One night, lying in bed waiting for sleep, it suddenly came to me that whatever else had happened or would happen, I had made the crucial turning, done the work I was meant to do. I had climbed out of the bushes and gotten on the path.
Before that crucial turning, I felt fragmented, full of contradictions, self-loathing and despair that I would ever be able to change. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me but I couldn't see what it was; at the heart of me there was a mystery I'd never solve because I didn't even know what was mysterious.
But I made the crucial turning. I had a spiritual awakening. I discovered something beyond and behind the problems and fears that filled my thinking, about myself and about the world. I'd come to understand certain universal spiritual principles - surrender, detachment, atonement, meditation, ongoing self-examination, service - and slowly those principles became the context of my life. When something bad happened, I asked myself, which one of those principles will help me get free? Do I need to surrender or let go or accept what is; do I need to ask, what is my part? Do I need to take a moment to sit quietly and find the energy of those principles inside me? How can I apply those principles so I can climb the ladder they provide to a higher perspective?
I have many regrets about the past and on most days I wish certain things were different now. I wish the blues and lethargy didn't come around to claim me. I wish my life had more continuity. I wish so many things. But there is a continuity, an unspooling ribbon beneath my feet and it supports every step I take. It's the path, the solid ground of faith in the principles that I've lived with for a very long time. Faith has grown in me because I've experienced time after time the solace and freedom they always give me when I remember to breathe deeply and make the effort to connect with them.
Years ago I went to a birthday party for a friend. After we sang Happy Birthday and ate the cake (this was a westside of Los Angeles group and probably half the crowd had given up sweets), we went around the room, and took a turn saying what my friend meant to us. I remember how calm she was, taking it all in, and I thought to myself I couldn't bear to be the recipient of all that attention, that loving attention. I thought, I would rather die.
It's strange to remember a time when I couldn't receive compliments or hear anything good about myself. Very strange...I was desperate to shine in the world's eyes and yet I'd do everything I could to deflect the good things people said about me. It was a kind of extreme embarrassment but something more - there was an ocean between the compliment and what I thought of myself. I knew the muck inside, the doubts and fears, the pessimism, so I couldn't sit still for anything good said about me.
And something even more. One day I was brushing my hair, looking in the mirror, when a voice inside me said, "I want, but I can't have." I knew instantly this was a voice from the deepest part of me; I knew that at rock bottom I believed I would always be denied, could not have all the things I wanted, would always live with frustration and despair. It was the voice of my emotional anorexia, my perverse inability to take in all the kinds of nourishment every person needs. I lived on the razor's edge, ravenous and self-denying all at once.
Reader, I've changed. I can trace the path to change, the watersheds and landmarks that made me willing to see what was inside me, and gave me the courage to look. I can feel the many moments I was forced to surrender self-loathing and -denial bit by little bit. I can feel all the times I had very little to go on except the faith that if I didn't run from whatever truth I found inside, I would somehow be all right. I had been covering up so much fear and lacerating beliefs about myself and I'd been terrified that if there was one little chink in my armor the whole facade would collapse. But I learned the opposite was true: in Leonard Cohen's words, "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." That's how the light gets in.
The light has come in, slowly, so slowly that sometimes I've thought nothing at all was happening. But many wheels inside were turning, are still turning, and I've learned to walk the braided path of willingness, surrender, faith and courage. Each of the strands is crucial and takes its turn at the forefront of my being. The more time passes, the more I see that braided path is the only one I can walk now, and more and more it's the only one I want.
To find a way to come out from under self-loathing and fear is the greatest gift, one I receive over and over. I unwrap the gift with gratitude and humility and sit quietly so that more light, and even more light, can keep coming in.
There was an article in the NY Times last week about the memory aid often called the memory palace. It's a very old technique going back to antiquity. The idea is to give every object (it didn't say but I assume it can be used for more than objects) you want to remember a location and the more eccentric the better. The asparagus is sitting on the window sill wearing a yellow hat. Those cans of soup I want to buy are in the bathroom sink. There were some tests to see how well you did and all I can say is I did better as I went along.
I wish I knew more about how the brain stores memories and how they can be summoned up. I picture those synapses snapping, little jolts of electricity, and everyone of us with our own connections. It makes me think that a universe is lost when anyone of us dies - all the random connections and all the memories packed into that brain.
There are so many aspects of memory but the one that really interests me is our ability to revise everything we thought. I get a new idea, or learn something new about myself, and I can view the past, my memories, in a whole new light. Things I couldn't understand come clear; actions that puzzled me now have an explanation. History is filled with dramatic revisions - spiritual awakenings and religious conversions, and many other examples of new insight bringing an unexpected change of view. "I was blind but now I see."
It's as if we have our particular memories and also a kind of overview of how we understand those memories. A memory on top of a memory - and once you begin thinking about that, you very soon get to the wonderful knots and complications of human consciousness.
May I always be open to revision. May I never stop looking for insight.
I think so much about powerlessness, the spiritual kind, but the other day I was reminded of my experience with another kind of powerlessness. Many years ago my ex-husband and I drove from Los Angeles to Mexico City, then north again heading for New York. We were stopped at the border, the officers searched the car and found a joint in a box of typewriter paper we had forgotten about. We had some more hidden away. It was enough to get us arrested and taken to jail.
As if in a movie, I heard the barred door close behind me and the key turn in the lock. I wanted to shout, "Hey, it's me, a nice Jewish girl from New York!" But I knew there was no appeal. They didn't care who I thought I was; to them, I had been in a car that had marijuana and that was that.
There were two other women in the holding cell, a Mexican prostitute and a small nervous Anglo who had passed some bad checks. I sat on a bunk, stunned by what had happened. For the first time, I, a politico in the Sixties, slowly began to be grateful for the rule of law. If the men who turned the key hadn't obeyed the law, I could have been locked away forever. But there was a process, a routine that jailers and officers and the courts all choose to obey, so that after two days we got out on bail. They dropped the charges against me and my ex-husband eventually got a suspended sentence. When we were released the first thing I did was throw away the dress I'd been wearing; I knew cleaning it wouldn't get the smell of jail out of it.
That sense of powerlessness in jail, of a shocking destabilization, effected me more than I knew. In the next few years, I had a series of prison dreams, one in the Catacombs, another in a concentration camp and a strange one in which I was locked into something like a bamboo bird cage. I began to be phobic about being hemmed in, unable to get out of wherever I was. It took unexpected forms; years later, when I got off the ferry on Martha's Vineyard, I had a couple of hours of anxiety - there was no way off the island except on ferries keeping to a schedule. I couldn't leave whenever I wanted.
The fact that I had experienced the jail kind of powerlessness in part led me an interest in prison memoirs, stories of people who found a way to be free in the most unfree of circumstances. Many of them were stories of spiritual awakening, even for the ones who had no religion. These people found a way to maintain their identity and integrity.They came to terms.
I see I've come full circle. The powerlessness I knew in jail was all about helplessness, robbed of autonomy. That led me to seek out stories about a similar experience, and that in turn led me to my own spiritual awakening, to a sure sense of my own always possible freedom, an inner autonomy no one can take away from me, no matter what. Full circle. One more time, coming a great distance in order to begin.
Years ago, I came across a book by a Dutch woman named Etty Hillesum. It was her journal for the year between the Nazis marching into the Netherlands and the time they took her away ultimately to die at Auschwitz. Her entries went from terror, helplessness, the desperate need for someone to save her, to a faith that freed her to act, to be of service to all those around her who were sufferings. She wrote, "No matter when they do to me, there is always room for praying hands." Praying hands isn't a phrase I relate to, but I understood she had had a spiritual awakening. She had faced a situation she was powerless to change but instead of that powerlessness destroying her, she found courage in it, a fearlessness that allowed her to do what she could do. She found a purpose to her suffering - helping others - and that purpose led her to a connection to something greater than herself. No matter what, she knew she would always feel that connection. She would find freedom in the most unfree circumstance.
Hillesum's spiritual awakening provided a framework, a context, for all the horrors she saw around her, for the horrors she knew were still to come. That context was the realm of the spirit and it was beyond everything, arching over everything. always present. Her belief was personal, individual, and it was real; it had real effect on her daily life and thought. It led her to acceptance and peace, which in turn enabled her to act.
