Monday, November 29, 2010

Eldering


I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t been there. Maybe you won’t either.
For me it took an experience, maybe it will for you too. But, I think that my experience is so rare, that I want to convey it to you, in hope that it will touch something in you, as it did in me.
 
I’ve spent a great deal of my life struggling with myself to just be myself. What I have observed in my self, was that I had a tendency to make myself into whatever form I thought I needed to be, to earn love, respect, and caring from important others. In other words, in order to be loved I betrayed myself. I got really good at it. I could fool others, even sometimes fool myself, but could never get beyond the feeling that I was only too willing to sell myself out.
 
I knew the pain associated with being untrue to myself. I felt lost in a world that could not, would not, make a space for one like me. It is too simple to just say I was alienated, although I did sometimes feel like an alien, the truth was, that I couldn’t find a place, because I didn’t trust my self enough to take a lasting form, one that anybody could relate too. I was a blob, a changeling, restlessly trying to be something, anything, but myself.
 
There is a huge pain, and deep disappointment, in realizing you want someone else to love you, because you cannot love yourself. Coming to such a place, feeling so far from oneself, being so emptily alone is really disturbing. It is also liberating. The stroke forced me to do what I always was loathe to do, look at myself. It made me grasp, rather desperately at first, that I had one more chance to learn to love, and that I had to start with me.
 
I have spent much of my life being a freedom fighter. I have always sought, and advocated for causes, that increased freedom. This was part of my values, and part of the way I convinced myself that I was on-track when I wasn’t. In all that time I never took on the greatest tyrant, the chief restrictor of my freedom, the treacherous ambassador determining my relationships, myself. The stroke put me in a locked room with him. Learning to love a tyrant is no easy matter (maybe especially if its you).
 
That last sentence is the story of my recent life. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I came to realize that the struggle to love myself was one of the greatest gifts I have to give. It was in the elder’s circle that the light came on. We had just completed going around the circle stating our names and sharing one thing that we liked about being elders. I had been paying attention because instead of the usual aches and pains of getting older the group was talking about what aging had given them. It turned out to be a lot, so much that freedom and richness filled the air, and filled me.
 
I was touched, as I had been before, by how much hardship had grown the people present. I was impressed by how unique, idiosyncratic, and self-possessed this same group of people was. Suddenly it dawned in me that having survived the years, undergone real hardships, and struggling to fight the good fight, and stay true to themselves, these people had been initiated, they were not just a group of old folks, they were elders.
 
In that moment several things rushed into my awareness. Eldering wasn’t just about getting old, it was about being ripened, initiated really, by life. Eldering also meant that these souls, through hardship, loss, love, diminishment, and struggle had become themselves, not completely, but just enough to make a real difference. They were the most subversive beings imaginable, the antidotes to a world gone materialistically mad, different in the only way that matters, free to be themselves.
 
Doubly surprising is the realization that the life-long work of becoming oneself can come to fruition, and can mean so much, not only for the self that has been struggling for freedom, but for the world that needs models, that needs to know that being different is possible.  Out beyond rules, roles, and shape-shifting for love, there is a way to actualize our existence, to give Life its due, to become free, to become what Life intended.
 
When I realized what eldering was I sensed the possibility of happiness. I saw, for the first time, that the freedom fight, the struggle to be myself, is synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. I will write more about happiness later, but for now I just want to bask in the glow that arises as I see that loving the tyrant, loving me, makes me one with, aligned with Life. And, that is what eldering is.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Wisdom



“Wisdom is directly proportional to the size of the group you take responsibility for.”
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi

I have been wondering about wisdom. As part of an elder’s circle I’ve been thinking about what constitutes the wisdom in this group of human beings. I don’t think I understand what I’ve noticed here, but I think I’ve got a part of it, and if that is true, I think that there is something here for all of us. Here is what I mean.

It is true I’ve found perspective being amongst these people. I can see a lot of things I couldn’t see before, or could only see dimly, partially. My sight is sharpened as it is failing, but this isn’t the source of the wisdom.  I can see the way the years have brought some things into focus, and that is good, but it isn’t what has moved folks to go beyond themselves. Sight, seeing the bigger picture, certainly is edifying, it brings about a change in consciousness, but it doesn’t go all the way to wisdom.

What is it — what moves a person into a realm that goes beyond conventional ways of knowing? As I sit with these folks I sense the presence of a broader way of knowing, of feeling. I can feel it. It is in the group, sometimes it comes out of someone’s mouth, behavior, or demeanor. Sometimes it sits over, or amongst, us like an atmosphere, about to storm through us, or someone amongst us. Sometimes it is ripe in the silence. Sometimes I am suddenly pierced, something in another’s words, or quietness, takes me away, and simultaneously delivers a chastened, or healed, heart. I want to cry, to exalt, to exclaim my undeserved privilege. Sometimes it just hurts so good.

I have been after this experience for a long time. For me, it started in a community-building workshop, in 1986. I felt something, a presence I knew was bigger than the group gathered that spring day. It included all of us, was somehow of us, but went way beyond us. I had the audacity to believe then that whatever it was, was something that could be integrated and made a regular experience of the world. I’m glad I had that impulse because it has kept my butt sitting in large circles paying attention and trying to learn. Now I’ve had enough experiences of what I’ve come to call communitas that I can tell when its present and when to shut up and listen real hard.

And I’ve been changed. I don’t know how much is a result of the stroke (though I do recommend near death experiences), and how much the world appearing as a circle changed me, but I do know the combination created some kind of strange hybrid awareness. Now I’m always in a circle, always feeling my self, extending out in disconcerting and overwhelming ways. I’d say I simply like it, if my circle of caring didn’t bring in so much human suffering. The Universe now is my circle, and I am just a part of it, trying to act consistent with the whole, and failing magnificently. Practicing being part of the circle has disrupted my life, so much that I no longer think it mine, and delivered me into a circle I intuited, but really had no idea about.
Oh, but I’m trying to write about wisdom, not about circles. I can’t help it, they seem to be linked in my mind. Its like, when I’m in the circle of elders, being in a gold mine, and discovering there are many rich, untapped veins, just calling out to be explored. I feel the rush of sudden wealth and an urge to share such abundance. The location of this mine is a secret though. Strangely it can be sensed, but remains hidden, right here in the midst of us. I can feel its presence, know its here, feel the wealth it implies, and am helpless to go there, to cavort in our shared wealth, until more of us open the doors. Which doors? Our doors, whatever that means.

Wisdom, of the sort that is present in the elder’s circle, is an emergent quality. It becomes manifest as we invest in each other. Not the passive kind of investment we’ve been taught, like into stocks, but a more active, even interactive kind of investing, of shared knowing, caring and responsibility. I really believe that it has been my investment in the others of the circle that has made the circle come to life for me. And, I know the circle, especially the big, unpredictable, other-populated, never safe, circle delivered me more fully into the wonderful mystery of Life.

What is wisdom? I don’t know, maybe its like pornography. Didn’t one famous, but now forgotten justice of the Supreme Court once say, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Yes, I think wisdom is like that, but I can’t help but feel it is more likely another group of humans, motivated by something more exquisite and elusive than pornography, that create it. Like pornography, it probably starts between the ears but goes to the heart instead of the loins.

I’m sure that one dimension of this experience relates to the quote above. Large circles, circles filled with conflict, chaos, diversity, and differing capacities have served as microcosms of the larger macrocosm and have thus stretched me out in a variety of directions. I think I have been exposed to wisdom, and grown wiser, because of those circles. With exposure to them, like the elder’s circle, my circle of caring has grown, and with it, I have been grown.

From here, wisdom is mystery unfolding, in whatever circle I care enough about to be broken by.

l/d

Pricks of Light


I have waited for this moment. From the time I determined that I was going to write about this, I have lived with feelings of dread and excitement. That is how I know that I am about to be taken on an adventurous ride through the looking glass. I will go, but I will keep my fingers crossed. This journey promises to be wild, bumpy, and more than just a little irreverent.

I am a man. I like having a penis, usually, but now, and for a long time, I am angry and hurting about the state of male sexuality. I am angry enough that my feelings will probably leak (is that a bad metaphor to use here?) out throughout this missive. I am also hurting in a way almost no one knows about, or could guess. That is the real reason I’m writing about this aspect of being male. I could have taken these feelings to my grave, but I have a sense that others are hurting about this, and these feelings are so buried away, so taboo, that people, men and women, may not even know this pain hurts them too.

I haven’t really wanted to notice these feelings. I try hard to ignore the hurt. I’ve talked about this to only a few people. I don’t think anyone gets it. I certainly didn’t think I would ever write about this. But, here I am, going where this awareness take me, believing that air, consciousness, compassion, and caring will help redeem something that has lived in the darkness too long. Please bear, forgivingly, with me.

I’ve been angry and hurting about the fact that I have seen no positive images (not even in the gay world) of male desire.  When was the last time (if ever) you saw an erect penis portrayed as a positive, loving, connective, creative source of divine inspiration? The answer is probably never. And, that has an impact upon me. One, I have ignored too long.

I am aware of the Hindu frescoes that show a loving Krishna with an erection. Thank God! At some point in history male sexuality was seen as a spiritual expression, but not so today. And, what a price I (we) have paid! As a man, I can’t think how many times I felt that what was arising within me was the worst (although it also felt good) sort of thing. Having an erection may seem simple (certainly it is portrayed that way) but it is a complex emotional experience. I am deathly tired of masking my vulnerability, hiding shame and being the butt of myriads of degrading jokes. Socially, culturally, the absence of any sign of kindness related to male sexuality is painful to me.

Male sexuality, especially erect penises, are shown as powerful, but more tellingly, as animalistic, unconscious and rapacious machines disconnected from hearts. How sad, untrue, and indicative of the worst kind of de-humanizing reductionism! Growing up as a man, I lived with, and was treated as, something alien, laughable, and unwholesome. And regrettably, excruciatingly, I believed it, even played the part, and hid out.

Being male has always been confusing, even (maybe especially) when enjoying the privilege of maleness, because there are very few positive images of maleness. Being male sexually is supposed to be the most privileged of positions, but sadly, it also seems to be the most hated, and the most misunderstood. And, there is nowhere to look for a positive image of male sexuality. Does anyone know, or care, what the effect of that is upon the male heart, women, children, the world and our relationship with the Great Mystery?

I am beside myself with grief, fear, sadness and anger about this. I am mad at women, at the terrible things they allow themselves to say about men, who are admittedly sometimes clueless. I am mad at the way women wouldn’t be silent if another women was being degraded in their presence, but will join in when it is a man. I know there is more, the way women think they are better than men, but I am also angry with men.

Pornography doesn’t just reduce women to exploitable sex objects, it reduces male sexuality to the crudeness of disembodied and pathetic penile machines, and exploits the loneliness in men’s bodies. And men pay for their own degradation! Men play like dumb, bumbling, aggressive animals, and forget their own humanity all the time. This isn’t heroic, no more than being cannon fodder is, if a man must go down with the ship, at least do it lovingly!

Sometimes, when I am particularly aware of being a male, I feel despair. The absence of a positive image of a loving man, happy in his body, alive with desire, sensitive to the Universe, haunts me. I think that something important is being left out. Is the light so one-sided, so blind? I don’t think so, our short-sightedness, and on-going prejudice, hurts.

I know women have a lot of pain too. I know men have been the cause of most of it. Still, someone has got to give voice to male pain and exhort everyone to look upriver at how we keep hurting each other. I pray that Rumi is right, that “the cure for the pain, is in the pain.”

l/d