Monday, May 20, 2019

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.



Inner Life


One of the great things about getting old, is that while my short-term memory fades, my long-term memory sharpens. This makes memory odysseys like today’s all that more compelling. 

I find myself wondering about ‘inner life.’ I feel compelled, and interested in my own, and in the phenomenon, in generalI once asked an acquaintance, “When did you first feel whole?” Now, I’m asking myself, about the whole experience of having something going on within me — that I thought of, as my internal life. It seems that the internal life I have, has become what I identify as me. How did that happen?

When I get to thinking about how it all started, I realize several things. It’s hard to believe that something I so clearly identify myself by today, was so seemingly absent then. I recall that my first experience of any kind of psychic phenomena was when I was 5. I still recall the shadowy hand that appeared on the wall in the dim light that came from the hall. It seemed to be reaching out for me. I was terrified, and I knew I was going to be gotten. I forced myself to turn around in my bed, and look at what was coming for me, only to discover there was nothing there. I didn’t sleep well that night, nor many nights later.

When I was eight, with a friend who could draw peanuts really well, we created a comic book of peanut adventures, stuffing it with whatever humor our 8 year-old imaginations could muster. During that time I had a dream, where I told a band of Indians, who were intent on killing me with arrows, that they couldn’t kill me, because this was only a dream. I woke up laughing, and dreaming has been an interesting playground for me ever since.

I remember that as a child I often thought my dream life was more interesting than my real life. I didn’t know it at the time, but dreams would become one of my chief navigational tools later in life. I don’t recall any adult ever telling me that what went on within me was important, but somehow I knew.  

My mother was Catholic, so I was raised Catholic. She made sure I went to parochial schools, and catechism— so I got a big dose of religious dogma in my childhood years. It was only later when asked about what I was proud of in my life, that I surprised myself, and said, “that I escaped from the church when I was 13.” There was something inside me, even then, that ran from the ways the church wanted to direct my inner life.

Later, in college, I was fascinated with dreaming, researched, and had lucid and shared dreams. The war in Vietnam raged on, and I was happiest, when I could escape into sleep, and dream of another life. I believed that dreams were primarily wish fulfillment then, yet I had the sense they were something more too. Dreaming, it would turn out, was the doorway into an inner realm, that I now think of, as what my life is actually composed of. Dreaming dominated that phase of my life, and introduced me, to an unknown self.

It wasn’t until the end of my second marriage, and the ravages of my stroke, and its aftermath, that I really came to see, that what is within me, is the most important part of me. I am a dream, I’ve been dreaming-up for a long time. I come to this stage of my life with such a rich internal life, florid with Don Juan-like heightened experiences, so much so, that I now realize I was lucky long before I called myself “Lucky.”

I don’t know to what extent my experience is like, or different, from anybody else’s. I don’t know if any of what I share will have any meaning for you. But it is clear to me, now in the waning years of my life, that what stirs within me, is what is most real — and that all the rest — the jobs, moves, relationships, and other achievements, have been the real dreams — bound to slip into oblivion.

I am a figment of an on-going dream. I have an inner life that is both dream-like and real. This — these stirrings within — are who I am. I suspect these stirrings are what will continue, even when this dream is finished.