Category Archives: empathy

Is this a time to be conflicted?

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We are between two stools, sitting on two fences, contorted into a new yoga shape that is more Chinese acrobat circus than a pose that has a name. Shouldn’t we be more clear with ourselves than just walking around the gallery of funhouse mirrors watching our projected sense of self morphing into grotesque and incredible shapes.

“That is not me,” we say.

Where do we stand when the floor is lava, the once green and calm back yard is thrust up by earthquake? Where do we stand when the very topography of our reality has changed beyond any name we could dial into our label gun? What do we believe in a time when all beliefs are suspect? Who are we when the nicely-created cattle runs that separated us no longer work? What is our purpose?

I ask who are these people around me when I see a post on social media. A friend boldly emblazons in the status space, the idea that autistic children should be killed because of the drain on society and, you know, the gene pool?

How did we get here wherever here is now? But it all changes first in the dismantling of old systems. It all changes as we have to adapt our behaviour to the new threat to our continued existence. And what I, personally, can feel right down into the marrow of me is that we are just beginning to end it.

I see in my mind’s eye the depiction of an old method of killing an individual who contravened some subtle law drafted with the hope of maintaining a structure of beliefs for some perceived goal. ‘Death by bricks’ is what comes to mind. An individual lays down and is under a board. Weights are gradually added until all the life is pressed out of the person. And for so many that is exactly what it feels like now.

The virus is not real. COVID is only in some foreign land and surely the border mark made in the invisible marker will keep it isolated to hurt only the not me people. COVID is shutting down access to the shiny distractions that have kept us running in place. The second brick is that we can no longer just run in our lives the same pathways we have always run. The third brick is the economic distress now dispersing like ink dropped in a pan of water. People are struggling with fear of the virus while some refuse to believe and are hosting happy COVID spreading demonstrations.

Alone with self

And then we are alone

We no longer have the distractions, the drug of the usual, the mindless actions that we have invested so much time and energy into the building.

And then we are alone with ourselves.

As we sit like those arrested and sent to the involuntary walls of the monastery, we endure the results of climate disruption. Thousands endure storms. Spain has snow. Earthquakes continue. Mountains, we are suddenly reminded, are volcanoes await the moment of release.

As we are like those who are trying to adapt to the weight of the bricks. We see political chaos. We see that which we cannot believe.

But we are getting better and better at absorbing shock. The concept of “It is impossible. It will never happen,” fades away.

The vaccine is created. The virus mutates. The storms throw trees through houses. The crews show up to return electricity.

The stock market keeps track of how happy the corporate rich are in any given situation. And we are envious. We are envious of their invested point of view.

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Our very sense of self erodes. Who am I when I am at home? That is a British saying I have always loved. When you are not involved in the performance art of assuming a character in the eyes of the world, who exactly are you?

When your sense of self is built in the spaces between the restrictive pillars of society, of family, of your role at work, of your star-like coming down a stairway in your costume then who are you?

As we sit at home we are mightily irritated by the sense of being conflicted, of being confused and, may the saints help us all, ignorant.

“I did not know that!” is the beginning. It is where we all become submissive to the idea that what is manifesting in the future will be unlike what our past experiences have lead us to believe was reality.

“I don’t know what all of these bricks of fear are doing to me.” We say this to ourselves as we release expectations.

Some will find it too crushing. Some will decide that it is too much to stay with the transition and to keep creating space within themselves. Some will not make it through.

But others can, at least, build their skills at surrender.

“Yes, I believe two things at once. Yes, I was wrong in my perceptions and I might be wrong even now. Yes, I allow myself to transform.”

And so the old life gets crushed out of us as we teach ourselves to stay loose. We teach ourselves to breathe deeply and not ask for assurances.

The greatest teachers for us are our ancestors. They went through periods wherein the very paradigm of reality shifted. The earth was no longer the centre of the universe. The upstart middle class refused to be slaves to the lord of the manor. Cars and horses shared the same streets. Black death, smallpox, polio swept through towns and villages. Thousands starved because of food emergencies. Wars brought the harrowing Vikings, knights, warriors that decimated the work of generations.

I look at my ancestors and know that in each of us there is the ability to survive even as the very nature of our concept of reality is destroyed. They rebuilt. Those that survived were more creative, more energized and more likely to bring forth an unforeseen future.

I look to my ancestors to understand that what is happening now is simply a new formation of something we don’t understand yet.

The bricks will not kill us. The events will not end our curiosity, our creativity and our desire to participate in a new way, in a more mindful way in the life that is arising.

Embrace the conflict. Shout loudly, “I don’t know. Yet.”

 

The Dream Map. Awakening After Reading Jung.

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As I come out of the enfolding sleep, a hear a phrase in my mind. My eyes slide along the crack between the blinds and the windowsill. The sky is obliterated again. There is just the thick sickly blended muddy color that the burning world has filled in where the sky once was. My nostrils feel swollen, assaulted by smoke. The fires are everywhere, persistent, threatening.

 

But the word stays clutched in my thoughts. “Substance”. That is the primary idea I cling too. And as I slowly awaken more of the words tied to the first become clear. “Substance and strength”, I hold onto that.

shimmer of energy

I focus on the entire narrative that wants to disappear into the unremembered dreamfield and pull tightly on the connecting thread. I follow it. There is something there, I realize.

 

When I was 27 and 29 I gave birth so I remember when I lived in Vernon, B.C. Two women befriended me. Maureen was a fighter, a person who was deeply connected to the power of women, to what liberation should look like. Kathy on the other hand had a stone like strength. She showed me that setting your jaw and trusting your own power could be quiet, persistent, effective. What both of these women demonstrated for me was a deep substance in the way they chose to live. They were wives and mothers, yes. But they read, they had a life of the mind which meant they were always adding to their store of knowlege

 

Now the connections were showing up for me. I was seeing the lesson in my dream state. I lay still so as not to lose the wisdom delivered as I slept.

 

My eyes begin to itch with irritation. The body knows when it is being poisoned.

 

Usually, when I first awaken, I orient myself. I check my body. I feel into space between sleep and waking. I see if the pain is with me today from disintegrating vertebrate or if I have emerged whole and free.

 

But today the words stay in my mind. I realize I have taught myself something about my very nature this night after an entire day of being lost.

 

My north star, my purpose, my yearnings have always been for my life to mean something.  The days are heavy at times and yesterday I didn’t want the spreading map of the hours to unfold before me in the morning. I didn’t want the vast expanse of the morning until night because I could see nothing on the surface of the day that engaged my interest.

 

“Everything is falling in on itself,” I thought.

 

The dream reminded me of the moments in which I felt most engaged in my own journey.

 

The trivial repetitive actions that support my continuing to exist, the eating, the preparing of food to eat, the planning of the preparation, the procuring groceries, the maintenance of the car in order to purchase and store the packages and plants, the earning of money to exchange for a method of keeping the body alive. All those hours and habits and actions have used up much of my 76 years.

 

The moments that have a shining intensity as I look out over the map of my life, are the moments in which I was a seeker.

 

Questions are answered by quests.

 
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Lately I have been revisiting C.G. Jung. As the pandemic is enclosing the world into a second state of paralysis, the deepening consequences of mankind’s accumulation of thoughtless repetitions of destructive actions are encircling us. We can no longer escape the pay off.

 

The fires burn and fill the air with tarlike flakes of the destroyed forests. The failure to understand COVID is resulting in more and more individuals falling ill. Winter is moving toward us and the sun will be a mere memory soon.

 

Without the hypnotic trance of the trivial, what will we become? Who will we become?

 

I realize I have used up my life in what I was used to.

 

My north star, my way out of the dark night of my childhood that more closely fit a narrative of a hostage taking than a time of nurturance has always been to find examples of people who were seekers.

 

The books I curled around in my bed were stories of heroes. Madame Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Isadora Duncan informed me. No matter what the current culture’s formulation of restrictions and limitations on the efficacy of a single individual, these individuals did not refuse to step into power.

 

I needed to know that there was more. I needed to see that the scope of human curiosity and attention was magnificent.

 

My eyes opened and the swollen eye lids told me immediately that it would be another day of thick obstructed skies. It would be another day of each breath being ladened and laboured.

 

But Jung had reminded me that we create our own mythology. We look into our own dark well of the subconscious mind to see our creation story.

 

We can choose to feel abandoned, bruised, invisible. It is a childlike narrative that begins to be whispered in our ear when the outside world refuses to give us a map to follow.

 

I have hundreds of hours of storing biographies and autobiographies of people who faced crises and like early explorers simply geared up and went into the wilderness. What kept them whole, what kept them strong was a clear sense of their own purpose. They found out who they were as a result of knowing why they were on the journey.

 

My dreams were talking to me. My dreams showed me two women I once knew who were strong in their own specific and opposite ways. My dreams reminded me that I need to get back to my own myths, my own symbols of power and push into my own wilderness.

 

It has always been thus, Jung reminds us. We are each essentially alone and responsible alone for our manner of being. As I move through the world, I become more and more who I am. I can see that as I lay still in bed waiting to start again.

 

I cannot depend on the exterior existence of  others to protect me from the task of defining and birthing myself, That is and always has been up to the individual. The second next worth is self, I realize. Substance, Power, Self.

The Easy way or the Difficult way.

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Background Trauma Sounds

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Like a martial drum beating, the sounds of shuffling feet from some invading army still unseen over the hillside, we can hear it. There is a sense of a lined up, designed, patterned chaos that is coming at us. We don’t have words for it. We don’t have words for the shivering anticipation that we are feeling in our bodies. And like a person in an abusive relationship, many individuals have become overwhelmed and collapse in a heap.

“What can I do?” we ask. “How can I stop any of it?” we cry out on social media.

The battered wife is so exhausted by just dealing with the next and the next inevitable attack that she loses the ability to remain in even a fight or flight stage. That was months ago. That sense of urgency of activity is long sense gone for most of us. We are now just frozen.

My brother and I used to play frozen rag on the front lawn on summer nights. He would grab my arm and fling me into the darkness and as soon as a car came past flooding the moving person with light, we had to stand in place. The car’s headlight were a ray that made us into an inhuman stone-like form. I remember holding on tight to the paralyzed shape that the sudden headlight rays had created of me.

If we fell or could not keep our balance, we were dead. The lawn had transformed into some lethal contact zone that would dissolve our very person.

As I scan the social media posts and see 500 fires in California, dismantled post offices, the history of the connection to beauty obliterated in the Rose Garden at the white house, two tornados headed to the south, and locally two fires nearby creeping the hillsides, I feel like that child on the lawn. I have been thrown. I am off balance and moving through the darkness. The sudden flash of car lights would freeze me in space. I don’t want to be frozen in this time.

Can I keep my balance? Can I find a way to hold my shape, my person, my hopes without falling on the dark ground?

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Someone said on social media, “What can happen next?”

His friend answered, ” Don’t even ask that question.”

So now we need to reconnect to the sense of our own bodies; the bottoms of our feet where we can stand; the small decisions in our daily lives. We have our breath; our practices of self-care; our intentions.

And as the loud sounds of the cracking walls of the old system fill our space, we are called on to trust. The only thing left is to trust that we have the ability to stay undisturbed and centred. We have the ability to disconnect from the childlike urgency of expecting more powerful people to protect us. We have this opportunity to strengthen the sense that the universe supports us.

We choose our actions. We choose our emotions. We choose to stay focused on becoming the person we desire to be. It is more difficult when there are no pats on the back, no outside validation routines. But there is also greater freedom. Having the structure collapse means that we are now not walled in with rules and rewards. We choose to not be thrown across the black night lawn and frozen in fear by the next event.

We seek out our own expression of self. And throughout history, we know for a fact that following chaotic events such as plagues, the collapse of nations and warfare, there is a period of great creativity. New social classes emerge, new forms of artistic expression, new methodologies and cosmologies are created. And it is because of those who choose to see an opportunity arising as the old restrictions fall away.

Refuse to be flung off balance and forced into a state beyond action. You are creating a new way of life. Dare to trust yourself.

Virtue Signals and Promises

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On social media, I have observed a hair pulling and kicking in the knees caps type of fighting. One person calls out another with a snarling tone. “You are virtue signalling,” the troll that lives in feeds says in a deep, accusatory voice.

Beware those who have the unmitigated gall (or any other ancient tribal name such as Celt or Galli) to brazenly state that they are not face down in an alcoholic daze during COVID. They will be attacked.

Shut in

The social fetish with victimhood, suffering, repetitive self-destructive behaviour has become more fashionable during the COVID retreat for some. Post that you are day drinking, have put on ten pounds, no longer comb your hair or can’t stand the smell of composting armpits when you lift your arms and the congratulatory messages come flowing in like a waterfall under your Facebook status comment.

Some are applauding paralysis and dysfunction as if it were a superpower. It is, indeed, a strange time. It is an open competition for those who can be the most worst. It reminds me of a bicycle race where the person who stays upright and has covered the least ground is the winner.

Virtue signalling has saved my life. Each time I chose not to tumble down the cactus-covered hillside because I wasn’t watching my steps, I start to trust myself more. Each time I look at my options and ask the question, “Who do you want to be?” Or visualized the person my actions will create, I become more gently optimistic about my own ability to run my life.

When I work out instead of binge-watching Netflix, I talk to myself. I will say, “Look at you go!” I will keep track of my walking, my eating, my sleeping, my reading, my meditating so I can clearly observe my growth. It is a necessary part of my personal growth journey to virtue signal to myself and to others as well.

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There is another way, another path, another reality to step into when I pay attention to my small, mundane choices. Every decision creates an entirely new world. The tiniest act is powerful.

I watch a lot of HGTV and I have a clear sense that we are constructing the place we live within at this time in history. Our home is in our thoughts. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself. And every time I rip out old inefficient wiring and have a more functioning pattern of thinking installed, I congratulate myself.

Keeping promises to my body, my health, my garden, my friends, my family makes me stronger and more trusting. I am not imprisoned by my own interior troll voice cackling gothic noises in the background.

Virtual signalling tells me, “Woman, you got this!”

It makes me stronger.

 

Mr. Robot

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I have just “found” the Mr. Robot series and it is enlightening to view it in the face of the disruption we are experiencing in the world today. Questions arise from the story’s script such as: “Who controls me?” and “Is anything I do originating from what I think of as self?”

During the turmoil that has arisen from societal dissatisfaction with hundreds of years of inculcated cruelty, institutionalized inequality and the resultant blatant public murders of those who are deemed lesser and of no value, people have begun to vibrate at a high rate of anxiety. The questioning of self is resulting in either a defensiveness of a person’s long-held views or a denial of the reality that seems to condemn what the person holds as the truth.

People react in various ways in order to disclaim their part in the system. They have a choice of saying, “It isn’t true. It is information that is being created to control my reaction.” Or they have a choice of saying, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know. It is too much for me, too big for me. I don’t have any power.  I am just standing here passively being a good person.” Or what we are seeing on social media is a third response which is growing stronger. “The people who are killed are at fault. They aren’t like me. They somehow deserve what happened to them.”

It is fascinating to see the philosophy of the early settlers winding through our world, still, in 2020. Preachers in Plymouth delivered hellfire sermons based on the philosophy that a person’s soul was either blessed by God or under the control of Satan before he or she was born. The signs that a person was anointed by God were found in skin colour, physical beauty, wealth, and perfection of health. To ensure that the devil did not rule children, it was recommended that children have the “devil” beaten out of them if they behaved badly.

And it was well known in the religious community that the mark of Cain was punishment. At some point after the start of the slave trade in the United States, many protestant denominations began teaching the belief that the mark of Cain was a dark skin tone,  Cain had killed his brother Abel and let Abel’s blood flow on the earth.

We think that we are in a world that is clear of the past and somehow balanced correctly in the now. But as we see how an inherited belief that the colour of a person’s skin is the result of some sin, some lack of being fully human, we start to wake up. We start to question everything that we have been inducted to believe in.


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An interesting example of how we view the world showed up on my social media feed. A man who understood how conditioning works explained that the map that Americans sit staring at in their 12 years of public schooling is nothing more than propaganda. The USA is placed in the dead centre of the world in order to reinforce the idea that America is special, the centre of the known universe. The other continents are not depicted in their actual sizes. The comparative size of the USA to other nations and of North America to other continents is inaccurate. Power is size. Power is being in the centre. And so the conditioning is ubiquitous. It is in every part of our social context.

What we are being driven to face is the question of what matters. Which of my actions has any inherent power?  Does it matter if someone I don’t know dies of COVID? Does it matter in my life if someone is living without clean drinking water? Does it matter if someone unlike me is being deprived of social justice?

We don’t like the feeling because it forces us to understand how we are formed. Each cell is a thought we have implanted in our concept of reality. We are so very uneasy with having to question all that we consider “normal”. It is painful. It is disturbing. It frightens us to a place where we feel like unprotected children and so we react like children.

As I was weeding my garden yesterday after viewing Mr Robot, I heard a question in my mind. “Is anything you think emanating from your own mind? Is everything you think just something you were taught, conditioned to believe, planted by some societal conditioning?”

I stood up with the weeds still connected to the roots swinging in my hand. And I knew. I suddenly knew. I had no way of knowing.

 

Wind Talking

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Today, I could feel the urge to slide down emotionally coming on again. It reminded me of the coal cellar chute we had under my house when I was young. It was dark down there and I was admonished in the ten commandment chiseled tone my mother could use when laying down the law to NEVER slide into that unseen space.

As I woke up, I remembered the visions from my viewing of the various streaming services I use to numb out before sleep. I had jumped from one documentary to another finding people who had set a goal, worked unflinchingly toward it and stood a healthy, tough, accomplished monument depiction of what a heroically dedicated senior looks like.

“Yes”, I thought to myself, “You will stop doing just enough, good enough, running along the tracks of the usual habits. Today you will dig your shovel into the coal pile of fuel and throw it into the furnace of ambition. Today will be a flame.”

After I took my pills and made coffee, my skin blossomed out like an aggressive tea rose with petals of hives. I couldn’t tell but it felt so pervasive, I imagined even the back of my eyeballs were swollen. My agenda made out so carefully by my personal assistant self was now out of the question.

“First, we cope.”

I took a Benadryl, slurped cups of water and lay down on my left side which is my poor- me baby curled position when I am sick. Just as I was about to fall into a drugged sleep my mind chirped at me, “You had a nap yesterday.” I ignored the nagging.

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So the urge to dig deep, make something happen, speak those words that would cast a spell so powerful it could lift a tsunami of curved lace waves to hit the shore had abated.

I heard the wind outside as I made my whatever the time it was now meal. The wind yowled at me to come outside.

I let the mind sit there in my skull under my twisting hair and walked barefoot to a garden bed. First from one direction, and then from another the wind confused the branches. Acid yellow pollen rained down onto the lawn. The sky shut gray and close to the earth when day began but now it was flickering from one picture projection of itself to another. Silver clouds opened up and the sideways sun took a stab at the earth.

There is something ineffable about a strong wind: It is primitive and savage. We have so little common understanding for the causes, the motivations of violent wind. We do not discuss in our lexicon of weather stories the first mover of the still air that makes it wild suddenly in our own backyards. We are so amazed that we cannot dismiss the force with a label of words. We stand amazed.

And lately the wind has been quixotic, unpredictable, blowing first hot and then cold. But always I feel a call to go stand in it especially when it is ferocious, multi-pronged, hysterical. I stood in the wind changing its mind surrounding me, my hair wrapping across my face and thought, “I want to be like that! I want to be so passionate that there are no words to describe me. I want to speak to the wind.”

I must ask my personal assistant for a new schedule.

Metta View: I can’t see me.

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.As I was twisting around in the mirror, turning lights to reflect illumination on the upper quadrant of my back, I thought about the ideas of “seeing” and “flexibility.”

I was bitten by a brown recluse spider three weeks ago and part of my morning ritual is now to go stand with my back to the mirror holding my phone on camera and trying to set up a clear shot at the inflicted area.

Almost immediately after I was bitten, the two puncture wounds showed themselves but over time with strong antibiotics and tetracycline cream, it is down to a distinct area of red. However,  I am under compulsion to view it. It is “behind” me. I cannot reach it easily. I cannot see it clearly. The ritual of self-protection is built in the monitoring of my body.

The entire OCD driven idea of assessing how I am at this moment, how my past decisions and actions impact on my physical, emotional, spiritual energy, is the place I have landed in my life.

The bite is no longer spreading. The dark ring around it is no longer turning black. The center is beginning to collapse inward as the online information had predicted. But what about the rest of me?

I keep coming back to the idea of blind spots or black boxes. There is an obstruction in knowing the self and it is held in the steel-like neurons that form a spider’s web of concepts.
I know I cannot turn easily to look at my spider attack but that information goes into the basket: “Must do yoga- I hate yoga.” It is filed away.

I watched a video today by a 92-year-old weight lifter who began his self-improvement beyond the age of 80. As I watched, I felt the flush of the warmth of excitement and passion for what I in my secret most heart want for myself. And as time elapsed I filed the intention in the: “Must work out more but don’t feel like it now” basket.

The issue I explain to my patterned self, my toy train on a track self that goes round and round and reaches only the same train station as it ever reached, is that I have a bankruptcy of using time.

Time is energy. Time is optimism. Time is the ultimate expression of the physical. Since I have been retired in 1999 I was outer directed as an artist. I prepared for shows. I worked to deadlines. I spent money in the hopes of making money. I “was” something.

over view

And then I opened the Airbnb for eight very successful years. I was once again outer-directed. The customers coming in would trigger action. The six to eight hours a day spent making beds, doing laundry, wiping down surfaces was not negotiable.

Now, at 75, I have my debt paid down. I have all the time in the world. The Pandemic has turned off the switch of the impulse of action triggered by the outside world and I twist around attempting to see myself.
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And what I see is the problem with “float”. I float in time because “I deserve it.” They tell me that. The inability to look forward to appointments, to trivial meetings with others, to pleasurable strolls through thrift stores to buy things I have no use for and store in the dark peripheries of my house has left me bereft.

Issues such as age, the constant mirroring back to me of what I am expected to do or be as a senior, an inborn faulty setting due to years of being a workaholic and one who has trained herself to jump for the reward cookie held in someone else’s hand haunt me now.

But when I drift in the mornings, I do it listening to coaches, watching videos, reading teachers.

training the mind

I think of the trips I took to Europe and how I spent so much time buying maps when I could have been learning a new language.

Always, always, always my mind runs like a sheep dog herding up scattering thoughts. I come back to the knowing surety that I am a construct. The habits that I build create my choices.

So can we ever know ourselves? How can we twist around enough to get a clear view?

I can only register in my mirror the actions that I am taking. Some of them are shaky, unskilled, full of frustration. But some of them have removed countless moments of drama and struggle that used to occupy my ego.

The spider bite is healing because I followed doctor’s orders even though the antibiotic was very unpleasant. The food I eat is kind to my body and supports my health. The friends I have around me are loving and supportive.

Each day is another construction site. Each day is another laying down of more track for my train to go further, to explore more, to not be so tightly wound.

Ultimately it is a better use of my time to focus on the use of my time instead of looking behind me to see if there is any scarring from past poison. I see my mind grabbing at me for security and I understand the fear that drives that grasping.

Can I loving schedule my time so that I am being rewarded for each minor victory? I begin. I begin again. I begin each every now. Eyes forward.

Day 22. But who is counting?

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Through this 22 days of semi-isolation I watched myself cycle up and down in energy. One day I am out in the garden walking 10 kilometres while hauling dirt and cleaning out the beds. The next I awaken with a headache and am stiff and sore all over. I have no interest in engaging with this new day. There isn’t enough passion in me for the beginning.

The underlying use of energy to keep myself afloat is obviously syphoning off what I would normally be doing this time of year. But managing the body, the emotions, the spirit take monitoring.

To be able to scan the self and see , “No. You cannot push me today,” written on the gauge means I must respect how the entire system I call ‘myself’ is operating.

Today I sat with a Metta Practice video for 30 minutes and I could feel it clearing me. It felt the same way that sliding an overworked, muscle torn body feels sliding into hot water in the bathtub. There was the first recognition that, yes, I was listening. Then the relief as I could feel myself letting go of even that which I did not understand until that moment had been a weight I was carrying.

As I worked my way through the practice, selecting first those who are easiest to love and sending them my wishes and moved on to those who are more challenging, I was floating in a tub of hot water. Each breath, each thought caused more release from my body. I became lighter.

The spirit craves simplicity. The soul yearns to love openly without worrying about being hurt, or attacked or wronged. We all share the desire to drop the protective shield that we are taught is the only safety.

The conspiracy theories are now plastered all over social media at various angles, They are crisscrossing one another out. This statement is untrue, that statement is untrue. Only we in our cult of reality know what is really going on. We hold the tablets with God’s word.

I see the clinging to groups more and more as we are more and more isolated. Our childlike need for the protection of belonging is highly activated now when we are not allowed to sit face to face.

“Show me you belong to my structured belief system group by posting pictures of black chickens,” someone will demand. We are separated into our families in one isolation chamber or we are floating alone in our homes without pets or other people. We need to prove to ourselves that we still hold social power.

And so we cycle. We talk about how nothing is true; more is true than we will ever know; the monsters are no longer in the closet or under the bed. They are everywhere. They are on the TV screen daily.
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And so surrounded by shadows that we see because we are so frightened of being on our own, we now accumulate more and more conspiracy theories.

The way out of our own, internalized, lies to ourselves and our sense of an unsafe world is through a deep appreciation of the efficacy of self-calming.

return to self

We go back to the child. We go back to the bursting out of our chest desire to love. We go back to making it safe for ourselves to trust and be compassionate.

I got out of the bath and left behind all of the spider webs of sticky thread imprisonment. I came back to the truth of being human.

We want someone to tell us it is safe to love others. We want our martial arts master to say we don’t need the sword; we can take off the armour.

And then I felt so much more present in my own body as I recited , “May you be safe. May you find joy. May you be released from suffering.” I said it for others, and I said it for myself.

Let go. Trust. Be of good heart. Nothing needs to be true except this breath, this now. Come home. Remember to love.

 

Honoring the Writer

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I awoke and visualized myself writing lines as I lay coming up to consciousness in the bed. I remembered the lines that had appeared and held on to them tightly so as not to lose them.

I am starting to see the shape of a new book like a body curled under a tangle of thick blankets. When I put my hand out, I can make sense of its shape. It is about all the stoires of real things that happened to me, to others who passed me in the carnival of life and for that brief period of time that we intersected they explained what ride they had chosen to ride, why they had selected this particular apparatus to mount and to trust their bodies to.

A moment in time, a single anecdotal exchange can reveal everything about a person.

Since I gave myself permission to retrieve this collection of interchanges more and more appeared to me, these torn pages of others lives I still held in my memory. I had let the story fly past as if the person was on a merry go round riding a prancing tiger rhythmically undulated. I had asked, “Why the tiger?”

I had watched, turned my head in wonder and then walked away.

I am understanding, now, the next step is the step that I have been missing: A university professor said to me as a 20-year-old sitting in his classroom that the difference between a full-blooded, full-hearted writer and a whimsical will o the whisp was the act of honouring the writing.

“The notebook,” he said in a leather-bound gold foiled voice, “Is validation of our relationship to our own words, our own thoughts. Like a fish getting off of our line of dreams, we do not care enough to haul them in, so that we can edit, weight and measure them.”

He went on to explain that everything we do not think to honour in ourselves, that we do not help to grow in our lives results in a loss of confidence. The words, the images, the hidden code of who we are needs to be studied. We can break apart the words to see the very relationship we have with self. We alone can decipher the message.

It is in the deepening of the romance with words that the object of our desire becomes less shy. It disrobes for us and we see nakedly what words formed our thoughts. We see what truths about self we have overlooked.

We can say, “This person’s story does not interest me.”

And so by dismissing the words that ticker tape across the brain daily we refuse to be curious about the very nature of being alive. What is the scrolling translation of the foreign movie of our subconscious mind trying to say to us?

We fail to commit to the intense beauty of language. It becomes a casual if not abusive situation.

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We find out fluctuaring flirtation with the self to be deeply dissatisfying. Like a wife or husband who feels abandoned and lonely, our soul’s very power stays contained and weak.

We have no confidence in our music. We tell the ballerina of expression that she is too frail, she lacks technique, she is flawed and at best amateur. We have no time for her.

When the soul in its expressive power shows up, we ask, “What can you do for me? Can you heal my childhood? Can you be used for status or power?”

And so we train ourselves to be disloyal to our own psyche. The ferocious strength that keeps us alive when we are lost and the sky is obscured with only a gothic hiss of a sun above us is within. We are all muscle and sinew. We do not leave the field of battle but use our self talk to embolden us beyond despair.

A true writer trains like a warrior trains. The writer swears an oath upon the blade of language. A true oracle speaker knows that all visions are treasures. There are no greater or lesser lines of revelations.

Every word that appears to us is a word to be respected and kept in honor.

But to honor the words that scroll through the brain means to make a commitment to our own individual manner of making sense of the world. And as it is with every living thing, that which is observed with love, that which is nurtured thrives.

The words no longer appear to us quickly flitting like a gray squirrel running on a dead winter highway of stagnant branches. They are not so fast and so distant that we can’t make them out.

Like so many experiences in my life the message that the professor offered to me was not received when I was twenty.

Today I am 75 and I am full of stories. I collected them somewhere below my conscious knowing. I can see their shape obscured beneath a layer of inattention.

I feel full of excitement as I understand that I am being called to accept myself, my thoughts. I open my journal and write down the pictures I have seen. I respect the torn fragment of other’s revelations about their lived experiences and want to study them carefully.

I think I am ready now at last.