THE JOY OF SURRENDER

I've had for a long time a certain image when I think about surrender. I see myself pulling colorful silk ribbons out of my chest and throwing them up to a sunny sky as I walk along. I haven't exactly understood why this image should represent surrender. But it just occurred to me the image is about joy. Surrender brings joy. Joy comes with surrender.

THE AFTERMATH

It's been six weeks since a man broke into my house in the middle of the night. When I realized the dark shape at the door was a man, I was out of bed before I knew it, screaming, "Get out of here - get out of here." I punched him and pulled him toward the door. I managed to get the door open, pushed him out, shut and locked the door.
     I didn't call the police until the next morning and when I thought about it I realized I must have been in shock. But it didn't feel like what I imagined shock feels like - everything got quiet inside me, I moved slowly, bewildered, trying to solve a puzzle I didn't quite understand.
     I went to a party later that day; it didn't occur to me not to. I told a few people what had happened, talked about how astonished I was at my aggressive reaction, pure reflex. Naturally, they commiserated and as they did I nodded, reassuring them that I was all right.  I felt all right. Something had happened, now it was over and I moved on. It's true for the first few nights I slept with the light on, but my need to do that was very quickly was over. 
   I sometimes saw the moment when I realized that dark shape was a man. I tried to feel what I must have felt when I was screaming and punching him but there was no emotion attached to anything I was imagining. I didn't quite believe that the break-in had happened and I shook my head in amazement that I had actually managed to push the man out the door.
      A few days ago, I realized I was jumpy, literally jumping at every sound, even during the day. And I heard a lot of sounds - my senses were in overdrive and I couldn't quite relax.
     It took me a while to associate my being so on edge with the break-in. It just didn't seem likely that I'd been fine for weeks and now suddenly wasn't. But I kept seeing the dark form that turned into a man and I felt the fear that I didn't feel then.
     I googled the symptoms of PTSD. It can emerge a long time after the traumatic event. In women, it's most associated with a violent event. There is obsessive thinking, a reliving the event again and again. As I read, it made complete sense that I had PTSD. But I didn't want to tell anyone or tell myself that there was a label for what I was experiencing. PTSD sounded so melodramatic it embarrassed me. But I realized there was another feeling in me that had nothing to do with PTSD although it was set off by it. I was really embarrassed by my having any reaction at all. I wasn't supposed to be rattled by anything. I shouldn't be vulnerable. I expected I would rise above such petty feelings as fear. Slowly I recognized that was ridiculous and then it came to me. I was demanding I be a block of ice.
     

LOST

I've been reading about a man who got lost in a forest. He had only the roughest idea where he was meant to go and when he finally noticed he wasn't see any of the landmarks he'd been told about, he kept walking, convinced what he was looking for must be over the next ridge. And then the next. And the next. 
     It took him a long time to realize he was lost and that he'd been lost for hours. This is evidently typical of people who get lost. The brain has made a mental map of what is supposed to be where and even when there's evidence to the contrary it doesn't register right away.  Hold off creating a problem, the brain seems to say - until the realization of being lost finally bursts through. Even then, realizing you're lost doesn't necessarily mean you're going to stop and take stock; pushing on seems to be wired in some people's DNA. It's why lost children are more often found than adults; a child when tired has the good sense to sit down, to stay in one place and increase the chances of being found.
     This comes out of a book I love, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales. He gives many other examples of people who press on when there's clear evidence it isn't a good idea - experienced river rafters who plunge into a current well beyond safety limits, a group that climbs a rock wall in Yosemite despite getting a late start and not knowing the day's weather forecast, because they'd been planning the climb for weeks. Having set a plan in motion it's often difficult if not impossible to stop it, even when you ought to know better. But if the "reality" of being lost doesn't burst through your defenses, you're probably done for; those who do survive usually have seen the real state of things very quickly and can act on the reality. They're able to come into the moment, as it actually is. 
      Gonzales is writing about the psychology of those who survive physical disaster but the ideas and language are certainly a metaphor for all of life. In a sense, we're all living in that moment before we realize we're "lost." I think I know where I'm going and go along even though I also know that life is completely unpredictable and that the only constant is change. No wonder we all feel a certain existential anxiety, that creeping sense that we know nothing and don't have any solid ground to stand on.
     But there is something that can keep us from being overwhelmed by fear. It's our willingness, our readiness, to accept whatever new circumstances come. We can develop the great spiritual and psychological muscles of adaptability, which run on the faith that no matter what, we will be all right. 

MY SPIRITUAL AWAKENING - PART TWO

     Six months after I quit drinking, I was still in a fog. with the air so thick around me I had to consciously will myself forward in order to move through the day.  I was coming off tranquilizers as well as alcohol and, even though I knew how much I had ingested of each, I was still surprised by how affected my body was. I was so on edge I had to put a towel under the phone because even with the ringer turned low it still made me jump. My reading lamp was much too bright, but that didn't matter because I couldn't concentrate enough to read anyway. I lay on my bed most of the time, sending a constant stream of cigarette smoke up to the ceiling, blaming myself because I couldn't rouse myself to move, much less act. And I blamed myself, not for the past - I couldn't even begin to face that - but for not using this strange time to ponder Life's Significant Issues or come up with an interesting idea to explore. I couldn't take it in - that my drinking and using had actually done real physical things to me - and that stopping had only revealed the actual state of things. Surely, I hadn't really drunk and used that much?
     One day, bored with counting up all the times  
The Beatles mention the sun in their songs, which I assumed was because they were from a cold damp climate, and unable to work up an intense fantasy like the one in which I was the only person in the world who could save Marlon Brando, I was on my bed idly counting the ridges in the cottage cheese ceiling. My mind was blank, but not quiet; I could feel thoughts colliding below the surface as anxiety drove them forward. Then, something emerged: "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." It was the beginning of the 23rd Psalm. Why has that come into my mind, I wondered. I'm not religious. I have no use for the concept of God. Nonetheless, I tried to remember what came next - something about still waters and green pastures. I got up and opened my paperback Bible, which anyone who claims to be familiar with the western tradition ought to have.  Like Shakespeare.

     The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
     He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
     he leadeth me beside the still waters.
     He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths
     of righteousness for his name's sake.
     Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
     shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou 
     art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort
     me. Thou preparest a table before me in the 
     presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head
     with oil; my cup runeth over. Surely goodness
     and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
     life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
     forever.

I brought the book back to the bed and read the words slowly. Then I said them out loud, and read them again. Suddenly, I heard the voice of the poet who had written these lines, who is thought to be King David; I heard him, the man, clearly across the centuries. He was longing to feel safe and protected from want and danger and evil,; he wanted not to fear death.  I felt how writing those words helped him lessen his fear and existential dread. He and his poem were very alive, and I found  myself trying to imagine what it would be like to be starving and come to green pastures, or be thirsty and find still waters. I tried to imagine there actually was something in the world that could restore me to equilibrium. 
     Most of all, I felt David's yearning, and suddenly I felt the yearning in me. I had never allowed myself to feel it because to feel it was to be vulnerable, which for me had always meant weak; I was a well-defended fortress and the smallest chink in the fortifications would send everything crashing down. But now, here on my bed and the sheets I hadn't changed in weeks, my yearning for something to help me wasn't threatening. In fact, I felt my reaching out as an expansion, a golden ribbon flowing out of me to connect me to the world. For the first time, I understood it was part of the human condition. For the first time, I knew it was all right to recognize this part of me. For the first time, I wasn't afraid to allow myself to be human.

DREAMY

One morning, quite early and without the aid of an alarm clock, I will rise up cleanly from the dreary, dirty sheets of my unmade bed. Slipping my feet into warm soft slippers, drawing a crisp pressed robe around my smooth, rounded shoulders, I will enter my orderly kitchen and brew a cup of strong aromatic coffee, which I will sip as I read the morning newspaper, each section and the ads. I will do the crossword puzzle straight through with the exception of two unknown letters. I will dress, washing my face in sparkling water, combing my shiny lustrous hair, doing each task calmly, quietly, precisely. I will pack a small neat suitcase, mostly sweet-smelling, evenly-folded underwear and safely- packaged toilet essentials. Dressed and ready to depart, I will pause before my large, spotless mirror and I will be content with the self-contained image reflected there. Then, silently slipping my key in the lock, I will softly close the door behind me, listening as metal meets metal, joining absolutely, and I will take pleasure in this, knowing that such perfect union must be esteemed. I will go to my car, a little blue roadster, and I will place the suitcase securely on the rear seat. I will slip another well-made key in its one perfect opposite, and when the smoothly tuned engine springs into life, I will drive off and disappear forever.

     I will drive until nightfall, the only car on miles of unblemished concrete stretching rhythmically through silent green valleys and across rolling molded hills. I will come to a medium-sized city, discrete in its boundaries, in a region I have never been. I will drive through the heart of this city, permanently noting the location of various places of interest, but I will stop a bit removed from the center, somewhere on its perimeter, distanced from the clutter and noise of the heart. 

     I will find and rent, at a reasonable sum, a furnished room with kitchen in a boardinghouse once grand but now declined genteel. I will sleep that night between clean sheets, although not of the best quality. My head will rest comfortably on the supporting pillow beneath it and the covers will be pulled neatly and evenly across my chest, my arms on top of them at my sides. Imprecise sounds will filter through the heavy, old but newly laundered curtains,. and I will hear each one separately and trace its source and understand it. I will listen to those sounds and know them.

     In the morning, I will dress quickly and go out into the street. Around the corner from my new home, I will find a diner, painted gray with green plastic on the seats and counter. As I eat bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, I will search through the job ads listed in the local newspaper. By lunchtime, I will be employed as ticket-taker at the local movie house, or saleswoman at the five-and-ten. My employer will show me what exactly my job consists of, and at each step I will nod my head and firmly fix it in my brain, so that I need only do it once or twice for it to be automatic. I will begin that very day and at its end my employer and I will express our mutual satisfaction.

     I will stop on my return to my new home at a small neighborhood grocery to purchase the few things I will want - the usual staples, a flavorful tea, imported biscuits, a particularly thin slice of veal. As I enter the boardinghouse, its proprietor and I will nod to each other, smiling circumspectly, respecting the other's privacy. In my room, I will slip off my coat and hang it on a wide wooden hanger made especially for coats like mine. I will arrange the kitchen in the manner most convenient for me and then I will prepare my dinner. The cooking odors will permeate the room, adding to its warmth.

     I will eat this meal on a mahogany table set before the window and, as I slice and swallow precise bite after precise bite, I will view the street below. Two or three old men are quietly talking and enjoying the evening air. Occasionally, they look off down the street at a group of children playing with a ball. By the men's posture and the movements of their hands as they talk, I can tell they are good men who have lived good lives, and I can see that they watch the children with pleasure and not regret. A young man and woman, their arms around each other, come out of a house opposite and amble slowly out of sight, leaving behind the sound of a laugh. A woman appears in a doorway and calls to one of the children, a boy of eight, and when he runs to her she offers him a slice of freshly baked chocolate cake.

     As I finish my meal and the evening shadows lengthen and seep out into the night, I will smoke a cigarette and I will watch the delicate smoke trail up and out my windows, joining the fresh night air which cools my face. I will wash my few dishes, clean the sink and wipe the counter space. I will neatly fold the dishcloth with which I have dried the dishes, and drape it over a rack suitably placed over the sink.

     Drawing from my purse a new purchased book, the characters of which are old familiar friends, I will draw my feet up under me on my easy chair, so comfortable it seems made for the curve of my back and the line of my bottom. For an hour or two, while the night spends itself in comings and going, I will read this book, turning each page silently and watching it fall flat against its companions. Then, I will stretch luxuriously, close the book and place it on a small polished table. I will undress. Again between clean sheets, I will lie on my back in the darkness, although not for so long this night as the last, and I will hear the imprecise sounds and I will understand them.

     Each day and each night will be like this. My life will have shape and form. My needs and expectations and desires will coincide perfectly with what my life provides. I will have everything.

NO, I DON'T WANT TO

"No, I don't want to." I've been thinking about how often that's my first response to just about anything. No, I don't want to work. No, I don't want to go to that party. No, I don't want to wash those dishes. No, I don't want to leave the house. It's not all the time and I'm much better than I was, but I suppose I'll go to my grave - of course, I'll go to the grave, saying no, I don't want to. That last one doesn't count.
     Over the years, I've come at this No from many different angles. It's fear and insecurity, my fear that the world won't welcome me - and this even though I can objectively see the world has, by and large, been a welcoming place. My NO is rebelliousness - I won't do what you expect of me, what everyone else has to do. It's laziness - I'm lazy and for reasons I will never fathom I just can't get motivated.  The NO is my emotional anorexia, my willful and compulsive choice to not do all the things that would nourish me - to deny myself the pleasure of work, a clean house, the energizing stimulation of everything the world has to offer. Each of these angles has given me useful information and sometimes has seemed like the answer to it all. But over time I've learned that none of them are or ever will be the key that will open my way to a new self, the one who never says a self-destructive NO, the one who is utterly changed. Any change is a slow and steady accumulation of many insights, it requires patience, and I've learned to value the bits and pieces of forward movement, instead of riding right over them, robbing myself any satisfaction simply  because they haven't  brought instant and total transformation.
     If I believed in miracles, I'd say it's a miracle that I got on to myself in the first place. But somewhere along the line, in another very slow process, I became able to look at the truth inside me. I constantly assessed my actions, thought and feelings, but those assessments grew out of the kind of inhibiting self-consciousness that comes from feeling there's a camera watching my every move and the eyes behind it see that everything I do is somehow wrong. But here was a new kind of watching and in it I suspended all labels of right or wrong. Whatever I saw was only neutral information, not the revelation of a truth that doomed me. If my reflex reaction was it feel it as doom, I could pause, step back and tell myself it was information I needed if I was ever going to change. I had to know the place I was starting from. I had to take the risk.
     How did I learn there's space between "me" and what "I" think? When did I see for myself the truth of what Viktor Frankl said, that I always have the freedom to choose my attitude? Well, that's part of a longer story and comes back to my favorite subject - the ability we all have to see ourselves from many angles and perspectives. It's an ability human consciousness gives us, our consciousness which is folded over and over again and, like the dough of a delicate pastry, has layer upon layers. Some of them are known to us, some are only hinted at, while others are beyond our awareness. William James said the mind is like a bird in its flights and perchings. The flights take place beyond our conscious mind; what we are aware of are the perchings, the specific landings of conscious thought. But all of it is part of the flow, the stream of consciousness. 
     His great phrase. Not mine.
     

SUSPENSION

I drove up to Sacramento a few days ago. It's a six hour drive straight up the 5 freeway and most people find it boring - once you're over the Grapevine, the drive is flat across the San Joaquin Valley with nothing but farmland running away from the road. But I like long car drives alone and I'm never bored. I note the landmarks I've made for myself on the many trips I've taken up this road, I try to figure out what's growing on those very small trees in an orchard I pass, I note that the heavy rains have turned some low lying land into marsh and I see a white heron. I wait for the road signs I'm compelled to say out loud. Don't ask me why but I have to say "Twisselman", "Avenal", "Coalinga", and most especially "Panoche" and "Little Panoche". I get to repeat some of them three times - on the miles-to sign, next-exit sign and finally this-exit sign. It's a ritual I've made for myself and does what rituals do: grounds me in the familiar, in repetition. And, not incidentally, makes me happy.
   What is it about long car trips? I like that no one knows exactly where I am.  Nothing is required of me; I'm free for any possibility. Sometimes, I investigate the little towns that are a few miles off the freeway: Lost Hills, Gustine, Maricopa. I ask myself if I could make a life in one of those towns, with their people who I imagine are so different than me. But I know I would get to know them, the woman who knits and can show me a new stitch, the teacher who has read some of the books I have, the bacon and eggs place that has two eggs poached easy cooking the moment I walk through the door.  The answer is usually yes, a life could be made here. If I had to.
     Driving a straight flat road requires only minimal attention and I like to let my mind wander. I have faith that something interesting will emerge - a remembered idea I had a few weeks ago I meant to write down, memories of the people I met when I was twenty-four, how to explain the modern world to Ben Franklin who has suddenly appeared in the passenger seat. (Over the years, I've often tried to look at my world through his eyes and see how strange and magnificent it all is.) I think about the state of the world and, of course, the state of me. What could be more interesting than that? And, when time is suspended, there are hours of the present moment to bask in.
     This love of time suspended is related to something else that comes to me, not often but from time to time. I'll be moving through my day and suddenly I'm possessed by a desire to throw it all away, chuck it, snap the cord, let it all go. I suspect many people have the same feeling, the same wish to get out from under all our obligations and responsibilities, our individual fears and desires. But I keep coming back to a particular moment, the movement of flinging as hard as I can, my hand at my heart and then with great speed, flinging, as if my life is a discus or boomerang. For an instant, I reside in that gesture beyond anything but pure being, pure energy., and even though I'm only there for a moment, it's among the most intense feelings I have.  
     I see how interesting the concept of suspension is. It's anatomy, psychology, philosophy. Very interesting. I'm going to forget it now. It's something to think about on my next trip north.

HONORING

I got word the other day that a professor of mine in graduate school had died. He had made a real difference in my life and I loved him. I was an adult when I went to grad school and I went thinking I would study ethics. But when I heard this man speak during orientation, I knew he was the man for me - even though I wasn't quite sure what his "subject" was. I studied many different things in his classes - "Moby Dick", Kant and David Hume, theories of symbolization, the photographs of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis, and, especially for me, William James. Somewhere along the line, I realized the "subject" was consciousness - how we invest the world with meanings and values and how we come to those meanings and values. In one way or another, that has been my subject ever since.

     When I heard about my professor's death, I found it wasn't enough to call a friend and tell her about it. I wanted to reach out to his family, to tell them what he had meant to me. I'd met and corresponded with his wife but I had no idea if she was still alive or had moved from the house I'd met her in. But my need to connect was strong and so I called the school. The person I spoke to thought the wife was in a nursing home and frail, but she said she'd look for an address for their son.

     When I hung up, I realized I could google the son myself. I knew he'd turn up because he'd had some high profile jobs and, sure enough, when I clicked on the first thing that came up, I easily found his current email. I immediately sent him a note expressing how grateful I was to have known and studied with his father, and the feeling that came up in me as I wrote it lingered the rest of the day. It went deep and had many layers - the emotional connection I felt for a man who had had an impact for the good on my life, the sadness I felt at his death, and an unexpected pleasure that I had followed through on my desire to reach out to the family, called the school, then actually wrote and sent the note when it would have been easy to let the facts of time and distance gradually dissipate my initial impulse. The next morning, the son's reply was waiting in my inbox. He was gracious, said how important teaching had been to his father, and thanked me for letting him and his family know how I felt. 

     His response was perfect and it completed the ritual we all want to enact whenever a person who has touched us dies - a relative, a friend, a teacher, even someone we don't know. I hoped the son had been inundated with emails and notes from other former students; that hope was part of my own desire to express gratitude, and I found myself moved that I, who has been a loner so much of the time, in this case wanted to stand with others. I recognized it as the humility that's always a part of gratitude, of the acknowledgement that something outside ourselves has helped and influenced us, that we haven't done it all ourselves.

     It was only later in the day that I realized there was something else in the deep emotion that had stayed with me. I had loved graduate school, did very well there and knew even at the time that it was the absolute right place for me. Now, I felt the truth of it, felt the emotional memory in my body, the happiness I felt at school. I realized that in honoring my professor, I was honoring a part of my past that was filled with accomplishment and recognition and gratitude, a part that was among the best times in my life. I felt the truth of that time; I was that woman and I did those things. In honoring my professor, I had given myself the gift of my own best self, not as in fantasy but as I had been in life. And can be - no will be now, in this moment, and at any moment in the future. My best self is the great possibility in my life, always there, ready to be embraced.

MY SPIRITUAL AWAKENING - PART ONE

 I was talking to a friend the other day about spiritual awakenings and as we talked I realized how many of my own milestones I remember - particular incidents that moved me forward on a path I didn't even know I was walking. 
     I wouldn't have found my way at all if I hadn't been drinking way too much, enough for me to pass out every night, to shake when I lifted a coffee cup, to dread the phone ringing because I was certain something would be required of me that I couldn't possibly do. I'd become used to reeling off the walls in the dark of 3AM as I made my way to the refrigerator for one more tumbler of vodka or white wine. I was after oblivion; I couldn't bear to feel my sometimes hidden but always constant despair, my certainty that I would never be the woman I wanted to be or have any of the things I wanted, and thought I needed, or be recognized by the world for the many things I wanted to accomplish. I believed that no matter how hard I tried, nothing would change, so it was far better to put myself in a place where I didn't even have to try. Not to sleep but to be unconscious without the possibility of the pain of unfulfilled dreams.
     One night, as I stumbled my way to the vodka, I hung over the refrigerator door staring into the light. I was reaching for the bottle when I suddenly thought, I can't do this anymore. I had no idea what that meant but I astonished myself by pouring the vodka down the drain. I slowly walked back to bed. Something had shifted; something had been decided.
     But the decisiveness I felt at 3AM had faded by morning and very early I found myself getting dressed to go to the liquor store. The memory is very vivid - I'm sitting on the edge of the bed lacing up my sneakers when I again have the thought, I can't do this anymore. For an instant, I knew that was true; there was a flash of light, palpable and uplifting, a shaft of light that released all my tension and anxiety. But in the next instant I felt my stomach clench in fear - there was no way for me to move forward without the means of deadening reality, without chemicals to get me out from under all my fears and frustrations. I see now I was like a prisoner who, when the gates are thrown open, is afraid to leave the safety of her cell, to walk away from the certainty of what is known, no matter how harsh and painful it is. But once the gates are open - and you know that they are - there's no going back. I hated that I'd somehow brought myself to this crossroads. I felt tricked by my own resolve. 
     But something real had shifted in me that morning and I haven't had a drink since. I haven't done it alone - I've had all the help I could wish for, all the help I need - and now it's been years since the thought of having a drink or a drug has even entered my mind.
     I often think about what happened to me early morning, sitting on the edge of my bed. I had said many times, I have to stop drinking, but as soon as I said it, it went out of my mind. What was the point of trying when I knew I wouldn't succeed, I who couldn't keep any commitment I made to myself? If, for instance, I was driving on the freeway and said, I won't light a cigarette until the LaBrea off ramp, I had the lit cigarette in my mouth before I'd gone a mile. I knew anything that depended on my using self-discipline simply wouldn't get done. My constant reiteration of all the ways I disappointed myself and why there was no reason, no reason at all, for hope brought me lower and lower, and eventually I'd come to believe I was completely helpless, without resources of any kind, unable even to take care of myself. A terrible phrase kept going through me - I would become a ward of the state...a ward of the state. Or I would be out on the streets, a bag lady like the woman in Doris Lessing's impossibly sad story, "An Old Woman and Her Cat," which traces the step by step descent of a woman from middle class comfort to life on the streets and finally death with only a stray cat for company. I held on to that story as evidence for the prosecution - see, that can happen and it will happen to me.           
     William James describes grace as a sense of inrushing energy that feels as if it comes from somewhere outside ourselves. He wasn't so much interested in where this energy comes from. We can't prove the reality of the Unseen; we can't touch grace or the "reality" of He From Whom It Comes. But what we can see is the altered behavior and feelings of those who have experienced that energy. Accounts of those changes, whether religious or political - or spiritual - are all around us and for James they were stories of the power belief has. Belief is real to the person who has it, and that belief, that insight, often results in real change.    
     Thinking of it this way, I would say now that I, who was (and has remained) an atheist and thought all talk of "the spiritual" was California new age hooey, had a moment of grace. Something happened, and I stopped drinking. At the time I didn't know what to call it. It wasn't the result of my frantic search to understand myself, to uncover and analyze all the hidden forces that blocked me and led to self-destruction. It didn't happen because I used my will as a battering ram for change. None of that brought me any closer to the liberation I craved. But in that moment on the edge of my bed, my shoelaces in my hands, something new had come in. A light had flickered for a moment. The stunning thing was that I recognized it as something different, a new feeling I had never had before, a good feeling which wasn't ridiculous or threatening, in need of being quickly repressed. It was new and it was good. For a moment, that was enough.