Off the Map

What Doesn't Kill Us....

2010-08-26T22:01:00.000-07:00

As you may have guessed from the time elapsed since I last wrote, my mom withered away and died. When she passed on August 5, she was 10 days shy of her 82nd birthday. Her illness threw my family into a tizzy. And now, after her death, my family is falling apart. I don’t know if this will last – I hear it’s common for siblings to fight in these situations – but my feeling is that the future has been forever altered. Personality traits and disorders that were hard to take before are now unbearable. Damaging things have been said and done. The most troubled of us has turned me into the villain with very little cause, and for six months I’ve been simultaneously shut out and provoked. In circumstances where we should be supporting each other, this is simply too much on top of a lifetime of similar behavior. It feels pretty unforgivable – this coming from somebody who forgives and forgives until the word doormat appears on her forehead. I told her I’d had it and to have a good life.

In fact, life really sucks right now. I can usually do the Zen thing, but so much has happened at once that I’m unable to pull it off this go around. In addition to mom’s death, we recently moved. And we did it on our own. Tough, tough work. Then, my employer is undergoing a crisis. I love my job but the company is falling apart, just like my family. Fortunately and hopefully, though, an organizational consultant will help us put things back together. Last, my husband injured his arm and has to stay home on L&I. He may not be able to go back to his job, and since jobs are scarce for us over-fifty folks, and we have no savings, I’m frightened. All the events above have also caused some marital strife. Nothing we can’t handle, but it adds to the statement at the start of this paragraph.

Oh yes, the last thing going on: terrible PMS, made worse by perimenopause and stress. And, the research says, women with depression and anxiety disorders tend to experience an increase in those very things during the menopausal years.

Am I taking care of myself? As best I can, though without money and means to go to what really matters - the ocean, the warm sun, and discovering new places – looking for other outlets like inexpensive yoga classes or streets I haven’t walked feels like band aids for a broken arm. One thing I am greatly looking forward to is starting a printmaking class at Pratt in late September. For eight weeks, each Wednesday from 10-2, I will combine color, texture and paper to create what may be the most meaningful art of my life. It may not be pretty, but it will contain volumes: all the emotion that these last six months have stirred up, from events that haven’t been - and may never be - resolved.

(The photo here is of the tree in my parents' back yard that split in two around the same day mom got her cancer diagnosis. Some symbolism, huh?)

Losing Mom

2010-03-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

My mother has terminal cancer.

Six weeks ago I dreamed of a long haired woman stirring a cauldron of liquid. She was placing garments in it, swirling them around and taking them out. I asked what she was doing and before she could answer, the word “dyeing” popped into my dreaming brain.

I awoke a bit unnerved by what that dream might signify. Several months ago in my therapist’s office, I began to talk about losing my parents, even though there were no indicators of serious ill health in either of their 81-year-old bodies. We explored my terror of their deaths and of my emotions when that finally did happen. Back then, it was academic.

Over Christmas, an antique clock in my parent's house, stopped for years, stood out sharply on its shelf on one particularly bright winter day. I remember a quiet melancholy about it, wondering how much longer this clock, this house, this family, would stay unchanged after so many years of stability, predictability, and health.

Now I have just returned from a trip to see my mother, who only 2 weeks ago was diagnosed with bronchioloalveolar carcinoma. Some kind of post nasal drip had bothered her throughout the fall and winter, but she dismissed it. A routine chest x-ray in October showed nothing out of the ordinary. But several weeks ago she began to feel worse, and was admitted to the hospital for what was thought to be bacterial pneumonia. Tests and now-clouded x-rays were inconclusive, and were forwarded to Massachusetts General, which responded with a diagnosis of lung cancer.

The doctor told us as Dad, older sister and I had been smiling with mom about how much better she felt since taking steroids for her “pneumonia.” She had just been commenting on how nice it would be to live to 100.

The news now is that mom may have only a handful of weeks to live. She is not strong enough for chemo, mostly due to her age but partly because of her weakened condition. The new drug Tarceva, from a different class of treatment that targets the cancer, may buy her a few months, but it works in only 1 in 3 people. We are all preparing for the inevitable, as is she, and it has been an excruciating time these last couple of weeks coming to know and accept her prognosis. Mom may be 81 but until this winter was as active as ever, with all kind of projects planned – memoirs, living history interviews with the locals, more volunteer work for the library – fingers in lots of community pies. A few years ago, at age 78, she got her college degree. We held a party in her honor; so many people came!

I am so glad we got to spend Christmas with her and Dad at their home in upstate New York. This was a rarity, since they usually flew out to the west coast to spend it here, where three of her four children live. Now, mom says she wants a bench erected in one of the city parks here in Seattle, near all her kids. Talk about heart rending– she always felt sad that we were all so far away.

Although this is what people do – live and die – and none of us gets out alive, it still feels like a bad dream. She will be the first person really close to me who has died. I will finally join the ranks of all those who have lost a parent. Though it makes me feel very alone, I know that I am far from it. I only wish our culture, and our families, better prepared us for it. The taboo and shadow that exists around dealing openly with death is so deep and wide, I am certain it adds immensely, and unnecessarily, to our pain about it.

To Have and Have Not (or, Crazy is the New Sane)

2010-01-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

You know about the Middle Way, right? It's the Buddhist maxim about balance and moderation - a great concept that acknowledges tendencies toward extremes while generally advocating the middle of the road. The problem I have with the Middle Way is staying mentally centered while being exquisitely aware of what’s out of balance. To address that comes another saying: that to get by in this world, you must live in denial. Otherwise, how could you choose those (probable) sweatshop clothes at the department store? How could you justify the carbon footprint of your faraway vacation? Or the fact that you eat well while so many don’t? You need to put these things out of your mind in order to move forward. If you don’t, you are left with rationalizations: well, this is what’s here , it’s on sale, and it’s not my fault I was born into the middle class in a wealthy country during a wealthy era. This is what I have to work with; there’s no use denying that reality.

This happens every time I go into Whole Foods – something about the place makes me happy, even knowing what I know about this world. Recently I realized it’s the sheer profusion of choices - especially in the prepared food section, and especially at Christmas - that creates an undeniably comforting sense of abundance. Never mind that you have to navigate a gauntlet of homeless-newspaper vendors and nonprofit charities (that you’ve already talked to) before making it into the store. (The Girl Scouts at their card tables out front are at least offering us something we want – comfort in the form of cookies.) What I really want to say in this guilt-inducing scenario is "Hey, I know you probably have a worthy cause, but I gave last time, or maybe it was to that other group like yours, but I have only so much money, and I know YOU don’t know all of that, so you have to try, but please don’t ask me for anything."

So I go home and make the donations I can afford to the few charities whose appeals hit me at the right moment. This might be the local environmental or healthcare coalition on the phone, or the battered women’s shelter looking for pantry items at Trader Joe’s. Or, the down and out woman on the corner who recites me a poem in exchange for a couple of bucks. If this were Mexico, we’d also be contending with kids on every corner selling chewing gum and cheap jewelry, and I’d buy some occasionally. (In Mexico, there are no laws prohibiting anyone from selling or busking anywhere they like. Or if there are, nobody in the poorer towns pays attention to them, because everybody is scraping to get by. Even the cops.) It feels pretty useless - a dollar here and a dollar there - but based on my current commitments, my life trajectory, and other hard-to-reverse factors, it’s best I can do right now aside from writing to my representatives and voting consciously.

In the meantime, I walk through the neighborhood, in this city where starter homes cost $400,000, simultaneously appreciating and resenting what I don’t have. These Craftsman bungalows, so beautifully restored and manicured – where do the owners get the wherewithal – the time, money and energy – to pay for and maintain them? And that’s just the exterior. Look, they’ve got nice cars in the driveway too. What is it about me, about us, that we can’t manage to do this? I want a porch to sit on and read my book, or talk to neighbors from. I want to choose furniture because I like it, not because it’s cheap or came from a 2nd hand source. I wouldn’t mind a stone walkway and a mud room, and even a room with a long, cat-free table and lots of light where I can do my artwork.

And yet, to get many of these things I have to work in ways that don’t necessarily match my value system or my energy levels, and buy things that have been made by the sweat of underpaid and mistreated people, or by processes that poison the environment. Here we go back to Zen, and to the quote by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” If you can’t see the sun, rain, loggers, paper mills, polluted rivers, poets, students, etc., in a single sheet of paper, you aren’t really seeing. Though greener and more socially just alternatives are increasing, there’s no way to avoid contributing to the problem in some measure.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” So said F. Scott Fitzgerald. I‘m not sure about the intelligence part, but I can speak about functioning. Let’s cut to the chase: it ain’t easy for those of us who are extra sensitive. In this way, ignorance is truly bliss. An artist friend recently admitted that he thought about death every day. Not about suicide, but the existential angst about the human dilemma and mystery of being here, of the fact that life is short, confusing, and overwhelming, and it’s hard to know where to turn and what to do sometimes in general. Top that with the never-ending news about humanity’s culpability in "our demise" and you can see why sensitive artist types can go mad. I can relate, because I think about things like how many insects I am stepping on when walking across a lawn - all the time. The bottom line is, we destroy by simply being.

If there is any good news it’s that we also create by simply being. A look at Ode Magazine (tag line: for “intelligent optimists”) brings nothing but reports about good people around the world doing great things. Look around – on a daily, personal, interactive level, most people cooperate most of the time (except for traffic in Bangkok). Lots of people are working on our problems. Look at the outpouring of support for Haiti – it’s a stellar example of how technology acts like neurons transmitting furiously across our global brain/citizenry to rally a sympathetic response.

Another friend, John, would like to extinguish humanity from the earth – he’s that disgusted. Many are. What’s wrong with this plan is that it ends the experiment before the universe has a chance to have its say. If we are truly hitched to the cosmos (and how can we not be), then we are going in exactly the direction we are meant to go. It may not feel very good, but our human, always-changing feelings are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Chaos theory tells us that we must endure turmoil and confusion before a new order is established. There’s a lot of positive talk, a lot of good ideas and good projects coming to the fore, in response to the urgent needs we have created. Whether we have passed our tipping point into sure collapse is hard to say, because there is always the chance that an unknown, unanticipated element will suddenly enter and alter the picture.

Back to balance, where we started: the cosmos are built on the workings of yin and yang. There are seeds of light in the darkness. If we continue to get enough people focusing and moving toward that, then walking, breathing and living the Middle Way won’t be so hard to accomplish, and we'll be able to enter upscale supermarkets without a second thought.

The Great Exercise Dilemma

2009-12-15T21:02:00.000-08:00

I’m having a hate affair with exercise. Getting people to the gym is no secret; somewhere between only 30 and 45% of Americans get regular vigorous workouts, according to one study, and most who do are white with middle to upper class incomes. OK, so I’m Caucasian. But that still isn’t compelling me onto the treadmill.

I did some heavy thinking (as opposed to lifting) about why I’m so gym resistant, and came up with some answers. It’s not exercise I dislike, it’s artificiality. In fact, there’s nothing I love more than to go for walks and bike rides; not only do you get your aerobics, but you get to feel the wind or sun on your face, to observe the neighborhood, to stop and smell the roses along the way. It gets you out into the world.

On the other hand, going to the gym feels as obligatory and uninteresting as flossing teeth, or spending a day with people you can barely tolerate. All these things certainly feel good when they’re over, but the time spent doing them brings up, for me at least, feelings of deadness rather than aliveness. (See my earlier post on "Quitting the Gym" in March 2009.)

I finally see that what I am waiting for is a lifestyle that requires me to be out and about in the community, or on the go, much of the day. I want to get my exercise by living, by seeing, exploring, discovering, and doing - not by being around sweaty people reading magazines or watching TV and running in place. The problem is, I don’t know how to make this happen at the moment. And, I hate being cold and wet, so no amount of rain gear is going to make me excited to go for long jaunts in the chilly drizzle of Seattle.

I try hard to do things well, and either because of this or because of my sensitive nervous system, get easily overwhelmed. Even after relaxing my efforts and standards quite a bit recently, having to add yet another thing to keep on top of adds to the overwhelm. Information streaming in from all fronts imbues every choice with heaviness: what food, clothes, cosmetics, and home furnishings contain the least toxins? How can I get to work and heat my home without contributing to climate problems? Is aerobic exercise enough or must I lift weights? Am I getting the newly increased RDA for Vitamin D, and if not, will I get cancer? Is instant oatmeal as healthy as the kind that cooks for five minutes? How can I think about self-fulfillment when half the planet can barely feed themselves? Were these shoes made by child slaves in a foreign sweatshop? How can I eat eggs and meat with the inhumane horrors of factory farming coming more to light each day?

You can see why ignorance can be bliss. Every hour of every day these conversations go on in my head, weighing pros and cons and moral dilemmas. Maybe my anti-gym sentiment is a kind of sit-in, a protest of the conditions of our culture that have evolved us away from physical labor and true community with our neighbors, toward hollow substitutes for these life-giving qualities.

But if I want to keep my health – another thing to worry about – the common wisdom (which isn’t always so wise, by the way) is to get regular exercise. And so I need to find a way to “flip” my feelings about the gym, to remodel my approach to what is now an essential strategy for disease control as opposed to one for keeping my figure, which is pretty much gone these days anyway.

It will likely remain a struggle, at least until winter ends, when walking and biking during the lengthening days comes not only more naturally, but delights the soul as well. I can't wait.

The Wisdom of Being Itchy

2009-11-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

One of the bazillion symptoms of menopause is itchiness. A minor one, usually, compared to major league problems like hot flashes, terrible mood swings, and dried up mucous membranes, it’s a bit like Chinese water torture – a scratch here, a fidget there, furious scraping with the fingernails at 3 a.m. It starts small and then spreads, until you are clawing at your body as if being invaded by a nest of fire ants. Even just typing this paragraph, I have scritched and scratched in about twenty places.

Symbolist that I am, I like to think of this menopausal itch as a snake-like shedding of the skin. Remember what our mothers used to call growing pains? It seemed dismissive, but when you think about it, kids grow like corn stalks. And, farmers say, if you’re quiet enough, corn grows so fast you can hear it. If a time-lapse camera were focused on a person standing perfectly still throughout his or her lifetime, I have no doubt we’d witness the same kind of twists, turns, and re-shapings as a seedling breaking ground and reaching for the sun. Growing up – and then growing back down with age – endlessly stretches and reforms us, inside and out.

It’s no secret that menopause is a time of great “homecoming” for many women; maybe itchiness is also a restlessness for change and authenticity. Today, on the last day of this month’s period, everything is getting under my skin. My desk space, where I spend ten hours or more a day, is cramped and doesn’t work; some of my relationships are bothering me; our apartment feels smaller and less appropriate every day; and I have no reliable or suitable place to do my artwork. You could chalk up this irritability to shifting hormones, but as Dr. Christiane Northrup points out, symptoms that arise during PMS and menopause are also truth tellers in women’s lives, if only we’d learn to listen. It’s during these times brain chemistry shifts us to be more inwardly focused, more intuitive, and less interested in meeting the needs of others.

Life is beginning to feel too small again. I say again, remembering that the last manifestation of this urge resulted in a purging of belongings, jobs and residence, and a nomadic trip around California with my bewildered but loyal husband in tow. I don’t think we’re in for anything quite so drastic this time, but I do sense changes are in the wind. (Aren’t they always?) The key is to make them consciously, to be discerning about the pros, cons and reasons for each choice.

I don’t know exactly what is being called for other than making room for what I want, which is emerging with rather slow but exciting clarity. There is no way to hurry this process; it’s been a lifetime in the making and now is not the time to be impatient. (Impatience is what the last 49 years were about.) What's essential is that I watch carefully and, like this passage from Zorba the Greek, let nature do her thing.

"I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the back of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited awhile, but it was too long appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life. The case opened; the butterfly started slowly crawling out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled; the wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath, in vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled, before its time. It struggled desperately and, a few seconds later, died in the palm of my hand.

That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the external rhythm."

Are We Having Fun Yet?

2009-10-31T22:25:00.001-07:00

Most children don’t have to think twice about fun. For them it comes as naturally as breathing, and is almost as spontaneous. But fun often caused more trouble than it was worth for me. Gaiety and the ways of children seemed to irritate my father, and I could never be sure what would set him off. One minute I’d be in the back yard on the swings having a blast, the next I was getting several firm swats for disturbing his nap with my laughter. An ice cream cone was a wonderful treat - until it started to drip, which brought a scolding for making a mess. Even sand on my clothes after a frolic at the beach was met with a sour face and swearing. It was almost enough to make me wish I hadn’t bothered.

My father was also a stern environmentalist who tried to instill green values in us early on. I remember a seashore outing on which I let my candy wrapper float off the boardwalk onto the sand below. Before I knew what was happening, he picked me up, roughly tossed me over the railing, and forced me to retrieve it. The hard landing and his impulsive violence left me mentally numb.

So you can see why I have never been able to understand the appeal of leisure-time devices like snowmobiles and jet skis. They are an environmental menace with their pollution, noise, and potential to harass wildlife. They turn once-peaceful parks into places to be avoided. They are for thoughtless, fun-loving, beer-drinking partiers who think of nothing but themselves. They are, in the words of my father, for boobs. I felt this way for most of my life.

Enter Robin Williams. A symbol of unchecked hilarity and spontaneity, he is to the straight-laced adult what Id is to Ego - in dreams, anyway. That’s where we met one night about seven years ago. He was swimming on the far side of a small lagoon. Near him floated a jet ski, waiting to be ridden. “Come on in,” Robin said with a big grin, motioning me toward him. “The water is fine!” I awoke before a decision could be made.

Not long after that dream, I vacationed on Florida’s Sanibel and Captiva islands, whose warm waters and shell-strewn beaches have long been favorites of mine (until several years ago, when escalating prices made them unreachable). On this particular visit I heard about an opportunity to take a guided tour of some outlying islands. Always first in line to see anything new, I was eager to sign up, but there was one caveat: we’d explore the islands by jet ski.

By this time I was aware of the straight jacket I'd worn most of my life. Determined to try something new, I called in my reservation and gave them a hefty, non-refundable deposit.

The night before the excursion I could barely sleep. Not only was it expensive, but I had no idea how to ride a Wave Runner, and no idea if I would have a good time. The anxiety was excruciating, but my love of the water and sun and islands won out. In the morning I joined a family of four and our guide for a quick beach-side introduction to safety and vehicle operation. Fifteen minutes later, we saddled up and slowly headed out of the marina toward the open water. In a few minutes we were flying, bumping and splashing over wavelets and wakes from other boats. I could not believe how fast these things went! Nearby, dolphin fins sliced the water, and the shadows of groupers and sting rays drifted by under the surface. For nearly two hours we followed the guide around the perimeters of deserted islands, gliding quietly past inlets hiding private getaways, or simply sitting and soaking up our good fortune to be there. Opening up again when we were too far away to be heard, I twisted the throttle as far as I could, and almost fell off from the acceleration. It took a while to get used to slamming down on incoming waves; but it was unavoidable if you wanted to see what you were made of.

I zipped over the water with an unflagging grin, the Florida sun warming my body and the temperate sea washing away my fear. I was outside of time and myself, happy beyond belief from intimate contact with waters I had been longing to lose myself in for years. I was closer to the sea than a sailor. By the end of the day my neck and shoulder muscles ached mightily from the force of forward motion. But it was worth it, just to learn that delicate balance between holding on and letting go.

Style 16

2009-10-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

In 1993 my husband and I bought our first and (so far) only house. A one story structure built in 1907, it was the first home on the block, perhaps the first in the neighborhood. The kitchen, back rooms and side porch were add-ons that extended long behind the original front, making it look like a double-wide shotgun shack except for the small portico over the front door. Whoever built the place must have been a novice: every fixture and switch plate was slightly askew, and every room had a DIY aura that subsequent owners, us included, didn't have the cash or wherewithal to fix. Real estate parlance classified houses such as ours "style 16" – meaning, it had no style. We lived there for 12 years.

By 2005 our energy for home ownership had fizzled. The little fixing we could afford amounted to a new roof and an exterior paint job, which set us back $16,000. We couldn't figure out how other people managed to remodel kitchens and bathrooms and make changes that were actual preferences rather than necessities. Lawn mowing, constant garden weeding, keeping the flood-prone basement dry, and sitting near single-pane windows were other hindrances to an affordable future at this address. Additionally, we were not handy with much more than the most basic repairs. I also sensed a personal crisis/transformation coming that demanded fewer working hours and therefore, much less income. For these reasons and more, continued mortgage payments seemed absurd, and so we sold the house and moved to a rental home.

Sometimes I drive by our old homestead to see what's what, and over the last four years it has fallen into greater disrepair than ever. The young couple (with new baby) who bought it had terrible luck after the purchase, with damaging floods, interior remodel projects on hold for years, and as far as I could tell, not much income. At one point the place was so ripped up that only one bedroom and the kitchen were livable, everything else in some process of being ruined, torn down or fixed up. My beautiful rock garden, once the pride of the block, became a huge patch of weeds.

How bittersweet, then, to drive by recently and come upon a house transformed. Almost gone are the peeling, ancient clapboards, in their place pale yellow siding as smooth and fresh as a new stick of butter. The rotting wrap-around front porch is now a gorgeous new deck with a huge arbor and trellis, the kind that bestows casual elegance to even the plainest houses. The front door, which was starting to split down the middle when we moved, is now a graceful new entrance, and the windows have been replaced with stylish double-paned affairs ten times better than the aluminum-framed ones we had. Even the knocked-down walls in the living room appeared to be restored, freshly painted and pleasantly lit.

I drove away feeling betrayed. Where did they come up with the money for all this? I wondered. They were struggling, just like us. How come they suddenly got it together and we couldn't? Four years after the sale, we are living in a 2 bedroom apartment, barely making ends meet. This former millstone around my neck – this money pit of a house – became an object of envy. I felt left behind, and discouraged.

To make matters worse, later that evening an acquaintance hosted a painting party in her new studio. She had just moved with her two young sons from a tiny apartment to a new address, which I approached from the back alley adjacent to the studio. The space was wonderful: stainless cupboards and sink, ample and bright moveable track lighting, lots of storage, and other comfy touches including heat and large windows. What I didn't realize was that this new studio was attached to her new house in progress, custom designed and one of the more beautiful homes I've seen. Every inch of it had been thoughtfully hand picked and coordinated, including a water-garden courtyard in the back, stainless steel appliances, radiant heat in the floors, floor to ceiling triple-paned windows, beautifully tiled bathrooms with a huge clear shower enclosure . . . not garish but simple, clean-lined elegance and quality everywhere. My house envy surged with each passing minute.

When we came to the master bedroom and bath, I noticed the sauna next to the shower. My friend told me she had installed it to help with her pain. "Pain?" I said. "Are you okay?" She asked me if I remembered the car accident. Only vaguely, I said, thinking that maybe she mentioned it, briefly, about a year ago. With prompting, she went on to tell me exactly what happened: about how she'd been rear-ended by the party at fault; about the concussion that doctors missed diagnosing for six months, and the resulting brain damage. About the daily physical ache that she kept hidden from most people. About the days on end she spent in bed with migraines, the emergency medical trips still occurring, about how her life was divided into two parts: before and after.

I left with a much different feeling about house envy. Are the auto or malpractice insurance companies paying for my friend's new home? We didn't talk about that. But it doesn't matter. She paid for her house with more than money. As for our former 100-year-old house, who knows what circumstances brought it into the 21st - well, ok, 20th - century. It’s like that ancient Chinese folk tale about good luck and bad luck. Often, what looks like one, in time turns out to be the other.

And if you recognize the wisdom of that ancient parable, you also know the value of gratitude. Even if "style 16" is all you have.

The Way It Is

2009-09-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

As we head into autumn, and then the long winter, I need to remind myself that spring is always, always on the other side. Holidays are not enough to distract me from the short days, the low gray clouds, the rains and the bone-deep chill of the Northwest after its glorious summers fade. There's always a price to pay, isn't there, always another turn of the wheel. Good ol' yin and yang. This poem was sent to me and I thought it would be a good way to wrap up September:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford ~

The Pros and Cons of Flying High

2009-09-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

At the beach today a couple of kids were fishing off the rocks. All well and good – a pleasant scene on a beautiful fall day. After walking some distance past them, I heard one exclaim that he'd caught something. I turned my head and saw an 8 year old boy excited to have even the smallest creature dangling from his line.

"Can you get it off?" called his mother from her blanket on the sand.

"I think so," he said. A twinge of anxiety shot through me. Hoping he wasn't going to do what I did as a kid with fish on my hook, I continued up the beach and tried to think about something else.

The dock and the fish and my cousin Tommy came flooding back anyway. I think of this every so often, how each summer at grandma's lake house we'd drop our lines over the edge of the dock and troll for sunfish. Sunnies, we called them. They were easy to spot through the clear lake water. Mother sunfish liked to build their nests - light colored circles on the lake bottom - right alongside the docks, almost directly in the center of each boat slip. They bit fast and were an effortless catch.

But once caught, they were not always easy to unhook. Tommy knew how to get rid of the toughest ones. He showed me how to slide the fish between the wooden slats of the dock, rotate it perpendicular, and yank hard.

"What now?" I said, eyeing the entrails on my line. A strange feeling hovered on the edge of my awareness. I watched the body of the ravaged sunny, stunned and dying, as it sank to the bottom of the lake. We kept on fishing and, when we couldn't unhook them, leaving them for dead. This went on each summer until we morphed into teenagers and outgrew fishing and each other.

Because I am now an adult who cannot kill anything without wrenching remorse, these kinds of memories deeply disturb me. Due to the increased anxiety I have from immense midlife changes, they’re occurring more frequently. Moderate and minor stressors from the past have a new sting, long after I thought the toxins had worked themselves out. They bring me into harder contact with my ongoing existential despair – that of being merely human in an unfathomable universe, and of feeling guilty for our contribution to the destruction of our beautiful world.

It's nearly impossible to walk out your front door if you think too hard about these things. Anything we do has detrimental consequences in some form or another. The only way around it is to remember that we know how to create as well as destroy. And to remember that regardless of our actions, we are part of the natural world and the natural order of things. As with any natural phenomenon, we contain darkness and light. Our consciousness is another duality, for it is both a blessing and a curse to be aware of ourselves, what we have done, and what we can still do.

That is the high altitude view, and that's where I spend much of my mental time and energy. Away from the messiness of being human, of unsolvable dilemmas and pain. It's good to have the ability to go to thirty thousand feet, but it can also be an escape. I fear that I have spent too much time off the ground, because now comes a growing awareness that I must descend into the personal in a way I've never been able to. My body and psyche are sending signals that they're ready to deal with old issues, with trauma still embedded at a cellular level.

For this work I have to be willing to let ego and my small, little self take center stage. I have to acknowledge what it is and was like to be me, one inconsequential person among billions, and to act as if I matter. (Sure you're special. Just like everyone else.) To act as if my needs matter as much as the planet's. I am being asked to revisit what it really felt like being discounted, yelled at, smacked, ignored, or made fun of those times when I tried to explain it away or shrug it off. I need to go to the narrowest view, to think of only myself. This in service of breaking up the stuck energy that has manifested as a chronic, low grade, agitated depression since teenhood. At least, that is my hope.

Most people spend most of their time in this small place, as if life is about them, as if their eyes and egos show them reality, as if they know the universe. I have always been discouraged by this fact and proud that I can see past such short sightedness. But I often take it past discouragement to contempt. Perhaps it's a case of "protesting too much." Any extreme position is usually masking something not yet conscious.

Could it be that what I need most to heal is where I've least wanted to go my whole life? To go back and affirm my personhood at the most basic level? This is certainly what the psychological and spiritual texts tell us. It's not that I haven't tried. Now that I better understand timing – from that high altitude perspective - I know you can't hurry acorns into oaks. I just want to make sure, being more conscious of aging and mortality these days, that I live long enough to see the treetops.

Sex with Johnny

2009-09-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Johnny Depp won't have sex with me. I've asked him dozens of times, in my mind at least, and though he's only four years younger than my 50, I am a matronly older woman to him.

This is what a brain at middle age can look like. Vascillating wildly between calm acceptance and temper tantrums, this intelligent, sensitive and wise woman is still driven nearly mad by the conflicting messages of culture, biology and personal history.

We all know the youth = beauty mindset; it's inescapable for both men and women - especially women. But the equation continues: youth + beauty = where it's at. As much as I don't want to buy in, part of me does. I fight with this "truth" all the time. We like to think that we know better, but the messages of a lifetime are hard to shake. Images, implications and blatant biases are bound into every mode and method of communication that assaults us. How is the puny human mind supposed to fend for itself, for rationality and balance, in such an obnoxious, insidious climate?

But while I have a deep commitment to fight youth + beauty = where it's at, in hopes of reducing ageism and marginalism, there is some truth to what I'm railing against. This is part of the paradox of middle age, and maybe peri-menopause especially: the body and mind are making last ditch efforts to partake in procreation, to be aligned with Eros and not Thanatos. (Recall that Eros is the life force, the libido in the largest sense of the word. Its counterpart is Thanatos, the shadow or call of death, which feels closer in middle age than in youth. Both of these dynamics have inestimable influence on the psyche.)

One of the great tasks of midlife is to come to terms with the past – the roads not taken, the achievements not realized, the future that is now here and doesn't look anything like you thought it would.

So what is there to do when you realize, at 50, that you didn't take advantage of your share of youth + beauty = where it's at? That your Eros was distracted by factors outside your awareness or control, its energies drained or mischanneled trying to stay mentally afloat in an overwhelming world?

In particular, what do you do when you realize that Eros did not get its fair share of sex? And to add insult to injury, now you are attracted to men half your age, while knowing full well that their life energy and beauty is a reflection of how you are beginning to feel inside, if not outside, as a fifty year old woman – and that they think of you as their mother?

Channel surfing one day, I came across a painful illustration of this topic. A reality show featured a group of young, attractive actors hoping to be chosen for a film project. Of course, there were love scenes that needed rehearsing, and the boys were very eager to practice with the girls. But first, a coach skilled in on-screen lovemaking was called in: a woman formerly from the "industry." An archetypal grandmother type with a thick, wide body and floppy breasts (one of which she flashed, to the dismay of the young folks), she insisted on teaching the hunky young men how to properly kiss for the movies. One very reluctant volunteer got himself pinned to the couch and was so resistant you could see his gag reflex working overtime. I felt sorry for them both.

Maybe she still thought of herself as a girl, the way I do, full of hope for the future, interested in being where opportunity is, where life is. In other words, being where it's at – and expressing the full range of who we are, now that we know how: the wisdom, the love, the knowledge of what's important, the desire to connect all this in ways we couldn't before. What young people don't know is that middle aged women make the best lovers, their passion (once focused) igniting for a second but more powerful time and wanting expression in response to life itself, not just flesh. The title and contents of my friend Trebbe Johnson's book, The World is a Waiting Lover, describe this concept beautifully.

So Johnny, if you, and more importantly I, can get past my 25 extra pounds, past the double chin, sallow skin and graying pubic hair that age so thanklessly bestows on the juiciest women on the planet – us middle aged gals - you are in for the ride of your life. Call me. In the meantime, I've got a beautiful husband to practice on.

The Big 50

2009-09-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a month since I last posted. Lots going on with a new job, trying to get up to speed and balance a life that was very calm with one that's much busier now. Quite a contrast. Plus my 50th birthday over Labor Day weekend! My new job requires me to be at my computer most of the day, so typing even more for this blog is not as appealing as it once was. But my friend Jeannette, whose blog ReinventedVoices is a must-visit for excellent, thoughtful writing, has kindly said she misses my essays. I complained to her about just not feeling like writing out my whirling dervish-like mind full of thoughts, but I also just realized how important it can be to get things written down. It's a healing process, this writing, but I suppose sometimes I write only when I am ready to take the next step in healing.

So here's the latest thoughts, which have been a burr under my saddle for a long time but are now finding expression. And to quote Ziggy, or some pundit from an earlier time,

You can complain that roses have thorns, or you can rejoice that thorns come with roses.

Postcript

2009-08-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

Let me always remember that I have never regretted getting on my bike and going for a long ride. Despite the sore crotch promised over the next few days, I am home now with a good sweat and an even-centeredness from endorphins.

I rode to Golden Gardens park, a popular city beach overrun in the summer with picnickers, boaters and special events. I went to the "secret" part of the beach, way down beyond the farthest end of the parking lot, where hardly anyone ever goes. There I propped up my bike and, shielded by lush foliage, laid on a bench in the shade, listening to the waves of Puget Sound splash on the shore. About 10 years ago they ripped out the parking lot that used to be here, and restored old wetlands. Now this corner of the park is home to wildlife of many types. Usually I count at least eight turtles, all kinds of birds, and sometimes a water mammal.

I closed my eyes and let myself sink into the bench. My muscles relaxed. A perfect breeze and - finally - late morning's appearance of the sun conspired to bring peace to my weary mind and body. Each time I opened my eyes something comforting crossed my vision: a bloated dragonfly racing with a butterfly, billowing white jibs on sailboats offshore, the play of light off water. It was a wistful, bittersweet feeling, the kind you get when visiting, say, Cape Cod after Labor Day. Mid August is to summer as Sunday is to the weekend. You no longer have the entire season ahead; the inevitable change is in the air.

On my way out of the wetland hideaway, I passed a young woman preparing for her wedding in the park. She was dressed in a creamy white short dress, nothing overly formal but still very bridal. On her feet were strappy flat white sandals, perfectly suited for the setting and the warming sun. "Big day!" I said, wheeling my bike past her. "I was an August bride too, seventeen years ago." Tears filled my eyes as I took in the late summer perfection around me. We both have our whole lives ahead of us.

Boardwalk or Baltic Avenue?

2009-08-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

As I knew it must but hoped it wouldn't, the other shoe has dropped. It had to eventually – shoes come on and off with regularity. What did I expect? Like the odd weather lately in my typically wet city, with unremitting blue skies and no rain for months, the pattern changed a week ago: to all-day gray with still no precipitation, and clouds low enough to touch.

My mood is right there with the skies.

I suppose this is nature's way of saying, "Don't get used to anything!" And I, coming off a spectacular run of positive brain chemistry and events, have settled down into what feels like a winter funk. I noticed immediately the earlier sunsets once August was underway. Almost overnight the skies darkened an hour earlier. I notice this every August, and besides the change in the angle, intensity and length of light, it signals other adjustments. Evening bike rides must end sooner. Long strolls during the magic hour – the time photographers love called dusk – are limited to a fast-shrinking window of opportunity. Like every other cycle in the Universe, this is the beginning of a contraction, the opposite of Spring's expansion. A Rumi poem addresses this beautifully:

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you'd be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.

I must also remember that, as with an earthquake, I have no idea how long this perimenopause will last. There's no way to tell just where I am in the process of The Change, and how much the hormonal upheaval intensifies a lifelong pattern of blues. The spring and summer have been a gift, granting me several months of "up" – not mania, but contentment and joy that were present when I awoke and with me throughout the day. I made some major personal breakthroughs during this period, found a wonderful job, began to lose a few pounds. I thought I was finally "on my way."

And I suppose I still am. Perhaps this isn't a setback so much as a reminder of cycles. This one comes with baggage I 'm not used to: the frustration of being unable to read anything without increasingly strong glasses, a persistent brain fog that robs me of focus and concentration, a low-level fatigue that propels me to the bed for far too many hours on far too many days. Dizziness and headaches occur with increasing frequency. Not to mention dryness everywhere, in my eyes, my skin, my sex. The estrogen balance is askew, and will remain so. Though I have not had more than one or two mild hot flashes (knock on wood), I am probably at the difficult point of deciding whether to begin hormone replacement therapy. Every cell in my being says not to do it. But there are risks in that decision as well.

And so comes the other component of this stage of life: the knowledge that no matter what you do, you're falling apart. It's a recognition of mortality, made more difficult by multitudinous and conflicting opinions about how to stay healthy. It's as if nobody knows anything but generalizations, and yet we're all so different that those generalizations can be nearly useless.

(As a sidebar, the "medicalization" of society is a huge topic, surely a symptom of a deeper malaise. An inordinate amount of money and energy is spent on perfecting individual fitness and health. While health is not something to take for granted, hardly any of us put similar energy into addressing the other things that ail us, individually or culturally: lack of community, overwork, environmental health, poverty, etc.)

As I said in my earlier post, it feels like a return to adolescence, replete with confusion and growing pains of a different sort. It's amazing how you can be so clear, focused and purposeful one minute, and then feel like you've drawn the Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 card the next. Like the fortunes won and lost in Monopoly, though, it helps to remember something about this transitory and mysterious life, from a Buddhist perspective at least: no matter how much or little you have, it's all play money in the end.

Who Are You Really?

2009-08-07T17:21:00.001-07:00

One of the great themes of midlife is the burning question, "What are you going to be?" Not the way it's meant in high school, when guidance counselors, parents, and well-meaning others pressure you to pick a path before you're even half-baked. The question in middle age assumes you have spent the first part of your life pursuing what you thought was the right path – or a reasonable facsimile - and have now come to question not only your choices but your culture, your world, and the depths of your being. In other words, the very meaning of existence. You're either coming to recognize that you've been sold a bill of goods and it's not made you happy, or you've gotten a whiff of your mortality and it's reckoning time.

But how do you answer the question when you discover that paths already taken only reveal who you were? You might do as others do. Midlife is a time of affairs and broken marriages and uncharacteristic behaviors. Stories abound of spouses finding themselves (and ditching their partners) after years of faithfulness, of sudden excursions into cosmetic surgery, foreign countries, interests long forgotten, and other symbols of youth. This course of action is a double-edged sword. It attempts to meet the soul's need to put the ego in a more rightful place, which is a beautiful and vital task of midlife development. But it can also throw lives into utter chaos. Most people cherish norms, agreements and obligations above struggles for personal growth.

The pressure to act during this time enormous. Choices are often premature. The alternative, to sit with the discomfort and explore what it's really trying to tell us, is also not cherished in our culture. We are groomed to think of time in microprocessed minutes, to assume that broken things must be fixed (and the sooner the better), to impose our Western will on the intelligent rhythms of nature. We have no socially sanctioned process, much less concept, of exploring midlife malaise, any more than we have such rites of passage for adolescence and elderhood.

This is why some of us feel we are being drawn and quartered in middle age – because psychospiritually, we are. The urgent voice of the nascent and true Self can barely be heard above the din of voices imploring us to not change. To complicate matters, one of those imploring voices is our own.

And yet, approached with intention and consciousness, this often intense time can yield rewards beyond imagination. Jungian analyst Murray Stein writes, "When the unconscious erupts at midlife, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. Life still clings strongly to them. And actually the seeds of the future lie in these neglected figures, which now return and call for restoration and attention."

Who am I really? is a question for which the answers must be "lived into," to paraphrase the poet Rilke. Who are these neglected characters from our inner past? Last night, I dreamed my 80-year-old mother saw me painting on my hand. She looked reminiscent and sad. "A life in the arts," she murmured regretfully, "is not a bad thing." There's no question I put this part of myself aside after college, to meet the "necessities of life" as so many creative people must do. But that part I'm already conscious of. It's the other new voices that startle me: the one indignant at past and current suffering of certain fools; the other one who wants me to "brand" myself after all these years and present it to the world. Do I know what this is supposed to look like? Not really, not yet. It's an exploration. It's messy, it's a process, it's – well, it's half-baked, a return to the theme of adolescence.

In a sense, we get a do-over at midlife. It's almost like living out the fantasy of if only I knew then what I know now. It won't be perfect: our youthful bodies are gone, and practical worries can dominate our days. Avenues we'd hoped to travel may be re-routed through new parts of town. But one of the great joys of being off the map is the potential for discovery. If we are lucky, we become aware as we stumble and explore that despite our confusion, this mysterious life really does know what it's doing.

Armchair Traveler

2009-07-24T22:16:00.000-07:00

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once - a joke with truth to it. I'm wondering about far-out theories of multiple realities because lately I've been visiting France and Italy without even leaving Seattle. No, I'm not talking about dining at Basque or Tuscan restaurants that take me on imaginary journeys with their amazing flavors. I'm talking about the uncanny feeling that I am, for a split second or two, back among the cobbled streets of Vernazza or looking at the sky above medieval Le Baux.

This isn't about hallucination – that I'd be worried about. I'm not seeing tangible, 3-D evidence before my eyes of places past explored. It's more a fleeting rush through my being that the quality of the air, the light, and my inner state have somehow aligned exactly with certain moments in those places.

Waking the other day, I heard church bells in my neighborhood that I'd never noticed before. For a second the bells and I were in a little hillside town, looking perhaps at a map or a guidebook during breakfast and wondering what lay ahead. A feeling of freedom and discovery washed through me, even though it was a work day. The sky was blue, and the day promised to be pleasant and of my own making. I was in a new place with nothing but my interest and energy, ready to explore a new, strange place and be thrilled. A few seconds later, I was home.

This happened a couple other times recently, once when I was driving to nowhere in particular, and another time on a walk. Perhaps it goes back to resonance: enough elements in the current time line up with the qualities of the one I had before, elsewhere, and the tuning fork is struck. Deja vous doesn't describe it; it's not a duplicate of something that already happened. It's more a felt sense in the body than one in the head. Perhaps it has something to do with quantum mechanics. Maybe it's something about a time wormhole that is joining current moments with ones already lived, and I'm having trouble distinguishing which year/life/place it is – because in theory, past, present and future – and location – are all of the same package.

The possibilities are mind blowing. Considering them makes life more fun, and interesting, than throwing out every idea that doesn't immediately make sense. All I can tell you is that I will never forget the morning I woke up in my sleeping bag on a campout when I was eight years old. It was the only time I have slept in the open, on the ground. Just before I opened my eyes, I was in the jungle, the cacophony of parrots and other animals around me, humidity steaming in the shafts of light that pierced the canopy of the rainforest.

When I opened my eyes, I was in the wide, grassy field just down the street from my house.

To the best of my knowledge, it was not a dream, but I didn't know what to make of it. I was young, a factor taken into consideration when revisiting the incident at a later date. But I also vaguely recall having the mental ability to "shrink my consciousness" into my thumb when I was a toddler. I would toggle it back and forth, saying to myself, "little, big, little, big." What this was all about, I have no idea, but clearly I was able to distinguish between two different states that felt like more than words.

It's too bad I can't travel back through some wormhole to childhood to see what was going on, before life closed the mind off to certain ways of experiencing. I'm not the first one to say it – but isn't it a kick that children may just be masters of the quantum universe without even knowing it.

Spring in July

2009-07-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Wow! I'm so off center these last couple of weeks. Getting used to a new job has pulled me away from the strong sense of self I had before I started. My husband reminded me that this is probably natural, but the strength I had been feeling is so precious and young I am anxious about losing it. I suspect it will return. I also suspect that perimenopausal issues continue to affect my energy levels and moods. Though they (the moods) are more stable than ever, they still surprise me sometimes, and instead of dissecting or resisting it I'm learning that I have to let go even more than I already have. It doesn't matter, for instance, if I've had one nap that day – if I need to lie down again, so be it. Nor does it have to mean anything in particular that getting a load of laundry done, taking a walk and reading are all I can manage sometimes.

I've never written about my letting go process, at least not in depth. On top of the difficulty of finding the right words for it, I know that it's not over yet. My sense is that I'm just coming out of the forest. It's a progression that for many can take years, and is often nudged into gear by a wake-up call. There are all kinds of these nudges: death, illness, trauma, and midlife are a few perspective-changers that come to mind.

My nudge came on September 11, 2001. As for many people, it stripped from me feelings of safety and security, even from 3000 miles away, that were taken for granted. It led me to the "final answer" of questioning my own status quo, led me to transform dynamics I'd been struggling with for years. (I was 42 years old, which, if you are into astrology or numerology, is a multiple of vital number seven.) It led me to try antidepressants, which I'd resisted for years on the poor-in-hindsight advice of a former therapist (but were, paradoxically, later encouraged by my naturopath). Celexa was a lifesaver, and helped usher me into a phase of great personal change and growth. I got fired for the first time ever in my Supergirl life, more due to lackluster performance from a poor job fit than any conscious sabotage.

In the summer of 2003, I drifted into states of mystical bliss, in lust and love with everyone and everything. A raw energy took me over that seemed to come from somewhere else, from behind some partition in my psyche. Voices that were not my own spoke to me, comforted me, guided me. An intense sexual energy I'd never felt kept my 2nd and 3rd chakras warm and buzzing for months, and anything remotely or directly sexual (sounds, drawings, talk) made me nearly swoon. ( I remember being in the erotic section of a bookstore and having to hold onto the bookcase while perusing an illustrated how-to manual.) At work I was followed into stairwells, bathroom stalls and elevators by this energy, which pounced on me day and night almost against my will. At the time I likened this amazing sensation to the difference between taste and smell: the tangible aspects of this presence, this ardent spirit, were not visible, but the effect and scent were the same. Needless to say, my ideas about life and psyche and spirit were profoundly altered.

The above-mentioned episode, which has been considerably condensed and simplified, led to The Great Shedding: of our high-maintenance old house, of ideas about work and myself, of friends, location, income - of outmoded ways period. Enter the liminal phase: of travel, visionary dreams, breathwork sessions, a new respect for astrology, financial insecurity, trying new and part time jobs and housing arrangements, and taking two hour naps every day for two years. Of losing two beloved, aged cats who saw us through 17 years of our journey. Of walking endlessly and observing everything, being with the pain and grief of "not knowing" and losing my grip on life as I had known it. Thank goodness my husband was on board with all of this; indeed, he was the beneficiary of my inflamed sexual energy! But had he known about the turmoil we would be heading into, I doubt he would have come along so easily.

Financing The Great Shedding and the liminal phase were the proceeds from selling our old house. A $160,000 profit paid off all debts and loans, and enabled hubby and me to go to Europe twice and me to Mexico several times - the latter reinvigorating my love of photography and of exploring new cultures. The house money enabled me to work part time while in the Shadowlands, and encouraged my husband to leave his stifling 20 year civil service job and undrtake his own midlife crisis. (One that he only came out of a few months ago.) Ai carumba, two of us in turmoil at once! Good thing we have no kids.

The last of our house profits were spent last summer, when a month-long foray to California to explore living and work options turned up no easy answers. So here we are back in Seattle – broke, accepting monthly assistance from my parents, but actually happier and more solid than ever, and optimistic about the future. There are practical things to consider: neither of us now makes enough money to keep on top of our bills. We are considering moving out to the suburbs to save on rent. But after so much change and four moves in five years, we are tired. We want to rest a bit, settle into a new phase now that it feels like the Shadowlands are behind us. In the cycle of personal seasons, we are in Spring. I want to strengthen the root system of our budding selves. We will fertilize, water and care for our tender green shoots as best we can. As for the rest - well, like any newly planted garden, we get to watch and wait.

An Amazing Commencement Speech from Paul Hawken

2009-06-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful." No pressure there.

Let's begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown -- Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Two Great Poems for Midlife

2009-06-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Does everyone know Mary Oliver's wonderful poem by now? If so, how about the verse of Walt Whitman's that follows? Enjoy!

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~Mary Oliver

* * * *

Songs of the Open Road, Verse 11

Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you:

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you;
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

~Walt Whitman

Are You Talking to Me?

2009-06-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

My friend and I were walking today, chatting and catching each other up on things, when she interrupted her story with a sharp "ouch!" A thorny plant alongside the trail had brushed against her hand. She then told me something a psychic said to her: When we are suddenly alarmed –by a slamming door, for instance, or some other brief shock - it's the Universe wanting us to pay attention to something in that moment.

Later we stopped to grab lunch at a grocery store. As we explored the natural foods section, we noticed a bundle of sage and wondered if smudging really worked. Or was it just woo-woo? I thought it could be a little of both, and said it was an example of intent manifesting through ritual, an important tool in dialoguing with the Universe.

It got me to thinking about the "waking dream" aspect of life. Many people have heard the famous dilemma of ancient philosopher Chuang Tzu, who dreamed he was a butterfly doing butterfly things, with no awareness of his human identity. He awoke. "Now," he said, "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."

His predicament can be as mind boggling as trying to grasp that the Universe has no edges, no end points. We humans clearly have no conscious experience with Infinity. The true nature of reality is impossible to tease apart. And yet, it's fun to try. So in the spirit of Chuang Tzu: if dream symbols are important messages from our psyche, what about the symbols in waking life? Does that dead bird on your lawn mean something? If your desired goal is blocked and you are steered somewhere new, is this destiny speaking? How do you know whether an occurrence is a "sign" from higher forces – a burning bush, if you will – or just something that happened?

Playing with the possibilities has brought magic and meaning to my life.

Case in point: I was agonizing about leaving a job I'd started only nine months earlier. Having job-hopped quite a bit, I was concerned about explaining another short-lived position to potential employers. Providing my share of the household income was a weighty factor as well. But the situation at work was not salvageable. As I wearily listed, for the umpteenth time, the pros and cons of leaving versus staying, I glanced down at the candy bar I'd been eating and absently turned it over in my hand. Three letters stood out in bold chocolate relief. My mouth flopped open as RUN resonated to my core, announcing in no uncertain terms that my decision had been made.

Was it pure coincidence that I chewed the right letters off of a Nestle's CRUNCH bar? Probably. But that's not the point. The resonance is what counts. This is the nature of a divination tool, be it astrology, angel cards, or someone reading your tea leaves. You are picking up on something some part of you already knows, or senses. It's as if everything in the Universe is a tuning fork, each thing or quality a unique vibration. When one fork is vibrating near other forks, those of the same pitch will automatically vibrate too. (Remember the old Memorex commercial, with the wine glass and the opera singer?) Some might call this resonance synchronicity. The famous story of the beetle and Carl Jung's patient makes for a good sidebar here.

What this means is that we and the Universe are in constant conversation. The things that resonate for you – whether it's Elvis, race cars or men with long hair – are reflecting back to you something about yourself. You may not be conscious of what that something is, but these qualities or objects stir up an energy within that attracts (or repulses) you. Each holds information that could be mined for gold. The alchemy of shadow work comes to mind here.

What about the less obvious symbols, like the fact that I keep coming across little piles of change in the street? The calla lilies a co-worker unexpectedly gave me from her garden during this same period? The dead crow I came across on the sidewalk last week? Deciphering these takes deep self-knowledge, or a willingness to observe yourself and your life from a larger perspective. Dream work, extensive personal work, and the gifts of my midlife transition have given me good tools for getting a 30,000-foot view of themes and patterns in my life, and an idea of where the Universe might want me to go.

To me the coins, found seven or eight times over a few weeks – highly unusual if you ask me - are little breadcrumbs of encouragement that I'm on the right path. I had to laugh when I found a nickel on the floor next to a toilet in a client's office. Was this a message that my metaphorical "shit" had value and needed attention? Sure, you might think this is a stretch, but considering what I've been through lately, where I am in my "transformation" and, if you want to get woo-woo about it, the fact that my astrological transitions accurately predict an examination and cleaning up of lifelong issues – well, it begins to add up.

I've told you only the tip of the iceberg. If I also listed the dreams, conversations, synchronicities, and sudden insights and healings that have also happened over the last few months and years, you might be convinced too. Just play with this idea and see what happens: there are clues and keys to yourself, hidden in plain sight, all over the world.

(Check out this article at Spirituality & Health magazine for another take on such matters.)

Panty Panic

2009-05-26T09:03:00.001-07:00

On to a mundane topic that causes more angst than the existential ones: underwear. Specifically, underwear for us middle aged gals. I didn't have to even think about this issue until recently, when it came time to replace my current crop of panties, haggard with stains, loose threads and spent elastic.

Off to JC Penny I went, where I've been buying the same brand of undies for two decades. They're called Adonnas, nice cotton panties with just the right amount of coverage (a design called hipsters) and a pleasing look. To my great dismay, I found that Adonnas have been discontinued. The sales clerk said many customers were similarly crushed. Indeed, a woman behind me was looking for them too, and we whined in unison at the bad news.

Our choices now are these: big waist-to-thigh bloomers suitable for the 19th century, or band aids with strings. These latter disappear into the folds of your (whatever) if you are carrying the least bit of extra poundage, making your hips and legs look like a stack of sausage links. The former scream "grandma." Neither does justice to the vibrant, vital, sexy women we still are.

A lot has been said about the dearth of appropriate clothing for women over 40. We have that polarized spectrum of choice again: baby doll outfits for teens and young 20s, or the kind of leisure wear often seen in retirement communities. The other option, one that could solve these clothing quandaries, is out of reach for the majority: the upmarket departments in stores like Nordstrom's or Macy's. If I had $2000 and style consultations from the What Not to Wear team, I'd look damn good all the time.

I will say I'm happy to see the tunic tops in stores these last few years. Tunics usually have stitching under the breasts and a deep neckline to accentuate the waist and shoulders. My blue, brown, and white Liz Claiborne tunic is the most flattering piece of clothing I own. Because the front hangs loose over the stomach and hips, there's lots of room for all body types underneath. Now all I have to do is get the corresponding image of maternity wear out of my mind.

(Art by Eric Gill, early 20th century.)

The Middle Way at Midlife

2009-05-18T09:18:00.000-07:00

I started to write an essay on body image in middle-aged women. About mine in particular – the ups and downs, the acceptance one day and despair the next about the gains and losses of aging. I wanted to write about cultural transgressions against our humanity, the inundation of mixed messages and outright lies we must sort through daily about health, youth and beauty. Downhearted about my 49 year old frumpiness, the sex goddess inside of me wanted to rage about her invisibility. It's painful and it's real, no matter how much I "know better" and can slough off the negativity on the good days. I planned to wrap up with considered, articulate arguments for self-acceptance and a balanced attitude toward mental and physical health.

Then a few things happened over the weekend.

A friend took me to a play about Alzheimer's disease, in which the main character changed from a bright, energetic woman to a slobbering, incoherent mess. My husband and I watched an episode of The Sopranos, the one with Tony at death's door and a plate-sized hole in his stomach, life support clicking away while his family watches helplessly. This led to Googling "coma, memories" and reading about people's experiences with that. To top it off, I hopped into the tub with my Sun magazine and came across a moving essay about a girl in upside-down traction about to have spinal surgery.

I went to sleep with an appreciation of my moving legs, my overweight but healthy body, and my (so far) sound mind. My ability to see, hear, and walk without pain. My freedom. Whenever I'm in that state I promise to appreciate those blessings always, and on one level I do. But it's never too long before the dissatisfactions creep back, demanding equal time. This is the see saw, the yin and yang, dark and light. It's always in flux, and by now I know that the wheel will turn. It doesn't make the hard parts painless, just a little less intense.

Buddhism says our suffering in this life is about attachment. Put another way, we can't deal with loss of control. If we are observant we know the impossibility of controlling others and the world around us. The closest and easiest thing we have any direct power over is ourselves. When we learn from birth that the problem is us – how we look, act and think – we buy into it to gain acceptance and the illusion of safety and security.

It is with this mind-set that we approach our unsocialized impulses and our uncooperative bodies. But how do we usually choose to do it? Certainly not through gentleness or love. We tend to go at ourselves like a drill sergeant in boot camp. We go at it with something akin to hatred and fear of our humanness, a terror of our limitations, of decay and death. This may well be a curse of consciousness, for as Ernest Becker asserts in The Denial of Death,

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Additionally, our culture holds little to look forward to for the aged and the marginal. You can see why so many of us don't want to go down without a fight.

The problem is, we are trained to fight ourselves instead of the system that dismisses, judges or minimizes us. Ideally the "system" would care for the humanity of its members by creating a container of rituals, myths, stories and vehicles from which we took comfort and meaning in the face of our eventual annihilation. That it doesn't adds yet another layer of terror we must push away in order to get on with life.

Becker, whose work expands on that of Kirkegaard, Freud and Otto Rank, says mankind's invention of civilization – a symbolic system - helps us transcend the dilemma of our mortality. He calls this our "heroism project" – engaging in something that we feel will outlast us. This gives us the feeling that life has purpose, meaning and significance.

Enter one of the great blessings of the second half of life. About this phase, Jung pointed out that

“At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning…. we can not live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

This means that the values and goals of our first thirty or forty years begin to chafe. They no longer feel meaningful or appropriate. Instead of focusing our efforts to live forever by accumulating - wealth, children, toys (all tasks of youth) - it eventually becomes our impulse and our task to give, in the form of wisdom, knowledge, and the little time we have left.

A friend who is facing a real possibility of future illness is struggling with a body and will that won't oblige her vision of health and fitness. This is doubly painful in light of other losses she has recently faced. She is angry for not having the control she hopes will minimize future suffering. I would never presume to tell her how to feel; her frustration is understandable. But I encourage her to minimize her current suffering with kindness and compassion for her mortal dilemma. By her own admission, she has not fully grieved her many losses. She would like to get herself and her life back on a track that feels and looks better to her - now. But spirit and psyche may be dragging their feet, implying that she needs to finish the work of this passage.

When the timing is right - timing that mocks our laughable human "schedules" – she might find comfort and progress in the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way – the antidote to the polarities our minds torture us with. As one psychotherapist put it, "I have found a middle way approach most useful when people swing between two unsatisfactory or unsustainable extremes . . . trust vs. distrust; optimism vs. pessimism; positivity vs. negativity; idealized happy self vs. depression; over-indulgence vs. self hatred; perfection vs. imperfection; total control vs. no control . . . "

I must constantly remind myself to walk this middle path. It's true, my "meno-pot" and double chin may belie the sex goddess inside, but she is there nonetheless, expressing her lust for the world in every encounter and intention. The life force may be shapeless, but she is eternal.

A Wish Unfiltered

2009-05-13T08:10:00.001-07:00

My work of late is taking me to some interesting places. Specifically, to garbage dumpsters, full of intriguing refuse from businesses in the SODO district of Seattle. This is where manufacturing plants, the trucking and shipping industries, wholesalers of every stripe, seafood brokers, commercial bakeries, foundries and so much more form the backbone of the city. It's a bit overwhelming at times, with trucks and NOISE and odors and dust . . . but it gets quiet too, in the most unlikely places. The Georgetown area in particular is dotted with pockets of green and houses that date back to Seattle's earliest days. In the triangles formed by adjacent industrial office parks, you may find a sweet little espresso and sandwich café, or a soup stand, or a falafel wagon. In between towers of crushed automobiles and concrete blocks are buildings with no visible names or addresses. These are warehouses full of workers handling imported stone, artisans creating with metal and clay, or perhaps seamstresses assembling sportswear with customized logos.

Needless to say, the trash bins outside these places are filled with trade remnants. I've come across hundreds of malformed zippers, pieces of exquisitely polished marble, dozens of long purple eggplants unfit for sale, slightly wilted but still beautiful flowers. I get to meet the people who work in these blue collar environments too, and I could be projecting, but mostly they seem more engaged than office workers – maybe because they are more active, using both body and mind.

At a commercial bakery the owner packed me a free box of warm donuts, glaze still dripping, right from the assembly line, which I passed along to a road crew down the street after being tempted to eat more than one. I made the rounds on Perimeter Road, along the eastern edge of Boeing Field, where airplane hangars for the wealthy and the little King County Airport provided yet another show I had never seen before.

It was here that a new, clean thought occurred to me while I was talking to the owner of a flight school about his recycling. Suddenly came the idea that I could learn to fly a small plane. It seemed interesting, and doable. Slightly stunned, I realized it had never before crossed my mind - or if it did, it was shot down in milliseconds by visions of malfunctioning controls. Just like thoughts of sailing on the open ocean invoked my reflexive terror of being lost at sea.

It was the first time in long memory that my psyche delivered a wish unfiltered. There was no split second debate, no voice in my head steering me away from doing something as unfamiliar and potentially risky as flying a plane. No aversion whatsoever to a new and wild idea.

It seems that my work among the dumpsters is serving as an education I never got – one in which certain professions were off the radar because white collar work promised a more suitable life, or held more cache for my status conscious middle-class peers. I may never end up employed in the freight yards or airplane hangars of South Seattle, but my eyes are open now to more possibilities than I knew existed. Flying – or trusting that I can learn how – is suddenly a symbolic and appealing option.

Refuse to Choose Part II

2009-04-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

An email conversation with my friend V prompted a bit more thought on the topic from yesterday. (Also I wanted to get another post in before April ends!) Here is my half of the dialogue:

I've been working on the "self acceptance" project a lifetime, but it's been since about 2003 and especially 2007 through now that all the deepest work has been done. (So far.) I have always been one of those "let's see what's around the corner" people, liking the sense of adventure and discovery more than anything else. But "practicalities" always have called me back. As I age it does seem important to have a home base, no question. Like you, maybe I need a home base half the time and adventures the other half. Also, I have to think about this other person I took on as a responsibility! That is really the big question, rather than what will others think of me. It's, what is the extent of my obligation to my marriage? I love my husband dearly and want to factor him in.

It is interesting trying to find the way while also sorting through all the generic and saccharine self-help advice out there. The happiness issue is so complex, and changeable. On paper, of course everyone has a right to be happy, or to pursue happiness at least. But I also think our culture promotes that at the expense of family ties and social ties. Is it really most important for us to be happy as individuals, over and above the harmony of the family or group? Of course it's all situational... but all things being equal, the "me first" aspect of our culture can be pretty destructive.

I've been reading a bit about Americans vs. other societies, in which community and the group is more important than the individual. Americans (generally) like their individuality, since we were founded on those concepts... we like to stand apart. It's part of our national myth. Other countries value choices that favor the collective. Fijians don't understand celebrating one's birthday. (or is it Bali?) They are named based on their family groups and roles, and not given individual names. Individual happiness is not part of their myth. So who is "right" (nobody, obviously) and how do I, as an American woman who also deeply values community and cooperation and harmony, straddle the two?

I Refuse to Choose

2009-04-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

These last few months I've had a taste of the kind of work life that suits me. And I'm scared, because something vital has become apparent:

I can no longer be someone I'm not.

I can no longer look for my niche in the world by applying for permanent jobs. I can no longer seek my happiness in the next position, the next organization, thinking that this will be the one I stay at; this will be the one that makes me content.

I have followed that route for 30 years. And yes, I've had some wonderful experiences in the "permanent" jobs I have taken, but none of them lasted more than 4 years. In fact, most last two or less.

Truthfully, I get itchy after nine months.

I've spent much of my life in counseling trying to figure out why I couldn't settle down work wise and find a field to stick with. As a job's novelty wore thin, darkness and despair accompanied me regularly and I wondered, year after year, how to solve or escape these feelings. Many times I thought I was verging on madness, not knowing why I felt so trapped and defective. I could see that I wasn't cut out for the conventional work world, but I hadn't a clue, nor the inner resources, to address a solution.

When you are ready, shift happens.

I was re-reading Refuse to Choose, by Barbara Sher. If you don't know Sher's work, check her out here. She's a champion of self acceptance and goal achievement with several popular books to her credit. Refuse to Choose is her most recent, and it addresses the special challenges and needs of those she calls Scanners – people who are interested in so many things they don't know which way to turn.

Though I didn't know what to do about it, I've always known I was a Scanner – that's nothing new. But in Sher's experience there are several types. Most of the type descriptions don't fit me well, and in years past I was discouraged by that fact. The last few chapters of her book, however, include a few types that I had never gotten around to reading about – or if I did, the words did not resonate. They now settled into my soul with a resounding "welcome home." It turns out Scanners of my particular ilk are not so much interested in mastery, or spending a lot of time with our "too many" interests. What we crave and thrive on is learning for its own sake, random experience, dipping our toes in and then moving on to the next fascinating thing. We are happy beyond description about variety, change, and experiencing life differently every day. (I'm a combo Jack of All Trades, Wanderer, and Sampler, to use Sher's labels.)

Sher's "types" are her own invention, but that's ok with me. I've been reading enough about neurobiology and personality lately to be convinced that I'm hard wired in a way I cannot change. But even more importantly – and this is relatively "new" for me – I accept deeply that I shouldn't change. I am tired of trying to fit my round peg in the world's square holes. (Actually, I don't mind a few square holes for survival's sake, as with the latest economic shenanigans; it's fine as long as I know I can move on.)

Now that I am in a better place, psycho-spiritually, to move forward in a way that's more in tune with my strengths, gifts, and weaknesses, is it going to be easy? Probably not, but I have to ask: how easy has it been up until now?

The Gnostic Gospels say,

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

These wise words bring up many questions regarding my quest for authenticity:

Am I entitled to fashion my life in a way that makes me happy?
Should I do this even if those close to me don't agree with my methods?
Can I be true to myself in this or any economy?
Can I also meet my obligations to my husband and our life together?
Should I put my needs not just on par with his, but above his?
If so, what are those needs?
What do I want to do exactly?

So why am I scared? Because midlife feels like a life or death threshold for these choices, and I still don't have any real direction or answers, other than what I've stated above. Maybe that's the point, and the Wanderer/Sampler way: making it up as you go along. But at least now, I have genuine, heartfelt permission to do life my way, from the one who counts the most.

On Being a Cracked Pot

2009-04-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

You know, I'm not usually a ranter, but I have to take a minute to complain. I know all the mental techniques for minimizing despair at being middle aged, like counting my blessings and realizing that nobody has it all together even half the time. I've read just about all there is of the midlife literature, so I know I've got plenty of company and reasons for feeling the way I do – physically, spiritually, psychologically. A million bittersweet observations have been made about sagging boobs, bulging bellies, fuzzy heads, loss of purpose, and yes, growing wisdom around midlife. That's all well and good. But those are somebody else's words. I usually think this is too trivial to write about, but today I'm going to spill it. Here are the personal things that distress me these days:

Twenty extra pounds (or so)
Often-uncontrollable carb cravings
Monumental boredom and confusion
Achy joints
Easily fatigued
Unpredictable mood swings (ok, that's lifelong)
Nonexistent sex drive
Being outside the radar of younger men I find attractive
Jowls, double chins, and saggy eyelids

To be fair, here are things I like about where I am now:

In touch with healthy anger
The aforementioned increased wisdom
Tolerance for ambiguity
Acceptance of What Is
Self-confidence
Speaking and acting with integrity and authenticity
Joy and appreciation for "what really matters"
Increased feelings of unity and purpose with Self and Universe

Funny how some of those contradict the first list!

I suppose if you weigh one against the other, it's obvious which list is more valuable. Or is it? It depends on your values. But that's one of the famous tasks of a successful midlife – to cast off the more superficial values of the first half of life – the pursuit of wealth, beauty, bling and status – and turn inward to discover the dormant treasures (of list 2) that await. It's often a hero's journey to make the transition; that depends on your history, temperament, and circumstances.

Youth is wasted on the young, as the saying goes. Wouldn't it be nice to have both youth and these treasures of conscious adulthood? Think of the possibilities! Alas, nature does not permit year a round spring, light without dark, or recreation without destruction.

Coming to terms with that, rather than pining for what's lost, is the better but harder way to go.

Animal Instincts

2009-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

It's not my idea to be up at two, four and then six a.m. each day. If I have any dreams it's for a night of uninterrupted sleep. But the creatures poking my face, playing with phone cords and using the bed as a trampoline have an agenda and an inborn taste for nocturnal activity that can't be argued with. Doors between us only make the noises worse. These early morning feline wakeups make me issue threats I'd be horrified to follow through on. They remind me of something I read recently in a New York Times Magazine article called "Pill Popping Pets":

People’s willingness to employ behavior-modifying medications stems in part from a growing desire for more convenient, obedient household animals. “Our expectations are really going up," says [pet industry analyst David] Lummis. "Owners want their pets to be more like little well-behaved children."

What compels me, then, to forgive, kiss and clasp their little bodies each morning as if hanging on for dear life?

Like the rest of nature, animals are unapologetic about what they are: of the earth in ways we humans have rejected. Animals are a bridge between the "lower" world of the seemingly inanimate - trees, rocks, ground – and the "higher" world of the self-conscious. Animals are a reminder of where we came from and what we're made of. They are the bearers of our ancestry. As much as contemporary life asks us to think and behave otherwise, deep, forgotten parts of ourselves are embodied by animals, and thus, most of us are fascinated with them.

Another of their roles in the mystery is to represent layers of the world that humans are not designed to perceive:

Cats see ten times better in the dark than we do, and dogs hear sounds far above human range.

Bees can see ultraviolet light, revealing yet another layer of reality beyond our own. Click on the flower names on this site to see how the world looks to them.

Elephants and whales communicate via low-frequency sound and seismic waves that carry up to six miles. Furthermore, says one researcher, "when it rains in Angola, elephants 100 miles away in Etosha National Park start to move north in search of water. It could be that they are sensing underground vibrations generated by thunder."

So what are your own reminders of your origins? What in the natural world especially calls to you? Have you ever had an experience in or with nature that is unitive – i.e., made you feel connected to it at a visceral, unspoken level?

More on this in the next post.

Building Community

2009-03-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

In the late 1990s I worked for M. Scott Peck, author of the best-selling book The Road Less Traveled. Actually, I worked for the nonprofit organization he established with the profits from his books: the strangely named Foundation for Community Encouragement. FCE's mission was to teach people the principles of community, as defined by the ability of two or more people to "communicate with authenticity, deal with difficult issues, welcome and affirm diversity, bridge differences with integrity, and relate with love and respect."

When people signed up for FCE workshops, they usually came expecting to meet new people and form bonds based on mutually enjoyable conversations or experiences. They understood the word "community" not as defined above, but as a kind of fellowship or social interaction. What they didn't yet know was that Peck's "community" was an achievable ideal agonizingly difficult to create. Sitting in a circle, anywhere from ten to forty people found out that there was no agenda for the weekend other than to start talking – about anything - and then to see what happened. The only "rule" I recall (though there were others) was that the group had to let each person speak without interruption.

I participated in a number of these circles (one of which included Seat of the Soul guru Gary Zukav), and experienced the gamut - stomach aches, anger, tears, awe, and peace, often without having to say anything. It was part of my job description to participate, and although I didn't "enjoy" the workshop, it gave me tools, insight and courage that I sorely needed in my life. I carry some of the wisdom of this process with me today, even though I cannot recommend Peck's model of community building without reservation. People sometimes quit the workshops because they weren't interested, ready, or engaged, even after being urged to stay and work through their discomfort. Some, not being familiar with the ideas behind the work, felt duped into having to pay for and endure a very difficult process without warning. (We tried to run the office with the community building principles; it was painfully tricky, and ultimately unsuccessful.) Not all who stayed through the weekend workshop gave it a thumbs up. But the majority did, and that's what made the process so interesting.

Workshop dynamics generally cycle through four distinct stages:

The first is Pseudo-Community, characterized by polite interaction as individuals operate on the assumption that group members have few differences (and nothing unsettling to say).
Soon, previously unspoken differences begin to emerge. People start to say what they're really thinking or feeling, and it isn't pretty. Most participants deal with the resulting discomfort by trying to "fix" or heal others, or by trying to convert people to their point of view. Limited listening, high emotion, and a significant level of silent or expressed frustration characterize this stage, which has been labeled chaos.

This is when things fall apart. People want to go back to being polite and friendly, but not authentic. Or they want to organize the group or the process in some other way. Neither "leads to a deep level of connection with others," said Peck.

As you might guess, the only way out is through. Peck called this stage emptiness. This is when individuals begin to notice "what they carry within themselves that keeps them from being authentically present and fully accepting of others. As people share what is real for them—their experience of the present moment, prejudices, stories of past pain or joy, unfulfilled expectations—group members begin to come together in a new way. In this stage, a group will often feel like it is dying but, in the painful struggle to let go of the barriers to relationship, there is opportunity for something new to emerge."

In my experience, the holiest feeling that exists happens in emptiness. Particularly in a group, feeling yourself and others let go of defenses, opinions, excuses, and agendas and just sitting still with ten to forty different and accurate versions of Truth – it's liberating, comforting, and hopeful as little else is. It's a solution to the majority of our problems, really.

The last stage is the gift of Community, characterized by deep acceptance of others and being accepted in return," observed Peck. "Individuals come to know themselves and others in new ways. Differences still exist, but they are transcended and celebrated rather than suppressed. The group is characterized by a sense of profound respect, appreciation and joy." The hope is that workshop participants will take this home with them, practice it, and spread the word, so to speak.

FCE closed its doors in 2001 after twenty years of operation. M. Scott Peck died in 2005 at the age of 69. Dozens of facilitators and many hundreds of workshop participants exist throughout the world, hopefully carrying forth what they learned about true community into our increasingly challenging world.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202203133/www.fce-community.org/about/index.php

Quitting the Gym

2009-03-01T19:30:00.000-08:00

When my husband and I bought our first house in 1993 we were, like most new homeowners , full of hope and excitement about making our new nest our own. It was a 1907 farmhouse in need of much TLC, and although we each brought in modest civil service wages, we figured that over the years, we could handle the basic upkeep and make some improvements. I bought a home repair manual to learn how to tackle the easy stuff, like leaky faucets and running toilets. Not long after moving in, I came across a suggested maintenance schedule in the back of the manual that made my heart sink. It became the first nail in the coffin of homeownership:

For fall, thou shalt

clean, fix or replace window and door caulking; insulate hose bibs; check for water leaks; sweep out chimney; service furnace, sump pump and emergency generator; clean gutters; rake and dispose of leaves; kill moss buildup on decks and walkways; put up storm windows; put your right foot in and put your right foot out; love thy neighbor as thyself, etc.

And that was for just one season. I realized neither one of us would keep on top of even half that list. Instead, I focused on planting a garden, since the previous owners had nary a shrub in the yard. On the front slope I created a rockery, with a "one of everything" approach creating a naturalistic and pleasing improvement to the yard. Neighbors raved about the contribution to the street. It was beautiful, all right, but it cost me many spring, summer and fall days to water deeply, weed properly, and replant where needed. Though I never regretted the garden, I often wished I'd chosen a more thoughtful, easier to maintain design.

At the time of our house purchase, we didn't know that a new roof would cost more than five thousand dollars, or an exterior paint job twice that amount. Never mind aesthetically pleasing additions or updates; after the basics, we couldn't afford anything else. Neither one of us was particularly handy or willing to do this work ourselves. More nails in the coffin. I had my hands full with the garden, and was starting to lose interest in taking care of it. My husband was as indifferent as could be about learning maintenance. So we took out loans to have the necessary work done, and that was that.

But it wasn't. As the deck started to rot, so did my investment in the cultural model of working, living and thinking. I was heading toward a huge midlife transition, and true to the phase, the values I 'd bought into decades ago no longer made sense to me. I was being called to a deep, dark place with many questions and few answers, and I needed to make space for it. Working full time didn't feel right anymore. I resented having to work in a way I didn't believe in to keep a house we didn't like all that much, and couldn't maintain. The tail was wagging the dog and it was time to do something about it.

So after twelve years of making a go of the house, I convinced my husband that we needed to "get out from under." His and my earning predictions, and the ideas we had about traveling and "working smarter," did not bode well for keeping up our old house.

That was three years ago, and we've been renting ever since.

So what does all this have to do with the gym? The idea of regular workouts is similar to the maintenance schedule, really, another item on a "to-do" list that promises security and health if followed correctly:

Get five servings of fruit and vegetables a day; floss your teeth; exercise at least 3 times a week for 60 minutes; lift weights to build muscle and bone strength; stay away from trans and saturated fats; drink in moderation (red wine is best); don't eat too many eggs; eat all the eggs you want; stay away from fat; eat good fats; get eight hours of sleep a night; drink eight glasses of water a day; don't slouch; keep sugar and white carbs to a minimum; limit your caffeine intake; shun fried foods; take vitamins; hormone replacement will save you; hormone replacement will kill you; etc.

Goody for you if you can manage all this. And yet, you will still drop dead at some point. Maybe sooner than you would like, despite adherence to "the list." Which changes annually, by the way. All the most recent dos and don'ts that come at us from no fewer than four media sources, with writers copying hackneyed information from each other and regurgitating the same fear-filled guidelines for saving ourselves – well, it's enough to make you eat a batch of Rice Krispy treats all by yourself.

I'm not suggesting that taking care of yourself is bad, or that exercise should be avoided. A reasonable investment in your health is important, recommended, and may actually extend your life. But at what cost? And what defines reasonable? In Mark Greif's essay "Against Exercise," he observes that "today we really can preserve ourselves for a much longer time. . . [But] the haste to live one's mortal life diminishes. The temptation toward perpetual preservation grows. We preserve [the body] in an optimal state, not that we may do something with it, but for its own good feelings of eternal fitness, confidence, and safety." Now that humankind has generally overcome the struggle for food and disease control, he says, "it might have been naïve to think the new human freedom would push us toward a society of public pursuits, like Periclean Athens, or of simple delight in what exists, as in Eden."

My decision to quit the gym can be likened to refusing to wear a watch, which I stopped doing 20 years ago. It's not that I'm against the clock. It was a symbolic rejection of our culture's busy-busy slavishness to time, the way most people are now to cell phones. I would much rather ask a passerby for the time, or poke my head in a store and engage with the world around me in the process. In the same vein, I would much rather take long exploratory walks through my neighborhood, or through a strange one. Without full body strength training, I may not have the strongest and most balanced muscles possible, but I am happy and willing to walk many hours more than I would spend inside a gym.

"'You are condemned. You are condemned. You are condemned.' This is the chant the machines make with their grinding rhythm inside the roar of the gym floor," says Greif at the end of his essay. Striving for control of the body and the future in a room full of machines does seem like a punishment of sorts. A gym workout feels great when it's done, but the process has always depressed me. It's time for me to overhaul the fear-based approach to exercise. How much more pleasant and life affirming to breathe and move outside, watching the gardens change, saying hi to the woman raking her leaves, and waving at the guys installing somebody's new roof.

Power Surge

2009-02-15T21:05:00.000-08:00

"I'm lying on the floor half the day," my friend is telling me. "The hot flashes are so strong I feel like I'm going to faint." Renee is one of many women I've spoken to whose perimenopausal symptoms are intense enough to alter her daily functioning. I feel an instant bond with her as we share stories of our difficult passage. Popular wisdom says that if your mother had an easy time of it, you probably will too. But Renee is one of several women I know who questions the popular wisdom - because her mom, like mine, reported few if any symptoms.

Are our mothers' menopause memories just a form of amnesia, an example of how people tend to remember the good and sweep the unpleasant under the rug? Or do they indicate a cultural change that reflects the navel gazing qualities of younger age groups compared to the outward-looking views of my parents' generation?

It could be some of each. Let's throw a third possibility into the mix: environmental contaminants, which have permanently invaded the bodies of each and every one of us. Chemicals from plastics, pesticides and other man-made toxins act as endocrine disruptors - which, say researchers, can mimic or block hormones and disrupt normal functions. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, "This disruption can happen through altering normal hormone levels, halting or stimulating the production of hormones, or changing the way hormones travel through the body, thus affecting the functions that these hormones control." Debate continues on the human effects, but low birth rates, birth defects and failure of nesting behavior in the animal world can be traced to known extreme exposure to endocrine disruptors.

Since the female body is already in hormonal chaos around menopause, it's certainly possible that the build-up of environmental factors since our mothers' time could compound symptoms in the more hormonally-sensitive of younger generations.

Last, we can't forget that the world is changing faster than we are, demanding more from us than seems humanly possible. It's been pointed out that humans have not evolved to cope with the kind of chronic low-to-moderate stress that modern life imposes on us. Despair, depression and anxiety about world events and personal issues can take a toll on our immune systems.

Though most people carry on in public as though nothing is wrong, more and more of us are sharing stories about just how difficult it is to live in the world we've created. Technology brings evidence of our short-sightedness to our living rooms every minute of every day. Our parents were worried about their survival during the Great Depression. Many of us are doing that too, only now it's coupled with ongoing distress about carcinogens, rising oceans, failing pollination due to bee decline, soil depletion, killer viruses, genetically altered and hormonally treated food, and so on. Not to mention more immediate stressors such as joblessness, homelessness, lack of education and global economic crises (to name just a few).

So when a 50-something woman says she feels like lying down half the day, perhaps menopause isn't entirely to blame. I feel a fatigue and an anxiety that may or may not have affected my mother, who was perhaps too busy raising four children to notice, too busy willingly taking on a role that I rejected (motherhood). It was still the 70s, after all, and cultural consciousness about female sexuality (and equality) was young. There were lots of things we didn't talk about then, and the types of internal conversations many of us have now were probably too luxurious for the women of her day.

There is something to be said for roles, expectations and rituals, not that I'm advocating a return to any particular "good old days." But today's lack of such markers and civilities leaves us with little to hold onto, and few indications of progress. If we can no longer find meaning and purpose within our homes, our jobs, and our communities, the world begins to look like a pretty scary place. Circa, say, 2009.

Perhaps we women, with our extra sensitivities, are canaries in the coal mine, indicators of the health and balance of the planet. It's not such a far fetched idea; to bring the world into equilibrium many have called for the return of the feminine principle. I say, give Mother Earth a big estrogen patch and let's get the show on the road.

The Hundred Dollars

2009-02-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

What's the difference between skeptics and cynics? Healthy skepticism is another way to say critical discernment, something necessary to get past, say, a timeshare salesman unscathed or beyond the "you have won" headline down to the not-so-fast fine print. But cynicism, it has been said, is a deep sickness of the soul. Many people have taken their skepticism too close to cynicism by making judgments from a fortress of denial, in which anything that doesn't make sense to a "rational" world view must be suspect. It's worth keeping in mind that because what we personally "know" constantly changes, and because the world does too, the truth is multifaceted and always shifting. It lies somewhere between total gullibility and absolute doubt.

All this is a long way of introducing the hundred dollars. Some years ago I was walking in a local park, bemoaning some fate or another, wondering whether all the talk of affirmations and positive thinking had much credence. I hadn't had much luck with them so far. "Okay," I said to the Universe, willing to take another gamble. "Show me if anyone is listening, if what I say matters. I'll take . . . hmmm . . . I'll take a hundred bucks."

I went home and forgot about it until the next day, when a birthday card from my mother arrived a week early. Inside was a check for $100. This didn't count, because she always sent $100 for my birthday, and I could have guessed it was coming.

A couple of days later, I received a letter from Fine Gardening magazine about an inquiry I'd made some time ago. They wanted to buy a single photograph I had submitted (rather unusual for slide submissions), and enclosed was a check for $125. My eyebrows arched in a possible concession. Did this count? I told myself that although I didn't know their payment would be in the hundred dollar range, I had been pretty confident that they would buy it. (Why? Most other photographs of mine weren't so lucky.)

The piece de resistance came later that week. As an admin at the law school, I occasionally helped one of the professors with personal tasks, like faxing and phone calling for non-work purposes. Unbeknownst to me, university policy stated that such work should be compensated separately, and from the professor's own pocket. Thus it was that Professor Burke handed me a check for $100 that Friday before I went home. "For all your extra help," he said, explaining the policy.

"Okay, okay," I said to the Universe after this third show of abundance. "I get it." It was hard to rationalize how all this had happened, and in such a short time. The birthday card may have been a given, but the other two were not. The third one wasn't even on the radar.

So do I fully believe in the Law of Attraction, and all that is good will come if you let it? Absolutely not. That's the gullible end of the spectrum. Unpleasant things happen to all of us despite our best affirmations and intentions. But the opposite end is no place to hang out either. It's the duality see-saw again. Energy expended in service of any extreme, be it ideas or behavior, is usually fueled by its unconscious opposite: methinks the skeptics protest too much. (What did Buddha say about The Middle Way?) Which is another way of saying that underneath every cynic is a wounded idealist.

As for the hundred dollars, wouldn't you know that I couldn't leave it alone. I went to the same park a few weeks later and raised my arms to the sky. "So," I bargained with the Universe. "I could use a few thousand bucks…."

Allow + Unfold = Grace

2009-02-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

The first time I heard the word "acceptance" in a therapeutic setting, it annoyed me. Here I was, pouring my pain out to a new therapist ten years younger than me, and her main point at hour's end was that her strategy, if we were to keep seeing each other, would be to work on accepting my pain and "limitations." I remember thinking that while she was well intentioned, she clearly had no understanding of my troubles, my personality, and the amount of therapy I'd already done.

You know what's coming, don't you? Yes, indeed - she was right on the money. The reason the idea of acceptance, as it relates to life's difficulties, gets a knee jerk reaction is that people confuse it with resignation. "If my in laws want to belittle me, there's no way I'm going to accept that!" But this isn't what's meant by acceptance.

It's akin to surrender, another word that a lot of people don't like. "Why should I give up what I want?" goes the rationale. Surrender and acceptance are not about giving up. They are about owning where you are. If we're always chafing under the yoke of "what is," all our energy goes into resistance. And you know the old saying, "what you resist persists."

How can we humans, with our fundamentally limited awareness, truly know how things should be? We are famously short on long-term perspective and long on immediate gratification. It's understandable: being alternatively hot and cold, happy and sad, fulfilled and bored, sick and well – it never ends. You get used to one thing and it changes. Or, it doesn't change on your timeline, or there's something wrong with it once you get it.

Ranting and raving is what we usually do in response to this "wheel of life." That's our way of venting, of saying, "I'm in pain." Of acknowledging how helpless and victimized we feel in the face of social or universal forces. That's a first step, but if we want to get anywhere, the next step is acceptance, which steers us away from victimization and toward empowerment. This is the place where we can feel ourselves fitting into a better story than the tiny one we construct for ourselves. It's partaking willingly in a larger mystery, one in which we realize that letting life lead us in this strange dance is ultimately more rewarding than a lot of the choosing we have done up until now.

Born With a Funky OS?

2009-01-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

Until I talked to my friend V recently, I realized I'd never put together - out loud - a more complete picture of why I've felt so hindered my whole life. As I get older, and as we learn more about the science and psychology of being human, I have begun to mesh together what feels like satisfactory answers. Of course, we can never know the whole truth of anything - the Universe and its workings are too profound and mysterious for that. (Then there's all the possibilities of past life issues, spiritual contracts, and your astrological profile, if you are open minded about that sort of thing.) But each of these points below, arrived at via both hard work and sudden intuition, resonate like little tuning forks for me. You can click on the graphic to enlarge it:

The trick is, how to manage not only your psychological programming, but your biological challenges as well. Whether hormonal sensitivity is a main culprit (one reason dysthymia and cyclothymia occur more in women), or other bio aspects contribute equally, it's very hard to pinpoint the problem - and thus know what to treat. It does feel as though my physical frailties have prevented me from getting a good leg up toward fulfilling my "potential," whatever that may be.

Bottom line: I've never had adequate, regular windows of time that I've felt self-knowledgeable and clear headed enough to get a handle on what I want. It seems for me life has been all about managing what I call the "bee's nest" in my head and attendant depressive symptoms; just staying afloat enough to get through the days. (Months, years . . . ). My hope is that the "coming home to oneself" of midlife will free up enough energy, self-knowledge and wisdom to help me push through some of these obstacles and become the late bloomer I think I'm meant to be.

Body Wisdom

2009-01-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

Last time, I mentioned the concept of overexcitability but didn't explain what it was. Before I do, let me first say that the concept solved another part of the mysterious puzzle of my temperament.

On the SENG website (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) is an article by Sharon Lind called "Overexcitablity and the Gifted." In it she describes some of the work of Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-1980).

"Overexcitabilities are inborn intensities indicating a heightened ability to respond to stimuli. Found to a greater degree in creative and gifted individuals, overexcitabilities are expressed in increased sensitivity, awareness, and intensity, and represent a real difference in the fabric of life and quality of experience. Dabrowski identified five areas of intensity - Psychomotor, Sensual, Intellectual, Imaginational, and Emotional. A person may possess one or more of these. 'One who manifests several forms of overexcitability, sees reality in a different, stronger and more multisided manner' (Dabrowski, 1972, p. 7). Experiencing the world in this unique way carries with it great joys and sometimes great frustrations."

After reading the article, I realized I'd been born with four of those five OEs. And on top of this loaded stack of sensitivities, the four had never been adequately appreciated, developed or even articulated. No wonder depression. (This would also explain why travel is so deeply rewarding for me.)

The definition of "gifted" has evolved from the narrow realm of intellect and IQ to a wider range of creative talents and inter- and intra-personal sensitivities. Whether you believe Elaine Aron, developer of the Highly Sensitive Person theories, or Dabrowski, or neither, it's obvious that some of us are more sensitive than others. And though the debate between nature and nurture has good arguments for each side, science of late seems to demonstrate a biological basis for much of why we are how we are. (See the recent popular works on mirror neurons for a fascinating example.)

The short story is this: I spent thousands of dollars and a couple of decades thinking it was all in my head, this restless depression that's dogged me since adolescence. And clearly I wasn't alone: lots of people were happy to take my money to try to get to the psychological bottom of things. There were psychological issues, to be sure, and I've done more work than most people to address them. But even with the advent of antidepressants in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties, none of us saw the biological possibilities, because that big picture is only now getting properly researched and paid attention to. (Don't get me started on the prevalence of antidepressants as a solution to our whacked-out culture.)

Sure, I've always known I was sensitive. And I've always suspected there were other reasons for it besides my "original family." But because psychology has been the dominant model to explain our unhappiness, it became popular belief that the way to good mental health was through the psyche. I bought into it hook line and sinker, like a good, dependent citizen. Now there's lots of talk about the mind-body connection, and smart people realize that we still know very little about being human.

The body, it seems, has a mind of its own. It's wiser than we are, because it knows things we can't remember, or refuse to. It knows ancient things that served - and still serve - a purpose in maintaining the health of our humanness. This is why the Hand-Movement-Depression info below and this idea on overexcitability are so… well, exciting to me. The first addresses a bodily basis and non-AMA sanctioned partial cure for my blues; the second affirms that my "excess" sensitivities are innate and may actually have a worthy purpose in my development, if I allow them freer reign. (On a side note, this reclaiming of original Self is a large part of the often intense work of midlife.)

Next time, I'll write about more biological pieces to the mysterious puzzle - recent research on estrogen and depression.

The Hand-Movement Depression Connection

2009-01-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

One of the most time honored suggestions for beating the blues has been to "keep busy." I sometimes balk at this advice because a) our culture overvalues busyness and b) staying busy is often a way to avoid addressing problems.

Recently, though, I came across a more convincing argument for keeping yourself occupied: the book Lifting Depression, by neuroscientist Kelly Lambert. She discovered a brain process she labels the "effort driven rewards circuit." From her website: http://kellylambert.com/index.php

"Drawing on innovative research (with rats, whose brains are similar to those of humans), Lambert identifies a circuit in the human brain—connecting movement, feeling and cognition—that is responsible for emotional emptiness, negative thinking, and other symptoms of depression. She reveals how stimulating this “effort-driven reward circuit” with hands-on physical activities that yield tangible rewards builds resilience against the disorder. Involving the hands is especially effective, since so much of the brain is devoted to hand movement.

Lambert shows how when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin. Our grandparents and great grandparents, who had to work hard for basic resources, developed more resilience against depression; even those who suffered great hardships had much lower rates of this mood disorder. But with today’s overly-mechanized lifestyle we have forgotten that our brains crave the well-being that comes from meaningful effort."

What I like about this approach is that you are not required to go out and change your life dramatically, or do things that feel too beyond your ability to cope at the moment. Preparing a simple meal… that's pretty do-able. Do that once a day or a few times a week, and perhaps you're on your way! What I also like about this information is that it connects the dots regarding my restless temperament. More on that – and the concept of "overexciteability" – next time.

Lambert's website and book also discuss the impact of our increasingly passive lifestyles have on our mental health – something I've been thinking about for years. Countless sources have pointed out that humans cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with our ever-changing technology. The unintended mental and emotional consequences – stress and depression - are rarely discussed and problem-solved in our everyday societal life.

The Vision

2008-12-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

On October 19th I mentioned having a vision:

It came to me one night a year or so ago. I was trying to fall asleep, but was distracted by a free-floating mood of dread and heaviness. It's a familiar energy that has shadowed me for much of my life. Instead of trying to analyze why it had descended yet again, I tried a new technique much like the "pain creature" exercise described in the October 19th post mentioned above. The technique entails friendly, feeling-oriented inquiry, as opposed to the rather hostile "what are you doing here?" approach.

Let me preface by saying that I don't truly know what a vision is "supposed" to be like, any more than I know what any extraordinary or transpersonal event should feel like. I do know that it feels different and important enough to grab my attention and elicit awe and respect for the mysteries of spirit and psyche. It's evidence that there is a coherence and meaning alive within all of us – within the world - that is intelligent beyond our comprehension. To me, that's awfully exciting and comforting.

The vision was a triptych, a three part series of mental images that arose spontaneously and flowed seamlessly from one to the next:

I am inside an unglazed terra cotta pot shaped like a slightly squashed ball. Its texture was ribbed like this one inside and out, but the shape was more like the one below. The opening in the top is smaller than the circumference of the vessel. Raised edges made by a clay scraping tool (a texture you often see on the outside) line the interior walls. I run my hands over their rawness. The pot is very clean and yet feels old and unused, like a cave that rarely sees life or the light of day. It feels like I have been in there for a long time.

The pot sits on the lap of an old Latin or Native American woman who is clearly an elder and keeper of wisdom. A quiet, calm confidence emanates from her. She has time, she has patience, and she has knowledge. I am still inside the pot she holds on her lap.

I am at a potter's wheel, working with wet clay to form my own pot. It is taller and has a much wider opening than the one I'd been inside, more like a vase than a pot. The vision ends with a sense of promise and purpose, a message that there are natural forces at work (or play) which require a timeline and perspective very different than mine.

(I should mention that though I'm an artist, the pot making process is foreign to me. But these vessels seem to have symbolism in the collective unconscious as profound as the universe.)

When the images stopped, I felt as if I had been given a gift. I recall the experience often, and it helps me to understand that time and meaning as humans know it is irrelevant.

From the depths of the psyche to the surface

2008-12-04T09:06:00.000-08:00

Never stand in front of a mirror at the gym next to women half your age. As I soaped up my hands at the sink, a dozen fresh young things (I typed "thins" by Freudian accident) were emerging from yoga class. A few came to preen in the mirror. Flushed with apparent health, their smooth, open faces next to my middle aged one made such a contrast that I looked away in shame and shock. Next to theirs, my face seemed almost death-like, with dark circles under the eyes, yellowish pallor, and an overall droopy look that I didn't quite realize was there.

And it was just this morning that I thought to myself, "You, my dear, are a beautiful woman." (This said with a peripheral awareness of flaws, but valuing the package as a whole.)

To make matters worse, a half hour into my aerobic workout the pit of my stomach got cold, and I began to shake. What had I eaten for dinner? A small bowl of soup and tiny piece of cheese. Uh oh, no real protein to speak of, I thought. Low blood sugar. Dashing to my locker, I grabbed my jacket, extracted money and hastily purchased an energy bar at the front desk. The trembling was getting worse, and a cold sweat began to chill me. This was a deeper reaction than usual, and I was a bit worried. "Sit, sit," advised the trainer, bringing me my change.

We chatted about hypoglycemia and exercise, and also diabetes. The latter had been on my mind for some time, considering I've put on 40 pounds in twenty years. Though I had no diagnosis of diabetes, my maternal uncles lost limbs to the disease. My mother's blood glucose has been on the borderline a number of times. So my genetic potential is semi-loaded, and my perimenopausal sluggishness probably has increased the risk. The American Diabetes Association says 57 million adults in the U.S. have pre-diabetes and don't even know it!

When I vent about feeling old, my parents, who both turned 80 this year, just laugh . "You have no idea how young you are," they say. I believe them, I really do. But they've had more time to adjust to the losses. My mom is long past the age of caring that young men will never see her as anything but an old lady. And though my friend Barb, when ogling a handsome twenty-five year old, insists that "women like us" are miles outside his radar screen, I bristle. I am not so ready to feel invisible.

It's the classic midlife dilemma: what to do with the well of vitality that our aging bodies belie. Stumbling around for answers, awkward or pathetic as it may look to others, is about all anyone can do. It's a good time to remember what Rilke said to the young poet:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Keep the faith, as they say.

How Long Does Limbo Last?

2008-12-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

If we learn any anything in this lifetime, let it be respect and awe for the fact that everybody's different. Especially on the inside. Many of us think that because people are all of the same species, we should respond to things in roughly the same way. Western thought, with its emphasis on rationality and logic, has drilled this into our heads, whether that was its original intention or not. If something's true for the majority, it argues, then it must be true period. The anomalies are relatively meaningless in comparison with the larger whole.

As information generated by our Western culture gets passed around, whether by word of mouth, media or meme, it takes on a life of its own, like a game of telephone. Pretty soon all of us are in a panic because we think we don't exercise enough, eat well enough, play well enough, and sleep well enough. Bombarded daily with this stuff, we are stunned into forgetting that much of what passes for information is flawed, incomplete, biased, or funded by those with ulterior motives. Wait long enough, and what was "true" yesterday will turn 180 degrees (eggs are bad, eggs are good; hormone therapy is safe, no it isn't, etc.) Economics drive our "truths" to an abysmal degree, as Upton Sinclair pointed out. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," he said, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

So when it comes to analyzing the emotional or spiritual aspects of personhood, there's no shortage of books, articles, workshops and well meaning others to tell us what's going on. Some of it can be helpful and even life or sanity saving, for sure. But what happens if your experience doesn't match up with "information" you find in the outside world? What do you do if you're an anomaly, or in a minority for whom there is little or no validation in the form of resources?

If you're like me, you make it your mission to find the exceptions, to find your truth somewhere else out there in the world. Whether this is in the form of another person who has had similar experiences, or some article in a magazine read by few, or in a piece of art, music or whatever – you seek out these needle-in-haystack, precious kindred souls and thank god for the grace of the finding. (This is one of the fabulous things about the internet; our access to potentially helpful resources increases tenfold.)

All of this is a long way of saying that after an extensive search, I finally found an answer to a question I've had for ages: why do some transitions - periods of liminality and limbo - last for so long? In the case of my own midlife psycho-spiritual experience, the only helpful piece of information I recall is from William Bridge's first book, Transitions – a fleeting comment about one client of his who felt in the dark and out of sorts for ten years. That's not much for me to hang onto!

But here's something I can hold onto, and even chew on. It's from a little book called In Midlife, by Jungian analyst Murray Stein. This book gets quoted a lot if you dig past the surface of midlife literature. I've had it for years, and probably even read this passage a couple of times without remembering it. Maybe these graceful "findings" are all about timing – about how things pop out at you when you are really ready to know:

"At certain critical moments in life, the psychological effects of losses or of defeats are greater than they are at other times; they signify more, and they have the effect of 'splitting the block' in a fashion and to a depth that they would not have done at other times. This is not altogether a function of the magnitude of the loss. Sometimes the term of liminality that results from loss … is only short-lived, relatively a mere flash of altered consciousness; at other times it takes hold and dominates consciousness for years. Why is this the case? …

"To this point I have discussed liminality only diachronically, as a [linear] segment within a span of time, preceded by the segment separation and followed by the segment reintegration. Here liminality is viewed as time-bound and clearly limited in duration. But a full discussion of liminality must also see it synchronically, as a permanent dimension or depth of the psyche, a 'layer' that threads through all time and occupies a space in every period of life. At a certain psychological level of things, we are always in liminality, floating and unfixed to identfications, betwixt and between (p. 47) …

"At midlife a person runs into a period when the liminality that is produced by external facts such as aging, loss of loved ones, or the failure to attain a dream of youthful ambition combines with the liminality that is generated internally by independently shifting intrapsychic structures, and the result is an intense and prolonged experience of liminality, one that often endures for years. At this point, diachronic and synchronic liminality come together synchronistically. "Synchronism" is defined in Webster's Third International Dictionary with an image that aptly portrays this kind of cooperation of forces: it is 'the condition of excessive rolling obtained when a ship's rolling period is equal to the wave period, or to one-half the wave period.'

"When these two motions coincide … the ship's natural roll becomes excessive. This is midlife liminality. Always the ship is rolling, and always some liminality is present within the psyche. Always, too, the sea is rolling: life throws up crises and failures that prove our limitations all the time. But when these two motions get together, and the force of each is great enough, they produce a degree of rolling than can reach excessive proportions…

"We do liminality … an injustice if not outright violence by limiting discussion … to the perspective of chronos, if we understand time only in the linear sense, diachronically. [Victor] Turner observes that the experience of liminality includes an altered sense of time, 'in and out of time,' as he puts it… Liminality, so frequently and classically imaged as wanderings in the desert, contains a different experience of time from that of ordinary diurnal ego-consciousness. (p. 50)"

Doesn't solve the problem, does it? But it sure goes a long way toward making me feel less confused and alone. I'll take it!

Idealists and Work - Can We Ever Get Along?

2008-11-25T18:02:00.000-08:00

It's 2 days before Thanksgiving and a familiar feeling is kicking in. I've been in this position before: unemployed around the holidays, with little hope of finding a job until employers are free from seasonal distractions. Meanwhile the days have gotten short and night comes early, pushing me indoors and making cabin fever set in that much faster. Projects exist, but nothing critical, and they don't call as loudly as the cell-level remembrance that between now and February, I get pretty squirrelly.

So I usually plan a trip to Mexico in January. This year, however, with no regular incoming funds, husband unemployed, and an unsettling economic forecast, it's not looking good. Help wanted ads are dwindling. I just finished interviewing with the only employer of eight in the last two months who responded to my application. They must have liked me, because I was invited back for a second interview. Though I put on my best face, I was not called back for round three.

Maybe they sensed my ambivalence about work. I fluffed up my best internal arguments for wanting such a position, with all the growth and social opportunities it would provide. I like to work – in fact, I need to for my happiness. And, I enjoy doing almost whatever is needed for any employer, since service is my raison d'etre. As long as the organization's mission and values are akin to my own, I will last a couple of years in such an environment.

But for years now there's been a lot of foot dragging on my part to commit to a permanent "office job" – the kind that binds you to one location all day, waiting for your measly two weeks vacation to arrive. As I told the women I just interviewed with, if I'm not learning and growing, I probably wouldn't stay longer than a couple of years. I usually begin to get itchy around 18 months. Also essential is that I have a lot of contact with various types of people, and can talk and problem solve and move around. In fact, I'd probably be happy as a barista or deli counter person, or some hospitality position. But there's the rub: they don't make more than minimum wage. And, I'm not getting the impression that many employers want middle aged females in their customer contact jobs. (Never mind the fact that I would be the best employee they could hope for, with high energy and a passion for helping people get what they want and need.) The other dilemma is the old "you're overqualified" argument. I think making a dumbed-down résumé just rose to the top of my to do list.

Regarding foot-dragging and work, is it because of unreachable idealism or realistic, listen-to-your-soul information? Probably both. Trying to match the ideal to the real in our imperfect world nearly always leaves a gap. Then there's the fear of becoming trapped or stuck. What's that really all about? At some point, all of this needs to be put aside until survival-mode passes. It's nice to know I can do that now, because it wasn't always the case.

To be in limbo was agitating, waiting to hear if I made the "final cut." But, the deadline has passed with no word. I feel an odd mix of relief and worry. "Good," a large part of me says. "This leaves room for something better to come along." There's a vacuum now where the energy and hopes put into this were, and so here's another transition to pass through. Funny about us seekers – having something solid robs us of the search. Not seeking feels passive, a feeling I personally have trouble with. Active, proactive, learning, moving, growing, problem solving – now that sounds exciting. Is that really too much to ask from work?

A Guardian's Last Stand

2008-11-22T15:00:00.000-08:00

Chainsaws awoke me this morning, and a wood chipper. They were loud enough to be in the back yard, but as I padded into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I saw the Tree Service truck parked across the street. They were cutting branches from somebody's lone, towering Douglas fir. A similar tree in my old neighborhood was nearly four stories high, planted fifty years ago the day after Christmas.

Although all trees have an energy - a profound presence - these sky-scraping firs seem to radiate a wise elder spirit that watches over time and change, holding the ground and sense of place steady amid surrounding developments.

As I watched through the window, with rain and wind pummeling the workers, more branches came off than was wise for a simple pruning. (Rule of thumb: don't take more than a third of any plant.) The crampon-clad worker climbed higher and then even the skinniest limbs began to fall. My heart sank: the whole tree was going to come down. The thought of this old but robust beauty being sliced to pieces and stuffed in a shredder made me sad. It did not seem to be diseased, or split-trunked (dangerous in high winds). It was simply blocking light from the west-facing windows of a newly-sold house.

"Well," I sighed to my husband, "if they're going to do it, I want to see how it's done." (I wish I could say the same for watching a blood sample being taken, but so far I just pass out.)

The process was careful and systematic. Each branch was stripped from the trunk and carefully guided on a rope down to the ground crew. The smaller chunks were chopped, dropped, and landed with a thunk on the lawn below. The trunk soon resembled a bumpy phone pole. "I wonder if they'll make a totem pole from it," hubby mused. Crampon Guy dug in hard with his feet, herringboned to the top, roped himself around it, and began to slice away at the apex. When the trunk got too thick for his chainsaw, he descended the tree to fetch a bigger one, climbed back up, and started anew.

Roaring like a jet plane engine, the wood chipper had been churning for two hours, recycling the tree into compost and mulch. It finally stopped. Thick slabs of trunk too large for the chopper were hauled away and seasoned for firewood. Soon the stump grinder demolished any above-ground evidence that an old, majestic life had been there. Only sawdust remained.

As in the forest, the fallen tree will go on to support other life, just in a different form: the mulch will help grow stronger gardens, the wood will heat somebody's living room. There's no right or wrong, no good or bad here. When whole tracts of them are razed, the picture changes. But the demise of the noble tree that watched over our corner for fifty years is just another reminder of life's essential dance of dark and light, of letting go of the old to make room for the new, of reconciling nostalgia and potential.

At the moment, the space where the tree lived feels like the scene of a fatal accident, a place of stunned limbo where the old energy form (and our perception of it) needs to disperse and neutralize. But soon the neighboring shrubs and trees will sense new space in which to grow, to strive toward light that once eluded them. And next spring, their branches will bud with new purpose and energy. Round and round it goes. It's all good, isn't it. It's all good.

Virtual Vacations

2008-11-16T17:53:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about the internet is its globe-shrinking capability. And being a visual person who loves to travel, the idea of virtually revisiting places I've been to gives me a particular kick. My first webcam thrill back in the late 90s came from the Sanibel-Captiva Chamber of Commerce site, where this camera atop a favorite hotel almost had me feeling sand between my toes again. Tween Waters.

For another beach a little south of that: Sanibel cam

Also in Florida, the cam at Mallory Square in Key West is fun. In the daytime you can watch passengers disembarking from cruise ships, and at night comes the sunset-watching, busker-loving crowd. Here's one with streaming video from Duvall Street, where at the moment people are wearing everything from shorts to winter jackets. Key West Yahoo weather says it's 65 and windy there, at 9:30 p.m. EST.

The one I love most at the moment, though, was sent to me by my ornithologist brother in law - Brazlian Birds. This site is run by a guy who puts fresh bananas out every day from his farm on the edge of the South Brazilian rainforest. The video stream isn't on during their nighttime, but after 2 a.m. PST, you can have these tropical blues, greens, reds and yellows flitter around your screen in real time. What a wonderful way to bring color and nature from far away into your living room!

The Sun and the Truth

2008-11-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

I hate to admit it, but way back in college, I read COSMO magazine and others like it. Even though I saw through much of its shallowness, the articles on relationships, office politics and the like held my interest because I was always seeking answers to life's painful mysteries. Over time, still seeking, I replaced these bottom rung resources with somewhat more intelligent and thoughtful ones, like self-help books and natural health magazines.

These days, however, an airport layover leaves me empty handed of new reading material. Rows and rows of magazines yield not one single publication I am willing to spend my energy and money on. In fact, there is only one magazine I feel good about buying, and that's The Sun. You can't find it in an airport, or in most stores. Good book and magazine shops will carry it, but the best deal is to subscribe. It contains no advertising, and it's all in black and white. And, it's pretty slim. I read it from cover to cover each month, deliriously. You know why?

Because it tells the truth.

Each article, interview or poem is written from a personal perspective, usually about a difficulty or dilemma that we all have faced or will face (to some degree) in our lives. The details may differ, but at each story's core is a shared humanity that you can't find regularly anywhere else in publishing. Nor on TV, or in social conversation, or any culturally sanctioned arena.

This is one of the fundamental problems with popular culture and media. You can't write or talk seriously about what life is really like for most of us, in which confusion reigns and solutions are hazy. It just won't sell. People want answers, solutions, techniques, exercises. We don't want to sit with uncertainty, ambiguity, and an eye toward "living into" the answers. We don't want to hear that struggles can last for years, or that things may not turn out how we hoped. It's uncomfortable and frightening, and our society offers no supports for it.

Humans have been trying to get happy or wealthy throughout history. Clearly, few have come up with the solutions, but the "experts" are always eager to sell us theirs. Some may be interesting and valid for our lives, and we can try their ideas on for size. But we are well served to remember that we have the truths we need, the material that matters, inside us. It may not blossom till next season, but the seeds and the wisdom are there. This is a law of growth and nature. Patience with ourselves is the most important tool we need to tend this garden. That, and perhaps the ability to discern and share our deepest truths.

(http://www.thesunmagazine.org)

Backstage at the Election

2008-11-09T22:09:00.001-08:00

The time since my last post has been spent doing tedious but necessary work behind the scenes at the county elections office. Here is where more things happen to a ballot than you could ever imagine. Each county and state are responsible for their own voting systems; ours happened to win a national award for the accountability and accuracy of its many-step process. From the initial incoming mail scan to signature verification to the final tabulation, great pains are taken to ensure voter anonymity and that each vote is counted, no matter how long it takes.

Most of the 600 temporary employees recruited for this election have one thing in common: we're otherwise unemployed. Granted, many election workers are retirees there to contribute to an important process while picking up some pocket money. But the majority of us are job seekers in transition, unsure of where this crazy economy is going to take (or leave) us. A lot of us are middle aged women having trouble finding a job; I have spoken to a few who've been searching for close to a year. There is some comfort in numbers.

Working in this warehouse-like space with hundreds of others who need the money makes me remember that getting by in this life often requires tolerance for tedium. Nearly a week after the election, we still have 40,000 ballots to process, all necessitating manual intervention of some kind. Days are long, from eight to six. Our breaks are regulated to make sure bathrooms and cafeterias are not overrun by all of us at once; lunch is just a half hour and then it's back to work. Eyeballing ballot after ballot, one at a time, is exhausting work and enough to make you cross-eyed. On the bright side, we all make fifteen and a half dollars an hour. In another life, we could be slaves in a sweat shop, or cigarette rollers in China making a couple of dollars a day. At least for us the drudgery is temporary and it goes a long way toward bill paying.

In my younger days I might have gotten caught up in resentment for "having" to do this work, or agitation for not being at some elusive dream job that dangles like a carrot before we idealists. These days I am grateful for the work, for the company, and for the chance to be part of the historic, amazing election of Barack Obama, who will try to fix the economy (among other things) and get us back to regular jobs.

And if I feel a twinge of defeatism, I can remember the story of my Uncle George's 3-hour train ride from south Jersey to his Manhattan office each morning; he would do it in reverse at day's end. He did this for fifteen years. I don't know how, really – he was part of that generation that had a more practical and patient attitude toward life. It wasn't all about getting what you wanted, when you wanted it. In his case, he had a family who dearly loved him waiting for his arrival each night. They filled the time between the tedium, year after year, and gave him the strength to do what he needed to do.

A Bargain - the Best I Ever Had

2008-10-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

I went for a walk this evening and found myself at the neighborhood thrift store. Aside from low prices, one reason I like this place is because some of the best bargains are hiding in plain sight. This is a metaphor for life, of course, and I reflect on it each time I find a great Large size sweater among the Smalls. Or a CD I've been wanting to hear stuffed in with the cookbooks. Think outside the parameters, advise the wise folk. Stay open to the possibility that good things can come from unexpected sources.

And, I get to pat myself on the back for due diligence on finding a deal.

One thing bothered me, though, as I walked home. Browsing the book section, I'd become quietly agitated. This feeling crops up often in bookstores. It usually happens when I'm not searching for any particular title or topic, but am looking for something new to read. I've always wondered why.

One thing is obvious: there sure is a lot of second rate stuff out there. Third rate too. (I'm talking non-fiction, by the way. I don't have the focus and patience that most novels seem to require.) I can understand an author and publisher wanting their time in the sun, but really - how many trees need to die for yet another volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul?

Really, though, the crux of my agitation is that the search for the "right book" is often a vain attempt to soothe the loneliness of being human. You could say the same for any type of shopping when there's not a specific need to fill. Many of us have spent strangely unfulfilling afternoons at the mall, trying to ease the emptiness or boredom we so often feel.

The kind of books I look for have the potential to deliver more than clothing, cars, drugs, and other distractions from the human condition. They come to us with the premise of education and expansion. And because we give so much authority and weight to the printed word, we expect a lot from these books. They contain thousands of thoughts that somebody went to a lot of trouble to arrange on the page, hopefully in some order that makes sense to our personal predicaments. And, they require a sustained investment of attention on our part. So when a book doesn't pay off for me, I feel especially disappointed.

Perhaps I sense that many authors write from a high-altitude perspective – from a conceptual rather than experiential viewpoint, as William Bridges puts it. He's the author of a well-known book from the 70s called Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. When his wife died about ten years ago from breast cancer, it threw him into a tailspin the likes of which he'd never known. "How could I ever have tried to pass myself off as an expert on transition?" he wondered in a later book. "I felt now that my words had totally failed to match in depth the experience of being in transition."

Ah, authenticity. Honesty! That's what pulls me into a book: confessions that confirm we're all lost and confused together. Bridges goes on to describe how he worked through feelings of being an imposter, whose readers and clients would now see through his charade and resent his ill-gotten reputation. Captivated by his admission, I felt less lonely. His transparency erased the artificial separation created not only by his authority, but by the mass medium of publishing. Momentarily at least, I felt re-connected – to myself, to him, and to humanity, whose every member has a story of suffering and confusion.

You know that melty feeling you get when somebody shares his or her deep truth? That's gratitude for ya. There's how we think things "should" be, and how they really are. I'm far more interested in the latter.

*Quote above from Bridges' The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments.

Lost

2008-10-21T19:32:00.001-07:00

A wonderful poem for any transition....

*****
Lost

Stand still.
The trees before you and the bushes beside you are
not lost.
Wherever you are is a place called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~David Wagoner

Get Out of Your Head . . .

2008-10-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

I did a visualization today from a book called Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life, by Stephen C. Hayes. I haven't had much luck with this kind of exercise in the past. But you know how it goes: as an onion grows, you get more layers. This morning it was fruitful.

"Pick out one of the painful items you noted in your Suffering Inventory . . . Take a minute to get into experiential contact with it. Now in your mind's eye, put that painful item out on the floor in front of you, about four or five feet away. . . . When you get it out there, answer the following questions about it:

* If it had a color, what color would it be?
* If it had a size, how big would it be?
* If it had a shape, what shape would it be?
* If it had power, how much power would it have?
* If it had speed, how fast would it go?
* If it had a surface texture, what would it feel like?

The results created what the author calls a "pain creature." After reflecting on the results, I went to the next paragraph. "If you have a "sense of resistance, fighting, loathing, judgment, and so on about this pain creature, leave it out there . . . but move it off to the side. Now, find your sense of resistance [or whatever] and place it in front of you, next to the pain creature. When you get it out there, answer the same questions about it."

My first "pain creature," an imagined symbol of my lifelong depression, anxiety, and confusion (aka the Big Struggle) had come to me as a dark, gray, dense cube. Its outer texture was both fuzzy and bristly, like cheap stretchy fabric with prickly little pills. This was a coating or slipcover for the thing. When I pressed harder it felt solid underneath.

Since so many voices vie for top billing in my head, I knew a second visualization on resistance or judgment was in order. And this one made me weep. I discovered another pain creature who wanted to be recognized so badly that it appeared fully formed before I could even finish the questions. This white shorthaired dog, lean and robust with a black spot on its side, was barking madly at the gray cube - doing what dogs are supposed to do, with innocence, integrity and obedience to its character.

Instantly I knew that my resistance or judgment was not malevolent but a protective force, and one to be grateful for. Expecting a dog not to bark when it's bothered is unreasonable and disrespectful of the laws of nature. Especially since the barking will serve you when the situation warrants it. I could see that my depression or anxiety might be worsened, though, by being yapped at all the time by a protective energy that didn't understand. It seemed very apparent that these two "pain creatures" were entities in their own right who needed to be further known and respected - and not by left brain methods, which have formed the bulk of my psychological explorations over the years.

The dog came so naturally and quickly, I was reminded of a vision I had about a year ago - the only true waking "vision" I think I've ever had. More on that next time.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2008-10-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

Order the PBS American Experience documentary on Eugene O'Neill, and watch the whole thing. The following passage has the most meaning when you know the story behind it. But it also stands alone. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

*****

Narrator:
In the climactic fourth act of Long Day's Journey Into Night, in one of the most beautiful and quietly moving passages O'Neill ever wrote, Edmund struggles to put into words the ephemeral sense of connection with something larger that had sometimes come over him while at sea.

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
I was on The Squarehead, square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free.

I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. . . I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself . . . To God, if you want to put it that way.

And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning.

[The following is said so wistfully, in such a quiet, understated way, that your eyes can't help but mist over.]

Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man. . . I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.

Robert Brustein:
Well, there's that beautiful moment in Long Day's Journey when Edmund begins to reflect on the time when he was at sea, and he found God, or what he thought was God in the quiet and the silence and the coming together of all the elements. And his father sits and wonders at this and says, "There's a touch of the poet in you." And he says, "No, I'm not a poet. I don't even have the makings."

Performance, Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund):
No...I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. Well, it will be faithful realism at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

The strangeness continues

2008-10-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

As I said below, everything shifted dramatically in my late 40s. I got more frustrated and restless about continuing on a path that was never rewarding to me in the first place. You know, the one where you go to school, get a career, get married, and live hunky-dorily ever after. I enjoyed work when I could stay engaged, but that was less and less as I got older. Barely able to sit still even at a temporary administrative job, I wondered what was wrong with me. Something indefinable had been calling me for many years, and was now screaming louder by drawing my energy and attention away with new insights and unusual experiences. At some point, trying to decipher my inner life became more important than whatever I was trying to maintain in the outer one. Though I had no idea where I was being led, I could no longer focus on the usual external demands.

One day at work, frustrated tears came to my eyes and I dashed to the (thankfully empty) lunchroom down the hall. A feeling welled up inside me with a physical intensity I didn't understand. Was this a new type of depression? It was a gray, dark winter, after all, and it had been for some time. Leaning against the bulletin board with tears streaming down my face, I suddenly felt the slightest glimmer of another presence. It seemed to be coming from within me. What is this? I thought, stopping in mid-sob. Who is this?

At first there was no answer, just the faintest sense that some kind of energy, with its own sentience, was trying to get my attention. Then, though it seemed beyond the rational, I discerned this new entity's voice along with its powerful inner presence. It's me. I listened for more, but that was all I heard. It's me.

"Oh," I stammered out loud, awed and perplexed. "Nice to meet you."

I collected myself and left the room feeling that something important had happened.

Not long afterward, I gave notice at work. Then, further unsettling my husband, I proposed that we move from our house so I could manage an apartment building. There, with part time responsibilities and no housing costs, I would have enough free energy to listen to what life was trying to tell me.

How it began...

2008-10-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a recommendation for a blue morning: go to Yahoo News and find the photo of the day. More than likely it's something fascinating from some corner of the world that will either make you smile, think, or shake your head in wonder. This morning the page features a horned frog on top of a mini pumpkin at the Bronx Zoo, two of nature's marvelous offerings paired not for humorous effect but for "behavioral enrichment," says the zoo. Keepers look for ways to stimulate the animals "both mentally and physically." You could say this photo did the same for me.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos

And if we add up the impact of the next photo - John McCain caught in an unfortunate grimace behind Barack Obama; and the next, an impenetrable thicket of sailboats in the Barcelona regatta; and after that, a man with a chandelier-like mosaic of fruit stuck to his ceiling in preparation for a feast in Israel – well, it's probably worth getting out of bed each morning, just to have another facet of our amazing world revealed to us. This is life's greatest gift to humanity: to be able to sense and reflect on Earth's overwhelming bounty. Every day our personal world enlarges to encompass what we've seen, heard, tasted and felt. Granted, that may be more than one person's senses can handle, thanks or no thanks to technology. But if we set our filters for delight and surprise, the 'inbox' brings messages that can ease a tough day.

It is inevitable that you will experience at least one small thing today that interests you or makes you smile. These are your gifts for the day. Hang onto them for dear life, for during the toughest times they may be all we have.

Here's mine lately:

Birds I've never seen on the backyard feeder (cedar waxwings!)
Yorkshire Gold tea with cream and sugar
My neighbor's garden
Singing to a favorite song
The farmer's market
Stretching
Walking
Doodling
Sharing deep thoughts with a friend
Seeing the sun come out repeatedly on a cloudy day
Warm wind on my skin
Good eye contact with a stranger

I could list many more. And even though I struggle with depression (lifelong dysthymia), I consider the ability to list more a true blessing. The glass is always more than half full in my book. I'm one of the most optimistic people I know. What's the depression from, then? Damned if I know: exquisitely sensitive temperament and nervous system; difficult upbringing; blood sugar and other hormonal issues; astrological sign (Virgo with Libra Moon and Sagittarius rising); karma; all or none of the above. If I ever feel helpless or hopeless about anything, it's the ability to get out of this box, to punch or love or accept down the barriers that have kept me from doing much besides coping with wildly fluctuating emotions and moods. I'm a smart person. I've read the books and seen the therapists and practiced the visualizations and sat the meditation. I'm thoughtful and introspective to a fault. And until recently, I managed the moods well enough to have a job and a quiet social life and a reasonably "normal" existence.

All that changed in my late 40s.

Welcome!

2008-10-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks for coming! I created this space as a container for things I've found helpful as I go through a difficult and confusing midlife transition. The material here may be useful for other types of changes too. So even if you're not "middle aged" - whatever that means these days - if you've stumbled across this, feel free to comment.

Primarily, I want to share some of the books, poems, thoughts and other things that have helped illuminate my own tricky midlife path. By no means am I "done" with my transition - at the time of this posting I'm 49 and still feeling around in the dark. (One could argue we do that our whole lives long.) But I sense that I may be at least halfway through this birth canal of sorts.

Put another way, I have confidence that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train.

********

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~David Whyte~