At The Edge

Here I am again, out on a cornice, overlooking the Abyss, feeling a kind of vertigo. I’m not here by choice, but it takes some part of me to stay here and look. I am done away with by the spectacle that unfolds around and beneath me. For some reason, I get to be a witness.  Is what I see my own folly, or something I can only guess at? My breath is not mine, not here. The Abyss seems to want me here, dizzy and awed. What I behold through the fear, anxiety and awe, is distorted by my own emotion, it is big and indeterminate.

I have been sitting in collapse, trying to live with the realization that the cultural house of cards is coming apart. I know not everyone is being affected in the same way. And, I know everyone is being affected, some more directly and immediately than others. I can feel this erosive process accelerating. I don’t know how long things that are familiar will last. I don’t know if what I am aware of is going to take 10 years or 100. But, I can feel it happening. I’m sitting here helpless, witnessing this certain demise, feeling emotionally overwhelmed, and struck with awe.

I’ve lived in proximity with the Abyss forever, but I only came to a vivid awareness of it when I had my stroke. Then I got it, that what I thought of as my life, wasn’t mine at all.  I began seeing things differently then, sensing the Abyss, and having my attention altered by Life. That is a long, disorienting story. Its been unfolding over time. Today, the latest version, finds me out on this cornice, trembling, and once again being made seasick by what I see, a roiling soup of potentials, all of which include demise, and some of which include evolution.

I know I should be glad. I am. Some of what I sense is evolution, the way these changes are going to bring forward other aspects of our humanity. But, I’m also horrified to see that all of the paths forward contain demise. In some it ends us, in some it alters us, in some it utterly transforms us. That is the good news. But, the bad news is the amount of pain, and the scale of it, that lies ahead. The good news is that some will be shaped by the pain, and made again in that crucible. The bad news is that all will know the pain.

I am constantly surprised by this life, it seems, that one thing is always joined with an other (or more others). I should know by now. The level of connection, of all things being coupled, is far more than I am used to. So, I should have guessed, and maybe I did abstractly, that demise might be accompanied. Sure, the probability of evolution is increasing, conditions are such that they are coaxing out of us the parts of ourselves that haven’t fit easily into the herd mentality of the mainstream. Diversity is giving us a chance. So is the gauntlet of environmental and deeply human limitations we are going through. Life is painfully teaching us what we need to know, evolving us, changing our nature.

Will we learn to fit in? It is too soon to say. What can be said with some assurance is that right now demise, collapse is happening. Are we learning from it? I’m not sure. I know that sitting here feeling it, directly experiencing the frayed ends, watching people losing functioning, is heart rendering. I know that evolution is messy and uncertain. It is working on us, using our own forms of neglect to help us awaken. I’m impressed by the possibilities implicit in this moment. If it is possible, I have an even clearer image of the pattern of creating through destruction. There is so much that is poignantly passing, and there is so much that is now full of beginningness!

I have long felt, as a disabled person, impoverished by my health and our dysfunctional social safety net, going without health insurance,  that I was living in a house of cards. I have made some peace with the realization that it could all come down some time. The improbability and seeming impossibility of this life has always impressed me. I’m kept from falling into depression by the even more miraculous awareness that despite it all, despite the improbability, we, I, everything exists, shot through with vulnerability, uncertain and here.

I am out on this cornice witnessing our death throes and birth pangs. I can’t make any of it happen. I am not immune to the pain and uncertainty. And, I am grateful for this moment. I am alive and I am witnessing, feeling, creation at work. It looks like the life I’ve known is being taken apart again, and I know it is simultaneously being put together anew.

Going Nowhere Fast

I was sitting in front of the common house, in my wheel chair, in the shade, enjoying the day, when suddenly I was hit by something I didn’t expect. From time to time I sit outside, to get fresh air, to feel nature, and to let myself be assailed by what wants my attention. I didn’t see this one coming though, perhaps I should have, I’m not as oblivious as I seem, but for a period of time, I was taken aback by the realization I was living in a collapsing society.

I’ve been writing the Slow Lane for a long time now. Along the way I’ve realized that even doing something as mundane and simple as taking a nap can be a revolutionary act.  Slowing down, enough to fall asleep, to relax into the moment, to trust the self, is beyond many of us. Even the road to the unconscious is cluttered with cultural detritus such as things to do, people to see, thoughts that press for attention. Thank God, exhaustion sometimes triumphs.

Even with this disabled seat, at the edges of the slow lane, I haven’t let myself stare fully into the abyss. By that I mean, I haven’t really let myself know what I already know. I get jittery just thinking about this. I feel anxious. I worry that if I let myself know, or worse yet, feel, that this cultural edifice is coming down, then I am going to be thought too pessimistic, crazy, or somehow self-indulgent.

Yesterday was even worse. As I sat, the realization came to me, that the predicted collapse is already happening.  All at once I felt so many things. I still am. I felt my shame and dismay. I wanted my daughter to have something else. I knew my own vulnerability, how easily perishable I am, in my little home in the middle of urban sprawl. I knew how deeply unprepared I am. I saw the extent of the denial I live. I wanted to cry, to feel grief, that I, and the human experiment have come to this. My silent longing for a community of companions, suddenly morphed into a family feeling, together, we are confronted by the brink.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need more books, or articles, movies and lectures about Peak Oil, economic disaster, or climate change. I’m saturated with apocalyptic images of the future. I understand the fear that possible futures generate. I’m afraid too. The present however, is enough to kick my ass. Yesterday, I grasped that the future is here and now. Collapse is happening! If not for me, right now, for those without jobs, homes, health, income, food, friends, family. Poverty, the third world, and all the ignominious ways that we let each other suffer, assail me now. I can’t walk away — there is no place to go.

So, in this moment, I’m just sitting with it, in it, feeling all that it asks of me. Strange, I know what I see is devastating, yet I’m still here, in the midst of this unfolding horror. I want to do something about it — but, I can’t. I’m too disabled. But, I am Lucky. I can sit right in the middle of it, doing nothing, just letting it sink in.

I’m sitting in collapse, the cultural world I have known doesn’t work, the end of an era is here. I know, I don’t want to argue about it, the whole edifice hasn’t come down yet. For some people it is working, there is very little change, maybe even an imagined future, the prospect of positive change. Maybe some unforeseen development will save us. I don’t know. I’m not predicting anything. But, I am aware of something. And, what I’m aware of, is that what is, already carries all the seeds that disturb me.

I think I have got to learn to live as if collapse is already taking place. What does that mean?

I’ve been blessed enough, by my life-threatening ailment, to know death exists. Knowing the surety of my own death has made me stronger, this awareness has helped me get clear about who I am. Maybe living with collapse could do the same. Suddenly, like Lazarus raised from the crypt, I might appreciate, more completely, the life I have. I imagine I might live differently, if I felt the presence of collapse, like I have come to feel death is a part of life. I know that my awareness of the miracle of this existence depends upon my ability to let if I let collapse in. Collapse is already happening.

I am sitting now. That is about all I can do. As I’m sitting, it is sinking in. I am in the circle. The end and the beginning are both here. Collapse, which scares the hell out of me, is part of wholeness (not my favorite part). I don’t want to accept it. I think a lot of the busy-ness and rushing I see everywhere around me are other’s refusal to accept it. But, I don’t know that. Still, collapse exists, and is part of the circle, an expression of wholeness. I want to run away. But, I can’t run, and there is no place, outside the circle, to go. So, I’m sitting, doing the most I can, letting it sink in. Collapse is here.

Falling & Flying

I am about to make a leap. I am planning on giving up my career, as a therapist in private practice, and re-inventing myself. I’ve given myself some time to think about it. The idea, with its major dose of uncertainty, thrills and frightens me. I didn’t even know this course of action would call me, like it does, until a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve been filled with creative ideas for re-making myself. So far this has been fun. It has also been dreadful, as I find myself anticipating financial vulnerability, the loss of meaning, and the surrender really required to become someone new. In the process I find myself reflecting on the seemingly twin processes of falling and flying.

I learned recently, from a poem of Rumi, that birds have to fall before they learn to fly. No falling, no flying. Since then, I’ve been captivated by the image.

In looking back over my life I can see periods of falling, dark times when uncertainty abounded and hopelessness seemed to be my lot. I can also see times when I seemed to be flying, times of self-discovery, love, and unbounded possibility. What I notice now, what takes my breath away, is that from the vantage point of my aging vision, I never seemed to be able to tell one from the other.

I know that to accomplish the leap that seems to be calling and awaiting me, I’m going to have to fall, maybe fly some, fall even more, and put everything at risk, to fly some more. I keep thinking it would be good for me if I knew the difference. I thought I did, but now, I’m not so sure, that I could recognize it, or do anything about it.

I have learned, looking back, that when I thought I was falling, and was lost, alone and afraid, that I was actually flying, a creature in a dark sky. When I thought I was flying, seemingly assured I was going somewhere, feeling a modicum of control, I was actually tumbling, with disarray toward my inevitable end. Through some trickery, a reversal happens, that I fail to notice, so greatly am I tied up in believing I have an idea about what is going on.

Flying and falling. They both accompany the kind of leap I am anticipating. At least, I hope so. I know I am most afraid of the falling. Maybe that is all I will know. My worst fears gather around being old, infirm, helpless, unknown, falling by the wayside. It helps to know that this might be what flying looks like. But, I’m only human, I don’t actually know, even my experience and the way I think about it, might lead me to misunderstand, to think myself arrived when I’m actually underway, to believe I am falling or flying, when all along it is the opposite.

I don’t get to know with any certainty. I just get to leap. It appears that it really makes no difference what I know, or what I think I know, I get to have the consequences of leaping, or not leaping, anyway.

That’s why I call this leap, a mundane career change by a nearly senior citizen, throwing myself into the grave. No matter what, that is where I end up. Knowing, or not knowing, falling, or flying, it all leads to the same place. Ah, but the manner of going, isn’t that my saving grace? Throwing myself, isn’t that flying? Isn’t that more dignified, and better, than just falling into the grave? Could be, but there is this pesky awareness, that I can’t really tell the difference, and stuff keeps changing into its opposite.

What is a mere human to do? Fall and fly, never be sure which is which, and risk it anyway. Yes, I guess so. I can hardly believe, or tolerate, that being human has to mean being so vulnerable. The grave takes on a more inviting hue from the perspective of life. I think peace is an inviting prospect. But on the other hand; no flying at all, doesn’t seem worth the possibility of peace. Leaping, will no doubt do me in, but so will not leaping. This is all I get to decide, which way I go into the grave. Flying, or falling, it will ultimately all be the same. But, I know I will be different for having given myself the chance to enter the grave kicking.

I don’t know about you, but I find that having to make this level of choice is both hard (almost impossible) and makes living worth doing. The uncertainty is difficult but I don’t think I would relish life so much without it.

Catch and Release

I remembered a time, when I was young, probably 10 or so, when I used to get up early in the morning and go fishing. In a rather cruel form of childhood recreation I used to catch and release blue gill. I guess I got to feel somehow powerful because I could bait these beautiful but hungry fish onto my hook. I never once, in my childhood, thought about what these fish might have been experiencing. That memory haunts me, as I recall being caught and released.

When I had the stroke I had no idea that life had just caught me. But, I would learn. I was drug out of the water of everything I had ever known. No matter how I wriggled I could not free myself, in fact the hook went deeper. I could have died, perhaps should have, maybe did die in some ways, but was ultimately thrown back in, to live another day in waters that have been forever changed by the hook, and the journey of being caught and released.

Life has become a more complex experience since that time. I no longer believe that what seems to be, really is. The darkness seems to be so deep, deep enough perhaps, to make the light really bright. The more I know that I don’t know anything, the closer to the truth I get. The waters, once they changed, keep changing, and I am lured and landed with each shift. I have a kind of post-traumatic memory. 

I am, because of the vividness of losing, still there, still caught — something hard, inscrutable, exists in me, a gut-wrenching recollection — and I am in the shock of re-birth, of being tossed back. There is nothing now that does not remind me that this moment is fleeting and that radical change is always here. I am caught, horrified from time to time, by the same perception that releases me. I am in the flow of Life but I am not that flow.

I have a hard time being around someone who is bored. I don’t get boredom in the midst  of a natural disaster, like the recent earthquake in Japan. I want to yell, “Wake up! Wake up to the near-death experience you are having.” That is how caught I sometimes am. I forget that I have also experienced release. I am disillusioned, and thereby freed of old limiting beliefs. I am diminished and thereby enlarged. I have had my life taken away from me, and thereby been reintroduced to this improbable miracle I experience as new life.

Being caught always, being released always, makes it hard for me to participate in the day-to-day life that goes on around me. Sometimes I feel crazy. How can anything matter so much? What am I doing here? What’s really going on here? I am caught in a world that is crazy-making, filled with so much pain, despair and hopelessness. I am simultaneously released into that same world and it is unimaginably beautiful, aware, and exquisitely alive. Frequently I am just confused, weepy and uncertain. I can’t even really explain it, to myself or to anyone.

I’ve tried to think about it. Is there anything I have brought back from the edge that I can give my fellow beings, my friends, my community, my kind? I was reduced to nothing, to helplessness and hopelessness (I had to be, in order to learn), I was suspended there for a long time (I had to be, to be rendered available), caught by who knows what, and I am being brought back to life (I’m learning to praise Creation).

You’d think I would have something. I do and I don’t. I know this isn’t the whole story, and I know it is a mixed, more complex story than most of us have been led to believe, and I guess now I know that not-knowing how to live in this mad-dash world is appropriate. I wish I could say something more solid, but there appears to me to be nothing solid about the world, or perhaps it’s just me.

I recall how banal was the cruelty of my childhood passion for catching and releasing fish. I remember that I read the Book of Job during my ordeal. I was looking for some way to make sense of the suffering imposed upon my life. I have never overcome the experience I had of the darkness of God, the inscrutability of the Void, the carelessness of evolution. Now I rest on this brink of time, alive with possibility, quivering, knowing that it is all passing so quickly, and deeply thankful, that despite everything, the years of hopeless longing, I have one more chance, that I exist, caught and released into this life.

Solitude In Relationship

I’m in frontier land. And, I’m way off balance. Nothing new about those conditions, I guess, except I’m not alone this time. That fact makes me feel more responsible and gives me a little more incentive. I like having the opportunity that a new friendship affords me. There is a particular challenge however, that I know is bound to crop up, and I want to see what kind of gumption I’m going to need to face this relationship inevitability.

I’m talking about losing myself, and my tendency to lose contact when that happens. I’m savvy enough as a relationship/systems therapist to know that if I let this friendship become significant enough to me, I’m going to have a hard time holding onto me. What is so special about me? Why does this even matter? Well, the short answer is that I’m all I’ve got. If I get lost, for too long, then I will surrender my ability to relate. I will hurt me, and I might hurt someone else. And strangely, it might be because the relationship is too good.

You can see why I might be apprehensive. This is probably a case of knowing too much. I have worked with a lot of couples, and a few communities, where someone went absent because they couldn’t hold onto themselves. I’m a believer, that relationships are “people growing machines,” (Schnarch) that there is an inevitability to the way a relationship eventually eclipses personal development.

I am not really interested in losing myself. I’ve worked hard to get to know me and it seems I’m a better person for knowing myself, certainly I’m happier. But, all of that occurs out of relationship. If I want a relationship, and I do, then, unless I’m going to condemn this budding opportunity to a predetermined distance, then I’ve got to find a way to regain my hold on myself when this relationship exceeds my expectations.

The working theory I have now, the desperate hope I’m clinging to, is that my relationship with myself can be strong enough that it will never go away for long. I don’t know if I can trust myself that much. I know I’ll find out, if I let myself proceed into this relationship. I’m willing to find out, and I’m knowing that there will come a time, when I won’t have the capacity I need. My relationship with myself is going to reach its limits. This is what a good relationship is guaranteed to expose in me, the reality of my self-love. I know this is the good and the bad news of caring about another.

I don’t like knowing my own limits. It hurts too much, and is filled with such self-doubt. Still, I also know that this is the real gold, the true reason for relationship. I get to know the truth of who I am. I also get the chance to become someone else, someone more, someone who has gone beyond who I used to be. The problem is that I don’t know if I’m going to grow myself until I get there, and find out how I need to grow myself. The risk of relationship is not just that I might be rejected by someone else, but that I might reject my self. I might not confront myself, and become what I need to become, to love another, to love myself, as I need to.

I’m banking on solitude. I came to really know myself by hanging out, and cultivating a relationship, with me. I know, as a marital therapist, that people don’t generally enter relationship to be alone.  This form of aloneness, I’ve learned, is also inevitable. I can’t tell you the number of times someone felt that being alone in their relationship meant something is wrong, with their partner, with themselves, or with the relationship. I’m counting on being alone. I won’t have anything to bring to another if I’m not.

Aloneness paradoxically looks like the relationship path I need. I know that if I am going to be myself, and remain true to me, then I have to stay in constant relationship with me, at present that looks like more solitude. Maybe there will be a day when my grip on myself is so solid that I will not be in jeopardy of losing my balance, but that day doesn’t seem to be here. Till then, I will have to practice the paradox of solitude in relationship.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

The Rut

This morning I’m reflecting on my own tendency to corral and trap myself. I have just entered a friendship with a new person in my life. This is a source of great joy for me. But, it is also a reason for soberly looking at all of my past relationship ways. I have some patterns I would like to forego. I don’t want my anxiety to determine how available I am in this friendship. And I can’t help but see that when I lose myself out of anxiety, or disconnect for similar reasons, I have repeated a pattern that I have been hurt by many times, and that I have hurt others with just as often. It all seems to be related to the way (the rut) I choose to live.

I’ve been talking with my new friend about the very human tendency to create systems of thought and activity and then to get captured by them. I know I can, and do, frequently corner myself in this manner. I have actually been aware of this tendency for a long time. As a psychotherapist I work, almost daily, with people (individuals, couples and groups) who have created for themselves the prisons they are struggling to free themselves from. The once-imagined mansion on the hill has all of a sudden become the prison cell.  And, this happens over and over again.

I don’t much like knowing this. I know I am not immune to it. My mansions, my systems, have become the ruts I trap myself, and others with. Although I know this is utterly human and probably unavoidable, I chafe against this knowledge, this self-defeating and pain-causing attribute of who I am. I have even gone so far as to imagine that I should wear a sign, much like the surgeon general’s warning, that says “danger — relationship with this person could be bad for your health.”

I haven’t figured out a way to escape from the prison-building rut-inducing warden of myself yet. But, I keep trying. And failing. I take some solace from a friend of mine who is a developmental scientist. She says that one of the states of adult development, that is seldom reached, but possible, is what she calls “construct-aware.” That means, as I understand her, that one can achieve a state of awareness where one can realize they are creating constructs, I think she means favored belief and action structures, systems or ruts in my terms, and through awareness, not be captured by them. I hope so.

In the meantime though, I am saddled with the unsettling partial awareness that I am creating these elegant ruts for myself, and maintaining distances with my latest versions, and am unable to stop myself. Every direction I look I am implicated in causing pain and restriction. I wish that weren’t true. I’m afraid it is though. I don’t really take comfort from knowing that this is an aspect of the human condition.

What can I do? Right now, it seems that all I’m really capable of, is creating suffering, and being aware that I am doing it. I have compassion enough for myself to know that being aware, of the damage I’m causing. is something. But, I want to stop it. Or, so I tell myself. The trouble is, and it is deeply humbling to admit it, I don’t know how to stop. Do you? If so, please help me. If you, like me, are a perpetrator and victim of your ruts, then you have my heart-felt sympathy.

Maybe my new friendship will be a help with this. We have talked about it. We have tried changing things around to avoid the ruts we know about. But, I haven’t yet admitted, until now, that I am totally caught in the web I keep spinning. I can’t seem to help myself and I know I am dangerous.

I want to do better. I really do. I know that the kind of relationships I am capable of, and the kind of community I build (and allow), are governed by the ruts I create, and indulge in. I spent all of last year writing, and thinking about freedom, and the tyranny of the self, and this is the amount of progress I’ve made with my on-going struggle to free you, and I, from the one in me who governs what I do.

I am glad to have come this far, to know my real responsibility for what is happening, and I feel sad and desperate. There is nothing grand about the suffering I do, or the hurt I create. Forgive me! And forgive anyone else you know who is doing it. This is part of my brokenness. It is part of my poignant, mysteriously imperfect humanity. In truth, it is part of the nakedness with which I arrive at this our shore.

Anti-Structure

This will probably be a Slow Lane that many will not enjoy. Why? Because; it is going to be about an idea, then later about me. This idea came to me when I was in graduate school, doing research on a psychological sense of community. It has taken nearly 25 years of experience for me to realize some of the true meaning behind this idea. I hope to share this idea with you, and then begin to explore the complex meaning that this idea has brought into my life. The idea, very simply put, is that the forms that surround all psychological, spiritual and community practices, get in the way. Here’s what I mean.

In graduate school (in the 80s) I was unable to find, in the psychological literature, any references to collective (shared) states of consciousness. This drove me to the anthropological literature; there I found several accounts, having to do with hallucinogens (shamanic use), ritual (by indigenous people) and rites-of-passage (communal rituals). I found the work of Victor Turner, a cultural anthropologist, who’s interest in symbols led him to observe many communal rituals, through which he recognized rituals that evoked a shift from individual to collective states of consciousness. He spent a good deal of his career describing and analyzing these rites, and the states they evoked. His work inspired me to look at the Community-building Workshop (CBW a copyright of FCE) as a contemporary collective ritual process.

While reading Turner I came across a book of his entitled Structure and Anti-Structure. I didn’t really understand the significance of what he was pointing out in this work, until now. At the time, I only understood that if limenality was going to arise collectively (the source of community feelings) then the normal structures of social life have to go away. Now, I think he was referring to something much larger and all-encompassing then that.

Now, I believe he was trying to articulate his awareness that structures, of all sorts, impede awareness of the primeval bonds that we all share.

This realization has grown more important to me. At first, I didn’t know that structures, such as meditational,  psychotherapeutic, or ritual practices and communal guidelines, could so easily, if I held to them too tightly, lead me astray. I found most of these practices to be very useful. But, as time went along, something surprising, and hard to explain, began to happen.

Success came less easily, and I began to resent (at first unconsciously) the very practices and guidelines that once served me. Where once those practices freed me, now it seemed that they were ineffective and even bound me. I came to resent, people in the earlier stages of this awareness, who were practice or guideline “Nazis” to me. The structure these practices and guidelines imposed, were great training wheels, but they actually kept me from riding freely.

Further on in my development, I’ve come to realize that these practices and guidelines do not produce an experience. I do. I mistook the practices for the thing itself. I relied on guidelines to produce community when all along it resided in me. As long as I looked outside myself, as the practices and guidelines seemed to have encouraged me to do, I missed my own capacity, my own responsibility, for being the change I sought. I couldn’t live in community, if, as I once believed, community was only a product of the shared practice of guidelines. I was lucky, perhaps it was my training as a transpersonal psychologist, but I somehow realized community was a state of consciousness, that was more dependent upon me, than on the guidelines and practices.

This has been a good, important, and hard lesson for me. Realizing that what I seek exists outside of practices and guidelines is scary and liberating. Facing my own responsibility for living inside, or outside, of these desired states is another matter. I don’t even know how to talk about the paradoxical nature of what I am realizing. For instance, I am not sure how I feel about the fact that these states exist inside me. Even community, which involves the paradoxical other, is as available to me, as I allow it to be. Community exists inside and outside of me. I know that it is always available, but I am not always willing, or able, to feel it. Somehow my consciousness is implicated.

All I know for the moment is that the practices are not the states I seek and that I have some responsibility, in how I use my consciousness, for living in what I desire. I seem to get the exact proportion of any of these experiences that I can handle. I know now that that says more about me than it does about these states. I seem to be the structure that is in my way. How paradoxical, because I am what has enabled me to get this far too. Happily, though I don’t always rely on this knowing — emptying, letting go, and jumping into the grave — are all anti-structural.