Saturday, February 18, 2017

The Guest House




This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.


Rumi

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The Healing Sound of a Tin Can



One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.  

Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage






I was around nine when Andy decided to wake at me 4 am to walk the pre-dawn streets of our gated village in Manila. We did it for about a week. The purpose: to walk through our world wide awake while everyone else was asleep. To do what kids shouldn't: gain secret access to what adults controlled. 

We had not known this version of our world: the unrelenting heat and smog turned cool and fresh, and the grinding traffic subdued to almost silent. 

I say almost silent because alongside the muffled traffic, there was this other sound, like a tin can dragging behind us.

My feeling on those walks was strong, almost cosmic: two souls meeting again after lifetimes of knowing each other. I felt a shared understanding deep in my bones, pre-verbal, the way the rules of culture enter our bodies implicitly without our conscious knowing.  We made every turn down each street as one mind without uttering a word. The darkness didn’t scare me because we were together. 

After we got home one morning, Andy put on the record player, turning the volume down to barely audible, and instructed me to listen. As I pressed my ear to the speaker, my stomach lurched.

Billy, don't be a hero, don't be a fool with your life
Billy, don't be a hero, come back and make me your wife
And as Billy started to go she said, “keep your pretty head low”
Billy, don't be a hero, come back to me

When the song was over, I said I didn’t understand the words. But it wasn’t true. My body had absorbed what my brain refused to interpret. Someone I loved was going to leave. Possibly die. I asked Andy to explain the lyrics, not for clarity’s sake but because I hoped he might tell me a different story, a different ending.

 “It’s about a boy who goes off to war and dies,” Andy said with his signature matter-of-factness already in place. But his eyes were not matter of fact. And what I saw there frightened me. I began to cry.

And then I was flooded with rage, like a screaming baby whose parents won’t come. Would Andy really choose war just to be a hero? Would he really abandon us – the people who loved him – for certain death?

And then I felt terror for my future self. Was there no safety in loving someone if they could make their own unfathomable decisions and leave me behind?

I wonder now if little Andy believed war was a boy’s fate. Was he testing this reality with me? Was he hoping I would tell him a different ending? 

As a girl, I had different fears about my fate. Far too young, I knew about the girlfriends of the fathers: secretaries in Thailand or Burma or Bangladesh, or even at home in Manila: not-so-secret women who were younger, more sexually available, prettier, or more whatever it was that the wives were somehow not. The information arrived matter of factly, like conscription. Girls were required by cultural law to become mothers or mistresses -- two mutually-exclusive categories. Before you became a mother, you might enjoy a brief moment of being desired as a girlfriend. If you were really good at sex, you might entice a man into loving you. Once you became a wife and mother, you and love had a shelf life: only until someone younger, more sexually available, prettier, less demanding, or whatever it was you were not arrived on the scene. Abandonment was pre-destined.

As I struggled to understand my place in the frightening world I was growing up into, the conundrum remained that since my basic worth seemed to be as a sexual object, what could a man's love really mean anyway? Who or what did he, in fact, love?

The question I failed to ask myself at the time (and continue to fail to ask myself) is, how can I love a man, or anyone, who cannot love me? The whole of me, that is, not just my parts.

By age sixteen, having gathered all the proof I needed around me – an abandoned mother, unrelenting sexist billboards, television shows, movies, ads, and a constant stream of misogynist jokes as empty and ubiquitous as junk food – I forged my belief system in the fires of immanent erasure. In a world where boys grew into men who were encouraged to exploit women in obvious and subtle ways, I would never be safe. I lived in fear.

Of the three options fear offers – Flight, Fight, or Freeze -- Andy chose Flight and I chose Freeze. He learned to fly and I learned to submit.

After Andy died, his wife announced that she was done with anxiety. She had spent her whole life worrying that terrible things were going to happen, yet all her worrying had not prevented her mother, her first boyfriend, her husband (my brother), and her brother from dying too young, too soon, and tragically, all of them.

Everything I have ever feared has also come to pass. Andy died. And I have been abandoned, often in ways so specific to my worst fears that I have started to develop a God complex. Seeing my nightmares unfold with such uncanny precision can only mean one thing: I let this happen. I am the author of this horror movie. 



What I am coming to understand now is that Andy and I didn’t walk two distinct and divergent paths of war and abandonment. We were both abandoned at a young age by a parent who had also been abandoned at young age, likely because her parents had also been abandoned at a young age. I'm talking about emotional abandonment here: the failure to see, cherish, and unconditionally love a child.

And we both went to war. Along with Flight and Freeze, we also chose Fight. We mostly fought against our selves. The rage we felt for all our unmet needs, for generations of unmet needs that lived on inside us, eventually turned inward, gnawing dark, ragged holes, tar pits of bottomless pain. To fill these holes, Andy and I developed a menu of pain relievers. For instance, we both binged on junk food with the dedication of Olympic addicts. Whenever we could, we got high on salt and fat and sugar until we crashed. As soon as we recovered, we started again. Our bodies ballooned at the rate of our blooming loneliness, burying our most vulnerable selves deep inside.

Not surprisingly, our unrelenting hunger could not be fed by food of any kind, junk or otherwise. That's the nature of addiction. It seeks to minimize pain and maximize pleasure but it never feels full. That's why the fix remains a constant lure. It delivers the short-term promise of an overflowing plate, brilliantly frosting the long-term bloat with so much saccharine we don't register how we are wearing down our organs and self esteem, often until it's too late.  

I spent my childhood living inside a body that felt like an ill-fitting Halloween costume, a body that both represented and hid my lack of self worth, my fear of abandonment, and my pernicious loneliness. I had buried myself alive.

As an adult, I finally gave up junk food when I realized it was no longer delivering me from my pain; it only pounded on more pain. As I shed weight, however, I gained the sexual attention I had feared, confirming my childhood belief that I was valued as a body first, a person a distant second. To escape this old/new pain, I found a new addiction. I quietly slipped upstairs into my mind, leaving my body behind.

The definition of an addiction is anything we use to band-aid anxiety, depression, pain. From cookies to TV to sex, it's not the substance itself or the amount that defines our addiction; it's the reasons for use, and whether use becomes abuse that disconnects us from, and causes harm to, ourselves and others. Addictions are the result of distortions about our worth and loveability, which are the result of childhood experiences of being missed by our significant caregivers, from misattunement to frank abuse. 

Addictions, however, are not evil. They are survival strategies, signs that we want to live. We just don't know how to live with pain because we don't know that pain is integral to love, and as such something to embrace, not avoid. Our culture tells us to avoid pain at all cost, which is why we feel flawed when we feel pain. And we grab at whatever we can to drown it out. 

There is a difference between clean pain and dirty pain, though. Clean pain is the raw experience of feeling our hearts break due to loss and a variety of human hurts. Dirty pain comes from adding layers of self judgment, shame, and other ways we are mean to ourselves on top. Addictions are part of the dirty-pain pattern. They keep us from feeling clean pain, which connects us to love.

In December of 2016, something came in to my life that put the breaks on my own addictions. It held up a mirror of love and healing so profound and hopeful, I have been moved to write this blog. I think it might be saving my life.

The thing I'm talking about is, Love Warrior. As the title suggests, this memoir is about a woman who faces her addictions and does the painful, almost impossible work of rooting out conditional, anemic love that culture has served up her whole life. With nothing but her courage to guide her, she works hard to stay put in her pain through terrifying uncertainty until she can feel the bud of unconditional love inside her, the love she knows she must nurture in order to survive. When I finished the last page, I flipped it over to start again. This book could not have arrived at a better time. 

The author, Glennon Doyle Melton, writes that we attempt to escape our “hot loneliness” in life through pressing “easy buttons.” Her buttons were bulimia, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity in her youth. Her promiscuity, like mine, was rooted in a need to control what she feared would control her:  culture’s “rules” about how women must present in order to be loved, serving everyone else’s needs at the expense of her own. Doyle Melton’s husband’s “easy buttons” were porn and affairs. As a sober adult, Doyle Melton sought escape from her loneliness through a life of the mind to the exclusion of her body. Her husband sought escape from his loneliness through a hyper-sexualized focus on his body, and the bodies of other women, to the exclusion of his heart and mind. Both of these escapes cost them connection. Within their respective easy-button bunkers, Doyle Melton and her husband were unable to share themselves deeply with each other. In his world, she was a fish out of water; in her world, he was a drowning rat, both of them gulping for the wrong sustenance.


In my 20s, my sustenance was seduction. Because I believed intimacy would never take root, seduction itself became the fix. And because the fix delivers an instant and delicious pain-relieving high, it seduces us into getting the next fix by any means necessary. We resort to lying, hiding, blaming, whatever it takes to get the fix and stop the pain, often resulting in our inability to register the harm we cause others in the name of meeting our need. 

I said seductive things to people I could not substantiate, or acted in ways that belied my true feelings. I barely knew my true feelings, having buried them deeply away from harm. I pretended at love when I didn't know how to love. I just wanted to elicit love and I did. But once I had love, I jumped ship for the next shiny fix. Why would I abandon ship when love was right there? Because I didn't know how to recognize love, much less receive love, much less give love. I had been conditioned to believe love was fleeting, conditional, and body focused. As I saw others around me succeed in love, I came to believe I must not deserve love. All I felt was my pain and all I wanted was the fix to solve it. 

I had no idea I could do that for myself.

In my 30s and 40s, I experienced my own seduction tactics aimed at me. I felt how much harm I had caused in my 20s. The Seducer tells lies and then gaslights the victim, making them feel responsible for the Seducer's behaviour as a way to reduce the Seducer's shame. The Seducer, however, holds only a murky idea of what they've done because the engine running their machine is bottomless need, not malicious intent. But that's what makes the Seducer so dangerous. They dress up their fear of abandonment as professions of love, and they want to mean it, but the story they tell is dressed to kill. And nothing about it is love.

I wonder if seduction underpins all easy buttons.

Andy’s seduction of speed began with cars. He soon graduated to jet skis, then snowmobiles. After that he learned to fly. Soon, flying was no longer enough. He had to build his own plane. Then he had to learn aerobatics. Three weeks after his plane crashed, my father said: “There was no stopping him.” It was a relief to hear because up to that point I think I believed I could have stopped him, or someone else could have. It was like watching an addict take a deep dive into a pool of coke. Even his loved ones standing on the edge couldn’t stop him. 

Was there anything that could have stopped him? 

Perhaps Andy did aerobatics at dangerous speeds to prove his worth. But to whom? We already loved him. Or, perhaps was he simply trying to outrun his loneliness.

I think of loneliness like a tin can at the end of a string tied to our ankles. Naturally, the can clatters away behind us the moment we flee. Instead of realizing we are the source of the noise, we drown it out with addictions – food, sex, alcohol, sleep – not one related to hearing the obvious: that the only way to stop the noise of loneliness is to stop running. 



But Andy didn't stop. It’s possible Andy didn’t know or trust how much love surrounded him, or how to digest the love offered him. Childhood pain has that effect: we desperately fill our plate to obscure our loneliness, blinding ourselves to the full plate already in front of us. We see only the white porcelain underneath. Empty. Cold. Waiting to be filled. Always waiting to be filled.

The more I learn about addiction, the more I understand that it's not an outlier affliction. Most of us have an addiction of some type and stripe. Until we are willing to wake up in our present lives and process the pain of our childhoods, knowing as adults we have the power to heal, we are doomed to repeat our past and reach for addictions instead. We will spend our lives fighting ourselves, as we flee or freeze out love.

My addiction to seducing protection against abandonment has not stopped it from showing up again and again, as matter of factly as the cliché of sexy secretaries. Every time I see my worth starting and ending with my sexual availability in the eyes of someone I love, I remove a little more of myself and send out “my representative,” as Doyle Melton calls her. This “Liz” is a pathological caregiver, addicted to fulfilling the needs of others: a prayer against abandonment that always leads to the same result. I abandon myself. 

I hide.

As a child, I hid in my body. As an adult, I hide in my mind. I hide what makes me most lovable: my whole body's truth, my past pains and my strivings for health, my failures to connect and my deepest longing to do just that. I hide the whole mess of me, utterly worthy of love. When I hide some of me, I hide no less than all of me, my MindBodySoul. Hiding not only means am I not seen (if I hide my self respect, it's harder for someone else to respect me), it also means I can't see. For instance, I can't see when someone tries to fills their plate by emptying mine.

Hiding has been my survival strategy since probably ever: both instinctual and deliberate, and as necessary as breathing.

And hiding has been the source of my betrayal, a living death almost impossible to bear.

On the seven-year anniversary of Andy's death, I find myself wondering if Andy hadn't hid his pain in junk food and speed, would he still be with us? If he had faced his childhood pain and healed his ragged wound, would he have chosen to moderate his speed to ensure he would come home that night to his family? Would he have felt how cherished he was and, therefore, not taken his life, or the lives of those he loved, for granted? I don't know. It's painful to even write those thoughts down.

My own addiction to seductions-without-substance has led me to cut off my body and ignore my soul to chase fairy-tale endings. As with any drug, in my addicted state my MindBodySoul goes offline, leaving me vulnerable to the blind harm of someone else's addictions. When properly attuned, the MindBodySoul can be an incredibly accurate barometer for truth (and bullshit). Without the whole system humming, the attuning instrument is crippled. Like someone who has lost an eye, I lose my depth perception.


The fastest way to stop addiction is to stop. That part is easy. 

But the road to health is not. It involves living through the sickening pain of withdrawal. That's the warrior part of becoming a Love Warrior. Andy did not have that chance. But I do. It's what I'm living now. And I'm here to tell you, it's as bad as they say. Every day, I want to reopen the door I've slammed on my addictions. I want one more chance to hear seduction tell me a different ending. And every day I sweat it out as I stay the course, knowing all seduction will ever tell me is lies. Stories without substance.

In Love Warrior, when Doyle Melton's husband discloses all the affairs he’s had over the course of their years-long marriage, hoping his wife might still find a way to love him, she slams her own door.

Next, she grabs at every thing she can to escape her pain. Instead of reaching for her stand-by addictions of alcohol, drugs, and sex, she ricochets between bed-bound depression and righteous rage. The former are easy buttons. The latter are the soul's expression that something is wrong, that something has to change.

The betrayal is so big, she doesn't know how to unpack it. When did this betrayal start? With her husband's infidelities months after their wedding, or with her own hiding so much longer ago? Was it culture that betrayed her by making her feel unworthy as girl and woman, cutting her off from her own body? Or was it culture that marinated her husband in porn from an early age, along with the notion that it was his birthright to help himself to his wife's body at will, and if she didn't comply he had a right to fill his plate elsewhere? Yes, all of it. The betrayal lives in culture and is enacted in people. Especially hurt and traumatized people desperately seeking a salve. As the saying goes, "Hurt people hurt people."

For Doyle Melton, the pain will not yield to a fix this time. It has cracked her open to a truth she can no longer ignore. She caused untold pain to her family before sobering up from booze and drugs. At her lowest point, her parents asked her if she even loved them. To her the question is shocking: of course she loves them! But the addiction was bigger than her, so how she behaved didn't look like love at all. 

She sees now that she and her husband have utterly lost themselves to addiction. So she chooses healing instead. She chooses connection to herself, and eventually they each choose connection to each other.

But before she knows that's even possible, Doyle Melton first settles into the raw experience of her searing pain because this time she has nowhere else to go. Another word for this could be rehab. In a yoga class (her way of reconnecting with her body), she has an epiphany: the only thing she can do, the bravest thing she can do, is “stay on her mat” when the pain hits. This is the training of the Love Warrior.

Doyle Melton gets so serious about feeling her pain that she does not allow herself the sweet relief of distraction: she denies herself the escape of writing her blog (I'm not there yet), or asking friends for partisan ears (I'm not there yet). Instead, she sits on her mat and lets every last cell in her body fill with the pain of disappointment, betrayal, and loss, along with the shame and regret of knowing she has also been both victim and victimizer. She sits there while the burn rampages through her body. This is not an intellectual exercise. It’s primal. It’s pre-verbal. It’s a reunion with her most vulnerable, most whole self.

Why would anyone choose to stay with searing pain, you ask? Because that’s the only way through hiding and addiction -- to face it, to accept it, and to transform it. And the only person who can do that is the person in pain.

Doyle Melton soon learns that the longer she stays on her mat, the more the pain metabolizes into something else, something nourishing, something her body can process. As she gives herself space to feel what she has warded off all her life, she realizes it's not only survivable, but it's healing to mourn one's losses, to face the traumas that have shaped us. She calls this process "unbecoming." She peels off layers of culture that distorted her sense of self and rebuilds her self from the inside out, with the rock-solid knowledge of her basic worth. She does no less than build her own personal culture, one that won't tolerate any form of not being seen or cherished.

I, too, am in the process of unbecoming. Like Doyle Melton, I know I have to first undo everything that has misshaped me so that I can become the whole person I was meant to be. Having watched helplessly from my hiding place as my addictions and their attendant betrayals unraveled me, I know hiding doesn't protect me in the end. So I am coming out to meet the pain.

I didn't know my heart could break into so many pieces, for so long, and so deeply that my soul's bruising has made it unrecognizable. Every morning I wake up to unspeakable loss, to heart-stopping betrayals, and to the deep disappointment that I survived the night. A number of friends have fed me a variety of painkillers by the dozen because apparently emotional pain registers in the same place as physical pain in our brain. It sure feels physical, as if the bruising travels from my soul through every cell in my bones, organs, muscles, and all the way to the surface of my skin and back again. I have cried every day for months and every day I wonder how someone who hates drinking water could produce so much.

None of my easy buttons work anymore.

Even if I could get one to work, I know now that every time I press an easy button, I stand to lose what I hold most precious. And what I hold most precious is my self respect, my ability to set and honour my boundaries. At almost 50, I have finally learned that I'm allowed to have boundaries, and that this deep honouring of myself is the gift I have to offer friends, family, lovers. My boundaries are not a rejection of someone else's needs; they make me a more loving, compassionate person. I have finally learned that someone who loves all of me will want to protect my boundaries, too, as I wish to honour theirs. And when I'm in the presence of this kind of love, my boundaries become doors and windows.

Precious to me is my worthiness of unconditional love, the kind that stays put through pain, through struggle, through imperfection, through time, through disappointment, through fear, through shame, through loss.  

Precious to me is the ability to hold myself steady when the pain hits, and to stay steady when the person who was holding my hand a moment ago has let go.

Precious to me is my courage to honour my truth and to behave ethically towards myself and others even when it spells my own loss. 

Precious to me is my body. I want to learn to love my body again, to invite it back into the fold of my mind and soul, to understand, as Doyle Melton comes to understand, that the body is a conduit for love and wisdom.

Precious to me is my courage to grieve. If I could reduce this blog down to one quote it would be this: "Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. It's the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price." (Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior)

I can't make love show up or stay. But I can focus on what is within my power to heal. I am here. In excruciating pain. So why not become a warrior? Why not do the work?

Why not unhide my wholeness - my MindBodySoul - the only wholeness that can stop seduction's deceptions in its tracks. The only wholeness that can turn me around by the shoulders to see what's causing all that racket and walk me back towards my loneliness.

Why would I want to go towards my loneliness? If you saw the movie Inside Out, you understand how integral sadness is to our well being because it magnetizes others to support and love us.

Likewise, the loneliness is integral to waking us up to our addictions. It's like our inner child pulling on our pant leg crying, "What about me? Love me! Love me!" Loneliness leads us back inside to see where we are abandoning ourselves.

I will never untie loneliness from my ankle because if I can hear the sound of a tin can, it must mean I'm running. The clatter is a reminder to stop, turn around, and walk back towards my myself. Without the clatter to ground me, I might disappear into a cloud of distraction, another addiction, and disappear. 




Besides, profound pain has a way of peeling away the layers of self-deception and self-protection until the raw bud at the centre is finally exposed: tender, vulnerable, precious, worthy, and lovable. This bud, the Buddhists believe, can never come to harm because it's the core of a person's basic goodness: irrefutable, indestructible, eternal.

My only goal for 2017 is to stay on my mat, tin can at my side, feeling my pain in every cell of my body. I'm learning that the only way to stay on my mat is to do what Doyle Melton did, and what a dear friend of mine also suggested: focus on Just the Next Thing. Get out of bed. Drink coffee. Walk Shy. Go to work. Let in the love my friends and family send every day. Only staying on my mat will keep me close to my MindBodySoul, and build my strength to stay put unconditionally for myself (and eventually for someone else). Only MindBodySoul can teach me to act ethically, with integrity, care, clarity, and love towards myself and others. Staying on my mat is the most profound act of love I can think of right now.   

Until I metabolize my pain, I will only see the world and others as an endless dining hall of empty plates. The only promise addiction can ever fulfill is broken self-respect, broken relationships, and the heartbreaking-but-inevitable result of hurting others along the way.

I won't spoil Love Warrior for you because it's a memoir well worth reading. But I will say her husband impresses the hell out of me. Not because he's honest, courageous, a feminist, and everything that's the stuff of fiction. He impresses me because he's a flawed, broken man, a product of culture like the rest of us. But he doesn't keep returning to his easy buttons to solve his pain. He finds the courage to say no to the parts of culture (and his childhood trauma) that harm him, his wife, his daughters. He works through his own addictions to find the boy who once wanted genuine, loving, mutually respectful connection and grows himself up to become that man. Even when Doyle Melton tells him she might no longer love him, he keeps showing up to love her and his children. He leaves groceries at their door, takes the kids to their various medical and dental appointments, buys them presents for their friends' birthday parties, etc. To atone for using women's bodies to soothe his anxieties and trauma, he volunteers at a women's shelter. What impresses me is he does the work. The work of healing requires enormous courage and endurance because it's a pain like no other.
 
Doyle Melton recognizes for the first time that what her husband is offering is not the usual "transactional" love that gives to get. He's offering love as service. What he learns to give is unconditional love. Love that sees and honours and cherishes. And it's this love that heals them both.

As I close Love Warrior after the second reading, I think about Andy, about how hard he fought to stay connected to his wife and his sons, even as he reached for another cookie, or pushed the speed limit of his airplane: his tin can. He may not have known he was in pain, or that he used speed to cover it over. I'll never know what Andy felt, but I don't believe he meant to disappear.

These days, disappearing feels like the only thing I want to do. But I won't. Instead, I am training to become a Love Warrior. To fight for my life, my heart, my body, my mind, my soul. I'm doing it because as a human being, I was born to bond with another. I want loving connection. But as a woman conditioned in a culture that devalues me in almost every part of my life, I am also conditioned to mistake addiction for love and to expect transactional love instead of unconditional love.

It is my deepest wish that in the not-too-distant future I wake myself up in the pre-dawn darkness to walk the cool streets of my own neighbourhood, accompanied by the sweet sound of my loneliness, my most honest and loyal friend. I can't wait to trust my instincts for which street to take next, sensing that despite the dark, I am not alone. I want to feel that I am here, alive in my MindBodySoul, and I am safe because my precious self always transcends addiction, betrayal, and anything else that is not love. I want to remember that I am love. I want to feel that no matter where I have walked in this neighbourhood, in this town, in this world, I will eventually end up somewhere I can call home.


(Note: For any woman (or man) who’s had the maddening experience of feeling dismissed when trying to articulate the ways patriarchal culture has shaped and harmed them, Love Warrior is the book for you. Even my own therapist dismissed my complaints about about how culture undermined my self respect, my self worth. She insisted I was projecting my family-of-origin pain onto culture. As if the two are mutually exclusive! As if there could be some other source that shaped my mother's belief, and my belief, along with many women I know, that our worth lies primarily in our sexual availability; or shaped the beliefs of the men in my life that women should be available on tap, usable within the scope of culture's moral compass, which does not value women. Doyle Melton validates the profound and unmistakable harm our misogynistic culture causes women and men. And she does so with clarity and compassion for everyone.)





















 

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Seven Years of Missing






It's possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

Rainer Maria Rilke




 



Sunday, May 22, 2016

Return



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This year, something unexpected bloomed in M’s garden. It’s like that every year. I meet the new flowers through a text message, waiting for my time to visit, hopefully showing up before they have grown tired of waiting for me. When I finally arrive, I drink them in like water from a fire hose. 





Every spring, I long to put my hands into the earth, to understand the visceral truth about soil: the darker the healthier. 


While light is necessary, growth happens from the ground up.



My first and only garden was planted for me by the previous owners of a house I purchased but never felt was truly mine, a fully mature perennial garden made up of a series of beds so well planned that as one flower died, another bloomed. There was no time for mourning. 



The only role left for me was weeding. My ignorance at the time, however, was such that even identifying weeds required a new education. With a dearth of teachers but a great deal of hope, I weeded the garden with administrative fervour, never allowing myself to sit idle, never stopping to just be with the beauty of my upkeep, not knowing just how quickly it would slip through my fingers.



Fifteen years later, I got to spend hours digging in the dark earth of someone else's garden, removing old roots and stirring in manure, mixing shit with soil that had lain fallow for years, the ground matted with wild trees and flowers to whom I tenderly apologized as I cut their ties, turning the soil again, uprooting more plants, then more turning and more uprooting. It seemed, finally, my education might start from the ground up, from first principles. If I could learn to ready the soil, I might learn to grow nourishment, sustenance, and beauty. 


This time, although the teachers did arrive, I did not. The garden was borrowed. And like in so many of my dreams, I found myself stuck in another city, at a retreat or convention centre, my own home still at large, with no sense of how to get there. For me, home is not a going back. It’s a constant trek, like a soul endlessly walking the distance an airplane has traveled to deposit all the world’s viable lovers into fertilized territory. 



As the jet stream dissipates, I am left with only clouds as guides. I cannot stop walking because there is no back to turn to.


At my current dwelling, I host two planters outside my front door. Dead grasses in one, weeds in the other, snow-burned soil in both, and I wonder if I have the strength to return to a nursery to make a choice. 



Both planters require that I start from scratch. But choosing among annuals feels like choosing among ice sculptures melting in winter sunshine. 




I have grown weary of starting again, of the short term. I'm tired of the recurring dream in which I am at a university or a hotel, but never home. I want the kind of return that means food, the return of worrying over bugs and working to find organic solutions to organic problems, the tending daily to something that has a greater chance of return in full bloom next year if I nurture it in this one.




Today I awoke thinking about small paintings. The kind with simple relationships -- glass and fruit, light and shadow -- the kind I can make in an hour without agonizing over worth or purpose. As I allow myself this small luxury of a future pruned down to a few hours in a single day,  the inevitable question forces its way through my deliberately narrowed focus, like a daisy pushing through concrete. 

For whom?








Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Forget Therapy




I quit.


That’s right, I quit. Everyone knows September is when the real New Year begins, when we start real things, like school. But I quit. I quit school. I QUIT SCHOOL.

Breathe, Liz, breathe.




Is it a coincidence I quit right around the Jewish New Year? While it’s true I’m a Jew – if one of the world’s worst – the fact that my soul’s new year also begins every September, which generally coincides with Rosh Hashana is, I think, only . . . um . . . coincidental.




Or is it?


There are mysteries afoot in my life right now that make me wonder if coincidence is really random -- coincidence itself not being the mystery but mystery’s symptom, its bell. 




For instance, I recently moved a bookcase from my side of the bed to the side my lover sleeps on. And I changed its orientation (the bookcase’s, not the bed’s or the lover’s), which had faced into the room but now faces the bed so that one can contemplate all those stories lying in wait, especially on sleepless nights when I am alone. 





This new arrangement led to my partner spotting
Amnesia by Douglas Cooper, a watershed book from when his first marriage came apart. “I’m amazed you have this book!" he jubilated. "We've read the same book!” he sang out, identifying yet another synchronicity in a growing list of delicious synchronicities, reinforcing what has felt so right, so destined, so homey from the start.





“I haven’t read it,” it pained me to admit. “That’s my shelf of to reads.” How many times had I picked up this book, read the cover jacket, and put it down again because it simply didn’t resonate. This time, I immediately cracked the book to gain insight into my lover – why was this book so significant to him? What I found was my own story. My own story right now, that is. Any other time it would have been a good read but perhaps not a profoundly resonant one. With quitting school just before September, just before Rosh Hashanah, I’m fairly vibrating with
Amnesia.


The book is about storytelling. The protagonist splits himself in two, projecting one part as himself-as-storyteller in order to tell himself-as-audience the terrible crimes he committed.
Amnesia is about the stories we tell ourselves in order to forget, the stories we tell ourselves in order to remember. It’s the confessionals we tell a listener to relieve ourselves of the burden of shame and guilt, or stories that toss a rope to those in need, or to those we wish to pull into the vicinity of love; it's the stories that serve as mirrors so that we might see ourselves and be seen in order to judge and forgive ourselves in the hopes that we may heal. 




Two weeks before reading
Amnesia, I had quit therapy-training school. The decision had been painful but, once made, joyous. But not for long. I’m now walking around with deep worry in my heart. If not a therapist, then what, what is my purpose? And what story do I tell others to make this decision make sense, but mostly importantly, what story do I tell myself?




In
Amnesia, the protagonist's is so preoccupied with home-life traumas that he unwittingly destroys a woman he loves, and who loves him, much the same way Hamlet's obsession about his uncle destroys Ophelia -- not directly, because Hamlet did not seek to harm her. But he was so hell bent on avenging his father that he missed Ophelia's love altogether. He didn't even notice her.


As September approached, I obsessed about quitting all the things I didn’t want to do anymore (which is kind of what therapy is about: quitting bad patterns that are self damaging). 





I quit school because my body felt sick when I thought about going back. And then I quit feeling like I owed an explanation for that decision to anyone, especially to the school. While on this quitting roll, I tried to also quit feeling responsible for people for whom I am not responsible. And I longed to quit avoiding conflict because as much as I hate conflict, I know that whatever disappears from the surface inevitably reappears on a subterranean level and eventually poisons my well.


My quitting obsession transformed me into a cocoon. My mind went numb. Last September, I read a freight train of psychologist, cultural theorists, visionaries, thinkers, and other declarers on the nature of the human condition. I nibbled at a smorgasbord of rational-to-mystical offerings, which left me feeling either empty or full but never really nourished. That was the real problem. I was not hungry, yet I ate. I felt bloated and uneasy in my skin.


Looking back, I wonder if I was trying to put myself into a state of hibernation: consuming in order to conserve. Whatever the reason, I stopped noticing anyone else. My desire to quit became so overwhelming that one day I simply left the table. Burrowing into a tree or underground might have actually served me better since a good depression is rich humus for evolution. But I stayed above ground instead, seeking flat lands. I needed to see the horizon. I didn't trust the dark. I slept with my eyes open.




And the people around me suffered. I began avoiding contact. Even my partner did not get all of me. Friends in crisis could not reach me. Nothing penetrated anymore.





So now I'm growing worried. I'm worried that past events in my life – Andy’s death, for instance – have cut so deeply that I’m not willing to take a deep dive for fear of never resurfacing. I'm worried I've pitched my tent in a daffodil-filled meadow from a sanitary-napkin advertisement in order to avoid the bloody work of digging a foundation.


I'm worried quitting is a form of amnesia, a way to forget things, a way to avoid more mourning.


Two emails arrived this week, however, that have snapped me awake . . .


The first was from a friend with whom I had recently discussed our new beginnings for September, her fall being filled with teaching and getting her long-awaited tenure portfolio ready. But before she could get started, her father required a sudden hip replacement, so she dropped everything and took up residence at his hospital bed located in the “Close Observation Unit.” Feeling helpless, she did the only thing she could do. Closely observed him. 

 


It was not an email she sent, but a story, a true story, a heartbreaking story. I wept. Her drawing of her father haunted me for days. Only now as I write this do I realize what has been pulling at the corners of my psyche: this is the same story of Rosh Hashanah, of
Amensia. All three are about carved-out spaces in time when our lives may be in the balance and close observation is the only thing we can do, and also the best thing we can do: a time and place of reckoning with ourselves and our loved ones, a deep-dive exploration into our oceanic sides, our hidden creatures.


The Close Observation Unit is where we wake up to the realities of our lives, where we see how we operate in the world. It's where we open up to our own hidden truths, where we heal and recover.


Rosh Hashanah is just another kind of Close Observation Unit in which God opens the book of life for ten days during which time you get to closely observe (i.e. reflect upon) your sins; and where you get to make amends and then plead your case (i.e. tell your story) in the hopes that God lets you live another year. Since you don't know which fate God chooses for you, all you have left to do is to act in good faith towards yourself and others.


In
Amnesia, the protagonist undergoes a long, drawn out Rosh Hashanah as he unearths his wrong doings in the company of a witness (even if the witness is another part of himself) in order to take responsibility for his forgetting, in order to remember, make amends, and heal. 



What I find fascinating about this process is that in telling our stories, we reproduce our creator because we presuppose an audience who will hear us and forgive us.
 

As I look at my friend's drawing of her father, I realize she has reproduced her creator in order to engage in their unfolding story together. Reproducing him is an act of devotion, an act of gratitude for what has been given, such as her gifts and talents, such as her very life. We the children are the lucky ones because we already know the person we reproduce through story telling (or drawing, or whatever form it takes). Our parents did not have that benefit when they imagined us and sought to reproduce us. But our act of devotion is based on a lived relationship, one we have the priviledge of acknowledging. What’s even more lucky for the children is that our relationship to our parents is not the product of our love for and with someone else; it is direct with them. It’s no different to a direct relationship with God. Or with ourselves as the divine.


There is something existential about Rosh Hashanah: the fact of God's will. In other words, you can plead your case through a story, but God will decide your fate in the end. God's will is another way of representing the givens in life that we cannot control. Whether someone loves you, or your fortunes rise or fall, or you get a PhD (or not), you will die. That's a given. Apart from the givens, however, you get to make your own decisions about the rest of your life. How will I choose to be in this world? Bitter and blaming or responsible and grateful? These choices can almost seem like too much freedom. I know it can be overwhelming for me. If not a therapist, THEN WHAT?


What matters, however, is not the answer to that question, but the beautiful freedom I have to choose in the first place. Even to choose to quit. Quitting is just a moment of decision making, and, as such, an act of living and self love.


The second email was from another friend whose father died much more quickly than she or her family can bear. “I’m beyond devastated,” she wrote. “My dad . . .” And I knew exactly what she meant. She had written the only expression possible for such a catastrophe.


For me, this is where surface and depth meet. Where sand whips around my tent reminding me there is no safe space where death won’t take away those I love. This is where therapy begins and ends, where one person tells another person the contents of their heart and other person hears it with all their heart. I wept. And I wrote back whatever support I could offer. 

 

When I admitted to my partner “I can’t do this anymore,” this being go back to school, he said: “Perhaps you want to live on the surface of things right now.”





And that’s why I love him. Because I knew he would reflect me back to myself. He gave me permission to surface, to come up for air, to cease diving into places that were pulling me under at at time when I couldn't bear it.




But also I knew his meaning was double. I knew that he knew the surface would not sustain me, that this was not an end point, only a beginning. That there would be another diving under later, another fall, another September when I could and would decide what’s next. Decide who I want to be; what I want to do. Just not now.


I feel so grateful for the ten days ahead of me when I get to join the ritual of reckoning, of admitting my wrong doings, of making amends, of visioning what is to come, and of being truly present with those I love, especially with my partner, whose preoccupations never seem to obliterate me. He always notices me. I am awash in the way he sees me, through the eyes of love.


In the Close Observation Unit, life becomes simple and clear: the world
is and we respond; acknowledgement is love.


So whatever I am right now (or at any time, really) -- whether I quit or stay the course -- there are no perfectly right answers; just close observations.