GLAMOUR

     I like to take long drives and one of my favorites is heading north on the 5 freeway, then turning off at the 126. The road runs east and west and goes through the Sespe Valley. It's a narrow valley with low hills I feel I could touch and that makes me feel cozy and protected. The valley is beautiful, especially driving east to west. Everything is green - the miles of orange and avocado groves, the flowers grown for commercial use, other fruits and vegetables, many of which are sold at two big fruit stands along the road. Los Angeles is very far away. The road goes all the way to the ocean at Ventura but I usually turn around before that, at Santa Paula, which I think of as the town that time forgot. The main street looks as it must have fifty years ago; gentrification is not a word spoken here. Sometimes I stop and have some tacos but usually I just drive through slowly, making sure nothing has changed.      

    One day, as I was leaving the 5 for the 126, I noticed a motorcycle and its driver pulled over to the side of the road. He was sitting on the bike, dressed all in black leather and just as I was passing him he pulled off his helmet and shook out long blonde hair. My god, I thought, the quintessential California image - man, motorcycle, black leather, blonde hair. Then I thought, no, it isn't just a California image - anyone anywhere would respond to him. For the moment it took me to pass him, he was Brando and the Hell's Angels and the two guys from Easy Rider and Harley Sunday drivers - everyone who has ever hit the road on two wheels heading somewhere else.

     I thought about him as I drove on. Was he just taking a break and by now was back on the freeway, heading north or south? Was he somewhere behind me; if he was, I didn't see him. I didn't want to meet him; I wanted to gaze at him, to be in the presence of the charisma I felt in an instant. As I kept picturing him, I realized I was feeling a kind of awe, low grade but real, the kind that makes you feel you're connected to something important. Then it came to me, a word - glamour. He was one of the most glamorous images I'd ever seen. Glamour means allure, it instills fascination, it has a mystique. It compels us to stare. The motorcyclist had the glamour of the loner - the cowboy riding the range, the detective going down mean streets alone, the surfer riding the face of towering waves with ease and grace, the motorcyclist pulling over to the side of the road and shaking out his long blonde hair. 

     All of those images suggest courage, a nonchalance in the face of risk. There's a reason they've become iconic - they touch something primal in us, the desire to test ourselves, to go it alone, to ride into the unknown. I may not have the chance to do that anytime soon but, gazing at the motorcycle rider, I sense what it must feel like. His glamour comes from knowing it first hand.

     

     

ADVENTURE AND JOURNEY

A group of us were talking about the difference between adventure and journey. I immediately thought of the hero (or heroine) starting out on an adventure. An adventure may have a destination but it will be filled with unexpected and threatening challenges. The wind will blow the ship off course. The forest will grow so thick it will hide the trail. Accepting and conquering the unpredictable is what adventure is all about - testing yourself, surviving, coming through.
      Surviving the tests adventure brings actually has a deeper level of meaning. It's the story of the hero's inner journey, of how he is changed by experience, possibly moving from childishness to maturity or from illusion to wisdom.  It's the story under the story and it puts us in touch with the universal mysteries of life and death, good and evil. This is the story in which we see ourselves reflected. We may not act out adventures on a grand scale, but we all make that inner journey, challenged by the experiences life brings. ADVEB 

COMPETITION

I started working on a new "thing" ( I don't yet know what it is) today, something that captured my imagination enough so that I put pen to paper. It;s no coincidence that it came after I read a few Amazon samples of books that have gotten raves, all by women. I was surprised at how ordinary the writing is. It could be the plots are ingenious, unpredictable, but the sample was only about twenty pages so I can't say for sure. I found myself thinking, well, I could do as well, and a few minutes after reading the last sample, I got an idea, a good one, and I actually wrote a scene.
     I never thought of myself as competitive. I never tried hard enough and that was one of my problems. I couldn't put  myself in the game. I didn't want to go head to head with anybody; I was certain I would lose. I didn't know this was at the heart of so many problems in me. I kept it hidden from myself because I was too afraid to let my real feelings out - the ones that were all about desperately wanting to win and the certainty that I never would. 
     But in fact I was very competitive. I cut winners "down to size". I found ways to discount and criticize their efforts - well, I convinced myself, I certainly wouldn't want that. My competitiveness was so repressed I didn't even know it was there.
     There's a very dark side to all this. It's the source of the constant comparison I was making between me and everyone else. It's a form of envy - see, that person has more than I do, has accomplished more; why do I always get the short end of the stick. 
     I wish I could trace exactly how I was brought out of that terrible dynamic. I know I began to make progress when I realized that constant comparing was a kind of self-pity. They have so much and I have so little. I saw how sorry  I was for myself.  I began to inch up to some of my fear that if I competed I was bound to lose. To finally recognize something so deep seated and self-destructive is to be already moving toward change. I began to be able to feel my strengths, to look at them and not at anybody else. I didn't know it but I was leaving the crippling kind of competitiveness behind. The more I valued myself the less I looked at and compared myself to anyone else. I began to get free enough to focus on my own work, and do my best work.
     But the ground beneath all of this has to be seeded. With the willingness to move forward, even when I'm terrified - in other words, to have faith that wherever I'm led will be the place I want to go. A willingness to surrender what I think of as my best ideas and opinions, especially about myself. A willingness to not run from deep and frightening emotion. A willingness to surrender everything.
     There is so much more that has gone into the changes I feel in myself. I know I can't trace the path exactly because no one thing sums it up. There are so many levels in each of us, so many aspects of our experience and values, so many chains and braids, merging and untangling. Our inner lives are an endlessly evolving collaboration.
     
        

CHERISH AND GRATITUDE

A friend and I were talking the other day about the difference between cherish and gratitude. Cherish is a verb, it's something you do, while gratitude is a noun; it's something you feel, a quality, something you can express or demonstrate.
     Cherish is a word I don't hear very often anymore. Maybe it's too intense for our cool culture. There's nothing ironic or cynical about it, no wink-wink. In fact, to cherish something or someone, to feel deeply, is the opposite of irony. It's the opposite of "whatever," which is another way of saying, I don't care. To cherish is to care deeply. When you say you cherish, you're  acknowledging that something is vital to you in a way that has nothing to do with dependence. Cherishing is a verb of pleasure and to cherish is to be enlarged.
     If I don't hear "cherish" much anymore, I can't get away from "gratitude." The word is used so much -"practice gratitude" - it's bordering on the cliche. I googled gratitude and clicked on images. Many came up and most of them looked like they'd be perfect on a greeting card. Maybe that's what always happens. Something that begins as heartfelt get co-opted, is used to make a profit and so stripped of real meaning.
     But here's the thing. I think of gratitude as the aristocrat of emotions because when I feel it deeply I have a sense of grandeur, a wide expansiveness, a going out from myself and touching the world. When that happens "gratitude" loses its meaning, all words loose their limiting meaning and become the doorway to the universal. The veil between me and everything else that exists is pulled away. I am totally connected.
     Here is some irony. We have only words to describe these transcendent experiences to ourselves and to each other. We have only words to take us to the place that's about the absence of words.

YOSEMITE

I was driving south from Sacramento.  Just south of Stockton there was a sign: Yosemite, Take 120. I pictured the road, a two lane blacktop heading east, running as flat as the San Joaquin Valley floor until it reaches the foothills of the Sierras and starts climbing higher and higher until it reaches Yosemite. The road may follow an Indian trail, laid out centuries ago, then replaced by a dirt and gravel path which in turn was replaced by this paved road with its sign - Yosemite.
     I've been to Yosemite twice. The first time was insanely rushed.  I had driven up the east side of the Sierras on the 395, through towns called Independence and Lone Pine, up higher and higher until I reached the Tioga pass at about 9900'. I didn't know it but if I'd come a week later the pass would have been closed because of snow. As I turned west, I also didn't know that the road, which went right through the park, was the 120. The sun was very bright, the air clear, and I passed an Alpine meadow that glinted in the light. I remember a lake and then the drive down ultimately to the valley floor. I'd only just realized I didn't have a place to stay for the night and I'd have to find a motel outside the park. So I was in an insane rush and speedily took in the sights but it was a kind of if-it's-four o'clock this must be El Capitan.
     The second time was very different. I had a room at the Wawona Hotel near the Mariposa Grove and I spent a morning wandering through the impossibly old, impossibly huge trees. There's no other word for them but awesome, and although there were other people there, we all were silent, our mouths stopped by awe.
     This time I dawdled as much as you can in a weekend. I walked up to the base of El Capitan, considered hopping over the Merced River which was almost a trickle, making it hard to believe this is the river that carved out the valley, along with the help of some glaciers. I got as close as I could to the famous waterfalls, the ones on a thousand souvenir postcards. The water begins falling in each of them very high up and comes down in thin white ribbons. You can't see its movement from a distance but up close, the sound and the power of the water is the sound and power of nature.
     I spent a long time at the lookout point from which you can see down the whole Valley with El Capitan on one side and Half Dome in the distance. It's one of the most famous and popular views of the park and, as I gazed out, the other tourists suddenly felt very far away. I sat on a low stone wall and tried to come up with something original to say. I gave up pretty quickly.
     There's a field of study called hermeneutics.  Its name comes from Hermes, the messenger of the Gods the go-between, the interpreter. Modern hermeneutics is the study of theories of interpretation - for instance, how do we understand, interpret all the levels of meaning we use to see and understand a text or our experience or a work of art. Since ideas and experience are always shifting, how can we get at the truth?
     Sitting on the stone wall, I realized my time in Yosemite had a hermeneutics all its own. There was the present, the direct experience coming at me through all my senses, my spiritual response to all that beauty. But there were layers beneath that, adding to that direct experience. There were the Indians cutting trails as they tracked animals. There was a book I had, written by a traveler in 1888 and he called the park by its Indian name, Yo-semite. There were Carlton Watkins' 19th century photographs of the Valley monuments and wide vistas from the depths of the Park, and Ansel Adams' oh so familiar black and whites. There were the people who climbed the sheer face of El Capitan without ropes, clinging to the rock by their finger tips. There was a vintage travel poster I'd once seen, of this very view.
     But mostly there was John Muir who walked south from San Francisco, over the Pacheco Pass, across the flat Valley and into the Sierras and ultimately to Yosemite. His love was immediate and included very pebble and leaf and animal. He was endlessly curious; on the night of a storm, he climbed up high in a tree because he wanted to feel the power of the storm. There was the fight he made to save the Hetch Hetchy valley which he lost and then watched as that valley, part of Yosemite, disappeared under hundreds of feet of water when its river was dammed up. I'll never see Hetch Hetchy but it has a meaning for me built on Muir's struggle to save it.
     All these layers and more were part of my experience looking down the Valley. If I had stopped to tease them out, I wouldn't have been present for my experience of the Valley view. But layers like these are beneath every experience and idea and feeling I have. They're part of what I mean when I say, "I". Some are accessible when I go looking for them while others float somewhere beyond my consciousness, always ready to flood in.
     Somewhere south of Stockton I saw the sign for Yosemite and I said to myself, "Let the revelries begin."

INDIANA

I'm driving through southern Indiana on my way to Los Angeles. There are cultivated fields along the highway and after a while it's all corn. I'm staring - I've never seen corn so tall with thick stems, dark green leaves. America is rich, I think, you can see it in the corn which looks so healthy it can only be the result of science and effort.
     I find a motel and go in to register. When I come out to move the car, it won't start. I try again and a few times more. I can't believe it. I'm in the middle of nowhere. I have AAA but it's after seven and for some reason I don't want the car towed to somewhere I'll have to leave overnight. It may not be working but it's still my car.  I know this is ridiculous but stranger, and worse, things have happened. If this is where my head goes automatically, I know I'm losing it.
     I suddenly remember I'm a member of a fellowship that has chapters around the country. I look in the phone book and one is listed. I call the number, it rings for a very long time but I feel hanging up is the same as cutting a lifeline. Finally, a man answers. I tell him who I am and what my problem is and he immediately says, "Don't worry, we'll take care of it in the morning." That's all I need to know - someone will help me and the panic is already fading. He tells me he was on his way to a fellowship meeting and offers to pick me up. Of course, I say, of course. I go outside to wait. I don't know who or what I'm waiting for but what drives up is the biggest Harley I've ever seen. It's a dusty pinkish color which doesn't quite compute with its size and power but for the moment  I'm not thinking about the bike. I'm looking at the man who's riding it. Think of Sterling Hayden with a crew cut and reflector sunglasses, in swim trunks, no shirt and flip flops. We introduce ourselves and he says, "hop on." I do.
     We take off and I can't get over the size of the bike. Unless my eyes deceive me, there's carpeting on the floor board. I'm holding on to the bar behind my seat and the ride is completely smooth. We're on a two lane country road. I look at the man's back, the overhanging trees, the fact of me on this huge Harley in the middle of southern Indiana and suddenly laughter rises up in me, deep spontaneous waves of laughter that I want to last forever. I can't believe it. I'm having the time of my life.
     When we get to the meeting, the man puts on a t-shirt and introduces everyone to everyone, including me. It's as if he's the official majordomo, making sure we have a pleasant evening.  There are long tables set up in a square. He sits opposite and I covertly watch him. He's restless, distracted, and half way through the meeting, me leaves without a glance at me. It's all right. I know someone else will take me back to the motel.  When it's my turn to share, I tell the meeting that I'm driving cross country and my car has broken down. Everyone is nodding as if it's a minor glitch (which I suppose it is) and this is enough to make me feel better.
     The meeting ends and I find myself standing with the man's mother to whom he introduced me. I say it was so nice of him to pick me up and bring me here. I say, "Your son stands so straight. Was he in the military?" She looks at me and laughs. "No", she says. "Jail."
     It turns out there's a mechanic at the meeting and he comes to the motel the next morning, lifts the hood and does something I can't see. Then he closes the hood much too quickly but that's because he's already fixed it. A clogged gas filter, many thanks and I'm on my way.
       This story is definitely one to dine out on and I've told it many times. I think the man would be astonished at how often I talk about him, and his dusty pink Harley, the country roads and the overhanging trees, his mother laughing and saying, "No, jail". But most of all - of course - I see myself hanging on to the bike and I hear my laughter, that deep spontaneous laughter. Even now, I feel it bubbling up and traveling through my body and there's no way to stop it, no desire to stop it.  How unpredictable and amazing life is. How great it is to be alive.

GETTING NAKED

   A while ago, I woke up from a dream that left me with a very bad feeling. The dream wasn't exactly a nightmare - it felt like a long dream, complicated, but what I remembered was struggling to get out of a jump suit that zipped up the front. I couldn't get the zipper open and I felt hemmed in, confined and I was desperate to get out of it. It was the sense of that desperation that I woke up with.
     I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. In a few minutes, the sense of desperation faded but I saw the image in the dream with sharp clarity. It didn't take much insight to understand what a perfect metaphor my dream mind had created. My sense of being trapped, unable to unbind myself. The longing to step out of my old confining skin and be naked like a baby, so I could begin again. It was all about my struggle to get free and my desperate fear that I'd never be able to.
     As I lay on the bed, I found myself wanting to go back into the dream and change it. I focused on my struggling self and then worked to let all that frustrated effort it all go. I watched how easy it became to unzip the jump suit and shrug it off my shoulders. I watched myself turning and walking out in the world naked, just as I am. 
     I did this again and again. I knew that just making the effort to rewrite this bulletin from my subconscious gave me back some power. It changed an image of myself that was all about frustration and desperation into a vision of an alternate possibility, one in which I was no longer helpless but could do the work that change required I do.
     With each attempt I made, it was as if a movie were unreeling itself before my eyes. I could stop the projection, change details, go over certain moments again and again. But then something happened. Suddenly, there was no distance between "me" and "it." I wasn't watching, wasn't an observer of the new story I was trying to tell. I didn't see it or absorb it.  I had no objectivity at all. The image was inside me; it was me. 
     When I came back from that moment of transcendence, which is what I think it was, my psyche knew something fundamental had changed. I knew there was nothing more I needed to do at that moment. Something had moved forward. 
     I've had this experience other times when an image has come to me, one that fills me with fear and despair. But no matter how many times I go over it trying to change it, nothing shifts until the moment when I and it no longer have any separation, when objectivity is gone, when consciousness is suspended for a brief instant. The loss of Self is what enables self to change.
     I've learned, though, I can't will these moments no matter how much I try. That trying mind is still the objective mind but it's the repeated trying that allows something else to take over. It paves the way so I can find myself in that place without words, where all is effortless and one, the place where real change can happen.

LOOK AT ME

I've known people who have a voracious need to be noticed. They want to dominate conversations, to show you how smart they are, how accomplished - they don't realize how often it puts people off. They don't seem to have any doubt or awareness of who they are. But you want to say to them, "Don't come at me with guns blazing, don't work so hard to impress me, don't push into my space." 
     Most everyone wants to be noticed and admired. I certainly do. In the past, it was all I wanted; I was sure that if I didn't have they world's adulation, my life would be a failure. That desire came out of deep insecurity, so deep it took years for me to recognize it. At first, as the insecurity revealed itself, I took it as evidence that I was worthless, so weak I could never change something so deep in me. I thought of it as a flaw. I was afraid that to recognize anything I wanted to change would pull my whole facade down.
     It turned out, a direct approach to my insecurity didn't get me anywhere. I couldn't snap my fingers and be "healed." What I mostly had to do was to acknowledge the insecurity, become unafraid to feel it, and I worked to surrender it, to let a power greater than myself in turn work inside me. I stopped trying to decide on the best solution to my insecurity. Instead, I began to say, "Show me what to do in order to get free." It didn't matter that I didn't know who or what I was saying that to. I just had to surrender my relentless super rational ego. 
     This is a process I go through over and over again. Surrender the demand that I be rich and famous; surrender the insecurity that is the very thing that's blocking me from being my most spontaneous, freest self. In the deepest way, this is my life's work, to keep allowing myself to feel the truths inside me, both the good and the not so good.  

FAME AND ANONYMITY

I watched "Listen To Me, Marlon", the documentary about Brando that's almost all drawn from audio tapes he made over the years. I assume every actor is out there watching the movie - Brando gives a master class in acting.  Listening to his voice, it's clear he was a brilliant man, sensitive, compassionate, which is something of a miracle given the childhood he had with two alcoholic parents, one of whom liked to knock his mother and him around. The demons that chased him all through his life were born his hometown in the mid-west.
     I was struck with what he said about fame. He hated it, hated that he'd lost the possibility of moving through the world seeing, rather than being seen. He was very aware of people treating him differently, in a way that kept him from learning who they were. When people looked at him, they saw Stanley Kowalski and The Wild One and Terry Mallow. He knew he was nothing like those characters. The myths about him put up walls that were impossible to scale. He found himself isolated, which was an enormous deprivation for a person who was endlessly curious about other people. When he first got to New York, he'd stand at the window of a cigar store and watch people going by. He felt he had them, who they were, their story, in the few seconds it took them to pass by. Fame made that impossible. No wonder he loved Tahiti where no one knew he was a movie star or, if they did, they may have been unsure of exactly what that meant. This actor, this great and unique impersonator, was desperate to be himself.
     Many famous people talk about the cost of the loss of anonymity. Most of us don't believe them - how could you not like the spotlight, being the center of attention, having every door open for you. Not to mention the money. In our culture, fame is the prize. But most of us live our lives unknown except to family and friends and the other people we actually encounter. It's enough for most of us as long as we feel rooted in the world we travel in.
     The opposite of fame isn't that kind of anonymity. It's not being noticed by others in the world you move through. It's the feeling that no one sees you, not only as you are, no one sees you at all. It's the same isolation that's at the heart of fame - the sense that you can't break out of the bubble you live so that you can be seen as you are.
     That there are so many people who live that life is heartbreaking. They aren't characters in a movie or book and to begin to think about them risks going down a very deep well. And yet to do nothing puts us in a moral limbo. Our culture says, "love you fellow man" and it also says, "keep your head down, look away, take care of your own." We all exist in the heart of that dilemma; sometimes we're drawn to one side and sometimes to the other. The seesaw is always going and all we can do is the best we can do. 
     A few years ago, a book came out about our culture, focused on the loss of community and a shared civic life. It's called, "Bowling Alone." It's hard to think of anything sadder.
     

SATISFACTION

He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have -- Socrates


I've been very dissatisfied the last few days. "My life isn't anything like I want it be, anything like what I thought it would be. Why haven't I done more and have more? Why haven't I changed more, learned more - why have I turned out the way I have?" I could go on but you catch my drift.
     Satisfaction is an interesting concept. I used to think if I were satisfied, it could only be because I'd given up and surrendered ambition; I thought my desire for more was the only thing that would help me get what I wanted. Contentment, which is one of the definitions of satisfaction, seemed like the kiss of death. I didn't want to be content because it meant that I'd be like a dumb beast in a field, chewing my cud, getting nowhere.
     It took me a long time to see that I rejected satisfaction and was afraid of what contentment would mean for me because I was run by a tyrannical ambition and the kind of perfectionism which told me that everything I did wasn't good enough. I was afraid that if I turned away from them, I'd never do anything at all. That both paralyzed me and made it very hard to act for good or ill somehow escaped my  notice.
     Things only began to change as I slowly understood that the things I thought I needed, like ambition and drive, were the very things that were getting in my way. It's not that those concepts are bad in and of themselves; we'd never get anywhere if we didn't want things and actively pursue them. But in my case, they had a negative effect. That tyrannical ambition meant that my work didn't come first; it stood in the foreground blocking my view of everything but what my work was supposed get me. I was a capitalist of any talent I had, driven to make my talent pay, in attention, admiration and financial reward. When that drive is coupled with a perfectionism that tells you everything you do isn't good enough - well, I was living on the razor's edge and it was a terrible place to be.
     Slowly, I gained some insight into all this. It's hard to say why the process of change began but I know a part of it was my realization of the pain I was in. I'd been holding down my fear that I would never accomplish anything that was good enough (good enough for whom was a question I didn't ask.) But it was pain that forced me to consider the possibility that what I thought of myself, who I had to be, what I had to do, was - maybe - the source of my problems. I took a tiny first step - I became willing to change.
     I began to see my ambition in a new way and to understand how lacerating my perfectionism was. I slowly became able to find them in my being, to isolate and get some space around them. I worked to bring them down to size. My desire to let them go taught me about surrender.
     It's been a very long  process. It took time to strip away levels of fear so that I could bear to look at some truths about myself and my thinking. But above all things I wanted to get free. I instinctively knew that I'd never be free enough to do my best work and connect with the world if I wasn't willing to have the knots in me unravel. I wanted another kind of satisfaction and contentment, the kind that comes from the sense of being free.
     Well, you can tell from the first sentence of this little essay that I haven't gotten so free that I no longer feel dissatisfied. Some part of me will always want unrealistic things and make me feel I'm falling short. I'm content with that, not in spite of still being susceptible to the things inside me that cause me pain, but because of those things. I now know I'm human and humans have "issues." These are just my issues and I can live with that.
     

I WANT BUT I CAN'T HAVE

     Years ago, in the middle of doing something I can't remember, I suddenly heard a voice: "I want but I can't have." I knew immediately this was a voice from the deepest part of me. Core. One of oldest, perhaps the oldest belief I had about myself. It was shocking - and heartbreaking that I myself, ruled by this idea, was the reason I felt so held back by a force I couldn't understand. I knew had everything I needed to have a successful life - but I couldn't seem to get ahead. 
     The voice was heartbreaking because I suddenly understood the world or circumstances or luck weren't holding me back. I was the one holding me back. I had been confirming the truth of the voice again and again. I'd been compulsively enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy. I began to understand why I could rarely keep commitments, was always moving from thing to thing and place to place, unable to follow through on opportunities, unable to create the arc of a successful career or maintain a long term relationship.
     A hidden part of my subconscious had revealed itself, and it was devastating, to think that all the time I lived under a tyrannical ambition, wanting to (in shorthand) be rich and famous, I was actually living out a very different goal, one that was about impoverishment, frustration and self-denial. 
     I thought this core belief must have come from childhood but in a sense that didn't matter. Its etiology might be interesting, but I intuitively knew understanding its source wouldn't help me walk out of the prison the voice kept me in. How then could I get free? Was the part of me that wanted to get free, to change, weaker than the voice? How could I transform a fundamental part of my psyche, my very being, so that I was no longer under its dominion? Did I, so used to pessimism about myself, frequently in despair, really think it was even possible? 
     Over the years, I've learned there are many roads to transformation. No one of them is the only one; all of them are useful, even necessary, for dealing with the negative sentences I pass on myself. I first had to acknowledge the voice inside me; my hearing it at all was a great gift, the first step in seeing the truth inside me. I decided that the part of me that heard the voice was greater than the voice itself. I tried to act out of that decision - even when I doubted I could. Through experience, I learned how to take a step back, put some space around the voice and in that way to begin to bring it down to size. It's been a slow walk to the kind of change I want and it's still going on. I understand now the voice will always be with me but I don't have to believe it.
     Most of that slow walk has been on a spiritual path. I learned to meditate and often found images that could help me. I saw a collapsed stick figure, the picture of despair, and I worked for months to get her arms and legs fleshed out, to put color in her cheeks and get her standing. Eventually, I saw her walking out into the world, smiling with her arms open wide. It was powerful and I can still think of that image and feel the possibility of change. 
     Because of my frequent companions, suffering and despair, I've learned how to surrender to something greater than myself, to the idea that the universe is benevolent and wants me to have a good life. I do what I can to cultivate hope. I try not to impose my will, rush to come up with solutions to all my problems - I've learned that if I concentrate on principles like gratitude and humility, the answers, the right actions, will come to me. The answers aren't the end; my resistance to change is a major obstacle; it's a challenge to take the risk of moving out of my comfort zone. I have to ask the universe to give me the strength to take the actions to make the answers come true.
     Does this sound as if the work I've had to do is done? Far from it. There are still many days when I can't connect with hope or gratitude, days when all I hear is the voice, repeating again and again, that I want but can't have. But some crucial things have changed. I used to think the fact that I was so held back by a voice deep inside me meant that there was no hope for me; it confirmed all my hopelessness and fear. But, slowly, slowly, I've learned it's all right to have things inside me I want, need to change. In fact, I've come to understand that dealing with the voice inside me, working to get freer and freer, is the real purpose of my life, the work I'm meant to do. In a paradoxical way, it's the struggle that's put solid ground under me. I'm anchored in the effort to change.
     I've come to believe something else as well. If the deepest change is possible for me, it's possible for all of us. Hope, gratitude, humility and the art of surrender will inevitably lead all of us where we want to go.

WEIGHT LOSS

For more than a year now, I've been eating in a way that's allowed me to lose weight. Day in, day out - not always perfect but good enough. I've kept track of the pound by pound loss and by now I've filled up pages in a little pad I keep near the scale. Every once in a while, I go through the entries, track the slowly declining numbers, July, September, January, July again. It's the record of my commitment, my willingness to keep to a beneficial discipline.
     The other day I hit a new low, a significant low, and I felt a rush of deep pleasure, a special combination of amazement that I've done it and the thrill of satisfaction. For a few minutes, I walked around the house feeling delight, holding myself close, wrapped in the wonderful fact of my achievement.
     I thought about the day after day gradual peeling away, the process that's been taking place under and through whatever else has been happening in my day or month or year. In the times I've been dragging through the Slough of Despond or been pretty much oblivious to the content of my days - through all the time I've read as disappointing or unproductive or just blah, underneath, behind it all was something positive, something nourishing that I all but ignored.  
     It's a lesson in focus, on where I choose to put my attention. It's very easy for me to see only the negative or to float away into The Great Blank. I can feel all my internal eyes shifting, darting, not really alighting long enough to take anything in. The internal flow becomes incoherent, chaotic, overflowing with content, holding on to very little meaning. 
     In this year of continuing commitment, I'm going to take the time to feel hard won satisfaction. It's possible I can even manage to feel proud of myself. Even if I feel like a fool, I'm going to stand in front of a mirror and really take in how much my body has changed. I'm going to take time to think about how I can build on this accomplishment; is there some other good I can do for myself.  I don't have to drive myself to find that "other good." In fact, a frenetic search built on self-will is guaranteed to do more harm than good. Better to walk around allowing myself some good feeling which opens the possibility of coming to good ideas...
     You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on the affirmative, and don't mess with Mr. In Between. 

CAR AND COMPUTER

There are two things that can throw me into a panic: something going wrong with the car and something going wrong with the computer. It's not the oh-my-god-how-can-I-function-without-it sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it's not because I know nothing about them and am therefore dependent on other people who I hope know what they're doing. It isn't even the money it will cost to fix either of them, 
     I think the panic goes deeper. It's my fear of being without something I need which I can see is a kind of fear of abandonment. I'm a child saying, "Mother, don't take that rattle from me - Mother, don't take yourself from me." I feel bereft, and as I had bad parenting, I learned to cover up whatever I needed so I wouldn't feel the pain of not getting it. 
     The car and computer are crucial to my daily life and, even though I'm an adult and know whatever the problem is will get fixed and probably sooner rather than later, I find myself feeling resentment at the universe for doing something mean to me, and the powerlessness of a child, and  anger at myself for having that reaction in the first place. I know it's irrational and I have ways of quickly moving past the turmoil of those feelings, but the buttons that were installed in childhood will always be there. They've seared pathways in my being, and the feelings they give rise to will surface at the most unexpected times. I've learned that's all right. Those fears and needs have taught me most of what I know about surrender, letting go and the transitory nature of all feeling, both good and bad. Those feelings have taught me how to deal with them.
     Today, there is nothing wrong with the car and the computer is working just fine. No need for panic, no need at all.

WORDS

I was thinking about how personal words are. They're common currency among us all but their meanings, their resonance, is particular to each of us. For instance, I say "surrender" and think freedom, letting go of something that is blocking me, something I cling to, demand, expect. But many other people hear surrender as defeat or resignation, accepting you'll get less than you want, be less than you want to be. The way I understand surrender comes out of direct experience. When I'm rigid, insistent, controlling, surrender - letting go - comes as a relief, a lightening of the rock I've been carrying around with me. To accept things as they are isn't to resign myself; it's to free myself so that I can be free from distortion, free to act not out of ego but with equanimity. 
    Another word that resonates is for me is "austerity." I know for many people this word means less than should be: tighten your belt, do without, go on an enforced diet. It means bare, without ornamentation. But that's exactly what makes the word significant for me. For some reason I see water dripping on grey stone, zen-like, something very plain and simple. Something without adornment, something pure. Oceanic art, Bauhaus design, Teco pottery - their beauty comes from simplicity. So austerity for me means simplicity. I don't know why a word that suggests a negative for most people is a positive for me.
     There are many other words that resonate in me. Humility, gratitude, kindness...No one else can know exactly what I feel when I hear or think of those words. All of my experience, my thinking, my temperament has created certain connotations; they're completely my own, private and even if I wanted to say in detail what I hear, why it resonates, I couldn't. They're unique to me. Personal.
     Each of us has certain resonant words, the ones that put us in touch with something very deep inside us. We have many of those words in common; we agree on their meanings in a general way. But we can't know the particulars, the pathways through our being these words travel. 
     There is a universe inside us, a universe made up of what we inherit from our culture, what we've learned from our experience, our own connotations and random connections that are formed paradoxically in the vast part of that universe that exists in the place beyond words. We never come to the end of ourselves and the more we open ourselves the more the resonances come.

GUILT AND RESONSIBILITY

The other day, a friend was talking about telling someone else that she was sorry for something she'd said - making amends. As we talked, I began thinking about humility and the willingness to take responsibility, at how necessary both are to getting free. We live in a culture in which many people are defensive and blame everyone else. Sometimes, I can see them stewing, rehashing all the reasons they are right.. It seems impossible for them admit any wrong-doing and I think this comes out of insecurity. The more threatened the ego, the more it wants to protect itself.
     I think of the many times I've said or done something I shouldn't have, gotten angry, tried to get my own back. Something eventually shifted, though, and I began to realize that it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong; what I actually want is to let go of the residue of bad feeling I can so easily drag around with me. I've learned to feel in my body what anger, resentment, the need to prove I'm superior feel like. A motor revs up inside me and takes over, makes me go over and over again whatever the incident or argument was, becomes an obsessive reliving of all the bad feelings I walked away with.
     I no longer want those feelings in my body so I've had to cultivate the kind of humility that helps me recognize when I've been wrong or done wrong. It keeps me from leading with ego and from the need to prove anything. It's what make amends possible.
     But there's another ingredient in the willingness to make amends. Someone once said that the only way out of guilt is to take responsibility. Guilt imprisons and paralyzes me. Taking responsibility puts me on a new footing; it's as if I've been in a dark cave, endlessly blaming myself, giving myself all the bad feeling that keeps me from change. But I can find the way out, the way past the prison of guilt and that means taking responsibility. Not only for things I've said and done but also for the voices inside that tell me lies of negativity. I want that pathway, the freedom it promises. If it requires owning up to the truth or making amends or surrendering the need to clutch bad feeling to me, I'm more than willing to do it. I just don't want to live in guilt and carry bad feeling forward. 

CREATED BY FLUX, ANCHORED IN CHANGE

I was stopped at a traffic light at an intersection I've passed through a thousand times over the years. I look ed across the street and realized that the shop on the opposite corner had changed hands once more. I remember when it was a flower shop owned by a man who sang opera, followed by a vintage clothing store, followed by two or three businesses that didn't last long. Now I saw it had been updated in a very snazzy style and although I couldn't tell just what was inside, I knew it had to be something very trendy.
   The light changed and I drove on thinking about the visual overlay of the streets of my city I carry with me, a stack of acetate sheets my memory lifts to reveal what came before. There is much more to the overlay than I have seen; change went on before my time and will continue after. But there is something very moving for me in stepping back to see the various iterations, the slowly evolving change. It connects me to the deep flowing river of experience that washes over us all. 
     This set me thinking about my own slow evolution, the way I got from there to here. I can see the whole arc, the many eras - when I was in school or was married or lived in New York or... Like everyone else, I carry a sense of continuity, a continuous consciousness (which William James called "the stream of consciousness") so that my sense of myself remains constant. I always know that I am me. But I can't snatch a single isolated moment of this "me" - it's gone even as I reach for it.  
     Still, I know I have a story. It's the narrative of all the steps taken and not taken, of choices that were productive and others which weren't, of things remembered and forgotten, of love given and withheld and received - all of it teaching me lessons when I'm ready for them, the lessons of change.
     I am the process of evolution and I'm also an organic whole, without tears or disjunctions. Past, present, future; the whole of me arises from moment to moment, created by flux, anchored in change.   

     

WAITING

I'm compulsively on time. In fact, if I'm not ten minutes early, I feel that I'm late. Time is my tyrant with all the earmarks of compulsion - the sense of something driving me, an anxious motor, its low vibrations quickening my pulse rate. I don't know why I'm like this but I can say, given all the time I spend waiting for other people, if I have to have a compulsion about time I'd much rather it was for being late. The idea of other people waiting for me is an unexpectedly pleasant possibility.
     Actually, there's another kind of waiting I think about more. It's the waiting that comes out of magical thinking. Something will happen and I'll be changed - I'll put out a piece of work and its reception will change my life. I'll get this or that or meet someone. and everything will be different. I may as well say I'll win the lottery.
     It's the kind of waiting that flies under my radar, so much a part of me I don't even notice it. I don't notice what it tells me: it's all right to be passive, I don't have to push past my resistance to discipline, I don't have to get up and do anything at all. Waiting's voice isn't as loud as it used to be - I've pushed past many of the things that blocked me - but on days when I don't feel like doing anything, and then don't, those days when I let things slide, I know the voice hasn't died away. I'm sure it will follow me into my grave. 
     It isn't easy noticing core issues, the ones that travel through as silently and invisibly as the blood travelling through my veins. But sometimes, I take a step back, not planning it, and I have a moment of clarity. I see what has been circulating inside;it comes up to consciousness and I can put it into words. That's the beginning of all great change, bringing into consciousness just what has been holding me back. Once I see it, I can move it around, look at it from different angles, and make out its anatomy. I can study how it works in me. I can shake hands with it, no longer in denial, or fear of what will arise, or the obliviousness that comes so easily. And I can surrender to time, acknowledge there are certain issues I will deal with again and again. But I know I will make progress and that's what matters - the sense that I'm heading in the right direction. A momentum starts to build, an appetite for working at change. There is so much hope in that energy, and it's hope that leads me on.