OUT OF THE SILENT DARK

I put something out into the world the other day, it got a good reception and I had a few hours of excitement and gratification. But excitement always dissipates and this time, as it did, I felt myself going down, slowly turning away from the light and into the dark, the oh so familiar dark in which I am silent, passive, despairing. How strange, not to be energized by recognition, but to turn away from it, away from the very thing I crave. Why not simply do more, put the next thing out into the world. Why not build momentum? In a perverse way, I perceive getting what I want, being seen, as proof that nothing will ever fix me, nothing will ever be enough. The insatiability of alcoholism, the bottomless pit of the unloved child. How boring - to go back to my mother. Suddenly, I remember a dream I had when I was nineteen or twenty - only a single shocking image stayed with me when I woke - my mother with tape across her nipples. I remember being astonished that I had managed to create the perfect image for what I felt, had always felt, that I had brought into consciousness terrible secret knowledge and shame. I am not seen. Or nourished. Or loved.  

     Another child may have come to the same conclusion, said, okay, that's the way it is and I'm going to get what I need somewhere else. Was it my depression that kept me cut off from the energy to act, or was my sense of being unseen and unloved the genesis of my depression? And when had I transferred that belief on to the things of the world? When had my certainty of never getting the nourishment I needed become "there's no point in trying?" When had I learned not to try again? When had that response become so fundamental, automatic, that it blocked a more natural human response – if this feels good, go for more.  Instead, my morbid fear led me to feel rejection even when it didn't exist, and to collapse completely whenever I encountered it, as everyone does in the course of a life. When had my certainty of failure grown large enough to truncate any and all production?

     Questions without answers, and they aren't new. I've been trying to get free of this hobbling dynamic for many years, searching for the way out my self-imposed silence and isolation. That struggle has led to the only thing I know with certainty - the way out, the only chance to get beyond all the things that block me, is to act. Just that - take action. Don't pretend there isn't a heavy undertow that wants to pull me back into the silent dark. Acknowledge it, feel its lure in my body. Then take a deep breath, look for the way up and over fear, connect to hope, and take my baby steps.

    

     

TIME, AS WE BOB ALONG

My high school friend, Abby, married an Israeli I introduced her to the summer we were 18, and went to live in Israel. We've been in touch sporadically over the years and she called a few days ago to tell me it was their 55th wedding anniversary...so astounding a number I can barely take it in. In high school, Abby and I were best friends with 2 other girls - Carole and Felice...Carole died a few months ago and on impulse, I called Felice yesterday - we hadn't spoken in something like 8 years - but very quickly fell into a very animated conversation that almost immediately was about our internal lives. She had reconnected with Carole after many years thru a spiritual group they both were part of, went to the funeral...and now so many memories come flooding in, things I may never have remembered but for the phone call, memories that now are beautiful and rich...Somehow, all this makes me feel that time doesn't exist, not in the linear way we think - that we're all always circling and spiraling, ready to connect as if no time has passed - because time doesn't pass - it expands, widens inside us as we bob along...and from time to time, I feel I have more than my infinitesimal arc, my instant in the flow, but have all time within me, accessible, felt...delicious...

IN OUR STARS

I just finished reading Philip Roth's I Married a Communist and find myself so moved. In the end, our lives are filled with errors and delusion and betrayals, even when we try to do the right thing - sooner or later, life makes us pay, the times we live in are rigged and always contain a price we must pay. And so much of the time, we can find our lives, the ones that feel as though they fit. And yet we're alive and we keep trying - the best of us keep trying to do the right thing...

     The book ends with a wonderful image - when Nathan, the narrator is a little boy, his grandfather dies. He wants to know where the old man went and Nathan's mother takes him outside at night, points up to the stars and says the grandfather has become one of those stars. Now, Nathan, in his sixties and alone, is lying out on his porch in the country, staring up at the stars, imagining that each of the characters in the story we've just read has become a star and is now beyond all the mistakes and betrayals that filled his or her life. As have all the people alive in that time, the famous and infamous and unknown.  You see "that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, the galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indespensable."

     So much the central mystery - that we should be born and have consciousness and that we should die...

SEARCHING FOR MY STORY

I keep searching for my story. I am the one who...I am the one who didn't....I am the one who did...I dart in and out of this roiling mass of self, looking for solid ground, a place to plant my flag, the flag of ME, to know and say this is my story, this is the skeleton, the backbone to which all my choices have been anchored. This is the way it all makes sense...
     And I do this even though I know there is no solid ground, that perspective is always shifting, that what I think I know is not only subject to change but is in fact always changing. I do this even though I know there is no Self with a capital S, nothing solid, fixed, nothing that doesn't contain its own contradictions. Memory itself works its secret revisions, offering up each version as if it's the only one, the truth, and not just one in a long line of embroideries. Memory isn't duplication; everything past is summoned up into the present and the present exerts its influence, becomes the context. More than the context because none of this - memory, present, act of revision - is a thing, a separate thing. It's all fluid, and the present enters the past, and vice versa, like a liquid poured in slow motion into another liquid, with billows and swirls and eddies that settle slowly until completely merged into something that feels -- only feels -- solid and has the ring -- only the ring -- of truth.
     This is a fact for me, by which I mean it has the ring of truth, this "fact" that there is no Truth, but rather perspective which is always shifting, undergoing change. This is the source of my freedom, that no matter what, I can always find a way to see things differently.When I'm suffering, I know there is the possibility of another perspective, a chance to find the purpose to the pain, and in that purpose find relief.  Basho: every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. Movement, fluidity, stability in motion, the only solid is no-solid, the only ground no-ground.
     And still I search for my story...