WISDOM #1

 This is what wise people know: in the midst of joy to remember inevitable loss and suffering is not to diminish joy. Instead, that awareness increases the intensity of joy, it expands its meaning. It's the key to the full expansiveness of life. Feel it all, accept it all, value it all. Open yourself - and praise - the full experience of life.

A QUESTIONAIRE

 A few years ago,  some of the pieces on this blog were published by an interesting website called Wild Culture. They asked me to fill out a questionnaire and here it is.

1. What is your first memory and what does it tell you about your life at that time and your life at this time?

My earliest memory is of my mother bending over my crib with a cigarette in her mouth. This image is so emblematic of our relationship that I sometimes feel I must have made it up. But it has the feel of a real memory. (Talking about how we know the different feel of a memory, a dream, a fantasy, would make a great conversation.) My mother never really saw me and, needless to say, I've struggled all my life to accept what she could give me and learn what I can give myself.

2. Can you name a handful of artists in your field, or other fields, who have influenced you - who come to mind immediately?

Ruth Rendell is the first that comes to mind and I'm sure it's because of her incredible productivity which I'll never have. Dickens who could create a full character in only a few sentences and wasn't afraid of sentiment. And many other; if I'm moved by a book or painting or sculpture, it's probably burrowed into my brain and set up its tents there.

But most of all Helen Keller. That moment when she connects the signs that Annie Sullivan is making on the palm of her hand, to something real, water. That is the most moving scene I can imagine. With that connection, with the learning of words, she realizes there is a life outside her. In that one moment, she is given the world.

3. Where did you grown up, and did that place and your experience of it help form your sense about place and the environment in general?

I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, a bedroom suburb of New York. It was perfectly ordinary and in high school that became the problem. My friends and I worked to "Ban The Bomb" and instinctively knew that racism was wrong. Those things gave me a sense of the world beyond my town. I couldn't wait to leave it.

4. If you were going away on a very long journey and you could only take four books - one art book, one fiction or poetry, one non-fiction, one theory or criticism - what would they be.

Only four books??? Well, Shakespeare, of course, because he would keep me endlessly occupied. The art book: Michelangelo. The power in that stone feels holy to me. Non-fiction? Hmm...Maybe Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night because it's about the time of my time, and reminds me of youth and ideals and the sense that we could do anything - even levitate the Pentagon. Or, one even better, Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. His voice is the most generous and tolerant I know of, and always inspires me. As to theory, this stumps me, so I'd probably choose someone I haven't read before.

5. What was your most keen interest between the ages of 10 and 12?

I devoured Nancy Drew and anything else that came my way. And I also loved to build models of cars and planes which turned out not to look at all like the picture on the lid.

6. At what point did you discover your ability with writing?

I always wrote, although I ad no sense that what I wrote was any good. I couldn't call myself a writer because writers were in some universe beyond me. But one memory stands out. I was pretty much grown, 19 or 20, and I have having one of the elaborate fantasies I often had, when it occurred to me that I was writing fiction. This must be what writers do, and I was doing it. Wow!

7. Do you have an "engine" that drives your artistic practice, and if so, can you comment on it?

Mostly, my engine sputters. I've done my best work when nothing was pushing me to do it. But there have been long silences. I wish I was one of those writers who work at it every day (Ruth Rendell, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates - she can't really be human! - and many others.) I guess I have my own pace and nothing changes it.

8. If you were to meet a person who seriously wants to do work in your field - someone who admires and resonates with the type of work you do, and they clearly have talent - and they asked you for some general advice, what would it be?

To a young writer: read, read, read. Think about a book's language, structure, how the characters are drawn - in short, read to learn how a writer creates a book.

9. Do you have a current question or preoccupation that you could share with us?

My current question is how to get freer and freer of the things that block me, in life and in writing. And how best to get that journey down on paper.

10. What does the term "wild culture" mean to you?

Wild culture...free and unafraid. The sound of a flamenco dancer at fever pitch. Untameable art and ideas. Subversive. Sets off the wildness in all of us.

11. If you would like to ask yourself a final question, what would it be?

By final question, I assume you mean on my death bed. I think it would be something along the lines of, did I do the work I was meant to do? Was I as willing as I could be to learn the lessons of change. And most naturally - why is life so short?

OZYMANDIAS AND A TASTE OF HONEY

I sometimes find myself in an Ozymandias moment, thinking about our misguided belief that the more power we accumulate, the greater the monuments we construct, the more we will be guaranteed some kind of immortality. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" In Shelley's poem, those words are carved on a fallen pedestal, half buried in obliterating desert sands. That is the irony, that despite our boasting and pretensions, our arrogant belief that what we build will signify lasting fame, through time and the unfolding of history, everything can, and probably will, be brought low. 
     There are times, though, when the poem leads me in another direction, something quite the opposite of arrogance and futility. I think about the fact of death, that we all know we are walking toward it, and the likelihood that all we are and have and know will be covered over by those shifting sands. And even so, and nonetheless, we do build and look for the meanings of history. We project vast systems of beliefs and morality. We create art . We procreate, we cultivate compassion, we sacrifice, and above all,  we love. 
     It's that I come back to again and again - the grandeur of the human spirit, our capacity to create the deepest meanings right along side our knowledge of what's coming, to find and believe in those meanings despite our knowing that death is ahead.
     Tolstoy tells the story of a man who is being chased by a dragon. The man sees a well and jumps into it, thinking to save himself. But by the time he's already falling, he realizes there's a monster at the bottom waiting for him. He grabs at a branch growing out of the wall and hangs on to it, between the dragon above and the monster below. Soon the man notices there is a white mouse and a black mouse nibbling away at the base of the branch, and he knows that sooner or later the branch will give way and he will fall. But then he notices there is a drop of honey on one of the branch's leaves, and despite the certain fate the man knows awaits him, he reaches out to lick the honey. 
     There it is, our glory: we reach for the honey.

SURRENDER, ACCEPT, EMBRACE

  A small breakthrough this morning. For the past few weeks, I’ve had a pain inside, as if there’s something nasty and mean - nasty to me, mean to me - at the core. I recognize it as part of the depression that’s been on me for a while but this isn’t one of its usual hallmarks, not the usual intensified self-loathing and a constant going over failures and humiliations. This was a sharper physical pain and it’s been very disturbing.

     This morning, I was feeling it and this time I closed my eyes and tried to focus on it, instead of trying to get away from it. I looked for it in my body, in my chest and belly, and slowly something shifted, the sharpness of the pain began to dissolve and I found myself saying, “surrender, accept, embrace” over and over again like a mantra, and slowly I began to feel the surrender, the unclenching, and acceptance of where I am now with all my faults and failures, and then beyond acceptance to a full embrace of all that is now and all that I am now.

    I’ve been here before, going through this process, these steps: surrender, accept, embrace. And I’ll be there again because full and complete surrender doesn’t exist, only the surrenders that go along with specific circumstances and those circumstances keep coming up and changing; we live on a case by case basis. In the same way, there isn’t full and final acceptance or final embrace. We never come to the end of what we have to learn. There will always be something more to do. 

     

I AM THIRTEEN

I'm thirteen. I've been at my friend A's house after school; in my memory, this is something I do most days. A's family is cultured and worldly, unlike my own. My mother, not a good cook, serves fried salmon croquettes and tuna noodle casserole for dinner; I eat my first artichoke at A's dinner table and it is served by a maid. I am just awakening to the wider world and my thirst for it and instinctively I know that dining table is the wider world. I don't realize it but I am at the beginning of many intense rejections of what I have grown up with, of exploring all the roads that lead away from what will be called "my family of origin."
     A's parents are unhappy in their marriage. My knowing it is a link between A and me, a secret she knows I won't betray. A's mother takes to her bed for days at a time, sick with something vague and passing. A and I don't need to mention it, only exchange the briefest of looks when we silently pass her mother's closed bedroom door. There is a shadow on that door and intuitively I know it's a shadow from an adult world I can barely glimpse. Years will have to pass before I wonder if A's mother was an alcoholic, a "periodic" who binged on booze and pills to knock herself out. But now, when we are thirteen, I'm still on the cusp - made nervous by the shadows but also running toward them. 
     On this day, I'm leaving the house with a friend of A's mother. It's April and there'a very gentle drizzle. I don't know it but this weather - grey, slight drizzle, temperature around 60 - will become my favorite. We stop halfway down the long drive to the street, beside a huge rhododendron bush. Water is slowly dripping from the leaves that are just emerging from its winter branches. I sigh and shyly say to this woman I don't know, "I think it's weird, but sometimes Spring makes me sad." I feel self-conscious but she doesn't laugh. Instead, she nods knowingly "Ah, yes," she says, "verdant melancholia." The words sink in and I'm repeating them to myself even as we say goodbye and I get on my bike for the ride home. Verdant melancholia? I've been studying Spanish and I know verde is green - so yes, spring melancholy.  I'm stunned. This woman I will remember nothing else about has just given a name to a feeling I've put into words for the first time, a feeling I didn't even know was there until the moment the words came out. I don't know if she's made up the phrase or if it's something other people know, but either way she understood just what I meant.  Verdant melancholia...
     Until now, my mind and feelings, the me of me, has been something amorphous, undifferentiated, simply the sum of the present I move through. I have not thought about it. But now I have pulled a feeling out of the interior stew and a name has been put to it and, in a heartbeat, my world exponentially expands. I suddenly know there are a thousand other feelings inside me, a million other thoughts, experience upon experience. I feel skyrocketed far above me. I can look down. I can see myself and I can reflect upon it all. For the first time, I understand: there is what I think and feel, and then there is what I think about what I think and feel.      
     Time begins, my time, my own inner history with all its illusions and revelations and endless revisions. I know I have a self; I am a self. Everything is changed.

MY BIG ORANGE SWEATER

I knit myself a sweater a few years ago. The wool yarn is a deep orange, flecked with yellow and brown. I didn't use a pattern; once you understand how many stitches of any particular yarn it takes to make an inch, you can make things to any measurement. My sweater is very long and wide so I don't have to worry about it fitting and so warm that if a blizzard ever comes to Los Angeles I'm definitely prepared.
     A few months ago, I noticed that moths had gotten to the yarn. There were a number of holes, one of them fairly big and I wasn't sure it could be mended. I bordered on bereft; it wasn't fair that something I was so proud of, loved so much was damaged by little flying creatures that for some reason had targeted me. I shook out the sweater, put it in a plastic bin with some moth balls (which is what I should have done in the first place) and there it sat for weeks.
     I didn't forget the sweater - I kept seeing those holes, so big I couldn't wear the sweater and hope no one would notice. Somehow, leaving the sweater in that state felt sacrilegious; this was my work, I'd put in the hours and hours it took to make it - if I didn't honor all my effort, it would be because I so little valued myself. I saw it clearly and knew it was true.
     I found a reweaver and took the sweater in. Mending it was expensive but my self-esteem was at stake so I left it at the shop. I picked it up today and it looks great - if the two women who own the business hadn't left markers of where the mends were, I never would have found them. 
     I'm looking at the sweater now and am amazed to realize I feel something like joy. If I hadn't taken it to be mended, I can feel precisely the guilt I'd have every time I passed the closet and thought about the sweater in its eaten state. I'm thinking now about all the times I've let things slide, been too lazy or to full of what's-the-point depression to do the ordinary maintenance everyone has to do. But I've been trying to do better and this time I did. I took care of my sweater - I took care of myself. 

COMING HOME

 You begin to breathe somewhere west of Tulsa. It isn’t simply that the land has opened out – that began miles back, crossing the flat plains of the mid-west – but now the air is changing, becoming drier and skittish on your skin, while the light thins and whitens taking on a welcome western clarity. The Interstate unravels and soon, off in the distance, you can see the towers of downtown Amarillo shining through the haze. You think of Dorothy and the Emerald City and you laugh because it’s not likely that many people mistake Amarillo for the land of Oz.

Oh, you’re happy, coming back, away from three years in crowded, constricted New England, where the landscape is small and always tree-obscured. Some motor deep inside you turns over because you’re heading west, toward sand and stone, tough old cactus, the ocean beyond – heading home to Los Angeles. Not even bad weather can make you slow down. As you drive into the steel gray vortex of a thunderstorm, banked clouds suddenly part and fingers of silver sunlight stream down. Now you slow, as if you could stay under that light, live inside it, and you wonder if the trucker you’ve been playing tag with for the last hundred miles is looking up at those rays and thinking the same thing you are, the only thing you can think: God shed his grace on thee.

You’re eager for LA but you need a big jolt of the West so you take a detour to Zion National Park. Heading out of Flagstaff, you go up and over pine-covered mountains that give way far below to the northern rim of the Colorado and the almost-mirage of Lake Powell flashing liquid in the cradle of all that rock. This landscape comforts you; in all its monumentality you don’t feel puny but right-sized, in sync with the natural order. You’ve hungered for these desert colors, not the pale pastels of Santa Fe pop, but vivid variations of deep greens and molten terra cottas against a piercing blue sky. Back east, when you tried to explain to people what it is that kept the western landscape so vivid behind your eyes, you’ve talked about the immutability and permanence of a desert vista, a timeless stability without the franticness of leaves. And the concept of big: big valley, big mountains, big canyons. And wildness, its possibility. In New England all roads lead somewhere while in the West they can go nowhere, lead to nothing at all, fade away as gradually, or as suddenly, as the human impulse that began them. On this trip, pulling to the side of the road for the tenth time so you can photograph the view in what you know is futile attempt to capture what you see, you finally put the camera down. You want nothing between you and the view. You hear the silence and you want to listen. This land speaks the truth.

The main part of Zion is dramatic, a lunar landscape of striated sandstone and thousand-foot stone walls carved by the Virgin River, which on this day is no more than a creek. But frankly you’re disappointed. The park is crowded, narrow and closed in. So when someone tells you about a back road leading up to a high lookout, you make the time to take it. For a half hour you climb up a winding strip of blacktop, up past alpine meadows and fattened sheep and aspens already turning gold. You hit gravel at around 7900 feet and when that ends you leave the car and wander through scattered bushes until the path too abruptly stops. Another step and you’d be Wiley Coyote just before he realizes he’s walked off into space.

Up that high, winter has already come. You’re cold but it’s a small price to pay for what you see. Mountain ridges fall away, one after the other, until they fade away into the early morning haze of gold and lavender. Huge black birds are circling far below. You strain to hear their calls but the wind is a wall of rushing sound – you don’t so much hear it as feel it vibrating through your shoes. It’s intermittent, though, and when it stops you’re flooded with silence, the familiar silence always contained in wide vistas, a suspension as in meditation, and as much a part of what you’ve longed for as the visual expanse.

You let go to it, float out, and it feels as if you’re climbing up on a promontory inside yourself, a stable shelf from which to see the world. There is movement everywhere – in the wind and the trees it’s shaping, in the granite spires of the ridges, pushed up by the motion of glaciers and earthquakes, the clouds, the birds – movement and signs of movement everywhere. You, too, are in motion. You think about how far you’ve come, across the continent and across the years. You feel all that is unresolved in what you’ve left behind and all that is unknown in where you’re going, and for a moment you sway as equilibrium shifts. What is there to hold on to? Then you remember a line from the great Japanese haiku poet, Basho: every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. You catch the stillness at the heart of those words, the safe place in the center of the whirlwind. You remember an image you once had in mediation: you’re playing tennis against a ball machine and, even though you have no idea when a ball will come or from where, you have no doubt you can return whatever comes. You see now the calm center at the heart of constant unpredictable movement, of everything that life brings and takes away – it’s the confidence that you have the resources to handle it. And something even more: the faith that you will.

Here, now, you feel this faith. You hold it suspended inside you and you close your eyes, trying to memorize what it feels like in your body. You know it won’t last, but that thought isn’t your usual negativity ruining something good.  You feel it now, it’s real, and the memory of this strong and certain calm, this equanimity, will remind you time after time, and no matter what, that it is always a possibility for you.  You let yourself unfold into it; you breathe it in and out; now you have it deep inside.

You take one last look and, as you head back to the car, you feel you’ve been given some internal solid ground to walk on, some armor against the bad times that will undoubtedly come. You open the car door and hang on it for a moment, taking in one more time everything you see around you. It’s beautiful and wild and every bit of it is part of the natural order – just as you are, a beautiful, irreplaceable part of it all.

 You head across the Mojave southwest of Las Vegas. Cresting one of its steep grades, the highway is thrown out in front of you, a thin concrete track poured up and over shifting desert sand. Gradually, even though you’re on the Interstate, pulled along with the heavy traffic of gamblers, lovebirds and pill-wired truckers, you lose all sense of safety. This is the only place on this western journey you think you couldn’t survive. If you break down, if somehow you’re stranded out of sight of the Interstate, ten minutes alone in that baking desolation will undoubtedly do you in. The road becomes not a hallmark of human ingenuity but a certain sign of human folly because chances are an earthquake or flash flood, just wind and time alone, will sink the road deep and out of sight.  You shudder and pull your attention back to the gauges on the dash board as the car struggles up the latest grade. You turn the air conditioning off to help it along; you’re sweating anyhow. The Mojave makes you work for LA.

You get past the worst of it. Edgy with relief, you speed past Victorville, down the Cajon pass, going faster now because you can smell Los Angeles, even pull in the flickering signal of a familiar radio station. Then you hit the smog. The light is yellow, thin and reminds you of dried out rubber tubing, the kind that used to prop up dying patients. Your first impulse is to turn around – why on earth would anyone want to stay here? – but you have 3,000 miles of momentum behind you and a hunger for the coast. The yellow fades, turns to hazy gray, but it doesn’t quite disappear. After a few days, it’s your noticing that will fade, your registering what you see.

And so you’re back. You do the things that let you know it: hike in the hills and stand looking out at the huge basin below, drive up to Santa Barbara and eat at La Super Rica, a much-missed taco stand. When you take Sunset out to the sea, you’re stopped by the light at Fairfax. You look at each of the four corners and feel a rush of gratitude that in all the years you’ve been in LA, these corners have stayed almost unchanged.

But everywhere else you look new buildings are going up, new houses on lots you thought were unbuildable, and some days that’s all you see. You think the perspective of your three years away ought to give you something original to say about all this, engender new insights, but maybe you’ve been away too long, or not long enough, because you can’t make Los Angeles snap into place, become something you can get a handle on. 

Then, one day, as you’re heading north on the 405 toward the Valley, you slow down to change lanes so that you can fall in behind a dusty red horse trailer. This is the West you’ve wanted, following a brown horsetail rhythmically swishing from side to side, ambling along at fifty miles an hour through the Sepulveda Pass. Just to say the syllables is to be showered with romance: Sepulveda Pass. You reach the crest. The Santa Anas have been blowing for days and when you look out over the Valley, your eyes widen. – you’re certain you can count the trees on the opposite hills twenty miles away.

Time stops while you breathe in the clarity of that view. Suddenly, the handmade city is only foreground. You see past it into the landscape, the plain facts of the land: the surging hills tumbling down canyons to the coast behind you, the Valley floor unfolding to the snow-covered mountains beyond. It’s all vivid, clean and precise, bathed in golden white light beneath a blue and cloudless sky.

There is a text spread out before you and as you try to decipher it you realize that this varied geography is the real glamour of Los Angeles. It offers a description of a city that takes its cue from its own natural underpinnings. It’s as gorgeously diverse as its landscape, in all its variety and perpetual renewal. It’s a city that derives its richness from contrast and interplay, just as mountain is set off against valley or shoreline against incoming wave. What you see is simple, unadorned, a natural possibility and what it gives you is hope.

The car tips into its descent, back into the haze, the congestion and conflict, all that attitude. But what you’ve seen is no mirage or momentary transcendent glimmer. In fact, it comes to you that this hope is rock solid, embedded in landscape, accessible, always resurrecting and you know it’s what you’ve been looking for, the Los Angeles you’ve wanted to come back to. The haze deepens but your clarity remains. You’ve seen the land, the bedrock behind all our human failings. And you know at last you’re home.

MY BREAK-IN

A sound wakes me in the middle of the night. I lift my head and see a dark mass at the front door. I take its snapshot, arrested in a stare but, as I’ll realize later, it’s only a nanosecond before I understand the mass is a man, a stranger in my house. Without thinking... the next thing I know… I suddenly find myself…I’m out of bed, screaming “Get out of here. Get out of here,” racing to him, punching him, pulling at him to get him out the door. Somehow, I’ve registered his body language and know he had no idea a person was sleeping five feet from him and he’s scared. I keep pulling at him, fumbling with the lock and chain on the door. He says, “Good, open the door.” He wants to go as much as I want him to. I’m scratching to get the door open with one hand and still punching him with the other. One punch lands squarely and he pulls back. “Hey, stop that,” he says. He punches back and hits me just below my right eye. But I get the lock and chain undone, pull open the door. Another man is standing just outside. I see his silhouette as he stands motionless. I push the other man out, slam the door, lock it and stand still as I listen to them go away.

     I step back from the door and stand in the middle of the room, the perfect picture of someone mulling over an interesting problem. Something has happened but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe a dream? But when I raise a finger and touch my cheek, I feel the swelling that has already begun under my eye. This was no dream. Interesting, I think, odd, very odd. Eventually, I find myself staring at the door. I slowly realize it was locked from the inside –  how then did the man get in? Curiouser and curiouser, I think, an Alice lost not in Wonderland but in SuperCalmland, where everything has slowed down and drifts along in neutral.

     It’s a beautiful night with a cool breeze that billows the drapes and, as they lift up, something catches my eye. It’s a gap in the large louvered window on one side of the room. I move a little closer. Is that really a gap? It takes some time for me to see that it is, and it comes to me this is how the man got in. He removed two of the glass louvers creating an opening and squeezed himself in. For a moment, I picture him, a sinuous ell in clear water, shimmying through. I should do something about that opening. But even assuming the panels haven’t been smashed, they’re outside, and there’s no way I’m going to look for them in the dark. Anyway, I don’t feel especially threatened so I prop up a large wooden folding bed tray to hold the drapes flat against the opening. It seems enough to protect me.

     I stay in the dark. Turning on the lights would make me feel exposed, in a spotlight. A target. Vulnerable. I get on the bed, lean back and make myself comfortable sitting up. I suppose I should call 911, but the men are gone so is there really any need? I keep touching my cheek. The man’s punch caught the edge of my cheekbone directly under my eye and I can feel knots forming under the skin as the swelling increases. So strange that I’ve been punched, by the man, by anyone. How is it possible that I punched him? For a moment, I hear myself screaming, “Get out, get out of here,” and it’s a sound I’ve never heard before, from a movie soundtrack shot in some other dimension. I don’t know what to make of any of it.

     I watch the light change, increase, revealing everything that is familiar and unchanged. When it’s been light for a half hour or so, I crack open the door, see no one, and venture out. The screen has been pulled back from the window and I’m relieved to see the two glass louver panels haven’t been broken. I quickly pick them up, take them inside and lock the door. Working fast, I get them back in their metal slots, close all the louvers tightly and lock them down. The locking sound seems final; now there really is no sign that anything has happened. I’m all right; the house is all right, and it’s as if the whole incident is closed. A part of me believes it is. I can easily go on from here without giving my break-in another thought.

     It’s still early, about 6:15. I make coffee and take a cup to my desk. I work for an hour or so. I take a shower. Something is beginning to catch up with me and around 9AM I think about calling a friend to tell her what’s happened. I hesitate. Once I tell her, it will be out in the world, she will ask questions, and I sense that in answering those questions, I will make it all real in a way it isn’t quite real to me yet. But I do call her and her first words are that I must call 911. I can see she’s right but I’m still not sure it’s absolutely necessary. I compromise. Since the emergency is over, I don’t need 911. Instead, I dial 311, the switchboard for non-emergencies. I’m on hold for twenty minutes but that’s okay. I have nothing else to do. Eventually, a live woman is on the line. Oh, my, she says, are you all right? Do you need an ambulance? No, I say, I’m fine, fine. She tells me the police are on the way.

     I’m beginning to come out of shock, although later I’ll see I’ll be in some kind of low-grade shock for days. Now, waiting for the police, fear grips my belly, my stomach, creeps up into my throat. It dawns on me how easily things could have gone another way. The men could have had a gun; they could have pushed me back in the house; they could have beaten me up or raped me. Just the possibilities make me tremble. But I also see with intense clarity what did happen. I see the dark mass as it resolves into a man. I hear my screams, see myself out of bed before I know it and rushing at the man without any thought, without any decision. I see my fingers fumbling with the lock and chain. I see the grain of the wood as I throw the door open. I see the silhouette of the other man. I feel the strength in my arm as I push the man out, slam the door, turn the lock and replace the chain. What I can’t see is the moment I leapt out of bed. It was an automatic response, reflexive, probably the purest reflex I’ve ever had, straight out of the amygdala, the deep part of the brain that reacts instantly to fear and danger, even before there is conscious thought. I can’t believe what I’ve just done.

     When the police arrive, I talk much faster than usual. I’m also trying to be my most charming. I want to give them as much detail as I can, and I want to impress them, to make them think what a terrific witness I am. The fact is I can give them very little to go on. I have only the vaguest impression of the man in the house, that he was small and possibly had dark hair, possibly was white. I show them the panels the man had removed and realize too late I shouldn’t have touched them; there were fingerprints on them, and now some of them are my own. The police say it doesn’t matter; they’ll run them all through the data base and see if his turn up. A man to take the fingerprints would be along in a few days.

     I told one of the policemen how I had reacted and how much it amazed me. He said it was the right thing to do and probably was what made the man so eager to get out of house. When I said again how amazed I was, he shrugged and said there are just some people who get aggressive in the face of a threat. But that was the point - I couldn’t absorb that “some people” meant me. I’ve never thought of myself as brave or aggressive in that way. In fact, although most people imagine themselves a hero, I’ve thought the opposite. On a forced march, I’d be one of those who fall by the wayside. In the face of torture, I’d collapse instantly. In any show of physical force, I’d surely back down. But it turned out I didn't back down. I got aggressive. I thought I would fold but I didn’t, didn’t shrivel in the face of fear. Here is a completely new idea of myself. This kind of dramatic revelation has been very rare in my life (actually, I’m not sure it’s ever happened before) and it’s been a depth charge going off in my psyche, sending out slow moving shock waves that are the real effect. 
     Those waves are enhanced by something else equally stunning about my break-in. When I told friends about how I had reacted, most of them weren’t surprised. “That’s the woman I know,” one of them said. “You’re a survivor,” said another. I didn’t know what to make of it, that people see things in me – good things – that I haven’t seen in myself. But now I understand. The gulf is very wide between how I’ve seen myself in the world, how I feel inside, and how the rest of world has seen me. It’s wide because, for so much of my life, I’ve filtered my experience through a thick lens, a bifocal made up of negativity and critical judgments of myself. For much of the time I’ve been a witness for the prosecution.

     Now, the universe has picked me up by the scruff of the neck, turned me around and set me down in a different place. There’s a new view and a new story to tell myself. I’m the one who went into action in the face of a threat, automatically, without conscious thought. I’m the one who moves through the world with much more strength than I knew I had and people who know me have seen that strength. It’s a lot to take in and I need some time. But with all this new information, this unexpected revelation, a certain irony doesn’t escape my notice. As with most other things that have been problems and obstacles, experiences that have even caused me suffering, my break-in is turning out to be full of important lessons. It’s turning out to be a very good thing.

KING LEAR IN PRISON

A few weeks ago, a friend pointed out some lines from King Lear. Lear has been betrayed by two of his daughters, while the one he rejected, Cordelia, has come back from France to defend him. He and she learn that one of Lear's sons-in-law intends to imprison them.  Cordelia wants to escape but Lear stops her.

"Come, let's away to prison.  We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask my blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness.  So we'll live
And pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh
At gilded butterflies and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news and we'll talk with them, too
Who loses and who wins, who's in and who's out
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies."

Lear, not blamelessly, has been besieged on all sides; the picture he paints of prison would be a huge relief. No pressure, no attacks, no losses -- it's prison as a refuge. He and Cordelia will be completely reconciled and can spend their days telling stories, gossiping, and take the time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe.  Ah, bliss...

To come in from the cold, to get out from under, to shake off all responsibility, to be taken in and taken care of - how often I've longed for that. I used to think that in some magical way, I could arrive at such a place and all would be easy, delightful, effortless.  I know now that such a place can never exist because, no matter where I am, life keeps happening; one challenge is met and a new one begins.  I am always coming a great distance in order to begin and so it will go to the end.
     But there is a place of what, under the influence of Shakespeare, I'll call surcease.  It's that expansive place beyond my conscious mind and I can be there for moments from time to time.  But it's also in the search for those moments, in the effort I make to get quiet, to focus, to turn down the chatter occupying my mind. The  journey, not the arrival, matters. Simply trying contains its own rewards. 

TOILET PAPER

The other day I did something I often do. When the roll of toilet paper ran out, I left the empty spool in the dispenser, unwrapped a new roll, and put it behind me on the top of the water tank. 
     I don't know why I do this. It's incredibly easy to put a new roll in the dispenser and it isn't as if I'm racing off to do urgent things or am too involved with deep and weighty thoughts, like solving world hunger. All I can say is that there's something very familiar, a feeling, in letting the toilet paper roll slide. Is it an aversion to completing things?  Or an actual desire to leave things undone? Or a habit of inattention that allows me to use the toilet a dozen times with that cardboard spool still empty and not notice it, not notice the extra effort it takes to reach behind me for the new roll. The aesthetics of that empty dispenser and grey spool aren't pleasing, so again, why do I let it ride?
     I can come up with many theories but knowing all about them hasn't led me to significant change. Lately I've found another way. First, I noticed what I was doing and, in taking that step back, I realized that as small a thing as this seemed to be, it wasn't insignificant. In fact, it's core, an instance of what I sometimes see in many areas of my life -- obliviousness, indifference and lack of attention, my laziness. Changing all that is overwhelming; I feel puny, as if facing a tall wave I can't possibly control.      But I can do something about the toilet paper. I've decided it's very important that I change the roll immediately. It's a small step but as I said it goes to the core. I used to imagine waking up completely changed, all my problems solved, as if I'd arrived at some perfect place, I was perfect, and had no need to struggle. Now I feel the reverberations of changing just that one small thing. It's encouraging and helps me be ready for the next small thing and the one after that. And the one after that.

POPEYE

A few years ago, I began a love affair with Popeye. Of course, I'd known him all my life; he was born in 1929 long before me. I'd see him around with his usual crew - Swee'pea, Bluto, Wimpy - but he just didn't speak to me.
     I'd already been in love with Skeezix, who is even older than Popeye. He was found as a baby by his Uncle Walt and he made his way into my heart when he was a little boy, living with Walt and their African-American mammy-ish maid, Rachel, and his little brown and black terrier, Pal. What drew me to him? I'd say his coloring, the vivid blue and red backgrounds he seemed to live in front of, his readiness for adventure, chronicled in his books - Skeezix Out West, Skeezix in Africa and other exotic  places. I also adored his big blond cowlick, something he shares with Tintin, though I don't think they ever met. Skeezix broke new ground by doing what we all do -- namely growing up. He went through his teenage years and then to college, married, had children and is now rumored to be living in a nursing home where I'm sure he's having grand adventures which I hope he's writing down. But I liked him as a little boy. Well, maybe more than liked.
     Our love affair, like many, eventually wound down. Who can say why? But I've kept some mementos - an oilcloth doll (he's wearing a red onesie), some books and a little bisque figure about three inches high. I look at them sometimes and remember the old days, but I'm not nostalgic. I clearly see it was time to move on. 
     So much time passed without a new love that I gave up hope anyone else would claim my heart. But one day I noticed Popeye, I mean really noticed. His white hat and red and blue sailor suit, those enormous forearms with their manly anchor tattoos, and that odiferous corn cob pipe which I have to admit has saved his life more than once. And of course his cans of spinach, often overflowing, which he can swallow in a single gulp. That leafy green magically turns into superhuman strength so that his biceps soon match his forearms. Who could not love a man like that? Of course, it hasn't escaped my notice that he loves someone else, a string bean named Olive Oyl, who he would pretty much do anything for. Well, nothing is perfect.
     What made me tumble for Popeye, despite our many differences - for instance, he's drawn and I'm not - is something it turns out he says all the time."I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam." As he uttered those words for me the first time, I knew we were kindred spirits. It's true that Popeye came by all that self-acceptance naturally, while it took me many years to really mean it when I said, "I am who I am." I wasted whole eras of time worrying about who I was and afraid of the person I might turn out to be. My default was self-doubt; I just couldn't get comfortable in my own skin.      
     But Popeye's words, spoken in that gruff masculine voice I'm a fool for, made me realize how far I've come. I've left behind huge helpings of fear and doubt, and now it's all right to be who I am, with all my gifts and defects and the many things I know about myself that still need work. I may get on my case from time to time but more often than not I understand that I can't be more than I am and who I am is enough. 
     He's Popeye the Sailor Man, toot toot, and I love him for his innate profundity. I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam. Indeed.

COMING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN

There are certain risks I'm willing to take and they usually involve me in my car going down an unknown road. The west is full of roads that just come to an end and there's something about going to the end of a narrow track that more than appeals to me. A while ago, in between two heavy duty health treatments, I gave myself three days in Sequoia National Park. The first day into the park I passed a small sign with an arrow that said Mineral King.  I thought I remembered hearing that name in weather reports, but maybe not. I was intrigued, though, and on the second day I turned on to the road. There were houses along it for the first quarter mile, but when I left them behind the road narrowed down to little more than a single lane of rough, potholed asphalt. If a car came the other way I thought we'd manage somehow to pass, but I would definitely be happier if it didn't come to that.
     The road followed the curve of the mountain and I could see straight ahead a line of mountains that seemed to go on forever. To my right, just past the passenger door, the pavement fell away into a very steep canyon with walls completely covered with tall pine trees. I rounded another curve and there was what seemed the same number of mountains stretching to infinity and saw the road was carved into every one of them. At one point, the road suddenly went down to a narrow river.  There was a bridge over it which I could tell was built by the WPA. Someone had tied a teddy bear and some flowers to one of its rails and as the road climbed up again on the other side of the water I tried not to think that someone had died there.
     The road went up for a very long time and the pines and other trees gave way to redwoods which in turn gave way to the pines. I stopped at one point and got out of the car to take a look down into the canyon.  I couldn't see its bottom and I had to reach behind me to feel the car to anchor me. When I drove on, I don't think I've ever been more exhilarated - to be on this track that people had laid down a long time ago in a landscape unchanged for thousands of years, to be alone following the curve of mountain after mountain, to have no idea where I was heading. I felt completely free.
     After almost ten miles, the road finally did come to an end, at Mineral King which turned out to be nothing more than a Park Ranger's cabin. It was locked up and that gave me pause because coming around those mountains I had thought if the car broke down a ranger would come along and we'd figure out what to do. I sat by a nearby brook for a while, listened to the birds, then turned the car around. The ride back wasn't as exciting as the one out but I didn't think once about the car breaking down. I had what I'd come to Sequoia for, a rush of intense life and the transcendence of stunning beauty.
     

     
     

I DON'T WANT TO BE A TREE.

 "I don't want to be a tree. I want to be its meaning." - 

                    from My Name Is Red  by Orhan Pamuk

A tree is only a tree, no more than a collection of molecules, until we perceive those molecules through our senses and it arises in our consciousness as something we call "tree" and "green" and all the other "ideas" we assign to our concept "tree." Things exist in the world but it is we who, through direct experience, give those things meaning - meaning in the sense of definition and also in the sense of value and worth.

Why is this important? If it is we who assign value and worth, those values can be changed. New experiences may add new information so that what was white yesterday may be black or some delicious shade of gray today. It means that I am always free to change my mind. We can say, "I used to think...." or "Now I see...." 

What we call experience is our interpretation of what our senses present. Sense perception transformed through consciousness, arising as concept and idea.

REBOUNDING

Even though I'm used to working at home alone, the quarantine feels different. I'm so aware that I can't meet a friend for a meal or a coffee, can't dash out to browse the shelves at Staples looking for the perfect pen which will change my life. The texture of a life is so much about small daily connections, with people in shops or on the street, walking their dogs, pushing past a couple kissing in the aisle of a bookstore - I don't know why I'm mentioning those instead of the hundreds of other encounters and observations the day used to bring my way. Without them, I feel cut off, lonely, and find myself having to surrender resistance to the loneliness again and again, to rest easy in what simply is, to work my way back to a sense of connection. Still, not a bad thing to struggle toward acceptance, to find the way to rebound. 
   Years ago, when computers were new, there was a screen saver that was a ball moving across the black. Each time it got the the edge of the screen it rebounded, bounced back, crossing the center, heading for the next edge. That's what I feel twenty times a day - hitting the edge, bouncing back.

MAGNOLIA BUDS

I'm sitting up on the bed, looking up and out my window. Sitting up, looking out and up - there's something about the posture - relaxed and alert at the same time, silent inside, attentive to whatever I see. There's a young magnolia tree right outside the window and for a couple of months now I've been watching its buds slowly grow, so slowly I've had moments when I've doubted they are buds at all. But now the largest one I can see is beginning to get a little color and looks like it will open any day. I'm aware of the metaphor - all the unseen energy going into creating the bud, making it grow until it finally blossoms. All the energy inside me, moving me forward without my realizing it, until something happens and I find myself in a new place. Not necessarily blossoming, but changed, expanded, different...

I wonder just when I acquired faith that those unsensed wheels are turning in me and will lead me where I want to go. I who used to, and sometimes still do expect the worst. When did the wheels bring me this deeper faith, that there is always the possibility of change?  When did I become able the break through my relentless self-consciousness and become like the tree, reaching up to the sun, enlarging all unaware?

RESILIENCE, AGAIN

From a book on resiliency:

"Eileen was struggling to get back to normal, not yet fully aware that she would have to reinvent what normal meant to her. She was going to have to come up with a new set of adaptations, because the person (almost killed by an alligator) was not the same person who came out."

I like the emphasis on action - having to reinvent. Not emerging as a changed person - having to take action, find ways to adapt and become that new, changed person.   We are all wondering what the new normal will be when the virus is controlled and we can resume, but we can't resume in the way that was. We have to create the new society we will be after going through this catastrophe.  We talk about bouncing back, but we don't bounce back to where we were - we "bounce" to a new, different place.

Active, rather than passive. That's where freedom is - in making choices, taking action, even unproductive action that leads to new circumstances which come with its own new choices. Not passive in the face of change, not a being acted upon but a being in motion, doing. Even if the only doing possible is making an internal shift, claiming a new perspective.

My image of being acted upon - standing alone, stationary,  powerless, passively accepting instead of creating. As opposed to the energy of choice, the energy that comes from going into motion.

HUMILITY, NOT HUMILIATION

It occurs to me that the way out of humiliation is through humility.When I feel humiliated by my situation or someone's (mostly imagined) response to me, I feel humiliation which is another word for shame. Shame is a judgment, the taking on of a certain belief, attitude - it's a judgment that's leveled only by my own fears and self-loathing., not tied to anything objective outside myself, to some standard that's been decreed from on high. 
   But when I open myself to humility, judgment vanishes. Letting go of it, I'm only where I am, full of acceptance  for where I am. Humiliation is static; when I'm flooded with shame, there's no way forward. I'm caught in the prison of judgment. But humility looks only for what is; let me begin from where I am. Humility opens me up to the possibility that I don't know everything, that there may be another view, that there may be something I can or need or want to learn. Humility is a great bowing down, not to any other person or god but to my own shared humanity, a recognition of the human condition with all its faults and weaknesses and fears. 

Humiliation is the child of the ego, of all the judgments ego creates. Humility is the gift of the spirit, the way to move beyond ego and find a path forward.

NOT OLDER, CLOSER

I read something the other day I really like - a writer paraphrasing D. H. Lawrence - some of us begin a long way from where we need to go and I'm not getting older, I'm getting closer...

The sense of a trajectory, even more a purpose, to keep going toward - what? - toward freedom, from all the things that block me, that keep me suffering, and freedom to be simply where I am. I know I am on that track, that one way to see my past is as a steady march toward connection to the deepest part of me, the place in which I'm grounded in self-acceptance, in confidence that no matter what I will be all right, grounded in gratitude for all that is and my place in it. I've never been more at ease in the world, welcoming and sure of my own welcome.

And yet...there is another track, the one most boisterous and demanding to be seen - the one that's all about the struggles of my everyday life - the practical - making money, cleaning the house, doing the things I say I'll do and think I want to do. The ongoing struggle with self-discipline, my default desire for isolation and simultaneous rejection of it - all the gettings and spendings that make up my day. 

When things get the better of me, when depression blocks out everything and leaves me empty, passive, still...I remind myself there is another track, the one of deepening freedom. But to remind myself isn't to feel it; to say the words isn't to connect. Then I can only keep reminding myself, saying the words, until at last something shifts and I again feel purpose and hope.

A WOMAN GETS INTO A CAR

     I'm driving up the 5, coming back from a long day in Orange County. The late afternoon light is beginning to soften everything I see before me including, when I glance to the right, the Anaheim hills miles away. I'm listening to Joni Mitchell...she's my contemporary and, as always, her young voice makes me feel young and now it tips me into a surge of energy, plunges me into the world, makes me want to swoop down like a magpie on all that is glinting in the infinite sun...I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive and have fun tonight...the sky is slowly turning into twilight, a baby blue with pink puffy clouds...I wish I had a river to skate away on...an intensity deepens in me, the keenest feeling, a giving myself over to connection to the whole world, to all of time. The Portuguese word, saudade - nostalgia for something I may never have had or never will. A state in which time and place and experience are blended into a single poignancy, the fullness of life...Carey, get out your key...The light in front of me is exquisite, I want to snort it up, take it in suddenly, all at once...sometimes all color makes me feel that way, I think ART and the time I was sixteen and at MOMA with a friend and her cousin and aunt. The cousin and aunt lived on Park Avenue, which made them part of a world I knew existed but was afraid I'd never enter, the aunt was some kind of textile artist and I had a mad crush on the cousin who seemed to vibrate with energy and who I was certain would never notice me. A man approached the aunt; he had met her casually before and after they'd talked a few minutes, she said to him, "May I know your name?" The phrasing, her intonation - it was the most elegant thing I'd ever heard and still may be, now with the added charm of how old-fashioned it sounds, how much part of a gracious world that feels gone forever...
   Now, it's getting to the magic hour. Car lights are coming on, billboards glow...I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet...that desire to take everything in and feel myself limitless, infinitely expanding...looking out, I think I could be satisfied forever with only the view beyond my windshield, with all the time in the world to take apart the nuances of its nuances...the Edward Hopper sketches he made from the front seat of his car, to take back to his easel in the studio, with careful notations of color and detail...a pencil drawing I found somewhere of a vase of flowers, the particular hunched backs of Cezanne's card players, the depth of brown and sienna...the irregular Ellsworth Kelly canvas, clear unbroken blue, his homage to the bay in all the Cezanne paintings I saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
   Now it's Dylan...people are crazy and times are strange, I used to care but now I've changed...the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan lying on a Persian rug in an apartment I haven't thought of in years, then the black raincoat I wore one whole winter with black boots with heels - was I beautiful with my long blonde hair... the way I was always looking out from behind my eyes to see if I was being judged and how much time, slow time, had to pass before I realized I no longer did that...traffic is inching along but that's all right, my mind is occupied, more than my mind, my being, and I feel the wheels turning inside me, carrying me forward and I think this intensity I feel, my connection to the world, is always behind whatever I get caught up in, I see the whisk broom that hung in my mother's kitchen, that's what this feeling is, it can always sweep away the foreground to put me in touch with what I know is the deepest part of me...
     I've had a lot of news lately of people who have died and it's made me aware of how, when any of us goes, a whole universe goes with him or her, the universe of memories and the infinite random connections and resonances we all carry within us, the "perchings" of conscious thought and the "flights" that connect them which we can't quite articulate. The times I've leaned over the sink to rinse the soap from my face and have thought, out of nowhere, with no reason I can understand, about the side of a train car that streamed past me twenty years ago...all of this, this universe, is what makes us us and when we die all of its detail and energy will be gone. I know its going is in the natural order of things...I saw a shooting star tonight and I thought about you...but I feel an urgency to get it all down, tell someone else about this universe inside me and my enchantment in it...even though I know it's impossible and no one else can possibly care or feel my urgency, which maybe is the main thing, that while the intensity inside me is private, solitary, unknowable by another, it tells me that the intensity is alive in all the passengers in the cars around me and I marvel that this core inside me brings me out into the world, makes me feel the living energy that surrounds me. 
     As I've been driving north, the sun has been sinking on my left. I pull my eyes from the road to glimpse it just as it goes fully below the horizon. Home with all its comforts and uncertainties and night are closer now. And it's all right...not dark yet, but getting there...
     

SOMETHING I LIKE

Here's a paragraph I like from something I'm working on:

     I pull open the sliding glass door and step out on the terrace. It’s a clear night and surprisingly quiet here in the middle of the city. There are sounds – the hum of freeway traffic, music somewhere across the canyon – but sometimes silence is more silent when there are sounds to emphasize it. I sit on an old aluminum chair with plastic webbing and look up at the sky. Los Angeles light blots out most of the stars but the grayish bubble of sky is vast and comforting. Time slows, and I begin to relax. I focus on what I see – a single light across the canyon – a porch light? street light? – Gatsby staring at the light on Daisy’s dock – a car coming up the street below me – who is inside and where is it going? – I could start a novel with less than the answers to those questions. A door slams somewhere in the distance – is someone going in or out? – any story would depend on the answer to that – William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow - and I’m suddenly pierced by the mystery of everything, the moment to moment contingency of it all, the achingly human way we want to make sense of existence, our own and others and every atom in the universe. My gaze goes soft focus and I am full.  The fullness bleeds out of me and into the world even as the world seeps into my every pore. It is mystery and magnificence, fused together, and I don’t want answers, or to make sense of anything. For a moment, I understand, and can hold on to my understanding, that this fullness has come because I’ve let go of my relentless need for answers, for any thought at all.