signs of fire, of watching the sky anxiously, as wisps of white turned to grey – not wet grey but burning grey. Weeks of smoky air, damaging to breathe, forcing us to stay inside with doors and windows closed despite high daytime heat. Few homes in my area have air conditioning because we’ve been accustomed to daily breezes and cool night time temperatures to regulate the indoor atmosphere.

Maybe this season will be different? More like “it used to be”? That row of smiling mini-suns by the barn, and the rains of these past few days, suggest the possibility of a break in the drought, in the fires, in the smoke and danger and loss. It’s going to be a big year for cicadas on the East Coast. Might we hope for it to be a big year for thunder clouds and rains out here in the far-too-dry Southwest?

Tags: climate change, drought, wildfire
Posted in life wisdom | 3 Comments »

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