I went through a period of darkness like the seasons.
I didn’t realize that I had until today when through the rain I felt like God descended on my shoulders and lightened me in the sweetest way. I again felt the opening energy of spring on the way, the imminence of sunshine and new growth. What a small battle the winter has been, beautiful, but a little tormented! I sense the final sighs of winter on the way.
I just found this while cleaning out some papers. It’s from May of 2005, I guess some things were stirring earlier than I thought. blips on the radar…
“We all sat on the Air-bart bus to the Oakland airport, the sun was going down in a grayish peach sky; college students going home. You can tell us around holidays, packs of us headed to the airport in college sweatshirts and hats and on the phone making plans for the evening with the friends back home, looking around, thinking or dreaming the distracted thoughts of travel. Nobody talks, just slides in their hard plastic seats thinking themselves home while we drive into the fields of cars laid out before the air traffic control tower and the open sky. I always wondered why people didn’t really talk to each other on this trip. Seems obvious we’re all going to the same school. I guess I could say something, but it doesn’t seem welcome…My grandfather just died and right now, I could be screaming, laughing hysterically, maniacally even, jittering around in my seat making everyone very uncomfortable. I kind of like the idea, but instead I can’t open my mouth, or I won’t open my mouth. I feel like one of those damn plaster lawn ponies in a foot of ice plant in front of the weird Italian food restaurant we’re about to pass, sitting underneath the flight path gathering soot with a frozen expression plastered on my face. Are all these people buried underneath layers of hiding and numbness? Do they know who they are, more than I do, or are we all simply pretending? Do we prop up two-dimensional concepts of identity cobbled together from other people’s ideas of who we are? Somewhere in this version of me that is trying to be a good person, sitting quietly and not speaking, I think there is actual good in me, god in me, that is starting to optimistically bubble through the crevices and out of me. It feels like the life I was born to live, the life we were all born to live, with no pretending, with crying, laughing, shaking, smiling, and gasping for breath to be alive.”
the sky exploded with color tonight. Not ostentatious color like a vivid orange, red and pink spread in clouds all over the sky. But all blues swirled and their progeny imagined new colors, and those bleed together as well…
and I wondered if it were possible for me to be so deeply grounded, so fully in the earth, and yet have my spirit so high up above the tail lights, up in the infinite shades of twilight blue. I am taking off, or settling in, and my spirit just blew apart to corners of the sky, dematerialized…
Later, I am with two very handsome, very very sweet, men. They are both, respectively, a foot taller than me. I feel very small. They are good-naturedly walking over to the bar to buy us drinks, they are laughing and slapping each other’s backs, they are talking talking talking, and my body is completely relaxed into an expansive feeling of beautiful sadness that is making it hard for me to enjoy talking or listening. My body is calling me to be with it, there is almost a drug-like quality to how textured it all feels. I am at peace here, there isn’t anywhere else I want to be..
Driving home I am fantasizing about heading up to the lost coast for a two week ramble up and down. I am thinking about the rain and the weather. I am thinking about the storms, I am thinking about being alone. I am thinking about getting angry. I am thinking about breaking things. I am thinking about writing and writing to my heart’s content. I am thinking about silence, and walking, and the sound of the ocean, and those nights where the weather breaks and the moon is full and it is pouring bright beams through dark clouds. On those nights there is a power that you can feel viscerally in the air; it makes you look around in awe and fear as the wildness of a place without people trembles under the fast changing sky scape. I am thinking about letting go and having a vacation inside of my own peace and quiet. A stillness that I carry with me and act from all the time, and yet get to spend too little time fully inside of.
Part of this is a big tired fuck you that almost immediately turns into a deeply reverential thank you once I am out there. When I arrive with my feet on the ground and sleeping under sky I let the earth take the things I don’t want to carry anymore. The earth and the water can take those forces and turn them into waves, sunshine, rain, and the energy that makes a hummingbird’s heart beat so fast.
I go outside to be small, powerless, powerful, and free.
transformation
I am walking slowly around my apartment, picking things up, putting them away, placing dishes in the sink, picking up the sheets left here, the tea pot by the bed, I am walking quietly so as not to disturb the tomb like silence that permeates the air. It is a very pregnant silence, a thick silence, the silence after laughter, and good conversation, and joyful touching. The silence that follows when delicious moments like these are released with an I’m sorry. When people who like each other can’t do it, when it isn’t right, there is a deadening silence to it. It is not boisterous like an argument or shallow like a fickle change of mood, it is…resigned.
I’m going to be very honest, it pulls all my triggers. The echoes of past relationships forgone fill the air too. The question failure? lingers in the back of my throat. Did I bring this on? Is it something about me? Humbly, I have no answers to these questions except for I hope not, and all I can do is try.
Peace and understanding are here too, they sit silently next to the resignation and the feeling of aloneness. Together the four sit in a row, legs crossed, slightly apologetic eyes on me, watching me put things back together in a painfully mundane way… as though they are family in a waiting room at the hospital or the dentist’s office. They watch without judgment, just…patience, and silence.
Some one I work with came to my “office” today and asked if I would be interested in picking up some extra hours in a month or so because the woman who I occasionally work next to would not be coming back. It seemed like a good idea; my grandmother has recently told me that she is unable to contiue supporting me through school and I need to supplement my income somehow. This would probably do that. Five minutes after this conversation my office mate comes back from the kitchen and tells me they aren’t renewing her position so she’s going to have to look for another job…Can I take her work when she needs it? Do I have a choice? If I were to turn it down somebody else would take it, they had decided not to renew her before they came to offer it to me…But is this just rationalization? I’m not sure if there is a right, or more right decision in this situation….
It’s not uncommon for this to happen with contract work. In fact, I was in the same position when I worked for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. When my contract came up they decided they wanted someone who worked on campus and they didn’t renew my contract. Granted I was fine with the position ending, but in my mind it didn’t have anything to do with the next person coming into the position, it was between me and my employer. I would have had no bitterness towards that next person. But that is me, am I an anomaly? Is this just more rationalization?
In days lost wandering the landscape of new learning, writing papers, immersed in words, sometimes I look out the window at the sky, the green things wavering in the day, the clouds, and it seems I’m outside of time. It’s going so fast and so slow, and sometimes time disappears altogether. I long for a ride on my bike in sunshine. A moment of worry crosses, am I giving up life to learn? No. But in successive days where going to the bathroom and eating are my breaks and I can’t remember when I put these clothes on it is easy to forget that it is not always like this.
Most of my life I didn’t understand what people were talking about when they talked about heart. It seemed like a sentimental and poetic conceit, a symbol for a certain type of altruistic or touchy-feely kind of thinking. It wasn’t that I acted mean or selfishly, I was the same person, but I understood things in logical terms: helping people was about justice as an objective standard and worthy goal, not compassion and love.
Lofty goals can be tyranny too when they lack the animation of true feeling.
Somewhere along the line I was blessed to meet someone…he didn’t accept my perfectly reasoned and logical answers to his questions about my dreams. He asked me, “What else?” In this single question and his tone he transmitted to me the undeniable knowledge that indeed there was something else and that he had experienced it. The awareness dawned that I was indeed longing for something more, but that I had no framework for understanding what that something more could be. It seemed to be beyond the tightly reasoned world of cause, effect, and logical progressions. I was truly confused, at a loss, and humbled. I longed for it yet my brain was no help. Whatever it was, it wasn’t stored away up there waiting for me to discover it through deduction and intellectual conquest.
I’m not sure how it happened but another awareness dawned that there was a tension, a tightness in my chest. I had heard of chakras and one day musing aloud to a roommate I mentioned that I thought my heart chakra was blocked. It was said in the way someone might pronounce a long word that they’d never heard said aloud before. I had no idea what I was talking about. With my forehead and nose crinkled I entered conversational territory that was foreign. In a halting tone my hypothesis clawed it’s way out of my mouth punctuated by question marks as though it was a telegraph correspondence;
“Uh, I think there’s energy, stuck? in my chest? I don’t know why. But sometimes I get short of breath? something with the heart-chakra? I don’t know what that is though. I think I need a heart-opening? I have no idea what I’m talking about, but something is stuck…in my heart. I think.”
This conversation was amusing to me even as it was taking place because I was really muddling through towards something unknown informed only by a longing and questions that I had no answers for.
It must have been amusing for my housemate too because she was a massage therapist and probably knew exactly what was going on. She asked if I wanted to see if it would come out. I was a little afraid, but mostly skeptical, but I said okay anyway hoping it could be something easy and I’d be fixed! If I only knew. She took me to the living room, had me lay down on my back, knelt behind my head, and asked me to breath with her while she held some pressure points on my chest.
We lived in an old Victorian house that we both loved. There were eleven foot ceilings and the living room windows all faced South and filled the house with bright light all day. I lay on the floor bathed in all that fresh January morning sunlight. I was looking up at the maroon ceiling and chandelier, breathing, and thinking “this isn’t going to work, this isn’t going to work, this isn’t working.” And suddenly from a part of my body that had never spoken before I said “But I really want it to work.” That voice was strong, clear, and full of the longing I had tasted before. I did hesitate for a split-second, but how can I describe this? The voice that said “But I really want it to work”, that voice resonated with me, a part of me I was unfamiliar with but hungry for. In a way I chose to go with that voice, but in another way the voice was simply me, it was as though I had emerged, I didn’t feel like that other person anymore. I felt like this raw, shivering, wondrous, thing. I pulled these onion layers off all at once from over my head as though I was watching it happen, but it was me doing it. I saw a small new person pushing those layers off, as though coming out of a really cumbersome chrysalis. It stepped out, and I was different. Suddenly images were flashing through my mind. Images from my families past pains, my dad losing his father, my brother losing his first love, my cousin feeling rejected in our friendship, my mom working in a job that didn’t satisfy her, all these painful moments of isolation, abandonment, all these desires to be loved, to be held, ran through my mind and my body shook with crying. As I saw how each of them, and me, had contributed to our own suffering I began to laugh and see a strange kind of intricate beauty, our mutual humanity. I saw the river in the om chapter of Siddhartha where all the sounds blend together and he realizes that they are all the same.
After the crying, and the laughing, I got very cold and began to shake and my housemate took me outside to sit in the sun on our front steps. I had literally never seen the world before. Every sensation was entirely new, every color, every sound, the birds, the breeze, the sun, the color of leaves, the person in front of me. I was laughing and crying at everything, amused, childlike, in awe of humans and their subtleties of speaking, interacting, feeling, I had never experienced any of it before. I went through all that I had been carrying and I told my housemate, with eyes wide with amazement that I couldn’t do it anymore. That I couldn’t help them, not in that way. That I could love them, but they were on their own journeys and I couldn’t be the person I imagined they wanted me to be anymore. I felt very strongly that I my most important job was to learn how to carry the soul that was inside of me. I couldn’t go to work for days, and in reality, I never went back to work. I gave notice within a month, and two months later I was done there. But that day she and I set sail by foot. I couldn’t even ride a bike, everything was so vivid the bike would have been too fast. I wanted to plant a tree. I could barely eat. I was so awake I was almost paralyzed by it. I spoke slow too, it must have been annoying to some people!
I was so afraid that I would lose this opening that I made several immediate and drastic changes to my life. I began to rise with the sun to meditate, write, and read, and touch base with myself to see what was “alive” for me that day. I would spend from approximately 6 am to 10 am in silence with myself examining my thoughts, my actions, and most importantly my feeeeelllllings. I wanted thorough change. I went through my closet, my books, my music, my stuff, my friends, my obligations, everything that didn’t feed my heart or resonate with me, out it went. I quit my job. I knew that this would be ongoing and cyclical, and to this day it is ongoing.
Looking back I see that this event is the central event in my life, other than being born. There was life before, and LIFE!! after. The path has been incredibly winding, and shot through with magic, love, mystery, beauty, and all kinds of things that I would have bah-humbugged just two years ago. It’s also been full of mistakes and pain, that I honestly, and humbly, can only smile at in my desire to adore it all. I want this for everybody. I want this feeling of struggle, joy, peace, pain, sensitivity, humility, and hunger, I want this for everybody.
Since then I fell asleep again, last spring. I was caught in an idea of what I ought to be doing and what was good for me. I was in a relationship that I felt grateful for but that was no longer making me happy. But I felt committed to it and I couldn’t make the hard decision to leave it. So I stopped listening to my heart’s subtle messages about what happiness means. One day I was meeting with somebody for work. He told me that he had met with me because he saw something in me. And then he broke me open. He asked me over and over and over again what I loved, saying “no!” when he sensed that it wasn’t true. He asked me why I was doing what I was doing and gently led me to the realization that it was logic, and not my heart, that had led me down the path I was on, and that it was, once again, time to go back to the path of my heart.
Heart. What an incredible gift. Just no way to express the gratitude I have for each of those people that with their time, care, patience and love held my hand through the shaking and tearing down to build up. The same sense of gratitude for all the other people that pass in and out of my life, and for the blessing of getting to be alive in this magical and brilliant world. Oh.
Sometimes I get so frustrated with myself over my thoughts. It sounds schizophrenic to say, but do you ever hear yourself thinking something, and wonder… where the hell is that coming from? A romantic situation, a few months ago provides me with an example.
So, I already kind of knew that we’re weren’t right for each other, the writing was really huge across the wall, we’re in totally different places, need totally different things, etc. I, having seen this coming from 10 miles away, feel okay with it. In all honesty, I felt sorry for the guy. What he was going through and the tough stuff ahead? Hard, and heart-breaking. I wanted and still want him to take care of himself. For me? I want someone who, like me, has worked through the last painful parts of whatever their old relationship was, knows how to take care of himself, and wants to be present and having fun with me now. Self-awareness is critical too, but that is another article.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to get those things in this situation because this gentleman had too much stuff occupying him emotionally to be able to offer much. This is not a criticism. Emotional trauma, especially the loss of relationship, can take a long time to process. So, I really wanted him to be present with whatever he’s going through. ANYWAY.
So what’s the problem? I’m writing a paper and my brain is calling him to see if he wants to come over and watch a movie. Stop that! Bad for you! Bad for him! No! I say. But my brain, though it understands and feels the same way, is dead set on distracting me with ill-conceived fantasies. Ended many months ago? doesn’t even matter. Oh to be human, how amusing…and yet, this is how I know it’s time to make a point of meditating
On New Years day I went to a sweat lodge ceremony out in Ramona that I have been going to for several years now. It’s a pretty old place with big old oaks, eucalyptus trees, orchards, outdoor sculptures, mountains rocks flowers dogs chickens and all manner of life. And there’s a new home built where the old one burned in the fire two years ago.
Anyway, it’s beautiful. Wood, tile, stained glass, and a flowing sense of the outdoors welcomed in. The kitchen has one wall of doors that pull back completely and lead out to the brick patio. Every year after we feast and watch the sunset we tell coyote stories around a fire there. People arrive, place clothes in the round room, food in the kitchen, greet each other, wander the earth, visit the familiar spots and touch the ground that holds space for us here every six months.
Eventually Don calls us to circle. We sit on benches and chairs in a patch of green under the oaks. Don places those who speak for directions in the four “corners” and allows people to fill in the space, and find their places. Everyone takes noisemakers and uses them. It’s a beautiful circle with old friends, newcomers, children, young adults, the middle aged and always a few elderly. Under the open sky and those trees we go around one by one saying who we are, touching our connection to the place, and our intentions for the day. The act acknowledges the past that brought us here first, and the present that asks us to return again, honor this community, and seek something. Many people fast for the day.
The kiva itself is a wooden structure, that we built ourselves after it too burned in the fires. It sits on the ground above a dugout pit and around a stone bench that is covered with straw and sage leaves. Outside the kiva directly to the east in line with where the sun rises the fire blazes for at least a day in advance heating large rocks so that several inches thick when they split in the ceremony they are red hot to the core. Between the fire and the kiva is an altar with a few objects on it. Every object and every aspect of the ceremony has meaning that connects it to the way we believe the world works.
This year Don asked me to speak for the South. It is the first direction to speak after the creation story and the first stones are placed in the center of the kiva.
I was a little nervous about speaking for the South, though I had done it once before. The people who speak for the directions are there to set the container for the other participants, and it is a responsibility. When those who speak for the directions do well with what they hold, the circumstances are right for those inside to feel liberated to be vulnerable and open on their kiva journeys. We don’t know the specifics of what each person really needs, though we are all present when we set intentions, but when people feel safe, they can access deeper parts of themselves, heal more, be more honest with themselves, and share more authenticity with others. This energy builds and everyone shows up more fully. But for them to do that, I, and the others who speak, need to speak honestly and from the heart.
In the direction of the South we bring in our ancestors and families and we recognize the greater communities of which we are an integral part. Each of us has unique seeds inside us planted by the creator. Our job in this world is to tend to the growing of those seeds, for ourselves and for this greater community. Weeding the garden represents the repetitive act of soul maintenance that is giving up self-importance. And the integral relationship between giving up self-importance and being in right relationship with community (ancestors, family, future generations, etc.) is at the heart of the first round.
Why is it important to strive to give up self-importance? Self-importance interferes with our ability to see our accomplishments and failures as part of a fabric, and our skills and talents as servants of community. Self-importance is the coyote trickster and it shows up in the darnest places if we’re not paying attention, like when you’re talking about the importance of giving up self-importance, all the while feeling kind of self-important for getting to hold the lesson.
With each new chance to serve (chance to work, opportunity for “advancement”) self-importance rises, and that is totally normal, supremely human even. But if I’m unaware of self-importance when it arises in me, I am unable to be completely present and I lose some of the experience. I also don’t perform/create/think as well because I’m caught up in pride or thinking about what is special about what I get to do. Finally, though my intention is to serve, I don’t serve whatever I’m doing with every part of myself if ego is driving. Whatever the event, being caught up in the self-importance story interferes.
Giving up self-importance, the act of the South, isn’t like giving away a car that you don’t want anymore, though sometimes I wish it were that easy. And self-importance isn’t all bad either, as you might infer from the act of giving it up. Indeed, I think the return again and again to seeing it arise is part of what it means to be human, and it is a challenge that humbles me and brings me humor, patience, forgiveness, and thoughtfulness about my intentions. In developing my ability to notice self-importance I have been humbled to realize that it is a challenge that I will never overcome or be past, and that is in essence how much of life is. We act knowing that some things don’t change, yet it is right to struggle and act all the same.
I was deeply honored by Don asking me speak for the South. But of course, self-importance showed up all the same. And it distracted me, and gave me some anxiety, and in the end, again, it humbled me. I wasn’t able to fully let go of it by the time I was asked to speak, but I was aware of it and my desire was to serve, and I prayed that whatever was there wouldn’t interfere but could maybe be of service in some way. Perhaps that is all we can ever do, pray to serve well and move forward knowing we live in states of imperfection, all the while taking part in perfection…
