JACARANDAS

     I first came to Los Angeles in the summer, so it wasn't until the following May and June that I first saw the jacarandas bloom. It was stunning. The color, that delicate lavender on delicate blooms, a gorgeous simultaneous flowering all over the city. I hadn't noticed the trees themselves but now they were everywhere - an approachable, not impossible to think of climbing up into any one of them and resting back, surrounded by lavender clouds, not floating up but clouds drifting down toward the ground, a famous purple rain, to cover the ground as if the trunk of the tree was anchored on a doily of color.
     One early June, high up in an office building in Beverly Hills, I looked out and there were patches of lavender all over the city, as far as I could see. A delicate color making a powerful impact, uniting a landscape carved up by us into arbitrary areas to which we give names, labels of individuality, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails: this place is better than that, my place is better than yours. But the jacarandas are indifferent to those labels and for their weeks of bloom, they make a single landscape, stand as a metaphor for the delicate, even fragile, context that overrides antagonisms and makes us all part of same living universe.
     Over the years, the blooming jacarandas, enhanced by the simultaneous blooming of the equally lavender agapanthus, have had many meanings for me.  Of course, they've been about renewal, fresh starts, and also a more cerebral occasion to contemplate what we mean by "beauty," how we define it and give it meaning. This year, they're about the comfort of continuity, about natural cycles, the eternal return to an eternal beginning. I'm filled with the knowledge they will be here long after I'm gone, that I'm living my life in a span of time that is only a brief moment in their much larger story. I am a small but necessary, even crucial, link in the chain, and that feels right. To see so clearly that I'm part of something larger than myself makes me right-sized, anchors me to the deepest context in which we live.  
     Look around, at whatever you mean when you say, "Los Angeles." Chances are you see only change, and possibly not for the better. But call me naive, blinded by much too lavender-tinted glass: if the jacarandas are here, it will be all right.
   

PEOPLE LIKE YOU CAUSE WARS!

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with rousing myself to action. It's as if there's a lulling ocean coming up to meet and claim me, where everything is suspended, blank, out of time. A place where nothing is required of me, where I'm relieved of responsibility. I fall into it easily and sometimes I think it's my natural state, the automatic default setting that greets me when my eyes open in the morning and then I must work to shift.
     But is that an accurate description? Like so much else I say about myself, I wonder just how accurate that is. In this case, because I also know the part of myself that swings into action, that's motivated by ambition and competitiveness, that likes to set up targets and knock them down. So, maybe like everything else about myself and the world, it's a mixed bag. Of course it is - I know as clearly and deeply as I know anything, that everything depends on perspective, and perspective is changing all the time.
     Every view and opinion, all the concepts and ideas generated by my always self-conscious ego - each may be interesting but has nothing to do with The Truth. There are some abstract ideals that have the force of Truth for me - ie, Kindness is a virtue, a good that is always "true." But even here, when it comes to specific instances in my life, that Truth gets muddied by my perspective - have I been kind enough, do I need to be kind at all, does that person merit my kindness - in short, my relentless need to evaluate, to have an opinion, creates a sometime abyss between what I mean by Kindness and kindness in my daily life. 
     My subconscious, in writing here, has led me back to something that happened in the library a few weeks ago. I was in line behind an Asian woman who spoke very little English. She had a website address but had no idea how to use a computer.  The young man behind the counter explained that he couldn't leave the desk to help her. When it turned out she didn't have a library card but could get a temporary one to use the computer, it was obvious it was all beyond her and she gave up.
     Throughout this exchange, I stood behind her, thinking, I should help her. I have the time. I should help her.  But I didn't. When she geve up and walked away, I moved to the desk and watched as the young man checked out my audio tapes. Then, in a rush, I realized how crazy it was that I hadn't offered to help and went through the library looking for her. She had gone...this bothered me for days. Why hadn't I helped her? What held me back? Looking at it now, as I recount the incident in words, I'm at a loss to explain the disconnect between "I should help her" and my inaction.  
     This single incident isn't a description of the whole of me, proof of my moral failure. It doesn't mean that when faced with the next situation, large or small, I will fail my ideal. But it is an example of my lack of perfection and a motive to my desire to do better. As I say, I am always a mixed bag.  
     It's humility that helps me not collapse in shame at my "failure" to help, which I could easily do given how hard I often am on myself. But with humility I recognize my always imperfect humanity and that recognition grants me a release, an acceptance in which to view this incident, any incident, without blame. I can take responsibility, not at all the same thing as blame, and most importantly,  I can vow to do better.
     While I've been writing this, I've been thinking about the great moral challenges history brings. Of course I have - there is a direct line between that one small incident in the library and the great choices life and history present - would I name names in front of the Committee, would I turn in the Jews, would I betray a friend for my own gain? Would I betray myself and my beliefs in order to live? 
     There is a scene in Falconer by John Cheever which I often think about. He's on a supermarket express line for 10 items or less. Someone with more items cuts in and Falconer gets angry. He yells, "People like you cause wars!" Yes, arrogance, thoughtlessness, obliviousness, self-interest can ripple out until they're as large as the universe and consume everything in their wake.

STRAWBERRIES

I read somewhere that strawberries are the only fruit with its seeds on the outside. Of course, I thought, those little specks on the outside - seeds! And inside - none. I've eaten strawberries all my life, studied them while I search for the one in the plastic tub I think will be the most ripe, the sweetest. But I had the macro view, focused on strawberries as food, which one will delight me the most. The micro view would have led me to notice that the specks are seeds; I would have seen the strawberry qua strawberry and I would have marveled that such a thing, a delicious thing, exists.
     It's the same with people. As I go through the day, I'm moving so quickly I don't actually see people; I get an impression of them, sometimes a fairly detailed one. And I'm judging - this one looks intelligent, that one has terrible shoes (and therefore isn't my sort), she looks like someone I'd like to know better. First impressions are useful but I so rarely pay attention to them. When a long relationship ends, I often think I should have seen what would cause the problems - it was all there in the very beginning - it registered somewhere in my being but I didn't pay attention to it.
     We really see more than a surface view of the other. Even when we fall in love and want to know everything about the other, it isn't at all clear that we aren't seeing a projection of ourselves. This is true with everything we think and feel - it's all filtered by our consciousness. I mean something else - the simple fact of recognizing the humanity in the other, in many others. Then it doesn't matter if someone is wearing shoes I don't like or spouts political opinions that make me want to punch him. There's something beyond that, and if I look for it, I'll find a person with whom I probably have more in common than not. Most of us share the important things - how easy it is to become full of fear, how much we want to our lives to feel stable and secure, how much we need love. That's in every single person passing me by. It's mostly impossible to break through to a mutual recognition of our humanity, but I'll have a very different day if I keep it in mind. I'll be more patient with the woman on the market line who waits until everything is rung up before she goes digging in her vast purse for her wallet. (This is only one of the many grievances I can accumulate in a day.) I won't judge every third person who passes by. I'll take the time to ask questions and actually listen to the answers. In a way, I'm talking about moving through the day with no expectations or demands, open and receiving rather than closed and trying to impose my will.  Of course, half the time I have my eyes closed. Then it's humanity, shumanity. I'm a very busy person - get out of my way.
     This is a very long way from strawberries. But now that I think of it, I'm getting to eat a bowl of berries and non-fat cottage cheese, which I have to confess is quickly becoming my drug of choice.

ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING

I was reading about a hike up into Griffith Park and I remembered that when I moved to this apartment, I could walk out my door and get to the top of Mt. Hollywood up above the Observatory. It took three hours, door to door. Today I thought, I couldn't do that now - I'll never do that again.

I remember the incredible lust I felt when I was 19 in Florence and met an American boy who looked like Marlon Brando. It was immediate, intense, a movie camera's quick zoom as our eyes met for the first time. We walked all over the central city, and at one point he stopped me and went into a flower shop. It was overwhelming, that he was in that very instant choosing a flower to give to me, and as I waited outside, I was trembling, actually trembling. Possessed by, taken over completely by a desire that knows it won't be very very long before it is fulfilled...Today I thought, I'll never feel that again.

There is a longer and longer list of things I can't do anymore or (probably) won't feel again. Physical things. Emotional things. I miss some of them very much. But thinking about them now isn't depressing me or filling me anxiety. Instead, those memories and lost possibilities and very natural human desires are right now all of a piece, swimming all at once and together in the golden cloud of the present, of this very moment as my fingers touch the keys, as words form on the screen in front of me, as I connect with what seems to have finally, at long last come - the sense of joy of being me, here and now, of expanding out into whatever it is I mean when I say "I". There are many words - surrendered, accepting, confident that meaning is always to be found, that freedom is always possible -- and beyond the words, an undifferentiated connection between myself and the world. It's taken everything, absolutely everything of my being and my life to get here. And that's all right. Here, right now, all judgment is silent. There is only me and my being spreading out and out...and out.

EGG AND HONEY

The other day, someone was talking about when she felt she was her best self and of course it made me think about myself. The first thing that came to mind was an image - sitting here with the laptop on my knees, letting my mind wander until something interesting appears and then setting myself the task of figuring out what I think and how best to articulate it. Figuring a thought out and articulating it go hand in hand; they're one and the same thing. So sitting here, hooking on to something interesting, making the effort to understand it and then how best to say it - that's when I feel I'm my best self. The self I want to be, fully engaged, in that place where self-consciousness has faded away and I'm one with thought and articulation.
    I look at the date of the last entry here and I wonder, if sitting here is my best self, why have I let so much time go by? Why haven't I been making the effort, taking the time to do what gives me the most pleasure and silences all my doubts and fears? But tonight, something says, don't ask that question, don't delve into what will only lead to self-criticism, bad feeling, guilt. Just be happy you're here now and connected to the pleasure of words and expression.

The past few months have been filled with examples of how much fear has fallen away. I've lost that terrible shame I used to feel at being hurt by soneone in my life. The fear and shame of acknowledging vulnverability made me see myself melting away to nothing, like the wicked witch melting until only her hat was left. I thought to be vulnerable is to surrender control, which is only the illusion of holding it together. In the simplest sense, I was afraid not only to show what I felt but that I felt anything at all.
     Just now, that fear is gone. Some people have hurt me lately but I'm not ashamed or in fear of showing that to them. I feel what I feel. It's seems impossible that I should have come to this deep acceptance, of myself and the world around me. I think of the past, even the not so distant past, and see myself filled with trepidation, with the awful suspicion that who I am and what I feel is wrong and/or any one of another hundred negative judgments. 
    Now, that egg I've imagined so many times, the one above me cracks open and releases something as slow and golden as honey and which pours down and washes over me. That liquid is a comforter, literally, the comforting voice, which says again and again, it's all all right. It's all right...it's all right.

READING

I was an avid and precocious reader. To have read the classics was absolutely necessary for people like me. The downside is that I read many of the great books before I was 20 and now I realize I don't remember so much of what I read. And I'm sure my 18 year-old reader's mind grasped only a part of what I'd see now.
I remember I loved Alyosha in The Idiot, his innocence and kindness, but I don't remember much else in the book. Or, staying with Dostoevsky, I barely remember the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov and for that matter much else, but some names - Ivan, Dmitri, Grushenka. In truth, I can say the same for most of the great 19th century novels - Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, the Brontes, Dickens. And I confess that what specific memories I have of those books may have come from the many movie and tv productions I've seen. Even more, my memories have come down to plot - style, language, metaphor, whatever I perceived of them at twenty, are completely lost.
     Like many people I know, I read books less and less as I get older. I've lost interest in most of current fiction, except for mostly Nordic mysteries,       also I do spend time reading but it's mostly online - newspapers, magazine "long form", it's the problem of having so much instantly available. There was a time when I would have finished the morning nrespaper over breakfast, gone to my work and still had time to pick up a novel. I follow many of the links to "interesting" articles on facebook; I spend a ridiculous amount of time looking at animal videos. 
     I find myself want to spend my reading time only with books that seem - at least to me - world class. I mean the difference between 100 Years of Solitude and, for instance, The Goon Squad. That book got such good reviews, I felt duty-bound to read it. I liked it but when I finished it I didn't feel it was worth my time. It seemed another in a long line of stylish, up to the moment inventions, several grades above chick or gent lit, but not something that leaves you touched in the way that stops time while you contemplate the deepest mysteries of our very human lives. The books that do that are still being written - Don Delillo, Orfan Pamuck, Edna O'Brian and many others. 

     Delillo is a good example of a writer who is "up to the minute" but is also concerned with what in shorthand I'll call the deeper things. White Noise was so prescient about our current moment  that future readers won't feel that special wonder I felt reading it when it was new - that he crystallized something only sensed - that a time would come, was already here, when rolling toxic events would barely register, when sons would tell their fathers it couldn't be raining (when it clearly was) because the radio said it wouldn't rain, when in all seriousness one academic would say to another, "I want to do for Elvis what you did for Hitler." But there is an additonal layer to the book that will always claim readers - the fear of death and the desire to find a magic pill that would make us immune to it.  (Compare Good Squad death with WN.) 
    When I want to read fiction now, I mostly go back to the classics, the ones I've already read. 

TRUST

I was reading about faith the other day. It's not a word I relate to - for me, it has religious, Christian connotations. But I know what people mean when they talk about faith, so I asked myself , what is my version of the rock bottom knowledge, the certainty that no matter what, I will be okay?  Trust. I trust that there is always a way to connect with the spiritual principles through which I've found change and freedom over and over again - the principles of surrender, powerlessness and acceptance.  Those principles are a higher power for me. I may not be able to connect to them immediately or in my time frame, but whenever I give myself over to their power I find relief.  Over the years, I've been caught by so many things, some superficial and some very deep seated, and it's taken a very long time for me to  understand what real surrender, powerlessness and acceptance are. No magic light of understanding has suddenly lit up the dark night. Instead, understanding has come slowly and only through experience, direct experience. Like everyone else, I've had to live out my voyage one day at a time. Each surrender, every effort to let go to acceptance, to things as they are in this moment, every to the bone realization of my powerlessness has made me more willing to turn to those principles. Every experience has increased my trust.

THE JOY OF SURRENDER

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

THE AFTERMATH

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

LOST

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

MY SPIRITUAL AWAKENING - PART TWO

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

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

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

DREAMY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO, I DON'T WANT TO

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

SUSPENSION

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

HONORING

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

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

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

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

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

MY SPIRITUAL AWAKENING - PART ONE

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

IT CAN'T BE ME

Years ago I struck up a causal friendship with a woman I met through mutual friends. On the third or fourth time I saw her, she called her husband an idiot. I knew in that moment that she and I wouldn't go on to be friends. Her saying that and having no qualms about it was a signal to me of a very different sensibility, someone not very "evolved", someone who had little compassion. I know I was making a lot of assumptions based on that one word, but we send each other signals like that all the time.and over time I've learned to trust my instincts.
    A few weeks later, I was having a meal with our mutual friend who told me the other woman, sensing that I'd pulled away, wondered if the reason was that I was jealous because she was married. It made me laugh. Her husband did come into it, but not in the way she thought.
    This is a good example of something all of us do, sometimes repeatedly. We defend ourselves  - the problem can't be me so it must be the other -  she must be jealous or intimidated or something else.  It's always a self-serving reason, something that leaves us with  a certain superiority and allows us to walk away with no hint of being disliked and rejected.
     I notice I haven't been doing that for a good long time. I can only think it's because my confidence has grown, my ego isn't so tender. It gets easier to say, well, maybe she doesn't like me when I know that thought isn't going to crush me.  My fear of rejection used to make me interpret every look as a signal of dislike and rejection; I saw everywhere the thing I was most afraid of. But age and whatever self-knowledge I've learned on the path, as I've struggled through the events and ideas that caused deep seated pain, have helped me through the fear of rejection, the fear that I'll never be good enough, the fear that I'll never have what I want or find a way to express all I feel inside me. The fear that I'll never be a  combination of Susan Sontag and Audrey Hepburn, which I have secretly always wanted to be.  Most of the time the camera in the ceiling which was always judging me, the self-consciousness that came from all that fear - most of time it's gone. I can stay in the moment and go through the day without constantly assessing what the world thinks of me. I can just be who I am with all my faults and mistakes and lack of self-discipline. I'm no longer the victim of my deeply threatened ego and if someone doesn't like me  I remind myself of all the times I was the one who walked away. It's the way of the world. It's what it means to be human.
   

SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, etal.

I've been reading a book called At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It's about the philosophers Sartre, Beauvoir and their circle during and after WWII - their lives, existentialist philosophy and more than a few affairs.
     Here's a long quote by Bakewell:

Freedom for (Sartre) lay at the heart of all human experience...as a human being I have no predefinednature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course, I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

   Sartre put this principle into a slogan: Existence precedes essence....roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on the create my own definition (or nature, or essence)...you might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that it is the human condition from the moment of first-consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom, no more, no less.

   I, Sherry, can see that if I alone create myself from what I do, I have a responsibility to act in such a way that I will want to be the person I'm always becoming. My actions will reveal who I am. No philosophy or religion or politics or other person can tell me what to do; I am the only one who can make my choices.

     What a responsibility! I can already feel anxiety. Will I make the right or the wrong choice? I think Sartre would say there is no right or wrong. There is only what we do which will lead to the next action and the next. 

     So Buddhist, so 21st century. Bakewell thinks it could be that existentialism will make a comeback. It seems to me that its ideas are already here.

     More about responsibility another time.

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Very often, I find myself thinking about the fact that everything we think and see and do depends on how we look at things, and how we look at things grows out of ideas we've absorbed from our culture, our temperament, how we were raised and what our experience has been. We use those things to determine truth, which is filtered and measured against all that we already are. This is why two people can look at the same thing and come to opposite conclusions about it. In a sense, we are only our opinions. None of us has access to Truth with a capital T.

     One more time, I wonder how any of us understand each other and why we don't get into more trouble because of misunderstanding. Well, we do get into a fair amount of it. There are many religions in the world with their individual perspectives and we all know the devastation the clash of these perspectives, these opinions produce. People find a perspective, often a received perspective, and cling to it because it's so much easier than having to figure out the world on your own. People need to be sure they have the right perspective and will sometimes go to any length to defend it and make other people believe it.

     There is often a clash of perspective between two people. Most of us don't like to be challenged - we get defensive or dig ourselves in even more. Sometimes, there simply is no way across the gulf of clashing opinions. But usually, unless we're rigidly stuck in our egos, we can talk through our differences and reach some kind of understanding.

     But even though the fact that we make our own truths leads to many of the world's most intractable problems, it also means that we can arrive at new truths. We can look at things from a new perspective. We can learn. We can change our minds. For years, the fight for civil rights, womens rights and gay rights existed on the edges of our culture. But little by little, those movements grew until a majority of people found a new perspective. They changed their minds. 

     It seems ridiculous to point out that we can change our minds, that we can grow. But in the most profound sense, it's our glory. It's what enables us to transcend our fears and doubts. It's what enables us to expand our consciousness.     

     

INTENSITY

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again, forever -- Goethe

     When I first read this, I was floored. Goethe was one of a handful of exceptional men in his time, amazingly productive, full of accomplishment. Not only a great writer, he did pioneering work in color theory and anatomy, designed gardens, ran a theatre and served as a councilor to the head of a German court. He traveled, wrote 10,000 letters and had a calendar that was always full.  
     He was restless, possibly driven and I wonder if that's how he dealt with the dissatisfaction he must have felt at bottom. I see him whirling through his days, busy, curious about the world around him, social, but when he is alone depression - anxiety - emptiness - move out of the background he can mask through his busy days, and come to the fore, as if they are the default in his consciousness. I wonder if he would have traded his accomplishments for a life of well-being. I think not. He was part of a Romantic generation that saw poetry in suffering and he might have sensed how much his angst and restlessness led him to make his world as big as possible.
     It's the push and pull between a life of inner peace and a life of public accomplishments. It's our idea of the tormented artist who suffers for his art, or our suspicion that creativity needs the irritating grain of sand in order to make pearls. It's hard to picture a peaceful person doing much more than contemplating whatever has caught her eye.  
     I suppose I, too, am Romantic with a capital R. I value my restless mind, my curiosity. They keep me from getting bored. Passion and obsession get me going, make all the lights brighter so I can see more intensely. Words, images often come in a barrage and I feel that I'm on a taut string, vibrating with ideas. It's not peaceful but it's often productive. The question is, is it worth it?
     I've spent a long time cultivating inner peace and yet there is a part of me that hates that phrase. Not only because it's become a main stream cliche but also because a part of me can't imagine anything duller. I know a spiritual person would tell me how I'm misunderstanding. In fact, I can tell myself: inner equilibrium in no way has to block intensity and creativity. It can do the opposite - unblock all the feelings buried inside. But I want the Sturm und Drang, the thunder and lightening, the yearning for something I can't even see much less have. Intensity, intensity, as long as I'm alive.