Here After

“What did I come in here after?” That’s what she says every time her memory fails, and she finds herself, in someplace, on a mystery quest. She has taken to calling, these increasingly occurring failures of her short-term memory, “here after” moments, as in, what am I here after?

When I heard this story, recounted by a friend, I knew I had to write about it. The only thing is, I can no longer remember what it was about this, that made me motivated to focus upon it. It rang some writerly bell.  So, hold on, I’m about to go off.

I like the sense of irony, or desperate humor, that is conveyed by her encapsulation of this little aspect of getting older. A ‘here after’ moment. It reminds me of the fairytales, and other stories I’ve heard, that all end the same way. They lived happily ever after. As if there is some place where things don’t change, where the moment goes on, despite the grip of time.

I don’t know about you, but when I have such a forgetful moment, when I can’t find a word, or I’ve screwed up my schedule again, forgetting something or someone, I feel like I’ve just suffered a psycho-emotional fall. Suddenly, I’ve been reduced, some form of gravity just brought me back into my decaying orbit. I am having my own form of ‘here after’ moment. Death seems closer than ever, and I find, something in myself is getting prepared, by falling, in this way.

Isn’t the time after death also referred to as the “here after?” There is something eternal about these kinds of moments. Oh yeah, that’s why I was so touched — by her seeing the everlasting aspect of these moments. It isn’t the first, or last, time I have arrived at the realization — I have no idea why I am here. What did I come here for? Am I in this scene for a reason? I don’t know. Is this a memory failure, or success? Whatever it is — it’s my “ever after” moment — just arriving.

What am I here after? The uncertainty implicit in that question haunts me. I spend so much of my life energy on other things. Some are very compelling distractions. But, no matter what I do, I can’t forget, that even as I am forgetting, I don’t really know what I am here after. This life seems to be my ‘here after’ moment.

I feel chagrined when my memory goes south. De-pantsed. Nakedly human. For a moment I am a flower with a broken stem. I wouldn’t pick me. I might admire the poignancy of my beauty, but I would move on. Out of the corner of my memory’s eye, I notice a long-misperceived latency. Something tells me, I am here, for this moment of uncertainty. 

What seems to be unchanging, in this parade of constant change, is the level of uncertainty that is omnipresent. How can that be a quality of ever after? I guess that is the ‘ever’ part, and the rest is the ‘after,’ that I clearly don’t remember.

Anyway, the “ever after” seems to be a place where things go when they slip the mind or, a moment when the mind is really working. I haven’t quite figured it out yet. And to be honest, I can’t really remember why I want to.

The Soul of Community

The soul of community is coming through us,

light on its forehead,


old stories in its right hand,

unknowing freedom in its left.

Don’t ruin this chance with easy promises,

 politeness,

pretenses of knowledge,

or elegant quotes.

The help that has been longed for is here. 

Join with other great souls.

Gathering together becomes a ceremony,

 approaching Mystery.

Meaning: pass quickly through your being 

into absence, unknowing and emptiness.

The self of your name and fame 

secures you


with a new knot every moment.

Personal identity is a sheath

The unique one resides within.

Reality unites


worn covering,


with our mysterious, unencumbered, nature.

 Look closely.

In community,

                           Love is purifying love.                           

                                                   —Rumi re-translation by David “Lucky” Goff

A Holy Vision

To be sane

in a mad time

is bad for the brain

even worse

for the heart.

The world is a holy vision,

had we clarity enough to see it.

A clarity that people

depend upon people

to make.                                                       

                                                       Wendell Berry

This is a difficult world to live in. This particular time in human history is full of uncertainty. To be a good citizen during these times is a daunting and powerful thing. Winding one’s way through the thicket of grief and joy makes such a present-time complex. The good and bad saturate this moment. Caring hurts. Awareness twists. The slippery dominates. A rare kind of vertigo arises.

During such a time it is easy, perhaps necessary, to lose one’s balance. This poem confirms this loss, while also affirming the underlying wholeness that sustains vision. There is a larger balance that can be found. It is a balance that relies on an assembly of human beings. The world is a holy vision that can be best seen together. This poem serves as a mantra that provides protection during an eclipse of coherence.

The age of modernity swells with chaos. The personal, social, political, and environmental are all under extreme pressure. An increasing speed of change, breaks everything down. The institutions are losing their integrity, and becoming untrustworthy. A great malaise blankets the land. It is a time when survival is in doubt. 

This is the backdrop that humans must cope with now. Human life reels with the extra burden of this apocalyptic awareness. There are fewer silent and beautiful places left. To maintain any kind of balance in such a world asks one to live unbalanced. As the poet, and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen says, “The blizzard of the world is crossing the threshold and threatening the order of the soul.”

Living in this kind of maelstrom is taxing. The mind that has crafted this tangle cannot go beyond it.

It is “worse for the heart.” Feeling the ailment that besieges these times is like feeling a ghost-infested house. The body-snatching denial of the masses heightens the heartache, increasing isolation, and rendering madness a relieving balm. There is nothing so debilitating as being sanely mad, and insanely well adjusted. Just as a plant wilts when it is denied water, the human spirit shrinks when it is immersed in a fragmented world.

The life of our times is a good mirror, as the poet knows, reflecting back to us who we have become.

Human constructed reality falters under the weight of too much hubris. The human world is bleak — but beyond the knowing and certainty of this era, there is a light. It is an underlying miracle that manages, despite our distractions, to support Life. This light is obscured by the beliefs that define the age. The junkyard of throwaway values is hiding our true home.

To really see what shines beneath us all, requires being in the world but not of it. Collectivity provides its own sight. Alone one can sense obscurely the animating force, but that intuition is not clear and stokes a hunger that only true vision can slake. This vision is multi-faceted. It takes many eyes and diverse meanings to behold it. Clarity is a relational thing; existing only through the perceptions of many different viewpoints.

There is an opportunity that interdependence brings. Communal life is more than a safe place, more than shared values and shared behaviors — it is multiplied awareness, which provides revelation. Between the many there is a level of perception that is larger, more informed, and more sensitive than what is common. A greater portion of the whole awaits cooperative perception.  The minds of many working in concert, magnify awareness, and reveal of the larger picture of mystery. 

Reverence for what made us, and locates us here, comes from an essential recognition of our mysterious origins. There is an opportunity that our mutual dependence provides — an opportunity for collective sight. The Universe of relationships is alive to the mind that is large and multi-faceted. As the poet says, this is “a clarity that people depend upon people to make.” The inclusive mind is a mutual mind; the result of shared endeavor, of collective learning, diversity, and of people looking together into what is.

This poem captures the effects of two relationships that define our possibilities. The first expresses the way our experience of ourselves is linked with our cultural practices. There is another relationship that is evoked. The magic of our larger surrounding is hidden away, obscured by social distrust, and its resultant blindness. The gravitas of this poem is captured by the poet’s use of the word “clarity.” There is a fog, an impenetrable haze, which comes between people. This smog is produced by distrust, alienation and isolation. It paints the world with depressing grey-tones, while obscuring a view of what mystery has wrought.

To see further, to more accurately take in the many-faceted complexity of our natural inheritance, requires overcoming the blindness of the crowd. From learning to distrust the many — one must make the journey of learning to trust one’s self in the midst of others. Such a journey is a complex maneuver. By becoming a part of something larger, while maintaining personal integrity and identity, one becomes a facet of the multiple eyes that are necessary to see more clearly. 

The relationship within is what enables the relationship without. Another way to say it, and to see the world more clearly, is that as self-intimacy grows, intimacy with one’s surrounding expands. The world comes freshly into view as the self does. The eyesight of the many is enhanced when some of them can see beyond themselves (because they can see themselves accurately). Community grows that capacity, providing the means. 

The process of growing a lucid response to a mad world is based upon our relations with each other. Some are capable of depending upon each other, they are made ready by the rigors of relating, and they have learned to hold on to their uniqueness. When this happens the integrity of the whole collective improves, and a multi-faceted viewpoint is more assured. Many eyes enable the holy vision.

The poet knows that “the world is a holy vision.” This vision provides an antidote to the madness that infects us. That antidote is available through workshops, seminars, and groups — wherever two or more are gathered together. The development of immunity, however, requires a longer-term engagement, immersion in a more complex social situation. Surviving in a mad world requires a kind of mutual reliance that now needs to be re-invented. We are social animals, capable of feats of collaboration. The poet reminds us, we need each other, to perceive the holy vision.

Wondering

“If our religion is based on wonder

our chief emotion is gratitude.”

                                            Carl Gustav Jung

Wonder. The gift of looking at something with awe and expectancy.  Different than an Easter egg hunt, where you are looking for it out there somewhere. Rather, wonder is something you carry with you, it’s more like an attitude, like planning to be surprised. Wonder is an inside attribute. Interestingly, carrying it around, seems to contribute to it happening. It’s like the world notices and preens before it. Wondering is a form of enchantment. Wonder makes ordinary magic more palpable. Some strange reflective something that puts things in focus, while shifting them onto the spectrum of awe. A life sentence, but of luminescence!

I woke-up recently to this form of noticing. I literally was assaulted with gratitude in my bed. It’s hard to know when awakening actually took place. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t deserve it, call for it, intend it, pray or meditate. It just invaded my soul.

I’d like to live this way. Perhaps, I will. Stranger things have happened.  I feel myself making a home for wonder, but it seems too wild to settle in one place. How does one hold what cannot be held? I am dying to find out.

Recently, I remembered a visit to Chaco Canyon. It was during a vacation with my second wife. Our “Rocks and Ruins Tour.” We pulled off the highway near Durango, and drove 30 miles of dirt road, to a place where wondering was a religion. We, being so sophisticated, didn’t know it at the time. While visiting the ruins of an ancient culture I went down into a Kiva. Maybe there, I got infected with wonder, but what seemed like a hole in the ground, held some kind of essence that enchanted me. I was inducted into a world beyond any I knew. Apparently, some forms of wonder have a long shelf life. Like an ancient tick, it jumped on me.

Now, I’m infected. I regularly view the preposterous as a possibility. Ungrounded as I am, in a disabled body, I get strange messages from what I encounter. Medicine moments arrive unbidden. Reality contorts. The world is full of horror and miracles. Sometimes, they are alike, and I wonder even harder.

My intention, as I sat down to write this, was to extoll the virtue of wonder, to marvel at how aging seems to enhance the probability of experiencing it, to genuflect before a world that contains it. What I’m discovering is that as soon as I realized I knew enough, to know, I knew practically nothing, wonder started flooding in. It turns out, that what I don’t know, opened the flood gates. 

I am blessed to be the rare shut-in, who gets to know wonder, in my interactions with others on the computer. Cyber groups have become visits to Kiva’s. The sacred wonder of meeting on-line. Something happens, that no one expects, but everyone hopes for. One can feel a subtle avalanche occurring, Connection, seemingly made by cyber-gods, takes place. Where actually, it is the power of wonder bringing us all back into an awareness of what has always been true. Connection is, and wonder is one way of broadcasting that recognition.

Yes, gratitude rises with it. I am flushed with I can’t say enough, nor can I be silent enough, to really acknowledge what I am experiencing. I guess, I have little real choice, I have to live it out. Wonder has overcome me, and shown me both sides of this inexplicable world. I am thrilled and I am terrified. I guess that means I’m alive. Wonder of wonders!

Comfort

There is something about the desire for comfort that makes me uneasy. Comfort seems like it ought to be the simplest thing, but as I think about it, especially in the age of climate change, social distrust and all kinds of polarization, I’m finding it to be increasingly elusive. There used to be a time when I found lasting comfort in a warm bed, an affectionate hug, or a poignant silence. Now, even the comforts of life have some element of discomfort in them. I wonder how this can be? Come, wonder with me — maybe we’ll find comfort anew.

Recently I went to someone’s house, to have a climate change discussion with a group of strangers. The gathering was supposed to happen in the host’s back yard. It didn’t. The whole event moved indoors, I gather for comfort’s sake. Someone might have been cold or allergic. The meeting took place, was interesting, and aroused in me later, the realization, that we altered the original environment we  were scheduled to meet in, to improve the comfort of all involved. This was such a normal, and casual change, that no one thought anything about it. It was only later, when I was at home, reflecting upon some vague dissatisfaction with the meeting, that I realized, by seeking greater comfort we had altered our environment.

Naturally, it occurred to me, that seeking comfort in this way, is a big part of how we have created, and maintain, the climate crisis, and other forms of collective threat. Some people’s comfort results in other’s threats. This has been a disturbing realization. Now, I know there are economic and ideological reasons threats exist, but comfort-seeking is something each one of us contributes to the general malaise of our times.

Thinking like this upsets my apple cart, throws me in a tither, and puts a spell on me. Suddenly, I start thinking about comfort. I remembered, that I once spoke to members of the elder salon, about how becoming a community meant learning about being uncomfortable together. Then, I recognized the way seeking-comfort could be a way of abusing others, and caring more about individual comfort than the needs of something larger. Now, I recognize the same principle applies to my desire for comfort. That is an uncomfortable idea.

How strange, that the uncomfortable notion, that my basic practice of seeking comfort can create discomfort, noticing this upsets me, and provides a modicum of comfort. Oddly, my life benefits from my knowing how connected I am — when I become more aware of how much impact I have on others. 

I long to feel connected. Experiencing myself embedded in a matrix of connection, where my actions, small as they are, have impact on others, and on the world I live in, thrills me, calms me down, and gives me a feeling of comfort that seems to reach deep inside me. 

In some way, I feel comforted when I realize I’m part of something larger. So even though the realization that I create discomfort around me, when I seek my kind of comfort, actually becomes more palatable. How paradoxical! Comfort seeking often leads to more systemic discomfort, whereas being open to discomfort, seems to arouse the greatest feeling of being connected, and a greater sense of comfort.

It hasn’t been obvious. This association between comfort and discomfort, it is having an indelible effect upon me. I have been seeking lasting comfort, like the old country western song says, “in all the wrong places.” With some appreciation, of how failing can paradoxically can increase one’s chances of succeeding, I am taking some comfort from the clarity coming my way.

Growing Older

I’ve found something I do really well. In fact, it’s effortless. No matter what I do, or how poorly I may do it, I grow older. I didn’t always do it so gracefully, but the inexorable way it kind of marches into, and through my life, taught me a few things. I used to worry about it a lot, then I realized I have no control over it, and happily, I came to relish the growth part of growing older. 

Now, I consider it a privilege, a perk associated with this mad thrill ride. Each day passes, I have a host of feeling experiences, and some part of me notices. And strangely, another bigger part, somehow benefits, and I am gifted with more awareness, than I know what to do with. I find growing older to be a complex, mysterious, highlight, of my short time here. I get to experience some perspective, friendship and rare moments of totally mystifying gratification. Oh, it hurts some, and I get tired of the uncertainty, but I know something extraordinary is happening, as I am forgetting my latest promise.

I have watched myself go through fear, loss, heartache, regrets, awe and wonder, apprehension, and now deep reverence. Growing older has brought me nearer to the freedom to be me, and the service I feel called to do, than all of the workshops, designed by well-meaning people. I am a graying stem cell, silently going about my business, becoming something needed and unseen before. Growing older, for me, means becoming barnacled with my connections, accruing from Life, the audacity of originality. I like it, the seeming fact that Life has saved the best for last. Death, for me, is an orgasm, the rest is just foreplay.

Growing older wasn’t intuitively obvious. It looked bad, smelled worse, and had a bad rep. The aged have been the homeless street people, the neglected refuse that deserved to be hidden away, for too long. I fell for it too. The sad diminishment, decaying into helpless nothingness. I’m still battling the rapacious refusal to give human dignity to Life’s finale. 

Then something unplanned and unforeseen happened.  I got older, began to wrinkle, turned gray, learned how to limp, and discovered a huge reservoir within. I began becoming more while I was becoming less. On the outside I am a typical old broken-down disabled man. But on the inside, mostly unseen, a light is coming on, an awareness is dawning, the landscape is changing. I might have trouble remembering to keep my zipper up, but some seed is breaking open inside. Life is pouring through me, as it never did before. In no way, I, or anyone, could have predicted from the images of the old that prevail in this culture.

The environment isn’t the only thing that has been recently exploited, ignored, and looted. Old people are Nature being mistreated. Growing older has meant playing in a trashed playground, and being considered part of the trash. To me, it is amazing, I would even say, somewhat miraculous, that joy arises with aging. Growing older has brought me to my knees, in more ways than I could have guessed.

The journey in took a lot longer than I planned (somewhere there was an inkling).  Ignorance and hubris had to go. Life humiliated me just right. I was raised in a cultural world that didn’t actually believe in an inner life. The religious had their dogma, patented ways to honor the sacred, but little real openings for Mystery. It took really being broken, hopelessly beyond rescue, the wretchedly neglected, living at the margin, to get a break. And, it was inside, there all the time — but discounted — and made other. Growing older is saving me from death by convention. The real spark came out from underneath all that weight.

Growing older is turning me into something else. I don’t know what, but I trust it. That’s good, because I’m not in control. I’m just myself, along for the ride, a passenger now, carried along by a friendly Mystery.

I had worshipped Nature. My greatest grief about being disabled was that I was unable to walk the face of the Earth again. The outdoors was my cathedral. But Nature came through for me anyway. As I say, “I couldn’t go out into Nature, so it came into me.” In truth, Nature had been with me all along, but I guess I had to lose it in order to find it again. Anyway, it became clear to me that I am of Nature, the spark inside is green, growing older is unleashing it.

To conclude this gray rant, I’ll just add, look inside yourself. The cultural world is full of bad advice. Be careful, and know you are endowed. Growing older allowed me some surcease, as I sank into essence. Perhaps it won’t be the same for you — but know — that growing older will come, and a release is in the offing.

Another Special Difficulty

Last time I learned that I am not supposed to be an animal — but I am. Several people responded to that “special difficulty.” Some had trouble with it— too messy. They’ll be thankful for it, when the mess happens to them.

  

“…. a response to a challenge

 of special difficulty 

 rouses one

 to make an unprecedented effort.”

                                                                                                                   — Arnold Toynbee

I’m going to write the piece I intended, before ‘the mess’ became more pressing. It is another version of ‘the mess,’ but with much more dire consequences.

One of my major disappointments about this life is playing out in a hideous way. Its pitting young folks against old folks, even more than was common during the Vietnam era. I have sympathies for both. To me, the body of our species, the home we live in, is suffering the greatest mess of all — we have soiled our nest. The earth is reeling and everything is being effected. This is the worst form of a ‘special difficulty’ I can imagine.

The current death throes arouse in me a profound shock, a painful kind of horrible compassion. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have no idea what this moment will call forth from us, but I know, like all ageing people, the end is nearing. Out of the ‘unprecedented effort’ that this moment will mobilize, I can see our kind rising and falling. And, oh the ache! The ache! The ache!

Strangely, I have this intuition. Recently, during a medicine journey I wrote, “As darkness crowds around, I get brighter.” I imagine that things get so dire, that it brings out some of the best of what it means to be human. The end of human time might be the best of human time. I don’t know if I could handle that any better than I could handle another form of horror. Which blaze do I want to go out in? I don’t expect I have a choice, or do I?

I find myself captive of this awkward intuition. I look around, even anticipate a little, that some hearts will break open, and get larger. I want to be near if that happens. I think it can, because it is happening to me. Mind this, I don’t think it is because of my efforts —I don’t deserve any credit — I think Life is playing out an unprecedented effort too. It is happening through me, through the heartbreak of this time.

We, humankind, have made a mess, so tangled, complete, and awful — so us—  that we cannot resolve it as we are.  Nothing could stop us — like ourselves. Somehow, this is justice. Now we will see, what unprecedented effort can render.

Hatching Out

I’m convinced there is a larger story playing out. One that is unfolding, in part, through our lives. Every now and then, we get a glimpse of what is going on at some other level. I’m about to share something of the way I got in touch with feeling implicated, and part of, what is coming to pass. More questions are raised by this awkward and fuzzy memory, but it has also given me goosebumps. It is like an invisible being is breathing down my neck. I can feel it, this strange warm aliveness, but I can’t really name it. I am cornered by not knowing, and knowing too much.

When my father was in his late 80’s, he began writing a book about growing up an Iowa farm boy. In the time before electrification, during the Great Depression, he had an experience, that he only recalled as a result of the memories he was exploring as he wrote about that era of his life. I lucked out, as happens to be my nature, to be present when he told of his recollection of witnessing, and being touched by, a miracle.

 His mother used to raise a few chickens, so she had a little house cash. He recalled a day when he was with her, and she showed him a small egg incubator she had in the house. It was full of eggs that were just hatching out. He remembered getting to witness the baby chicks pecking their way out of the eggs. To his astonishment, that memory transported him back to that moment, and with a vividness he could not believe, he felt the awe he had experienced as a child. Baby birds, little vulnerabilities, were working hard to escape what had been their nurturing safe homes, to come into a larger unknown reality. He was transfixed by the drama of what he witnessed. Years later, this memory, became something he wanted to pass on to his loved ones.

That experience was notable to me, because my father was not an obviously sentimental man, and because I could feel his intensity, his awe at witnessing something he couldn’t give words to. In his old age it still touched him — maybe more —as he neared the end of his life. This is an element of my father’s unknown inner life that has stayed with me.

Recently, I was doing some reflection of my own (I’m in my 70’s now), putting pieces of my life into some unknown pattern. Suddenly, I had a memory from my high school experience. I was a senior, and I was having my first experience of writing a poem. Looking back, I could see myself as a young man with practically no wherewithal for expressing the complex feelings I was having. I was a jock boy, who was assailed by something inside, that had no way out. For some reason, in my desperation, I tried to write it out through a poem. It was a poem about myself as a baby chick, confronted with the realization that I had to breakout of my previously comfortable home. The world I knew had grown too small, and the world on the other unknown side of the shell, awaited with its promise, and its terror. I wrote out my teenage ambivalence.

Now, I am an ageing man. The process of loss is breaking me open. My body, my identity, the very story of who I have been, is all drifting away. I am something else. This thin veneer — of what I thought I have known — is giving way. I am a mystery to myself.

Somehow, I doubt it is coincidence, I am recalling my father’s memory, and my own from high school. Connecting these two experiences arouses awe in me, making my upcoming transition look like an old mystery, one that I am familiar with, one that is stirring within me, even if I do not know what’s on the other side. I do know the ambivalence, uncertainty, and vulnerability, inherent in this time. I also now know — thanks to the power of recall — that this is the way life proceeds. I am less afraid than I was, and more excited than I ever have been.

Hatching out renews some mysterious goings on, that I am ambivalently happy to be part of.

A Favor

“Death is a favor to us.”

                                                        Hafiz 

                                                                      from Deepening The Wonder

It’s been almost 10 years since I first ran into the poem of Hafiz’s that held that line about death being a favor. Initially, I noticed it.  It had some kind of compelling quality that made it grab my attention, but I wasn’t ready to reflect very deeply upon it then. I am ready now. I guess I needed to age, and hopefully mature some, before I could start integrating what it holds for me. Life is strange that way. I came across “Deepening The Wonder” years ago, noticed this line, and here I am, visiting it years later. How, and why, did it stay with me all this time?

I think I have died many times. Certainly, my stroke has taken me into another world, where I could barely recognize myself.  Everything changed. Death, in that instance, carried me into a mind-warping reality, that brought me to the rampant confusion that is now my life. This was an example of reincarnation that took place all on this plane of existence. I’ve been through a few of these kind of soul migrations.  They take my breath away, and then land me in a new life. So, that has colored my thinking about how favorable death is. 

I have already been carried away, unexpectedly, a few times. As Rumi says, “When, by dying, have I ever been made smaller?” Somehow, I too, have been made larger, more aware, sensitized, and with a greater passion for what Life holds. Death seems to have taken me into realms of being, that made me more me, and then, given me some time, to more fully become this new being, before death moved me on. Each time, my life became something else.

I feel like I’m being refined. Each incarnation seems to extract some kind of new essence of me, some little noticed essential ingredient. I try to hold onto myself, but I inevitably slip away into something else. I like it — have found a confidence, a kind of equanimity, that makes shifting alright. Aging has helped with that. But, I still feel a kind of disequilibrium, a rush of adrenalin-like dizziness, that unseats me, and sends me spinning into a fresh encounter with emptiness. All in all, its bracing.

The greatest favor I have identified so far, is how clarifying death is. I start missing people, things, situations, and dreams before I pass, or before they do. My heart seems to break, in all the right places. I even find the wherewithal sometimes, to honor them, to really appreciate the miraculous nature of what I am exposed to, as passing takes place. Oddly, that has made living more vivid. Goodbye has become more poignant too.

There is a strange sweetness that attends death. Impermanence seems to have an embellishing effect. I am so touched by what I cannot hold. There is something striking about everything going, it’s as if some greater emptiness is calling to be filled, and attachment gives way, and the spirit, that lives by moving from one inside to another, goes in motion. Joy purifies joy.

Passing seems so fraught in our culture. Death is anything but joy unleashed. Why is that? I don’t know. But aging has given me perspective, allowing me to entertain newly discerned patterns, and changed my mind. Death is a favor to us. It is a passport, to any of the foreign realms where new forms lurk, and purification continues.

Ambient Uncertainty

It’s rising. Can you feel it? I can. There is an anxiety in the air, a pressurized hurry, that seems to be most everywhere. Even the water tastes of it. I feel myself eroding.  I usually feel freed by ‘not knowing,’ but something else is happening this time. It seems to be centered everywhere, like it doesn’t have a home, or its homelessness extends to this moment, this place. Life, the vitality that underlies this being, this energized actualization, is weighted with some tense freight. I can feel the atmosphere darkening, trees losing their luster, the hours becoming precious.

Something is waiting. Growing and waiting. I don’t know what it is, but I can tell others can feel it too. It is breathing down my neck. I would be squirming, if I could. Instead, I have this feeling of growing dread, like I’m somehow in the horror movie I’m watching. Perhaps, I am. One of the hapless, soon to be victims, of a strange monster, that wants to feed on me. It lurks, and I innocently go about my business. 

I’ve been feeling oppressed lately. There is a storm rising on the horizon. I can see it and feel it. I know it is coming. Not everybody sees it, or feels it, but I know some do. It is like growing older, and recognizing that death is closer. But, nobody is talking about it. I am strangling slowly from the lack of shared concern. My world is going down into some abyss, and I’m alone with the dawning recognition of what that means. Uncertainty is mounting.  I am screamingly lost, without other humans, isolated by this horrible awareness, unable to drink deeply of the miracle of the moment, because I am alone with this poignancy and disappearing beauty.

I am still here, a witness, gutted by what’s going on. I am facing what I would not, thought I could not, face. I don’t really have another choice. I’m seeing what we have done. I know I am complicit. I took the easy way too. Aching numbness overwhelms me. I want to be in the arms of my loved ones, and I wonder where they are. I realize, to my chagrin, that they too, participated in our mass suicide. 

I am not dead yet. I’m some sort of walking (actually wheeling) zombie. I am more dead than alive, defiantly angry and despairing. The rubble, the  world of appearances, looks so good, the smiles reassuring, and the inevitability so complete. It is an intoxicating set of circumstances. I keep wondering. “Why am I alive for this?” My only answer is “Why not.” 

The world, my precious mother, keeps providing, acting like nothing is wrong. Maybe for her, nothing is. But, for me, the storm clouds are gathering, the pressure is mounting, and I feel an increasing sense of dread. I’m ashamed to realize, I’ve never been so vulnerable. My soul is outstretched, do you feel it too, will you come into my arms, can I admire you for these last moments. You, like me, are such a beautiful and sensitive abomination.

The suspense is killing me. Maybe that’s the plan. Metamorphosis by loss, and shame, and of being a creative mistake. I hope I have another chance, and that my memory won’t fail. You too.

Teetering is a strange business. Utterly human, and desperately lively. My heart, is like some wild animal, penned into being a beast of burden. It shatters, then enlarges, and shatters again. My body is in the process of becoming dust anyway. So, why does it matter. I don’t really know. But, I feel the tide turning.

Gray, Restless and Strangely Alive

“One might say, I have decided to marry the silence….

                            The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife.”                                                     

“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity.

 a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.”

                                                                                 — Thomas Merton

I am torn between two callings.  One calls to me like a quiet impulse, a feint throbbing within, steady like gravitational pull, forever sinking me deeper into silent emptiness. The other begs me to be as fully in the world as possible, to take part in the tumult, to care about the center and the periphery, to allow my heart to be broken, to revel in grief.

I don’t exactly know how to respond to either one. I know they are related, I learn from both, and I feel so inadequate, so oblivious, so human. I hurt with aliveness. Each beguiles me, de-centering me, keeping me forever off balance, asking me to seek something new and un-named from the darkness. I am alone and I am accompanied. I could be overwhelmed at any moment, and I am in love with surprise. My being resonates with these unheard sounds, and I find myself turning, not knowing what has found me. At least I’m called, crazed with delight and horror.

The world I live in is so mysterious, so demanding, so absolutely beautiful, that I can’t believe I’m part of it. I am only the stutter that precedes astonishment. I want to learn from myself, to occupy this portion of time and energy well, but I am too dumbfounded, too flabbergasted. Bafflement plays with my mind. Words like this come out of me, and I know I have no passport of understanding. I am naked, an unwashed innocent, playing at being human, wishing I knew better, but going along with the current. 

I am torn by two callings. One says be still, notice how full the emptiness is. While the other begs me to wear my brother’s clothes, to feel my sister’s heart, to break in all the fore ordained places, to go to all the places where love can take you, but cannot itself go. Each offers a kind of enlightenment, but combined, they coax one beyond.

Aging has made me a stranger to myself. I am both more capable than I was, and less capable. I now have wrinkles that reveal me, a tired being, worn into submission, glorified by the unpredictable. I am wizened by what has enthralled and shaken me. I know now I am not mine, just a shadow of who I used to be, and a snowflake of originality.  I should be satisfied knowing that, but I still feel called by these twin attributes of mystery. 

Gray, restless, and strangely alive.

The Rapture of Living

“People say that what we are all seeking 

is a meaningful life.

I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking.

I think that what we’re seeking

is an experience of being alive…

actually feeling

    the rapture of being alive.”

                                               Joseph Campbell

Living isn’t easy. Especially for the old, disabled or isolated.  All too often that means most of us. Getting out of bed, can be an act of courage. These challenges provide lots of opportunity. They can lead one straight down the rabbit hole, or through some paradoxical wonderland. The choice is ours, but it is such a large one, that it takes a lot of souls, plus Life to make. The rapture of living is gained through the magic of loss — a pinhole in reality — that it takes many human angels to pass through.

Have you ever asked yourself why it is so hard to live fully, and why, when you are fully alive, it is so hard to sustain it?  Living fully is tricky. Living fully alone is almost impossible.  Oh, that doesn’t mean solitude isn’t essential. It is. But, being here, completely, with no foot out the door, no hiding, no spiritual bypass, no patent happiness, no made-up face, in the moment, that is an achievement that is beyond most of us. For good reason. 

Rapture is like wildfire. It relishes fuel, and goes where it will, to get it. Strangely it is the broken-down places, the collapsing dreams, the failed identities, softened-up resolves — the ripped open that feed it. The rapture of living appears after the storm clouds of being broken open. As a rule, we humans don’t take easily to being that vulnerable. We are prone to personalizing so much failure. And, by and large, we don’t know, though we sometimes sense it, that the place of our limitations is the place of our possibilities.

Life, like the light, pours through the cracks. The rapture of living is not an attainment. It isn’t some sanctioned x-sport. It is the background of our being. The baseline setting that is always there, just beneath all of the errors and bad advice we tend to live by. It is the little green shoots, that break-up all of our assurances.

Being broken open, saturated with grief and uncertainty, and finding others who are similarly afflicted, that is the surest way to notice how finely each of us is held in the great tapestry of Mystery. Life comes surging through the openings. Breakdown is often breakthrough. We aren’t savvy enough to celebrate it, but the calming breeze of newly freshened air blows through us anyway. Life feasts upon our failures, and in the process, re-vitalizes us. 

The rapture of living responds whole heartedly to our willingness to go to the place of our most humble secrets. And, when we share them with each other, then we discover that rapture can become a maelstrom, a bursting forth of energy, a release, a freeing, of our truest nature. Rapture of living is infectious when openness breaks out.

Drive-by Intimacy

A friend of mine shared this term with me. She was trying to express her dismay about a common phenomenon — the cultivated closeness, that emerges in certain kinds of contexts. She has grown tired of a kind of sharing that lacks enduring connective power. It is intimate, often rich with detail and feeling, but misses the most important attribute, which for her, I understood to be a lasting significance, an on-going relationship.

I thought she made a really interesting observation. One, that is highly relevant to those of us suffering from more than our fair share of isolation. I, too, am tired of being in emotionally rich and intense environments, mainly a variety of groups, where sharing and caring only seems to last for the duration of the group. Important connections dissolve thereafter, and relationship seems to disappear until the next meeting.  This breeds a strange brew —a painful combination of love and lovelessness.

I’ve found that the isolation I endure as a single old disabled man is heightened by this kind of pseudo-intimacy. My particular form of loneliness deepens, and I feel more like I am a cast-off witness, like I am being used. That is especially corrosive. My being aches with a strangely tormented sense of emptiness. I feel more like a neglected shut-in.

As an older person, living in a culture where being ignored is all too common, I don’t expect much real connection. Drive-by intimacy can seem like it’s better than no intimacy at all. But, I’m discovering it only serves to make me hungry — because I’m more malnourished — than I was before. Drive-by intimacy takes energy from me, and leaves me feeling full (briefly), while it is emptying out my reserves. I am diminished by it.

Now I could turn this missive into a long complaint about the rigors of isolation in old age, but I’m not very interested in cultural insensitivity. Instead, I’m much more interested in empowering myself (and anyone) to respond to the challenges associated with being in this culture-time. What actions can I take to increase my sense of connection, and weave together a more satisfying social life? How can I take greater responsibility for my situation?

These are the questions that hold promise for me. Yes, they call me to action, to going beyond the norms set for we old people, but living this long has thrust me into an unprecedented situation. I am still alive, with hungers (particularly relationship ones) that I want filled. Internally, there is pressure growing. I can turn bitter, or I can do something about it.

What is that something? Well, for a start, I can stop participating in drive-by intimacy, not by curtailing group life, but by using it better. I can show-up more, demand more real connection, reach out to others beyond group time, valuing others like never before, using any means to convey what matters, including the phone, email, and whatever new options that are available. I can make more of my face-to-face opportunities. How about I make isolation the thing I creatively respond to.

There is another thing, a less obvious option. I can use my moments alone better.

I’m savvy enough to have noticed, that when I know myself more thoroughly, especially when I’m liking myself better, I am more likely to be myself publicly. I fill up my space, and I connect more readily. Time with me could be better spent — as I connect better internally— I connect better with others too. 

I would like the kind of drive-by intimacy — that I, as an old disabled person get to participate in — to be more real and lasting. I want it to be more like a drive-by shooting, something memorable, that leaves marks and changes things. I don’t plan on leaving a gravestone, but I do want to leave an impression. I’d like it to be upon my brothers and sisters. You, for instance. You, know what I’m driving at. 

Spiritual Emergence

“We realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality…… we open ourselves completely to the entire universe…. with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind… this is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection. 

Everything is perfect just as it is. The nature of all is naturally-present as part of the continually changing pattern…. we are naturally free and unconditioned….we are intrinsically lacking nothing.”

                                                                                                                        HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Its Sunday morning. Easter Sunday. I’m not a Christian, but I am enamored by annual renewal. Spring brings with it a most profound resurrection. Today, I have little green growing edges.

I’m excited this morning. I’m going to write something, I’ve been feeling for some time, but never written down. I’ve never been sure, I’m not now, yet I can feel this awareness pushing through the ground of my ambivalence and poking me. I am being urged on by Life. I can feel it in the dizzying weight that surrounds me, I am going down as I am going up.

Aging is an on-going spiritual emergence. Just existing, and having Life ripen one, involves a slow renunciation of the world of form. Everything that one has thought one is, slowly evaporates. Letting go happens. Despite one’s preferences, an innocence comes over the mind. The world is re-enchanted, as the body becomes less of a player. Inner life takes up more and more awareness. Some sort of awakening accompanies what is passing. Wrinkles, wisdom and sensitivity arise as youth goes. 

This is the way of things. Nature serves. Aliveness instills awareness. Pain and hardship squeeze out the essential. Accident and synchronicity mark the two sides of the same coin. The brilliant illuminates the darkness, making it meaningful, while it consumes the light. The unchanging takes us for a life-long ride. All in all, Life plays out creation through us.

There isn’t much one can do to alter the trajectory of the Universe. Even buckling in for the ride, has its unexpected moments of uncertainty. Strangely, even the most man-contrived vehicle, is in the end — organic. Choice is symmetrical — some combination, of human response and mystery.

I find re-assurance in the role of play. The Universe is playing out the energy that set it in motion, just as I’m finding myself returning to the curious engagement with my environment that made my childhood such a joy. I’m playing so much more craftily now, emancipated by what once seemed to enclose me. Fun, joy and happiness are the landmarks of this playground.

Life is a primary way of preparing spirit for the next adventure. I’m tired of pretending otherwise. I get so distorted with a man-made form of gravity. One might not even recognize that I am an animal made to occupy this garden.

I lived so long depressed. I drank the kool aid. I sank beneath what passed for wisdom and caring. I died before I died —before even — living. I was a good citizen, I laughed at all the jokes, and took my cues from the crowd. 

Thank the Mystery I got older. The journey home has been such a rich one, so much disillusionment, and so much liberation. No wonder I feel so dizzy writing these words. Passing through the gates of Heaven looks so much like passing through the jaws of Life.