Scarred Heart

“Oh People.

Look among you,

it’s there, 

your hope must lie.”

                                                                                                     Rock Me On the Water by Jackson Browne

Surviving in a world that has increasingly become more inhospitable is challenging. Thriving in this same world is miraculous. Strangely, the trick is not really a trick, it is form of heartbreak. Persistent heartbreak. The scarred heart is the one that has been broken over and over by the disappointment that attends loving. This is not a paean to the wonder of the heart’s ability to love, it is recognition of the heart’s resilience. There is strength in the rising repair of great loss. This strength becomes an asset, a kind of power, when it is applied against what seem to be the odds. It is the strength behind any proclamation that claims to be “          STRONG.”

This strength isn’t a matter of will. Maui isn’t going to become more because the citizens intend it. Something else, much more mysterious and miraculous is underway. And painfully, all the destruction unleashed it. A scar upon the heart of Lahaina is forming. It is a product of a quality of the heart that is all too unrecognized. The heart has the ability to heal and enlarge itself. Not from merely breaking, but from returning to the source of heartbreak again and again. This isn’t about co-dependent suffering that needs to stop, it’s about the disaster of living.

There is some existential force that waits within us. It has an unfathomable magnitude. When enough of us are reduced by circumstance, usually by natural disaster, sometimes by human terrorism or accident, then this force arises within those who have been laid low. It is some primal aspect of the human heart. It suffuses those who have been viscerally touched, who identify with the true vulnerability of being human, who know their own perishability. An unpredicted power arises that binds individuals into something greater, a being-ness that encompasses and embraces. It is a collective experienced as “we,” but really is more alien than that, it is “us,” but beyond us. Some people refer to it as a field,  referring to some kind of energy, some call it communitas, a state of consciousness that arises with enough loss, but I think it is the way of hearts, at the deepest, un-feelable level, hearts that are linked. Being human has some kind of cosmic linkage which can only be seen and felt under the rarest of circumstances.

Disaster brings out the best of us. Have you ever wondered why? Because it reduces everyone to a level of nothingness that allows for the humble embrace of what is, and the ability to identify with anyone’s feelings. Equality is rampant amongst the dispossessed. Strangely this strength, this unity, this belongingness, lies at the center of loss. To get to where we are all connected, is to renounce all your unique strengths (not completely), in favor of what makes one most human. Going to this place, even inadequately, and incompletely, serves the heart, scarring it with loss, and helping it strengthen for the future.

The Phoenix that arises from the ashes, comes from another place. It is a place that seems magically connected to this one. It isn’t magic that sets the Phoenix free, but the humbleness of emptiness, the reductions of Life, the will to be broken. The Phoenix rises from what remains.

The scarred heart isn’t just a collective phenomenon. Each of us is endowed with the powers of the Universe. Resilience is a sign of Life. It is in each of us. The Phoenix will come through you, if you go down far enough. Do that with others — so that we go out in a blaze of glory — a Phoenix inexplicably rises. 

 

 

  

The Waiting Room

The proximity of death grows closer with each year, bringing a new perspective and a freshened sense of one’s axis shifting. Aging brings surprises — some wrapped in darkness, some in penetrating light. Each reveals. I have more pain and more clarity. I know I am more firmly ensconced in ‘the waiting room,’ hanging around for the final act.

Learning to wait has been illuminating. I had the illusion that I grasped death, but learned that each time I have a more vivid experience of it, I am introduced to a little more of its inscrutable nature. I’ve had my near-death experience, but this year’s birthday depression and a bout of chronic pain, made clear the uselessness of my life, and the emptiness of my efforts.

I discovered I don’t really exist because of what I do. For me, dying, this time around, made it really clear to me, that changing the trajectory of cultural life, of trying to make a difference, is not why I exist. These are not my accomplishhments, and it wouldn’t matter if they were. I am here not to satisfy, or meet, any criteria. The waiting room, enduring with the constant vulnerability of death, is about existing at a basic stripped-down level. I am not here to do anything.

To wait well is like active listening. Something inside is poised, like a cat about to strike. The chime of final freedom is about to go off, but it isn’t time yet. Waiting is a suspended movement, somewhere mid-way. Focused upon the inevitable, but not there yet. This is a state all its own. And, it goes on as long as it goes on. Enduring the formless, the obsolescence of identity, the substantial weightlessness, of being a non-being, is extremely corrosive and freeing. There is nothing but the moment.

A kind of radical dementia is altering everything. Focusing attention upon the moment, breaking the remaining bonds with what was, or what one thought one was doing, in favor of an awareness of what is unfolding. An opening is occurring, it isn’t a portal to another world, instead it is an aperture that reveals the current one like never before.

Waiting is like the beginning of a hallucinogenic experience. The world is slowly softening up. Things are flowing into each other. One’s sense of perspective becomes more fluid, taking on a disorienting depth, and effecting one’s sense of balance. Maintaining any sense of poise inside such an overwhelming experience is useless.

I don’t know how long I’ve dwelled here, I didn’t notice when I came. I think I have been in and out. Now it seems to be a feature of this part of my life, enhancing things and providing a mostly ambivalent clarity. I’m ready to move on, and I’m not ready at all. The waiting room is a mostly invisible landscape that haunts, besieges and reminds. I am not really alive without it, but hardly alive with it.

The waiting room gives me a place to ponder my existence, to view the scales, to feel the weight of eternity, to grapple with the essential mystery. Now, this seems like a blessing, a chance to sum up the whole. I can see the holes, the places and people, I didn’t give enough of the right kind of attention, and I can feel the burn of loss, knowing the chances will not come again, but also knowing that these recollections have timeless meaning.

I no longer have aspirations, or yardsticks to measure me by; the time of goals is past, now I think I am shorn of pretense. In essence, I am more relaxed, more present and available. This is the time when I am ripe, alive, and perhaps most nutritious. It is the time when I am here, but not for long. This is the time when I can offer the greatest perspective, and the most wisdom, as it is a time when knowing isn’t as emphasized as uncertainty.

It seems possible that the waiting room is holding me, while I discover there is even more to me than I imagined. The transcendent being, who is me, gradually comes, more and more, into awareness. I am not I, instead I am a gradually discernable placeholder, a facet of the Universe that is celebrating another expansion. I — no longer expresses what this being is experiencing. The waiting room just might be the final incubator, the place where a kind of invisible and effortless transformation prepares the way for a more profound change.  

Differing

“Our destination is to stand face to face,

feeling the space around us,

feeling our own powerful and unencumbered vitality, 

so that we have some chance of not being eternally alone;

 but different enough from us 

that we can never imagine him or her to be merely a part of us.

We will discover the Other to be someone familiar and someone forever new."

                                                                                                                                                                                  • Guy Napier

“…two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”

                                                                                                                                                    Rilke

Being different is relatively easy for me. I was thrown in the deep-end right from the beginning. I was a military brat. I used to say that “every time I was about to become somebody,a a aa we’d move.” A life that included an advanced degreWe, 30 years of psychotherapy, a stroke, an impossible initiation, disability, old age, brain damage, and a passion for elder life, pretty much insuMred that I have gotten to experience being different quite a lot. It’s kind of run-of-the-mill for me now.  But, being different presents another challenge; I am having a dramatically larger difficulty around differing.

Differing requires me to show myself, to sometimes interrupt the narrative of the moment, to be alone, to reveal complexity, to become momentarily the object of attention. It is like walking before a firing squad. One doesn’t know whether an execution is going to happen or not.

All too often some form of de-humanization does. People generally don’t take kindly to the disruption that otherness causes. Worse yet, being different usually gets blamed for any discomfort that occurs. So, living out a difference is more dangerous than passively being different. This has caused a painful conundrum in my life. One that has inhibited and strengthen me.

Differing well requires one to care for oneself. Removing the conventional mask, and revealing the more genuine is hard enough, but having to go further, and reveal the way you differ, is a courageous and necessary act. It requires love of self, diversity, and what is. This kind of move enriches relationship, and sometimes throws it into a spin. Every generous act of truth-revealing, is one that can be painful. Sometimes honest differing generates real suffering. Sometimes honest differing leads to genuine connection.

There lies the rub. Intimacy cannot really exist, without differing, without revealing what may not be acceptable. For the old person, in particular, with each day driving one deeper and deeper into uniqueness, becoming more and more different, the dilemma of differing, grows more challenging. Aging means becoming more different. So, naturally it requires more self-regard.

It is hard to muster what is needed by some circumstances. Life is full of ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ situations. This is another one. Differing has that quality in it. It is one of Life’s many gifts, the opportunity to grow oneself, any relationship one is in, and the expansive profusion of Life. All you have to do is be as different as you are. And, be willing to experience the consequences.

 

 

 

  

Playfulness

“Man only plays —

when he is in the fullest sense of the word —

 a human being,

and he is only fully a human being —

 when he plays.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Friedrich Schiller

I re-discovered play when a friend of mine became Dr. Fun. He was an internet personality for years, and someone I walked with every Friday during the nineties. Later, when I had a radio show on KOWS, he was a guest. He had a barn full of games, and was a delight to be around. His laugh and his me/we attitude were infectious. He knew play was a wonderful way to encounter the world. He’s gone now, but for years, he helped me lighten up, and become aware of how important something like play, which is seen as frivolous, held a key to human evolution. This essay is a homage to him, and an affirmation of the role of play in the development of happy, healthy, and engaged elders.

Dr. Fun intuited what Dr. Peter Gray later discovered around play, when he found that hunter-gatherer societies, across the globe, organized theirocial lives around play. They learned how to share, how to communicate, how to value each other, and their existence, through playing together. This evolutionary psychologist could see that mammals played from childhood into adulthood as a way of becoming proficient at being the kind of beings they are. It was a form of instinctive actualization. More importantly, he could see, that humans became most human, when they had an adequate chance to actively play with each other. He focused upon childhood, which leaves it to me, to broadcast through these words, that play holds a form of social elixir that can make an old person alive and expectant. The joy of childhood innocence can, through elder play, be transformed into joy in old age.

As I have grown older I adopted play more and more. Soon it was evident to me that an attitude of play made my day a fun project, more creative, imaginative and delightful. Of course, the days of a house-bound disabled person always hold difficult challenges, but I learned, that as I looked to each challenge like a piece of new playground equipment on the playground of Life, I began to look more expectantly at my days. What a pleasant revelation! Now I find myself cultivating more fun, to go along with all the other attributes of getting older.

All of this unexpected joy makes me wonder, I’ve been led to believe that perhaps the best use of my awareness was to develop mindfulness. As a therapist, and a transpersonalist, I was taught that things go much better with mindfulness. I believe it, and until now, where I’m re-discovering play, I always thought it was the best way to cultivate presence. But now, I’m not so certain. Time, and experience, have made me think again, and you can see from the little table below, that I am not as convinced as I once was.

Playfulness and Mindfulness 

Mindfulness   • goal oriented. (calming the mind) • private • controlled (regulate and monitor breathing) • dis-engaged  • inner directed • most prominent era:  adulthood

Playfulness   • non-goal oriented (discovery) • interactive • spontaneous • engaged • inner and outer directed • most prominent eras: Childhood   (original innocence), elderhood (emancipated innocence)

Maybe, this is a specific age-development, one that just magnifies the return of innocence that comes with old age, but I don’t think so, mindfulness came out of monasteries and meditation, whereas playfulness comes right from engagement. Both have value, I just wish I‘d have had as much emphasis on play, as I had on the benefits of mindfulness. I think I might have enjoyed my life more — like I do now.

Play has come as a great surprise! It has restored my sense of pleasure in life. It has got me looking forward to the day — and especially new encounters (they provide new playground equipment). Life is now full of interesting puzzles, spontaneous joy, new playmates, and excellent fun. I’m relishing these later years, and delighted I’ve developed an antidote for the rampant depression that haunts old age. Engaging is much more fun than the meditation pillow.

 

 

  

Wyrd Aging

When I was a kid, coloring outside the lines was heavily discouraged. Later, wandering away from one’s career track was similarly ill-advised. Marriage and family were de rigour. There was a track one followed throughout, what was considered, a good life. Happily, things are a little more fluid now, but it is still somewhat dangerous to go too far off the beaten path. Maintaining some conventional cred is still important.

As a marriage counselor I saw how much pain and effort went into staying out of the anxiety-provoking weeds. Some semblance of the norm was important. Even the miscreants knew the pledge of allegiance. 

Weighing heavily upon most everyone was an unconscious cultural weight. There was a kind of reliable sense of reality that shaped most of our possibilities and identities. The cookie cutter ruled our lives, and few of us even noticed. Early human life is about fitting in, people are willing to bear the consequences, rather than face ridicule, disbarment, censure, and worse yet, being caste out.

Today, we still argue about reality, our politics center upon a fight over what is real, and therefore acceptable. Society seems to be unraveling because the center doesn’t hold, as it once did. It is a hard time to be passing from conventional to non-conventional. Astonishingly, life in the weeds, beyond the norms, way beyond the favored cultural assumptions of the day, lies the terrain of the unknown, the home of today’s elder. Political polarization is lightweight, in comparison to the disruptions that come with aging. Life, and old age in particular, turn out to be the really unsettling immigrant.

The nature of reality is no longer an ideological argument, for the old person, it is more of a slow-motion race with uncertainty. Falling carries the day. Old ideas of reality, family, love, identity, physical well-being, and what one is doing here, give way. The weeds, the unsettling tensions, the thoughts that have always been unthinkable, the lost opportunities, now become the coin of the realm. Even a new form of wealth emerges.

Too often, these changes, the shift from cultural assumptions to more non-conventional concerns, are treated like something is wrong, rather than like something is right. Old people aren’t breaking down, they are breaking out. The human imagination has been straight-jacketed by pathological thinking for too long. It is time for something a little freer, like the weeds that keep breaking out everywhere Life finds a spot, that isn’t so well-cult-ivated.

Old age is such an occurrence. It is a time meant to be more on the Jwild side. Getting grey and wrinkled, needing others, going more slowly, gazing at the cosmos within — these are signs — that show there is a more natural maturity available to us, then our conventions are willing to admit. The truly demented are the ones not enough fixated on the moment, and who cannot see, that Life is changing, as it always does.

We are living in a world that is constantly changing — defying our expectations. Aging leads us into an innocent weed patch, from which one can experience more of those glorious disruptions.

This is a part of being human that is much needed now.

 

 

  

Desperate Play

There is a quiet, simple joy that comes with knowing that within us there is an antidote to all ailments. I know, that sounds like a preposterous assertion. But, think about it for a moment. Plausibly, the Universe has created a balancing agent, that restores equanimity, and encourages creativity (expansion) to go on, impervious to the slings and arrows of Life. Like everything else, we are composed of the stuff of the Universe, and thus contain within us, the power to go beyond where we have been before, and actualize wholeness wherever we are.

I forget what I know, much more often than I remember. I guess the compelling nature of human life baffles me just enough that I get distracted. I begin to believe this is all there is. In this kind of delusional moment, I forget where I’m from, and where I’ve always been. My earthly endeavors begin to take on a gravity of their own, and I fall sway to a weight that goes with the illusion. I lose some perspective while taking on another vantage point. Then, I am susceptible. I think I am bounded by the gravitational pull of the conventions of this time and place.

I labor under the weight of this place’s expectations. I get torn by the feelings that I am supposed to be one kind of man, while I am another. I now have an invisible disability that exacerbates the ones that can be seen. All of this adds weight, enhances the pull of gravity, and compresses my attitude, leaving me a lump of human protoplasm distorted and quivering. It isn’t fun to be so burdened. Worse yet, it isn’t even near the best I can do. I suffer from the potential I seldom get to use.

Firmly, under the sway of earthly and societal delusion, I trudge through life, like a good soldier, or a good cog in the system, forgetting what is within me. I even have trouble admitting to myself that I might be depressed. All I can muster is a metaphor of journeying through an arid landscape. I have begun to despair. The larger life that had really spawned me, has been reduced into a desiccated incoherent lump. I am thoroughly human, a victim of existence, a forgotten spark of the primeval light.

I am desperate. I know I am here because there is more to the story. I just don’t remember what. There are lots of stories. Divinity, if you believed everything said, is everywhere. But re-experiencing it is another matter. Stories, even the genuine experiences of others, don’t help. My desperation, is not for an uplifting story, its for a visceral unfolding. I want to be part of the flow.

Desperation, the emptiness of some aspects of life, has driven me back. I am turning once more to an old friend of mine. Oddly, this old friend is me. In some form of youthful instinctiveness, the old childish me used to perform powerful rituals by merely playing. I think I became human, the Divine child taking form, through play.

I had to get thoroughly lost to find myself. It took years. Now, I’m coming to a new place. I am once again lost at sea, bobbing in the great ocean. But now, I’m scarred, I’ve worn the rigid mantle, become the quintessential, followed the herd, felt the blistering of aloneness, and become old. Play frees me from the predictable me. I get to be what I don’t know. I am becoming again, only this time, there is no one, but myself, to guide me. I don’t have to to make sure I stay between the lines, be scored against anyone, or told what to do. When I begin to think of the things that assail me, like strange playground equipment, I get excited not depressed. Challenges are opportunities. Life looks and feels different.

Suddenly, falling and failing, has a new complexion. I’m beginning to have a more satisfied attitude. One that looks forward to what the day brings. I haven’t fully integrated this new/old awareness or attitude yet. I’m still in the phase of not completely believing it. Play is altering the way I’m encountering things now, and I’m enthralled with the experiential learning that it is provoking.

Maybe the aridity of some facets of my life drove me to re-discover what I already knew. I’m Lucky, that could be possible. But, I think that play is an aspect of the creativity of the Universe — that is within each and every one of us.

Play with that idea for a while.

 

  

Oasis Moments

The bleakness can be overwhelming. Life can be like trudging through a dessert. Out beyond hope is an endless procession of dull and almost lifeless moments. One keeps moving, because, that is all one knows how to do, because, the life-force keeps beating one’s heart, because, some animal part of one’s organism refuses to stop. Soon one’s internal landscape is as arid as the place one occupies.

The journey through life sometimes means going through these kinds of badlands. They zap and tax one’s soul. Without this kind of darkness, the garden contains nothing resembling light. Through some kind of other-worldly alchemy the darkness and light are linked, and bleak aridity coexists with the profusion of life. It is one of the glorious hardships of life. Poverty insures some forms of wealth. As does wealth insure some forms of poverty. The flow is paradoxical, blowing all means of cover. No one seems to know why we humans are party to this kind of sometimes macabre, always miraculous, dance form.

Anyway, this Slow Lane is not really about this form of the miraculousness of life, Rather, it is about how the rains sometimes come to the dessert unexpectedly. There are, what I call, oasis moments. Times when the waters of life fall from the heavens. Periods where everything glistens — and blessing permeates and refreshes the air. Such moments renew, and lend hope to hopeless endeavors.

The metaphors of miraculous and Divine intervention shine in most of our memories. The parting of the Red Sea, the locusts saving the Mormons, the coming of the just-in-time, the release of Nelson Mandela. These moments bear the stamp of the miraculous, but they are so big, so historical, that they threaten to eclipse the moments of such grace in our regular salt of the earth lives.

I don’t know about you, and your life, but I have danced in the rain of unexpected and surprising help. My pedestrian, unremarkable life has stumbled upon eras of grace, little times when someone has opened their heart, or their mind, and given me the boosting benefit of the doubt. Irrationality happens — in a good way. Unbelievably, the Sun shines with new energy.

I don’t know how this happens, but somehow it does — old lovers find each other, the desperately broken are sheltered, the abandoned are embraced, the hopeless cause discovers another carrying shoulder — and wEEE all carry on, despite the darkness. Oasis moments come right out of the darkness. How does that happen? What does it mean?

It isn’t given to we humans to know. But, we sometimes benefit anyway. I suppose I’m writing this because I have noticed. I can’t explain what has shaken my cynicism. I know I’ve done too little, to deserve such moments, and they sometimes come anyway.

This community is one for me. I have someplace to go with my wonder. It is a gift that goes way beyond whatever I thought I was cultivating. An oasis sprang up to meet my cry. Each of you is a component of someone’s oasis, mine for sure, but likely someone you may not even know. The oasis moment is us. How remarkable, and how perfect!