Mystery

I am thinking that the best way for me to achieve some measure of true humility would be to really take-in the level of unknown I live with. Mystery can help me gain the proper perspective. Uncertainty greatly enhances my chances of finding humility in myself, by revealing the world to me as partial as we humans make it. It is pretty unlikely that I will mistakenly act bigger than I am, in the face of the large hole in everything that is the unknown.

When I mistakenly think I know something, I leave out the best part of everything. There is a crack that runs through everything, Leonard Cohen writes - it does let the light in - and the light comes along with uncertainty. Usually imperceptible, invisible forces move in the realms beyond our imagination. Great feats, that appear to be magical, or miraculous, originate in unknown places. What I know is so small, while what I don't know is so large.

I say, I am aware of a "higher power," but I am reticent to let that "higher power" have the room that comprises the unknown to move in. It moves there regardless of my limitations, but I like to think I know what's going on, or how things should play out. Unknowing is more freedom than I can bear, more humility too. I should know I am building sand castles before the tide. Instead I ignore that inconvenient truth.

Reverence for the larger mystery of who we are, starts with some kind of acknowledgement of greater Mystery. I know this, and I don't know it. This kind of unknowing is ignorance, there is another kind, that is a rare form of wisdom. I know about it, but I am largely unable to practice it. Ripening, my ripening, happens as I am infused with more and more unknowing. It would be better for me, if I didn't call this phenomenon confusion, or dementia, but recognized it for what it is, the onset of radical availability to Mystery, immersion, in the sea of unknowingness that supports us.

Getting more and more mesmerized by the moment is frowned upon in most circles. It is tantamount to senility. Only the great masters are supposed to be capable of it. They have a legacy to uphold, a lineage of the enlightened behind them, and diligent practices. They embody the love that spawned this Universe. Strangely, so do some of the old, those who have been shrunken by Life, and enlarged by Mystery. Not knowing is some kind of passageway. It isn't just a passive one — though— there is a cost. Unknowing means giving up knowing, not like giving up eyesight, but more like learning to rely on inner sight to compliment what one sees.

I sense myself growing in the night, becoming some other life form —hopefully, a more humble one — softened up by the tides of unknowing beyond my control and understanding. There is a quickening happening in me. I can feel it. It isn't happening because I want it too, or at any speed I might desire. Life seems to me to be carrying the load, aging me into a fresh awareness. The unknown seems friendlier, like a benefactor in disguise. I wonder who or what is there?

Life

I am a human being. My life is messy, just like everybody else's. I am an unusual human because of what I experienced. Life selected me for a rather difficult blessing. My life was turned upside down by a surge of blood and a rare brain syndrome. I have never recovered from those losses, and to this day I am thankful. You see,  I was introduced to a different way of seeing things through that hellish experience. So much so, that by and large people don't really get how transformative this experience really was. I am writing this piece to try once more to give voice to what happened.

There is a very humbling reality that awaits us all. Death is easy, but getting there isn't. Being stripped of everything that one once relied upon for an identity is earth-rattling. It's what happens as one is being reduced. Ripening holds this very frightening aspect. As life drains away,  it imparts a strange liberation. At least it did for me. For once, I knew what I was doing here, in this twisted and complex reality, discovering who I was, and learning about the real value of these precious relationships. I disappeared. Extinguished by Life, only to become more fully Life's.

There is no way to capture with words the confusing whirlpool of sensation that came along with the experience of being taken apart and put back together again. I died, but I didn't die. My life ended, and Life's life took over. Not completely, but enough so that what is human in me is only a part of what remains. There were no super powers, no great insight, no spiritual abilities, just a throbbing sensitivity. I've been trying to figure out what's happened ever since.

In some strange way I can feel people. I can't read minds, I don't get to know someone's history or intentions, instead I seem to be able to feel their sincerity, and the strength/fragility of their emotional heart. I was sensitized by the hardship I went through, introduced, I believe, to some of the depth of the human heart. I don't believe I was carried away, instead I was carried in. Inside, I have been introduced to some of the human potential that is ours by virtue of our intimate connection with Nature.

To my particular form of restrained joy, in my suffering, I got to know that we may assume that we humans have stumbled badly and neglected our relationship with Life, but it hasn't forgotten us. That realization, that Life continues to hold us, in all of our rushing insensitivity, has made being unbalanced and unable to walk more than worthwhile. I am "Lucky" because I get to live with an overall awareness that Life has my back. The pleasure I feel goes deeper, I also get to know this is true for everybody else too.

I can't prove it. I don't even want to. This is a pleasure each of us needs to discover for ourselves. There is something utterly human about our need to discover things for ourselves. This is one of the things I admire the most about we humans. Yet, somehow Life pitches in, making the discovery feel completely autonomous while simultaneously helping. There is a secret agent at our backs! I appreciate the help, it has enriched my life, and lately, as I'm getting older, reenchanted this life.

Now, I live the connected life. I'm not used to it, thus I'm not very good at it. But, I'm getting better. In the meantime, I'm learning how to love what's right there in front of me, knowing somehow that Life put it (them) there for me to discover. This life has become something else, something beyond my making, something I get to wake up to each day. And, you know what's really cool, I have discovered this is a significant part of what old age is about. Eldering seems to be about discovering the help inside. Wow!

Now, I get to have the mixed, and sensitizing experience of realizing that not everyone knows how blessed we are. I don't have a way of integrating the way we humans are making so much trouble for each other. I feel plenty of grief about that. There is an aggravating and mysterious hurt associated with this facet of life. But, this grief is tempered, and becomes more connective, when I remember Life is on the scene. I am pleased to be old enough now to appreciate it all.

l/d

Grief and Praise

Human life is impossible. It is so complex, daunting, demanding and exasperating. It is amazing that most of us make it through it. Life is also miraculous. I wonder just as often, about how it could be as poignant as painful? There is so much beauty, compassion, joy, and outright celebration. It is mind-boggling, that both are so vivid, and present at any given moment.

I can’t help but be impressed, though at times I’m just as chagrined.

I want to write about grief and praise, about how they seem to come together, about how they are the same thing.  I’m sure I don’t have the words to capture this deeply mysterious phenomenon, but I feel compelled to try. Life would not be Life if it did not contain this perplexing quality, and I am alive, and want to be fully alive while I’m here. So, this mysterious and beguiling feature of existence captures my attention.

Here’s a secret I’ve never told. I laugh and I cry when I have a very powerful orgasm. I’ve had the experience enough now (I’ve been fortunate) so that I can describe it, and how my relationship with it has morphed over the years. At first, I thought about it as revealing some unsavory demented part of me. I didn’t want it to happen. It almost turned me off from lovemaking. Happily, I’m a guy, and that feeling didn’t last very long. Still, I’ve kept it a secret, because I couldn’t reconcile the hilarity I felt, with the forlorn feeling that also overcame me. I was torn, so much so, and so predictably, that I came (so to speak) to relate to these experiences as like being thrown into an ocean of feelings.

In my later years, I began to realize that I was indeed falling into an ocean of feelings. It existed somewhere beneath, or above, my awareness. I don’t know to this day if it is an ocean of unfelt feelings, or if it’s the feelings that reflect the way things are. I know I go there now, more knowingly, bereft but joyous, shrunken into a smallness I can hardly comprehend, and lifted somehow.  It is a death I cannot deny, and a birth that scalds me with a strange elation. I relish it and fear it. It is mine and it is not mine.

Anyway, what has this got to do with grief and praise? I don’t know, but something in my experience makes clear to me, that two seemingly opposite feelings can coexist as one. My experience of grief constantly threatens to overwhelm me. I rue my own awareness. The world is a vail of tears! It hurts just to be alive, and it hurts even more, if one tries to be more alive. Humankind is some kind of demonic miracle, so violent and insensitive, while so vulnerable and loveable.  One cannot say enough good about us, and one cannot say enough about our carelessness and cruelty.

I marvel that some beings had enough awareness to realize that grief and praise both arise out of the same place. Just as orgasm breaks me open, so  does grief and praise. I can go either way, and I end up in the same feeling state. There is no protection. Oh, I could neglect this portion of reality, but if I do so, I lose my passport to truly being here, human, alive, and really present.

More than my heart is opened. How is that possible? In essence, it takes my whole being to actively grieve what I’m experiencing. What collapses in me with the weight of grief, grows my perception of the exquisite beauty of everything, passing so quickly, illuminating the world. I am enlivened by what drags me down, and lifts me up. I feel a pervasive vulnerability that binds me to all things, I am essentially grown by a dual-awareness of unity.

This kind of illumination awaits me, all I have to do is really take stock of my existence. I don’t know about you, but I am a pretty broken guy. I am old, disabled, sometimes forgetful, afraid of how little control I have, totally dependent and often overwhelmed. Somehow the Universe has conspired to make my imperfection, like yours, perfect. I think that calls for grief and praise.

The Initiating Wound

I don’t know how to start this piece. I don’t know if I’m writing what I intend, because I want to inform my reader, relieve some heartache, or praise the beauty of Creation. This piece, I suspect will be a hodge-podge of all of those things. I don’t think I’m gifted enough to tease those things apart. But maybe, I’m reverent enough to just let them be; connected, beguiling, and some mysterious expression of the miracle of humanness. Surrendering before the Mystery of our being here is all I can muster.

What I want to write about is the initiating wound. I don’t know how this recognition of Life’s wily compassion first came to me, but I remember writing an article for a men’s journal in 1985 that held the first seeds of this perception. At the time, I didn’t have the advantage of the perspective granted me by my long life-experience, my years as a therapist, or my dive over the edge of the abyss. But somehow I already knew. Life stained me just right. It gave me the right quantum of agony and uncertainty to deliver me to real richness.

I don’t know how such a thing is possible. I don’t even know if others have anything like this experience. I believe so, but I don’t know. What I do know, because I’ve experienced it, is that I’ve been propelled through many sensitizing moments that hurt like hell, and been delivered to a place where now I can see that what hurt me opened me. What limited me, gave me an outlet for incredible creativity. What was filled with heartache, became a fountain of meaning and poignant freedom.

I now have a strange bittersweet feeling every time I hear someone lament the particular gash Life has doled out to them. I know better than to celebrate, but inside I feel a sense of ironic praise. I know and believe the hurting, the searing cost of being granted a painful gift. My compassion gets so activated.

I can get angry too. I know this is a sign that I haven’t totally accepted this awareness yet, but I rankle, when someone collapses under the weight of what they have been granted. When they spend too much time complaining about how much it hurts. I know I’m in no position to judge. Life has its own rhythms. I still have a lot to learn about sitting in the cleansing fire.

Recently, a guest on our radio show (Growing an Elder Culture on KOWS fm.) said of elder awareness that it contained “the burning of one’s past.” By that I think he meant that the wounds and heartaches of one’s childhood no longer haunt and limit one. I tend to believe him. I don’t think that fate or angels, however, swoop into one’s life and remove them. I think that they morph as one begins to have a different relationship with what once disabled one. What once was full of limitations, failures and shame, through Life’s poignant alchemy have grown into extraordinary sensitivities. Poisonous pain has become the nectar of awakening.

How is such a thing possible? I don’t know a therapist, doctor, or any kind of human healer that aspires to do what Life does. It just happens. Not to everyone, I’m fairly sure. Some destinies, keep us guessing. But some, give us reason to look deeply into the mysteries of existence, and wonder.

It is as if the wondering is some active ingredient in Creation.

Crisis

I live in the fire-riddled north bay. It has been a couple of weeks since we were all shocked by the vehemence of the firestorm. In those first 7 to 10 days, an aura of crisis accompanied the smoke. People were missing, homeless, and uncertain. The flames burned at more than some of our favorite spots, but at our hearts. It was a time of terrible vulnerability.

I have noticed, over the years, that times like these tend to bring the best out of people. There was an opening of hearts and homes, of supplies and of volunteerism. Life slowed its steady pace, and became a gradual offer of arms, tears, and gratitude for others. Gratitude and grief flowed over the fire-ravaged landscape. Along with the heartache, there was a great feeling of togetherness. For the time of the fires, reflected in the light of the flames, emerged a sense of community.

It is with this that I find myself dwelling today. I am heartened that so much of the general populace of this area rose up and cared about each other. This showed me something. We are social animals, we respond to each other’s pain. We want to address the damage done. We will help each other (even if we don’t know how). I could feel the way differences of skin-color, social status, or religious affiliations melted in the heat of the moment. Strangers cried and held each other.  We just knew we all shared the same vulnerability — something so awesome and unstoppable assailed us.

I knew that crisis is a powerful community-builder. I’ve known that for a long-time, although I’m always touched when it does happen. Still, I catch myself wondering about the human spirit. Why does it take a crisis for us to come together? I want to always feel strong in the ways I have found strength in our neighborhoods, schools, and cities. There seems to be something in our shared vulnerability that catalyzes a caring response in us. Thank God, but what is it about us, that sheds protective layers for the sake of others?

Whatever it is, crisis arouses it. I’ve come to believe that it is shared vulnerability, although, of course, I don’t know. I am so impressed by the sense of kinship that arises when people go through hardship together. I am sometimes envious, but mostly awed. Identity has suddenly been transformed, and teammates become buddies, neighbors become family, and housemates become life-long friends; all because they survived something life-threatening together.

I marvel at this. Others have noticed. In the nineties, many groups tried to replicate this sense of emergency to bring their people together. The pseudo-crisis worked, it brought people together short-term, but after the emergency, real or imagined passed, so did the cohesion of the group. Something more is needed to make the feeling last.

In my mind a lasting crisis is what it takes to provide an on-going sense of community. Something so threatening, at an existential level, that vulnerability is an everyday, everyway experience for all. But, I’m not even convinced of that. You see, in my mind, the crisis of living should be enough. After all, no one gets through this experience alive, and it happens to all of us, there are no exceptions. Isn’t the assurance of death enough? Isn’t aging challenging enough to soften the heart? It is for me. Isn’t the amount of unknown we all live with great enough?

Somehow we manage to block out of our awareness just how vulnerable we are. Maybe this is what it takes to go ahead with life, but I tend to think that if we humans actually felt our day-to-day vulnerability, we would be both more alive and more connected with each other. The vulnerability, we share with all of Life, passing so quickly, could, if we let it show, be just the thing that evokes in us, the tender regard for all, that is the true source of our strength.

Elder Absent-Mindedness

This is what paradoxical awareness does.

It’s already nearly November, the year has just flown by. My life, this gift from Mystery, has gone by so fast. Now I’m getting old, and I’m just beginning to get why I might be here. At the same time, I’ve waited a painfully long slow slog coming to some kind of recognition of what I am, what we all are. There have been eras of heartache, loss, and wondering, that passed so slowly that I thought they would never end. “This too shall pass,” was a speedy way of saying this might last awhile. I live in a world that is going faster than I want, and slower than I can bear. Both are happening, bewilderingly, at once.

I’m old enough now, that I’m starting to penetrate the fog of rushing business I kept myself (and my world) under control with, and I feel like a toddler walking on the freeway. It seems like everything is zooming by me. It took me this long to show up, and I am about to die. Old age is a human accelerator guaranteed to get me up to a speed up to where I can pop out of this body. Old age is an eternity of slowing down that makes me forget the little stuff in favor of what matters. I’m dizzy from going too fast/slow, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.  The moment is looking pretty good right now.

I am much more facile with my feelings now. What used to take me forever to notice, and express, now comes in little intense bursts. Wake-up calls that arouse me, leave me shaken, and more vulnerable than I ever knew. I like feeling this alive, and this near death. I want to walk through it all like I’m in some unanticipated cathedral, and I find myself running for my life. It is uncanny — feeling how grief and praise intermingle in my body — I feel lighter when I’m swept before a wave of grief, and heavier if I keep my head above the storm surge.

My relationships have a patina of wonder to them now. I am more connected and more alone than I have ever been. I know that the more I know someone, the more wonder and uncertainty about who they are haunts and freshens what transpires between us. I also know that my relationship within, determines the depth of my relationship with others. And, as the mystery of myself grows, so my sense of unknowing wonder increases. In some strange way, getting better acquainted with others, is acquainting me more with myself. The boundary between self and other is becoming both more solid and more permeable.

I am drowning in a sea of conflicting sensations. Bereft, at the turn of political events, and elated, about the unifying response to that encroaching darkness. I’m so close to others, and yet so far away. Laughter and sobs intermingle, defining my grief and my orgasms. Living seems to be a form of dying. I get away with nothing, and yet I feel supported. The days go by, in accelerating patterns, but kaliedescopically broken and slow. I want this life to add up to something, and it is filled with nothingness. I am tossed by the waves, and enjoy a head wind, all carrying me beyond myself into some other alien being. Life has tricked me into thinking it matters, but I have no idea how. Openness, flexibility, and unknowing, seem to be my fate, yet I like to know what’s going on.

This feeling of being connected, and in the flow, is a strangely solitary experience.  I feel the other humans around me like a star feels the other stars that surround it. The distances in an expanding Universe, are growing. The more I subjectively link with someone the more I notice how far away they actually are. The void has its binding power. I am relaxing, knowing that quicksand is my fate.  All of these tricky sensations tell me I’m on course, but my trajectory is carrying me beyond any gravitational pull I know.

Freedom dominates my attention now, but it seems to mean moving into a larger unknown space. It is wonderfully unbounded and terrifyingly unrecognizable. I am being drawn into a vast unknowing, just as I have learned how to be here. Life is pushing me to be more, as it is making me less. I am at the mercy of the unknown, at just the moment when wisdom is supposed to be dawning in me.

Maybe, all of these cross currents make of wisdom, not something you have, rather something that has you.