RUNNING OUT OF MONEY

     I'm running out of money. My anxiety is growing, the kind a friend once described as like a wasp in a coffee can, frantically trying to find a way out, pushing up against rigid walls that simply won't give. I'm working on a couple of projects but even if they sell money is distant and my need is immediate.

     Someone suggests I sign up with a temp agency. I've never heard of such a thing, but evidently I can register and with a little luck they'll send me out the next day. It’s a certain way to quick money. But I resist: the jobs are secretarial and to work in that way feels like abject failure. To have to report 9 to 5, to be subservient, most especially to need a "day job" because I'm not making it from my writing - it feels like confirmation of all my worst fears, the end of everything. But the walls of the coffee can simply won't give, anxiety is verging on panic, so I make an appointment and show up at the agency.

     There are many women like me signing up, all of us filling out forms on clipboards as we crowd the small reception area, with its lone scrawny ficus reaching up toward the fluorescent lights. I’m certain all of them have taken extra care about how they look. I myself am wearing a dress, something I rarely do, but it's my favorite thing in the closet, a conventional rayon blue and black plaid cut in a very fashion forward shirt dress style, narrow waist, very full skirt. I love the way it swirls around me.

     The agency woman who takes my application looks like someone I might actually know; I recognize the signs of similar background, education, class. I smile as I sit in a chair beside her desk and look directly in her eyes. I want the frankness of my gaze to make a unique impression, help her see that I'm not a run of the mill applicant. I want her to realize I'm special. Much later, it will occur to me that she's probably seen this behavior a thousand times. It's a cliche – who of us doesn’t want to be seen as special?

     All applicants must take a typing test (I'm definitely average) and a short math and grammar quiz. I finish the grammar section in little more time than it takes to read the questions. I look down the list of math questions - basic fractions, multiplications and divisions, nothing I can't handle. I finish this section quickly, too, with minutes to go until time is up. I hand the pages in and watch as they're graded - I get all the grammar questions right but I'm amazed to see that I get a few of the math problems wrong. I don't understand it - they looked so easy, so doable.  But it isn't anything near enough to disqualify me. I’m told to call in early the next morning to see if there’s anything for me.

     That night, I set the alarm for the first time in months. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I say, there’s nothing shameful in having to earn quick money. I’m lucky there’s a way for me to do it. Don’t worry, I say, the key word is “temporary.”  True, all true – but just words. They don’t put much distance between me and the full blown despair I sense only millimeters away.

     The next morning I’m told to report to an import-export office downtown, in a side street east of Alemeda. There are two small rooms and both of them are crammed with stacks of binders and bookshelves sagging under the weight of files, loose papers and pink, green and yellow forms. A man and woman, the owners married to each other, sit at desks in the larger of the rooms while a secretary and I are in the smaller. My job is to sort stacks of the color forms, then file them by invoice number into a rank of old metal file cabinets against one wall. Once the secretary has explained this, she pretty much ignores me for the rest of the day. That suits me. I don’t want her to know me at all. I want to be invisible. If no one sees me, I am not here.

     I’m caught in rush hour traffic on the way home – more grist for my mill of self-pity – and find myself thinking about the math problems I got wrong. Something about them is bothering me. I've kept the page and, when I get home, I go over the answers; I can see that I made very simple mistakes, which no doubt I would have caught if I'd taken the time to go over my answers. Instead I basically twiddled my thumbs until time was up - I'd decided the problems were easy, I didn't need to check my answers...

     Why is it still bothering me? Why am I holding on to - what? - embarrassment? - that I answered a few questions wrong on a very easy test? A kind of humiliation because after all I'm so smart, so well-educated, so well, why not just say it, superior -- and that's when it comes to me. I'd sailed through the whole experience as if I were superior to it, visiting royalty waving from a slow-moving carriage. Of course, I didn't take time, time I had, to check my answers. There was no need. I was superior and I'd already decided I couldn't get anything wrong...

     A word floats up out of the vast magic eight ball of my consciousness: arrogance. I don't need to do what other people have to do… and even as I say the syllables I feel them crack open like the spine of an old book and I'm staring at what my arrogance is meant to mask - my terrible fear I'm a failure and always will be.  

     I want to snap the book shut. This is too much information. I’m fully aware of my insecurities and self-loathing, they’re old familiar friends. But the idea that I’ve been unaware of their full workings in me, that I haven’t seen the defenses they’ve generated, unattractive character defects, ultimately self-sabotaging – a protective covering has been ripped off and I’m lost in a shameful exposure. I'm still at a point where to see something about myself that isn't flattering, that means I'm not perfect, that above all is something I don't already know, doesn't feel like the starting point of change; it feels like confirmation of every terrible thing I've ever thought about myself. I'm not strong enough to look. Not yet. Not yet…

    …and yet. Flashes of insight, even those I want to turn my back on, leave their traces behind. I know I’ve seen something important – my arrogance and how it works against me is something I stand of chance of changing. In the coming days, driving to that temp job and the one after it, meeting strangers who know nothing about me, and at night, making sure I have clean clothes, setting the alarm clock, doing things to get ready to do something I don’t want to do, I’m surprised to find myself looking for that arrogance, not dreading that I’ll see it but wanting now to see it so I can try to let it go.

     The first check arrives from the temp agency. It's a small sum in the scheme of things but enough to get me through. I'm at the bank, endorsing it, when I see the letters of my name as they flow from my pen. That's who I am, that's me - and on this day, I'm the person who is taking action, doing what needs to be done. There's no shame in that...I'm smiling as I walk to my car. I'm the person who is doing what needs to be done.

WE ARE ALL CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

I've never had any patience for conspiracy theories. They are so obviously creations of the believer. Decide Shakespeare didn't write the plays and every new piece of information will support some other author. Decide Kennedy couldn't have been killed by a lone gunman and you will interpret every fact as proof positive of your theory. Take a position and you can make everything, no matter how outlandish, fit neatly into your belief...
    I've been thinking a lot about how we each create our own reality and it came to me that in this sense we are all conspiracy theorists, making each new fact and experience fit into what we already believe. It goes to the heart of what our consciousness is - we form ideas and beliefs based on our experience and then we project those ideas and beliefs onto new experience. Our lives are constant streams of  encountered experience and the judgments we make about it, all of it contingent on what we already "know." 
     The world isn't full of ideas; we are full of ideas about the world. We pick and choose according to our temperaments: if you're basically a conservative temperament, you will search out, accept and attach yourself to ideas that make you feel anchored to some Reality with a capital R outside yourself - the orthodoxies of religion or ideologies, ideas you believe to be carved in stone someplace beyond yourself. If you have a more liberal temperament, you will be drawn to models of Reality that make room for evolution, interpretation and relativism. Either way, your ongoing experience will confirm and extend what you already "know." In this way, my belief that there is no Truth with a capital T is very little different than your belief in the reality of the voice of God. Both grow out of a fundamental fact of human consciousness: we choose what we believe.
     But this choice isn't necessarily free. Beliefs are shaped by the culture we're born into, who our families are and what status they occupy, and all sorts of other factors beyond our control. And many of our beliefs are unconscious, assumptions about the world we carry with us and don't realize are controlling how we respond to whatever we meet. We carry this force field of belief with us; it is the core part of our consciousness.
     But disruption to this core is possible; in fact, our human history and our personal histories are full of instances in which we went off in a new direction, had a conversion, reached some kind of enlightenment, clapped our foreheads and exclaimed, "I was blind! But now I see!" This is the great gift of consciousness and can be stated so simply it seems banal: we have the ability to get a new idea.
     

WORDS

Looking for momentum, the sense of a racing engine, energy not from the outside but from within, a surging surge, a tide that crests again and again. A spark inside, small, flickering, but just waiting to be fanned - through action...action creates action and the desire for more action. Small steps, larger strides, even to run...

Interesting, that I can think of "myself" carried along by momentum as if that momentum exists somewhere outside me, like a river I can float on, when momentum can only be inside me, part of me. O, the difficulties of articulating consciousness, of describing the 10,000 layers, the million aspects - and how it all can be felt simultaneously...my infinite self...

This a fragment, written mostly to feel the joy of the keys, laying down font, letting it all swirl...how grateful I am for words...

OUT OF THE SILENT DARK

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

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

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

    

     

TIME, AS WE BOB ALONG

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

IN OUR STARS

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

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

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

SEARCHING FOR MY STORY

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

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.