What Do You See?

     On first glance it seems just a lovely picture, a boy in a field of flowers.  And even though the flowers are poppies and the boy is actually working in the field, topping the poppies to prepare them for harvest and eventual processing into opium; the picture itself is still, for me, lovely.

     Maybe I should view it differently.  After all the many cultural and societal strictures against the production and use of narcotics, not to mention the reality that this child probably works all day topping poppies to earn less than one dollar, maybe I should feel offended - even outraged - by this photo.  Yet I don't feel either.  And honestly I consider that personal progress.

     I spent too many years viewing other people and situations with judgement.  Anyone or anything that didn't fit MY view of things surely must have been wrong - deserving of my criticism.  I'd refuse to see any "good" side, or the beauty, or the opportunity for learning or change - refuse to be changed, to even  consider that I could change, that it might be a good thing for me.  I wanted everything and everyone simple - and by simple I meant in agreement with me.

     It took nearly six decades before I learned to appreciate the complexity, the profundity, the chaotic and paradoxical in my own life and self, which led inevitably toward appreciating those same characteristics in the world around me.  I still fight against it, and want to be RIGHT, to have others do what I want them to, to have situations turn how the way I want them to.  But, these days, I catch those thoughts and can (usually) see them for the psychological bloody piles they are.

    So it does seem to be personal progress that I can appreciate the beauty of this picture, the contrast of textures and the intensity of the white of the flowers (very interesting too since white is the absence of color), the composition, the soft focus of the boy's expression - even as my acculturated thinking says "what a terrible thing."  Having opened up more to how little I actually know for sure, how not-in-charge I am of most everything,  how much time - and energy - I use judging and attempting to control; I am better able to connect with the loveliness of the picture AND into an appreciation of the combination of darkness and light inherent there.

     Sure, none of this is a life-altering revelation or epiphany - but from such awarenesses and appreciations as these,  of such ways of seeing, if not differently at least more comprehensively, is a life worth living made.  That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.  What do you see?

Individual Occupation? Hmmmmmm....

What is too often missed is that the movement is about occupying the space and the time

 to create a different world. 

Sarah van Gelder

      I'm aware that among those who usually read my words are people who may disagree with the ideas or tactics, even the underpinnings, of the occupy movement.  Or perhaps they just don't believe it has anything to do with them, doesn't matter in their lives.  To those people I dedicate the words in the header - and the linked article from YES! magazine.

Why This May Day Matters by Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine

     To go "on strike" tomorrow may not be possible for everyone.  But to inhabit space and invest time considering how a different world - one in which we are not all scrambling constantly for money and what we've been raised, or acculturated, to believe is security - could look and feel certainly is possible for everyone.  And even though the official Occupy movement encourages us to join with others in public events or protests, that joining is not necessarily the only thing we can do.  

   Individuals CAN make a difference, though we too often see our own efforts as too small to matter.  A friend of mine was talking the other day about her sense, when she was younger and her children were small, of not being able to do anything to make the world a better place.  She felt discouraged at her inability to make change in the world until someone reminded her that raising her children to be responsible, caring, awake, and loving people WAS making a difference in the world.  

   In the 60's I recall bumper stickers that read "If it is to be it must start with me."  That sentiment, or idea if you will, doesn't really read like a call to rebellion or activism.  That statement speaks such common sense, is so self-evident, that we don't consider it as the radical statement of living that it is  - in my opinion.  We tend to think of individual acts or ways of living as small change in the scheme of world change.  Yet the fact is that until and unless we come to understand and appreciate that our individual choices and actions do possess power (imagine if everyone you know, everyone you've ever known, everyone they know or have known decided never to shop at Walmart again) we'll feel this powerlessness and sense of futility.

   What the occupy movement calls us to do is sit down and think - about how we spend our money, what we do with our time, our trash, our possessions, how we view our work, our leisure time, our relationships, our skills and capacities.  The occupy movement encourages us to consider - how we're living and how what we choose supports systems of economic and political corruption - or how our choices free us from those systems.  The occupy movement wants us to cogitate on all of the things we choose, mostly unconsciously, and begin to make more conscious choices.  None of this requires joining groups or even leaving home.

   Making a different world just by making our own thinking and choosing more conscious?  Sounds too simple, doesn't it?  Maybe it really is that simple.  Hmmmmmm.

Good Advice from Mary Oliver

Pay Attention . . .

an April breeze, barely sun warmed, casts flickering shadows of the fully leaved trees on the table
tea bags float in deepening brown water in the pitcher on the porch
barely damp air moves against my skin in the early morning
sirens and the heavy rumble of a fire truck move along the parkway

Be Astonished . . .

the warmth in my belly at the sound of my daughter's voice
the dust of the stars, the elements of the cosmos doing their work inside our bodies
to forgive is to be forgiven
chaos is not a negative thing

Tell about it . . .

it's not so much what happens to us, what we do, what choices we make, as it is what we tell ourselves about it - that matters in the end.

Yes, I'm a Fan

Excitement is high here in the Bluegrass state, and will surely reach a fever pitch by Saturday – when the U of L Cardinals face the UK Wildcats in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament.  Flags of red – for the Cards, and blue – for the Cats, hang from poles normally reserved for the Stars & Stripes, or flutter from plastic sticks on car windows.  Yesterday as I walked five blocks toward work I counted twenty-six items of clothing with either UL or Go Cards on them, and twelve of the same supporting the Cats.  Of course this is Louisville where the fandom is somewhat divided.  In Lexington – well – red shirts there can only mean one of two things:  either a term describing  a player who’s sitting out a season, or a U of L fan forced to stop for a quick fill-up and wishing they had a jacket to put on while gassing up.

Most people not from here, and even some who are, can’t understand the passion with which we view basketball.  And while it’s true that there are many more important things our energies and actions could focus on, the plain and simple of it is that for many people, like me, college basketball is part of our lives, something we’ve followed since childhood.  The Cards and the Cats are just the most prominent teams, the ones we follow with greatest enthusiasm.  Games are an excuse to gather, for game day parties, in bars where others will yell as loudly as we will, reasons to crowd around somebody’s laptop or sit in the car with the radio blaring – to cheer our favorite players and, later, to critique the play or the referees.

Perhaps the best way to help all you non-hoops fans out there understand what I’m talking about is to tell the story of how I came to be a fan.  When I was growing up enthusiasm and excitement could find no space in our house.  So we had to listen to the games next door – at the Bisig’s.  Back then basketball wasn’t televised.  Radio announcers were the alternative for those of us without tickets.  My brothers and me, Dan & Don Bisig, and sometimes their brother Jimmy (on whom I had a hopeless crush) gathered around the radio to hear Ed Kallay call the games for Louisville, or Joe Dean describe Kentucky’s play.

I can see us now, flopped over chairs in the Bisig’s basement, even sitting on the table next to the radio when the game got close – as if being near the radio helped us feel we were at the game.  The action seemed faster to me than it was, propelled by Kallay’s words about beautiful passes, players diving for out-of-bounds or loose balls, the thunder of Converse-clad players’ feet running down the floor of Freedom Hall.  How, I used to wonder, can he keep track of ten men moving so rapidly on the floor, all the while telling listeners what happened with accuracy.  Sometimes, in the excitement of a snapped pass and twenty foot shot that rolled around the rim before falling through the net, Kallay’s words would desert him, and he’d fall back on telling us, “OH, I WISH you could SEE this!”

During Kentucky games, when a player – maybe Pat Riley or “Little” Louis Dampier – would make a soft layup from inside you could almost hear the swish, and Joe Dean would tell us there was “string music in Lexington KY.”  The twang of the Appalachians in his voice was always a reminder that in every small town and every holler and ridge of the state basketball hoops hung from garages and barns, and young boys spent hours shooting there, dreaming of one day wearing a Kentucky blue uniform.

In the Bisig’s basement we’d throw our popcorn in the air in celebration of shots that fell – unworried about getting into trouble for making a mess there.  The boys would pretend to shoot at invisible baskets, while I shook non-existent pom-poms in the air.

Back then only boys played, as far as I knew.  Yet I loved watching pick-up games, watching the power of the players as they moved the ball forward passing, shooting, even defense.  In high school my fascination grew as I sat in bleachers and cheered for Seneca, my high school, progressed to the state championship.  Then my crush was aimed at six foot Wesley Unseld – a soft-spoken senior who smiled at even a sophomore girl.  His incredibly huge black hands always held a ball, even when walking the halls between classes in his slow, slouching, sleepy--eyed gait.

When I was a student at U of L I don’t recall seeing players very much, but in grad school at UK I felt surrounded by their presence, their height and the way their bodies seemed to conserve energy off the court.  I’d often eat breakfast at the Student Center and watch with awe as Melvin Turpin and Sam Bowie moved slowly and confidently from the food line to the players’ table, carrying three trays, each piled high with food.  Then they’d shuffle back to the line and return with a tray of milk cartons and another that completely disappeared under the juice they’d gotten.

Early in my as-yet-unknown pregnancy and early in that basketball season I would join the mass of undergrads, camping in front of Memorial Coliseum – sometimes all night – to get my allotment of two student tickets for games.  When my daughter Sarah was born she had basketball somewhere in her consciousness already, surely.

When Sarah began to play in fifth grade it was only because her friends were playing – parks league ball coached by parents.  Yet Sarah, even taller than I had been at her age, loved to play.  And she began practicing on her own, with me or her Dad, or when friends came over.  By junior high Sarah had a soft touch with the ball and a way of moving on the court to block shots that amazed me.  Her tiny school held other girls who loved to play as well, and a coach who pushed, and taught, and loved her players – toughly.  Shalon Crowe dressed and looked like a model – for games.  Yet she’d get in a player’s face for mistakes, grab a girl by the slippery jersey and practically drag her to the official’s table to point out what she wanted the player to do when she got into the game.  Shalon could jump from her courtside chair and land, in three-inch heels, beside a referee to argue a call.  She knew the game as well as any coach I’ve met, and she knew her girls and how to motivate them.  Her players – her girls – would have walked through fire for her.

And I reveled in being a basketball mom – encouraging them from the bleachers, cooking high carb meals for the team.  My best memories were of driving girls home from practice or even games – the smell of girl sweat filling my car, their conversation moving from the back seat toward me, making me smile.

They were girls who were learning to love what their bodies could do, who had the chances that we, of an earlier time, had never had – to play, to assert their right to take up room on the floor, to use brain and body as a single unit.  They were girls who understood the execution of a play, how to win or lose as part of a team.  Watching and supporting them made me happy for them, and helped me understand a previously unknown aspect of female power.  To be part of a team, to know others will come to your aid, to know that those others depended on you, that your teammates will encourage you when your shots aren’t falling, and celebrate with you when they are – all things that my daughter was learning and experiencing.  I felt joy for her.

When I watch games now, on television or those times when Sarah and I attend a game together, I yell.  I’m rowdy.  I lean forward to watch a one-three-one defense unfold, and stiffen as a player sets their feet to draw a charge, even feel the slam as they fall.  I am IN the game as much as when I listened on the radio.  Only now, because I know the effort and the strain, the intelligence and focus, the discipline necessary to play well I no longer play cheerleader with invisible pom-poms.  Sometimes though, in the excitement and intensity of a well-played game, my body will want to express with more than voice.  And then, I will still throw my popcorn into the air.

Weaving Reality and Imagination

At the last Moth Story Slam I told about being twelve and imagining what the new boy coming into our class would look like, how he would behave - based on the one fact that our teacher had given us - that his family had just moved to Louisville from Hawaii.  I told how I fell in love with this imaginary boy before I ever saw him, based on my limited, and very romantic, ideas and experiences.  And I told how devastated I was when he finally showed up - only an average, pale, allergic, boy who was surely scared to death to be transferring schools in seventh grade.  My story ended with the consequences visited upon me for being so caught up in my fantasy that I couldn't see that in reality Kevin, that was his name, had positive qualities.

In too many ways to go into here this scenario - creating a fantasy of who people would be and how they would respond to me, then experiencing supreme disappointment when my imaginings weren't even remotely related to reality - illustrates how I was in the world for many years.  Long after I'd "grown up" and ought to have been more comfortable with reality, I still preferred imagination and fantasy.  This preference has given me no end of trouble - staying in dysfunctional relationships I imagined I could turn around being only one example.

I've often wondered what life might have held for me if I'd faced what was in front of me and dealt with it rather than living in my fantasy world - a world in which no real person or situation could ever be good enough, could ever measure up to my imagining.  In this, my sixtieth year on the planet,  I'm experiencing a shift in that wondering.  You see, these musings about what might have been were always deeply and tightly connected to the part of me where imagination and fantasy live.  I've only just begun to understand that lately, as I've allowed the reality of being an older/elder woman to affect me.

And I can see more clearly, as I feel the physical and emotional and other affects of moving into this stage of life, the value of what my life has held, what I have experienced, even what I've survived and learned through - by using my capacity for imagination and fantasy.  Before, when I wondered what might have been I'd wish I had not sought refuge from reality by immersing myself in fantasy.  Lately I understand that it was imagination and fantasy that helped me live in (to be honest, to endure) the reality around me.  And I believe I've come to that understanding now, at this stage of life, because I've been weaving reality and imagination together - in storytelling.

Not just standing on the Moth stages either.  I've been participating in a storytelling group - in which we bring personal stories, and respond to those told.  I've been writing the stories of my life - frequently only for myself, but more and more often, to share.  Opportunities for telling my stories seem to abound recently.  And I think somehow it has been - in large part - reaching this stage of life that has both encouraged and enabled me to apply my capacity for imagining and fantasy to my "true stories, told live."

Makes sense.  At this stage of life those moments or situations I've remembered with a cringe now seem to me merely funny, or even, sometimes, touching.  This is, after all, the stage of life in which we view what has been from a distance, and - voila! - find unexpected gifts in both the past and in ourselves.  The unexpected - life just never ceases offering that does it?

Occupy - an Idea

Occupy an idea, live with it, sleep with it, inhabit it until it becomes a kind of "gnosis," or genuine knowing. Occupy a place because you love it or because it needs loving attention or simply because you need a place to be. Find something that feels and smells authentic and occupy it fully in order to bring back life's natural state of diversity and abundance. In the midst of all the change, confusion, and chaos, occupy your own soul; for without soulful presence even momentous events can become hollow and be reduced to political in-fighting and the seeds of change can fail to take root.

Michael Meade.  

These words, written by a man who was my teacher for a grace-filled weekend in late 2007,  showed up in an article on Huffington Post about the Occupy movement.  Yet they struck me personally.  And I’ve tried them out, tried keeping them in mind – as well as in sight, printed and stuck under a refrigerator magnet where I saw them each time I went to the freezer for ice.
I needed words that reminded me to simply be still recently, as I approached what was for me a singular event – my 60th birthday.  Along with selections of meaningful poetry and fiction, I needed words like Meade’s, regardless of context or theme, for sitting with the anxious beliefs swirling in both head and body as I approached this milestone.  I needed reminders that my anxiety had a flip side, if only I could occupy it, “live with it, sleep with it, inhabit it . . .” until the crawly-skinned feeling could lessen.
In the midst of the change that I imagined was coming because a page on the calendar would turn I tried a literal occupation – something that’s worked for me before.  I established my bed as the site of occupation – brought to it warm drinks (on occasion, alcoholic also), yummy snacks, books, the journal I began in December when the first pricks of anxiety made themselves known, my laptop for writing, watching movies, listening to music, extra pillows, baby dolls and bears.  And I allowed myself to spend all the time there that I needed to.  It was, I see now, an occupation of soul and spirit, or psyche and mind – an inhabiting of what was going on within, while simultaneously allowing my insides to be affected by what I brought to the occupation.
And it helped.

I only understood how much it helped when, three days after my actual birthday a dinner I had been told was siblings-only revealed itself as a surprise party celebration– complete with friends and gifts and trick candles in the birthday pies.  [Yes, birthday pies – I highly recommend this alternative to cake and ice cream.]  Before spending time with my anxiety, my surprise at walking into the house where so many unexpected people were gathered would have ramped up that anxiety – made me feel as if I had to ‘perform’ somehow – resulted in internal expectations that I should be the ‘perfect’ honored guest.
I know this because it had been my reactive response to similar situations over the years.  It’s always been a conflict for me – being the center of any attention that I did not seek, did not bring on myself by my own efforts.  Unsought attention would immediately trigger an inner sense of “what do these people want from or of me – what’s my role, or job, in this situation?”
Occupying the uncertainty and fear of what it might mean to be sixty – to become what I’d previously defined as “old” – had in fact peeled away another layer of my thinking about self in this “what do they want” manner.  I’d sat with those habits of self-definition, that really came from old messages, long enough to know them for the burdensome weights on my soul that they’d always been.  I had spent time with my somatic and spiritual desires – taking them easy and pampering them from my bed – allowing myself to accept that I didn’t have to DO or BE or TRY anything except what felt right to me.
And the result was that I could simply enjoy my surprise party – move around to interact with the people there, drink my wine and enjoy the food and the pie (especially the coconut cream), open the gifts, give and receive the hugs – without worrying or stress.  And the result of that was that, not only did I have fun, feel loved and special – but everyone else did as well.

So here’s what I’m thinking:  I’m gonna keep Michael Meade’s quote up on the fridge a while longer.  Wedged under a magnet (one that was part of a gift from the surprise party) that says “I believe in a world where chickens can cross the road without their motives being questioned” the printout of Meade’s words shares space with my ticket for The Moth tomorrow night, alongside pictures of me and Sarah and Josh acting silly at a wedding.  I’m gonna keep the idea of occupying what calls to me for attention where it can remind me, when the next anxious time comes along.

PERMISSION TO BE HUMAN

     You’d think that by this age I’d have learned better than to ask “why” questions – I mean, those are ‘god’ questions, right?  But, wait, hold on to this beginning, this avoiding-getting-started-moving-in-the-totally-wrong-direction statement.  Don’t lose it while I start over.  You’ll see why shortly.

Why is it that the deepest aspects of us, the parts of mind or body or psyche or soul that we absolutely cannot change because they’re hardwired or fixed, the characteristics, traits, qualities, and attributes built in to us from birth and honed by experience – why do we struggle so in giving ourselves permission to be (or do, or whatever) these things?
     You’d think that these built-ins, these things that make us who we are, that serve as our definition in the dictionary of humanity, would serve us kind of like a safety net or a warm blanket as we move and act in the world.  But, in truth, the defining things, the unalterable aspects of us are those that we seem to fight against the most ruthlessly.  Giving oneself permission to be, and be comfortable being, who we are at our core feels, most of the time, nearly impossible.
     Even Jung acknowledged that the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.  In our terror we project those aspects of self we most hate onto others.  Much like what seem to be the motivations behind the actions of prominent Republicans these days – an obvious determination to grab power and control over our society even if it means the destruction of that society – we’d rather punish our own nature, punish too those on whom we project the hateful, than permit it to show.

     Which circles back around to the self-critical statements I began with.  Asking “why” is human.  Though there may not be an answer, at least not an answer we can understand in our human limitations, asking why is important – to our continued understanding of both self and others.  In asking “why” we become vulnerable, open to experiencing reality that may arouse fear, sadness, shame.  Thus the rationale for not permitting ourselves to ask, to not open to the inherent vulnerability of our humanity.  I mean, who wants to volunteer to experience those affects?
     Without experiencing that which hurts, the affects we’ve had-enough-of-thank-you-very-much in our lives, we cannot experience how those affects can become capacities which encourage and feed us.  Only through feeling the fear do we encounter courage, through opening to sadness we discover compassion.  Only through getting to know shame can we come to know its opposite – dignity.
Why sign up to do something so difficult?  Isn’t life easier, don’t we ‘get along’ better, if we just keep pushing away what doesn’t feel good, blaming someone else for what we experience?  There are those, obviously, who think so.

     Some years ago a friend’s mother died after a prolonged battle with cancer.  His relationship with his mother had been a source of profound conflict and intense need – on both sides – for all his life.  Experiencing the death of the parent on whom we most depended will engender, for most of us, a struggle with choices.  We can choose to accept that now whatever we wanted from our parent will never come our way; or we can choose to keep looking for what we wanted from those around us.  We can grow up, become who we are meant to be, or we can remain a child, trying still to be mothered.  My friend chose the latter.  Since I couldn’t, and certainly wouldn’t, be a mother figure to him; our friendship ended.
     Ending our friendship felt worse to me than the ending of my marriage.  Yet I learned so much in grieving that loss, lived so completely with the sadness, the anger, and the fear that I came to understand both more about myself and a great deal more about myself in relationships.
     The signs were all there that he wasn’t capable of living with what was difficult, that this was who, and ‘where’ he was.  I’d seen them, and from who and where I was, chosen to ignore or explain them away.  In the grief I later worked with at the loss of this friendship, I understood that I am a human who loves unreservedly, goes beyond the call, hangs in with relationships when others would quit.  And I roiled around in the muck of self-punishment – because of this aspect of my humanity – for a long time.  Until living with feeling a fool for how I’d been, and sitting in despair at my own stupidity became transformed, through sharing and writing, into appreciation for the depth and capacity for love my behaviors exhibited.
     Permitting my humanity, dwelling in the places where I most hated to live – in the seeming foolishness of my response in relationships, in the palpable sadness of loss, in all those hurtful and hurting places – I learned greater acceptance of me.  I’m more open in the world when I allow the difficult and painful to manifest, rather than try to push them down or project them out.
     Maybe we don’t ask the ‘why’ questions because we can’t control what answers we’ll get.  Following the difficult and uncomfortable feelings into our own interior, allowing them to inhabit and teach us, means we don’t control what will come back to our exterior.  And as perfectly imperfect humans, we just hate it when that happens.