Besides, maybe being “condemned to unreality” is the equivalent of being thrown into the briar patch?

I guess if I summed up my “quest” it would be “the problem of meaning.” I am certainly not unique in such a quest as many have influenced (and criticized) such a quest. One of my teachers, long ago, told me that if I pursued the problem of meaning, I would, in effect, “hitch my wagon to a bunch of obsessive naval gazers.” Another humorless person, after asking me in an interview for a University position if I was “too concerned with meaning” did not laugh when I asked her, “What do you mean?” She said, “oh, I see what you’re doing–trying to answer a question with a question!” Ugh!

OK, but what moves in my head (and stays there) versus what leaves my head (and gets into another’s head) differ in regard to response, or lack thereof. I suppose I err greatly on the side of “the meaning is the response (by external others)” crew, rather than “the meaning is made by my own response (independent of external others)” crew…

In basic (and overly simplistic) terms it comes down to reality as a product of one’s own doing versus reality as identifiable in consequences that more than one person experiences…I could write that a lot better, but…don’t try!

I’m holding onto a duality that supposes or pretends that one reality (in the head) differs significantly from the reality acknowledged by two or more people (outside of their heads)…as you know, I tell a lot of old stories about the old Catholic school…in the old-School-Catholic-school, being sinful occurred in and out of the head…if one thought about lust, say, he sinned, just as much as if he engaged in a lustful act with another…one fantasizes, even in a dream, about an erotic act of complicity, and one sins, just as if that act (and all the “sinful spillage”) “actually” took place (or occurred “out-of-dream-reality”)…I remember feeling such guilt and shame for thinking about “sinful things” and then getting so tired of being ashamed I’d just burst…maybe I saw, in the duality between “reality out there” and “unreality in there,” a way to escape the shame/guilt? The duality becomes a defense mechanism?

Similarly, contending that “the meaning is the response (by external others)” could be tied to anxiety…when I began accompanying Maudie to treatment/rehab places, I met more than a dozen therapists, all of whom pegged me as “co-dependent” (which brings up another aspect of reality–observer/intercoder reliability!)…my interpretation of the term resembled empathy, but in a more selfish/attached way…I would get very nervous around people who exhibit nervousness; I would become anxious around those who projected anxiety…I remember feeling anxious around my parents when their marital problems would become observable…my desire would be to make them laugh (what the therapists call the “heroic impulse of the comedian”)…I would do anything to get them to laugh (they did like to laugh–for instance, the bought and listened to avidly many of the vinyl “LPs” made by stand-up comedians back in the day)…

I wanted a distinct response from them…I did not see myself as funny unless I could make them laugh, especially at particular times…of course, I could imagine them laughing (and I did), but that particular reality would not ease my anxiety…I needed the external validation of their “actual” laughter…the laughter that they themselves could hear…

Maybe you are nudging me toward acceptance…in particular, acceptance of what I can realize internally, without the assumed or perceived external validation…is this acceptance a necessary “step” toward being spiritual?

You wrote once that, “at the root of everything there’s violence” and I wondered if one could ever get under a root…what would be there?

I thought about the old social psychologist, George Herbert Mead, who taught at the University of Chicago and became (without trying!) the father of symbolic interaction via his book, “Mind, Self, and Society.” Social psychologists had just begun to talk/write about child development in ways that differed from Freud…Mead got one of the balls rolling by distinguishing the “play” stage (imitation, non linear thinking, impulsivity, fantasy themes) from the “game” stage (linearity, role taking, responsibility, distinguishing correct from incorrect)…he knew that the dualities represented fictions and thought of the possibility that each person could always be or represent at least two things at once–or exist in play/game modes at once…

He provide an example of a young boy traipsing around the house in his father’s shoes, lowering his voice, moving his body as his father did, and “taking the role of the other” as he also played with the possibilities of the non-role…I thought of you, wearing your father’s shirt and the liminal world you enter, literally and symbolically, as you put on this shirt–you are at once the daughter of the man whose shirt you wear, but also the non-father who had adorned the shirt in a way that makes his memory and your being different, for the time being…you being the past to the present and then take the present and renew the past, just as the child does in his father’s shoes…

Of course, the dynamics and specific contexts are very much different, but we do engage in processes of wearing the other…taking what you would call the other’s skin and putting it on…or seeing of you could even imaging wearing another’s skin…

We see the canyon between us and sometimes it seems to separate us…but then it also seems to invite an awareness of what we have in common…I wonder if one of the keys to togetherness is a distinct and appreciative awareness of separation?

You are more poetic than you  give yourself credit for. Reading your words is both intimidating and inviting. How do you do it? When I write I feel like I spill myself down a well and hope I land in water.

The people we construct. The scripts we write in our heads. You condemn them to unreality. But what is its opposite? Isn’t this just as real as a walk in a field? I go back to the image so often of walking with you because I feel as though that’s what we’re doing, taking a walk. Do you think conversations are like this? I think prayer is like this, too.

And when I mean prayer I mean everything. An act of anything and everything. Like you said, the beginning of genuflection.

When I was little, I used to talk often with my grandmother. I barely remember but then again I remember quite well, though we are taught to distrust this kind of remembering. I say that because she was (is) dead.

I’d have dreams of her as well. I remember following her down a stairway. I don’t know why this dream sticks out the most. I guess because it was so vivid. Nothing else to the dream but the never ending stairwell, like our conversations.

So I never knew her in life and yet I had (have) a very real history with her.

I like that you were willing to admit the element of surprise in your August 1, 2011 walk with your mother. In Chicago. In the past-present. You are willing to admit that it somehow changed from other “scripted” conversations. And though, as before, I’d argue that the scripted is still “real” this particular time does seem set-apart.

There are holes in our environments. Our consciousness. I think prayer or meditation are doorways into those holes which are otherwise often closed off to our daily lives. What most people don’t understand is that there exists a time that is not our known-image of time. It is negative-time. It is what so many physicists try to peer into. And mystics dance within or at least try to court.

You and I, no, we cannot see the same tree or hear the same sentences or even know the same “I” and yet, how often has someone else showed you a “more real” version of yourself? And maybe version is the wrong word, maybe skin is a better word.

Each day we put it on, each night we take it off. A skin or many that we shed and try on and reapply.

But is one more real than the other?

And when someone, or some event or memory or action blasts open a different perspective, how can we judge the validity or trueness or value of it as opposed to the former, or other perspective?

So in a way, the fact that we are shouting across canyons at each other is the same exact reason we are not separated at all. But one body in a time stacked on top of itself.

Your mother at 30-something can offer coffee to her 60-something son and not just on August 1, 2011 but at any moment.

Consciousness and the brain is both our box and our wing. Oliver Sacks writes about this. And the disorders that unlock certain secrets and unknown territories when it comes to perception and time. But how can we KNOW unless we experience it?

It sounds like you have, at least once, experienced time collapse in on itself. You didn’t even notice the passage of time while going back, and standing still, and moving.

Right now, I’m closing my eyes and doing this thing where I can feel a sort of radiation of energy pulse out the top of my head and chest. I try to concentrate that energy in a certain direction. I write about this in poems, or essays, in my first book although I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing. But I speak as though I can  direct that energy to someone or some future someone who will feel it in their present. Whether that present is the actual present, or the past or future. What we think of as past or future.

Right now I am hoping you feel or think something out of character because in fact it is my character knocking on your door and moving your plants aside in order to somehow appear in your heart which is covered in plants of your own growing and thought.

I get stuck on this plant theme with you but I trust maybe there’s a reason. Is there a reason?

I wear my father’s shirt to sleep in. No one knows this. And it wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t even realize this until tonight, while brushing my teeth. I remember I took it from his drawer back in 1999, simply because I didn’t have a shirt to sleep in when I went over to his house one weekend. Or so I thought. Unconsciously, I think I was trying to find a way to be closer to him. And maybe that’s odd. It is a blue shirt with a pocket in the front. His eyes are blue and so are mine. I was 14 and now I’m 27. The child-me would never admit wanting a relationship I never had. The 27 me is just now comfortable understanding the not-understand-albe.

While living in New York I kept having a series of dreams where I was trying to make it to an important poetry reading (where I was to read) and it was a big deal and I was excited but there was too much snow on the ground and I was driving in Brooklyn and the snow kept me spinning. I get out of the car and run in the snow which is like quicksand which is like those dreams or nightmares that you’re trying to0 hard and not getting anywhere, sweating, or naked in public. That kind of feeling. Futile. Frustrating. The dream always ended the same. My computer breaks and I lose all of my life’s work. It is snowing in Brooklyn and my car is abandoned in the piles of white. There is a large warehouse building where many people wait for my arrival. It moves away in the distance. Never reachable. I carry the broken computer in my hands and there is my father in the middle of the street. I collapse in his arms and weep.

Now I am living back in Texas and I see my father every once in a while. I am no longer the self that is angry or hurt by him. I am the self that is trying to put the pieces back together. Mostly for myself but also for the self that was angry and hurt. He is different and I am different. And I sleep, still, in his shirt.

But they all still exists, don’t you see? The 30 something father and the child-me. The child-father and the present-me. And I’m trying to get them all to agree on one thing. It all spins and twirls and turns red and flows with blood and then blossoms and dies and grows again in a field somewhere in consciousness.

That’s what I think prayer does. In it’s own way, it collapses time so we can open, re-open, heal, break apart.

And you’re there, too. And though I wrote this and it means something different to me than it does to you, we still meet the same feelings at different times in the same caves. I’m on the other side of the canyon, but it’s the same earth we’re standing on.

So the snake sheds its skin and You struggle to free what’s called the Self from the crystallized web of affectation. I enact my own parallel struggle and we remain side-by-side, seeing the same things, but as you say, unable to experience the same things we do see in the very same way, regardless of claims to allegiance. That We could become useful to You and to I, but only if we transcend logical conclusions, at least what Other has taught You and I to regard as logical. Your balloons that you hold could be tears on the cosmos or they could be filled with opposition, ready to drift away once you let go. They may anchor You and I to the world we have pretended. Or, they may simply fill your hands to remind You of your grip.

We enter a cave. You taught me, an exaggerated I, that the cave marks the end of one psychological orientation, one paradigm of thought, and the beginning of sight. Suddenly, all that which marks the walls on the cave reverse us and make us tumble through dead pronouns and now liquid versions of former crystallized being. You are no longer the You, once so familiar, and there no longer exists an I that my body, as I knew it, clinged. All is separate now, in this cave, amid ancient drawings that at one time would appear as clues, but now simply bring forward vision.

At such a moment, in the world away from what seemed so stunning, so materialistic, one or two together can feel overtaken. No, I have yet to kneel when I walk, but some moments seem to stand out so clearly to me…when, as I have written before, the day trades places with the night and the air’s molecules scatter, turning the sky into variegated waves and of a sudden, I, or what would pass as I in ordinary circumstances, cease to exist as simply an ordinary being who pays his bills on time and collects paychecks and poses as one who knows…the whatever has occurred or remains in motion overtakes me, but it always allows for a hole through which I, the recognizable I, can move…as if Alice suddenly reversed her fall and tumbled toward the ground, thinking of herself as the very same person before she came upon the hole…

But, what might happen if I, or that person possessed of something called I, remain overtaken? Could another, You, or that which We had previously agreed to call You, then see exactly what I see? Could we not simply exist in a world of possibilities, but now enjoin all the possibilities into an entirely new vision and call it God, or god, or something greater? As a physicist might ask, could a new We emerge, allowing Us to communicate without a signal?

I talk to myself and say that whoever I conjure up in self-talk cannot exist outside of my head at that moment, or perhaps, at any moment. I will hear voices of those who died and imagine that I talk to them–I imagine they answer, but they do not answer, I tell myself; I provide an answer in the guise of their voice. They have died and cannot converse as I think of conversation, which consists of surprises. I miss the surprises; I can only bring them back to me through a script that I enact inside my head. But all of my assumptions exist in a paradigm that we label, in this case, we can label it quantum physics. Possibilities emerge and in so doing, other outcomes, processes, events, become impossible. I create possibilities by deciding to move in one direction and then make all experiences in another direction impossible, But what if such a paradigm, so obdurate and full of force, cannot sustain the power of a new consciousness, one that could allow for a world without the things you mention–the gardens, the balloons, the teeth? What if the invention in my head has invented Me, or that which calls itself an I?

One day, August 1st, 2011, I walked into the maw of a heat wave. Three o’clock at 103 degrees and climbing, or so a computer screen indicated. No one else walked on my path. No cars passed me on the road. I suddenly became aware of an utter solitude, as if “the thing bomb” (or neutron bomb) exploded and made all humans disappear, leaving all that which humans created remain still. I could only hear the music that came from my IPod, an old jazz song from the 1950s by John Coltrane. I thought of the “Twilight Zone” and saw myself as the only person left, somehow saved from disappearance, maybe as a thing instead of a human. The song, from 1959, brought me back to my childhood, remembering the music that my mom would play on the “Hi-Fi” in the afternoons. If I, or this particular thing called I, represented the “last person” what would I do?

But then another thought entered…perhaps, this I had crossed a time line and walked into the very time of the song’s release. I appeared the same age as in 2011 but now, in 1959, I had nowhere to go. Or maybe I could go somewhere…I could somehow get to Chicago and visit my mom. I realized that on this day, I carried my wallet with me and I imagined myself at my mom’s old house in suburban Chicago. I, a 60 year old man, tried to convince my mom, a thirty-something housewife, that the You she saw, the I of my presentation, actually made some sense. I showed her my driver’s license…I asked her to suspend disbelief…she asked me if I wanted coffee. We actually talked. It seemed less scripted. I had lost control of my carefully crafted conversational sequences and my fantasy free fell upward toward the hole. Subjects came up and finally She asked if all of her children remained alive in 2011. I said yes and that two of them, her daughters, just had birthdays in July…we thought about their age, this being August 1st, 2011…August 1st 2011…August 1st, 2011…

Then, I realized that I had walked over three quarters of a mile, including up the steep hill on Ranch View Drive. I had no awareness of such a traverse…odd in that I am always aware of walking up such a hill as its steepness creates such resistance…but I had gone past it, all the time conversing with my mom, without my usual script…and August 1st kept repeating itself…first as recognizable voices, then as cavernous echoes, then as sounds of thunder in the horizon…and I remembered that my mom died on August 1st, 1996…

One could easily explain all that which occurred with the concepts we have created via our quantum physics paradigm…I did not experience any observable breakthrough and simply entered into a fugue state, probably emerging from the possible combinations of heat, music, subconscious memory, on and on…but could another type of consciousness emerged, one that could easily be trivialized as a bad Twilight Zone script?  Or, maybe, could the experience have had an effect that would leave me open to imagining a world in which previous barriers disappear, and yet we feel safe and blissful?

Could it be the beginning of a genuflection?

I am with god in a boat

he keeps knocking

the keys out of my hand

Dear Mike,

Do you ever feel this way? Let me start over. I am in a boat. Which is my body. I am familiar with wanting. I am so familiar with teeth. There are too many balloons in my hand but I wanted to say in the cave carved into the side. When you go on your walks do you ever want to stop and kneel? Honestly, do you ever feel overtaken? I am familiar with want. It fallows me. The balloons represent separation-never-made-right. In the cave they are bodies but once they leave they become spirit. Maybe this is what the skin of the snake represents. Where does each balloon go? We cannot follow where they end, each one. I am in a boat and I can write you letters but we cannot read the same words in the same way. Do you ever kneel and feel it useless? Forgive me for overtaking this letter with my own wanting. Maybe I can plant a garden of my wanting outside your front door. Maybe when you’re lonely you can look at the keys that grow out of its spine. I would make them grow so as to unlock caves. Do you follow me? Sometimes I want to go into a cave. I feel I need to apologize for this. It is dark. Sometimes I do not feel like gardening or writing letters. I want to find the snake and I want to find rebirth and power which it represents. I think snakes are opposite to balloons and balloons cannot ride in boats, or at least not for long. And not truly. Keys to the side of the mountain where there are caves and maybe our own tiny christs and in their hands both snakes and balloons. I often want to kneel while walking. I often want to familiarize myself too much with teeth and separation-never-made-right. Your boat is going somewhere mine isn’t which means my words and this letter do not know where balloons go after wanting. I am so familiar with my own wanting that maybe I can touch yours, as balloons touch and as boars knock against each other before drowning. I think we demonized the snake because the power frightens us. One day we will know what its like to love one another. By then there will be no use for gardens or front doors or keys or letters or teeth. I cannot unlock your caves which are bodies which are dark and wanting along the spine. I think kneeling lets in light. I think this is why I write to you.

Your description of being “very much in (your) body” and correlating the body with Aesop’s sun struck me as so different from the Western mind/body dichotomy drummed into my head…you seem to put your body at the core of empathy so that instead of equating it with impulse, desire, and relentless drive, your “feeling through” becomes a way of experiencing the other’s soul…we (the royal, societal, we rather than the Mark Twain person with a mouse in his pocket) have constructed a complex “embodied person” that emphasizes particular qualities associated with the “physical self,” making such a self so prominent that any other non-material or non-physical quality almost becomes non-essential or “surplus…”

I keep reading over this paragraph. Sometimes I feel the proverbial mouse in the pocket is actually me. And there is no me, but I stand on the edge and wait for someone or some thing or some experience to solidify a thought of myself.

And now that I’m physically weakened by this temporary sickness, my mind is either extremely on or extremely off. For the most part, it’s off undoubtedly because there’s too much mental stimulus going on that I can’t sort through it all. I tried last night and ended up with a sort of panic attack in the middle of Walgreens. Funny, how the next isle over from the one that the attack began can seem as though a shelter, or a private room. Just give me a sense of aloneness or safety. Then I’ll be able to “compose” myself.”

But even the thought of having to shut the doors and compose the self constipated me. And that’s literally a physical ailment. My mom even said while in the ER room “I think you’ll literally spent your whole life swallowing your shit.” As in holding everything in. As in denying my third and fourth chakra, if you believe in that sort of thing. Self-expression, self esteem. Maybe in her own way she was acknowledging just how much I kept other people’s pain inside as well.

Let me put it this way, Mike. You’re looking for spiritual experience. And we talk about the body and the mind and the linear and the non-linear. Masks that we make and wear and unveil. Personas, even. Societal roles. And we must talk it through and we must understand and educate and speculate and go round in circles and share our stories.

But the body, yes, is the ultimate vehicle. Even the earth, atmosphere, where we make and break ourselves, is a body. The inner dialogues we have and create with our peers, and ourselves is a body. Logos, the word, is a body. The poem, the page, the space we leave ourselves and this life. The handshake. The break up. The coming back together. The sequences in and out of time. All bodies.

And what I mean is I can’t stop anymore. I can’t stop speaking or exploring. I can’t continue lying to myself or to you or my cat. I need to let whatever plant is there, grow. We carry trowels. We dig and hurt and replant something else in its place. I think there’s something in these acts that reflect why we get cut off from the spirit. Or from the sense of connection.

You talk of societies emphasis on physicality. And reference Million Dollar Baby. Maybe Maggie is the stand-in for society. She can no longer live if the idea behind her physicality is threatened. Aren’t we all very much a part of her fear, in touch with it? Death anxiety. What drives us, for good (toward good) or bad? Tell me more

about your thoughts on Death Anxiety.

Yes, we become personas. Maybe they are a sort of replacement for physicality. And we become them so well that we can’t shed them. Or, the opposite, we create so many different personas that we don’t know what’s real. Either extreme in either direction has the same result.

I think that’s a root, the main root, to the Big Problem. And I don’t mean consciousness. I mean spirit. Where is it. How and when do we feel it. What is truth, real, inner and pervasive? It’s as though we get confused and distracted and lost.

When I say I can’t keep going on like this, I know what I really mean is that I will but at least now I’m picking up on the patterns quicker. And hopefully, as I get older, I’ll learn to take less bullshit from myself and the world. I’ll prioritize. I’ll move closer to
spirit, my bliss, as Joseph Campbell says.

What do you want? I mean, really, at the end of it all, what do you want? Where are you going?

I feel like I walk around and look people in the eye (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically) and ask “What do you want?” And often I get no response. Of course, the one I need to turn that question on the most is myself.

It’s lonely, being here. I know that. But what I think I’m coming to realize is that the walls and barriers and insecurities and fears (mostly of the self) start coming down when we are true to what’s inside. Or at least ask it every once in a while. As though we have our little child-version inside of us who is actually more wise than
we are and simply needs us to converse with it every once in a while.

I work for money. But I work for money so that I can pay off debt for a dream. And I work for money so I can keep on track to have freedom to do and see and accomplish more dreams. This is the world we live in. It is hard for me. But also good. If I didn’t have to work, I’d get bored with even my most beautiful dream. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I need to “take the long way home.” But I do think the universe knows what we need and when.

Universe, yes. If I was a physicist I’d have a more scientific explanation for what I mean by that. As a poet-mystic I do not. But even poet-mystics love the ground and the seen and the explainable. In fact, hidden within the latter is what we all long for.

I am not making sense. My body aches. I don’t let on how much pain I’m in because I have always been the martyr. Swallowing my shit, so to speak.

Funny how someone like me can also openly write the words that maybe,
just maybe, pull on people’s inner hearts and ears.

Help me. I just want to write the next poem. In this way, all I do is ignore the body. Or maybe it is more my body because it speaks for me when the rest of me can’t.

Do I mean enough?

You make a lot of sense, more than you want to admit. I like the tangential quality of your writing; it has a very 19th Century feel to it. You called it “rambling,” but it’s way, way more than that. As I said in my last post, just a few barely recognizable seeds will be enough to get you to create something powerful…then when I read, I begin to reminisce…allow for a short story…

I know I said I’m not that interested in books right now, but I cannot define myself independent of them–as both symbolic and tangible objects, as substantive and representational “spirits” of their own. I grew up surrounded by books. My parents, who never graduated from college, read voraciously, often a book a day/night. And they did not settle for “pop/glam” books–they read Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Faulkner, Twain, and thickly referenced historical works (such as “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”)…we had books everywhere…then, of course, I finally made my way to the University and began a full blown love affair with all the books. The University of Illinois library system became my idea of nirvana…I think, at the time, it had the third most volume of books in the nation, behind The Library of Congress and Harvard…

When I got to Iowa for graduate school, I would sit in a corner of the basement in the library where the University kept the Ph.D dissertations and Masters Theses…all were bound in dark green covers with white print on the covers. I began reading the sociology Ph.Ds, the people I knew about or actually met…then the ones I never met or heard of…then the ones in other disciplines that caught my attention…I kept reading, mostly to get a sense of the structure of the ideation…but also to get a sense of rhythm and even “melody”–writing does sing, even very tortured dissertation writing…I wanted to “hear” the rhythm and melody in my head…remove the words and just let myself get into the flow of it…maybe turning it into jazz…that’s the time I fell in love with walking…I had no car and did not get a bike until my 3rd year…walk man cassettes had just come out but I avoided them because I felt it would interfere with my own “music”…

It’s funny that you wrote you thought about me while riding your bike yesterday; I had written you the post then walked and thought about how you might respond, if you did respond…and then wondered what sort of things you would look at, surrounded by all the things I saw in the park–what you would make of the bare trees against the bluish-gray sky or the various children running with and after each other just as the squirrels did it…

So, rambling? No…but you said so many things…and back to the tangential quality, let me clarify…what you wrote reminded me of some of those writers of yore…such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim in sociology, for instance…they would make a point as if they discussed a tree, and then would elaborate upon all of the branches attached to the tree and then, even, describe the forest surrounding the tree…I loved it!

First (long prolegomena!), yes, let’s make the past emails our ground zero for the blog no one will read…Second, trying. I really resonated to what you wrote about that. I find myself so guilty of it, as in trying to impress a person (such as you). Then again, I find that I can do some things to my liking without even thinking about what I’m “trying to do”–sometimes, I feel this way in class, when I’m talking about something that seems so real and true to me. Maudie and I used to talk about being funny and who we thought as funny and who not–she would say, “Yeah, he’s funny, but you can also see the wheels turning when he tries to be funny.” I liked that…most of the really funny people are simply funny…

You’re writing about something deeper than merely being funny, of course, but the principle seems universal…it’s a little bit of a conundrum to me as to get to a point in which we do without trying, requires a good deal of praxis…one of my old Sociology Profs always liked to say, “in order to be good at something, you have to be bad at it first.” I know some are more prodigy-like than others. I remember you wrote me once about how you wrote poems almost as soon as you learned to write–and probably sooner as you “wrote” poems in your head. But even prodigies learn praxis…the great athletes, poets, intellects, spiritualists…all of them develop…

But I believe one can get to a process of doing that transcends words, methodology, and reasoning as we define it…my mom, a housewife by her own proud definition as well as a societal definition, cooked for purely utilitarian purposes, but loved to bake…we, being brats, complained about her cooking, but no one complained about what she baked…one of my sisters, similar to the sister-in-law I referenced, wanted to bake what mom baked and requested instruction…sister could not get the handle of it as she thought mom as “too vague” in her instructions (e.g., her potato rolls required ricing and then mixing the riced potatoes in water and two-three other juices; sister did not understand mom’s utter lack of precision when mom would say, “you’ll know the mixture is right”).

Aesop’s fable “The Sun and the Wind” often (well, I say often, but I’m going by my experience) gets read as a moral tale of influence…getting someone to do something (a young man taking off his coat) that he had not, on his own, thought to do…but I read it more in the context of what you wrote…the wind represents trying–incessant, deliberate, powerful, industrious, and resolute trying…the sun represents being and believing in such being…

I really like reading/hearing about your past, especially the Sarah Lawrence days…I do recall you telling me about the near-brakdown…and your connection to the philosophy class and teacher…do you think you needed to push yourself as you did in order to get to some catharsis? I guess I’m in Blake’s corner regarding the necessity of excess, but I’m also too much of a pragmatist to let myself go “too far”…or maybe, as Blake would say, I’m a coward (he would make it much more poetic and beautiful)…but we have to find the “place” in which sanity and insanity converge–it’s much more dynamic and variegated than a spot on a Venn Diagram, but we need to immerse ourself in that which we cannot know and control so that we can realize what is necessary, at least for the time being…I do not mean to sound or appear so “law-like”…

Oh wow, the 108 number…a great clip from a movie film, the first five minutes from “Bull Durham,”  begins with Annie Savoy’s monologue, “The Church of Baseball.” You can Google it and find a few people who perform it, but Susan Sarandon (who plays Annie) does it best (and I don’t know if her specific version is available on YouTube anymore). Once you read/hear the monologue, you’ll “get the gist” and then some. It’s really a cool film and I do not say that only because it’s about baseball!

You wrote something else that blew my mind–”And I like to think there’s no such thing as ‘getting back in’ touch, because I think we always were.” Cats taught me something–openings and closings mean so little to cats. I wanted a dog; I did not feel any connection to cats. Maudie did not like dogs–she said they smelled bad, but really, I do not think she wanted the commitment (same with children, she always took birth control). She said we should get a cat. I said OK, where do we go? She said, nowhere, now that I agreed to get a cat, one will show up. Sure enough, “Red” the black cat showed up. Maudie opened the door, saw Red, and said, “Come here, Red.” I wanted to know wht=y she called him Red, since he was a Black cat. Because that’s his name, she said.

The Red died and immediately after that, Kittle shows up, pregnant, under a fir tree in our backyard. A few years later, Buckethead appear, lost, stuck behind our washing machine (outside, in an enclave under our car-port). At this time, I started believing in knowing without knowing…we’re in process of meeting (and re-meeting) all the people for whom we have receptors…when I read what you wrote, I knew it immediately…

It’s impossible to predict such a convergence, but at the same time, we anticipate it, subconsciously, for lack of a better word…I knew you would enter my life, I just did not “know it” as I am taught to know things…

I just thought of something–I want to call it “a sociological loop”–I’m not sure what I mean by it, but it has something to do with shared and common pasts and decisions to take off our social masks…

I am afraid to unmask…very much so…I believe that is at the core of my fear of self…

More to come…sooner than you may want!

__________________________________________________________________

I respond:

There is so much here. I cannot respond to everything at this moment because I am tired and can only feel through my body and not my brain. Somehow like the wind and sun in your mention of the fable reminds me of the duality between mind and body. Both necessary and both switching extremes–able to transform back and forth between the persistent one always trying and the steady “being” who does not have to try. My mind often is the wind. And I’m learning to allow it to be the sun. Though at this moment my body is the sun because it cannot try (and thus neither can my mind) so I am simply radiating with a wave of understanding and bringing-in of your letter.

I feel through my body a sense of sadness and yearning from your words. But also a mature calm and looking-back. Lord I sound pathetic and cliche (editing while writing!) but what I mean is that I need these words, too. You are doing that thing where you are going into teacher mode and praising me. I don’t need praising. I need to hear what you have to say from your being. Where are you? What have you found? What doors are you knocking on? Which ones scare you?

But never stop the stories. Your mother, for example, was a zen with baking. In this way the sun. In this way a steady faith in herself and the ingredients. And the act of feeding. MORE than feeding. It was not, after all, regular cooking that sent you into excitement. It was her baking. The sweetness of it. The joy of feeding. And in this way, spiritually fulfilling for both you and her. Which is interesting you bring this story up in this context. Think about it.

And books. You and I are similar in that aspect. The holyness of the book. Of the word. Logos.

I miss the library at Sarah Lawrence, which was very much my temple. Yes, the bound thesis books. Ours are black with gold lettering on the binding. I can imagine you there in a corner in Iowa reading those you knew and those you did not. Almost as though a score of music and your eyes playing the keys, your mind hearing the rhythms. I did (and do) the same. Not as often as I used to.

Something which moves the mind. How these things can be holy. Taking in of something. Taking part of. Reading, seeing, hearing, touching.

I am very much in my body tonight, as you can tell.

What would I have observed in the park? Most definitely the bare trees against blue sky. I always imagine them as dendrites in the brain. I imagine seeing circuits and wires and information sparking between the branches. One big brain.

But I see what you tell me.

Please read Joseph Campbell. I’m sure you have but if not, do. Or download his radio interviews. Actually, YES, download his radio interviews and listen to them as you walk.

But don’t do it to learn in the way we like to learn. Just feel it.

We can take too much time being someone who needs to impress with knowledge and understanding and concepts and name-dropping. But that’s not why we’re here. Not RIGHT NOW. Not FOR THIS.

I want to go back to the way we express and question and discover in the way you describe lecturing on something that means something to you. All rules are out. And you’re really “funny” without trying.

Explain more about the Sociological Loop.

Unmasking. That’s a lifetime of doing. And yet can happen in a second and return again the following second.

Spiritual experience / surrender as a sort of unmasking?

More soon. Maybe in the morning before my appointment. The reality of the body, indeed. Which brings it all back, doesn’t it? I think the idea of death or true vulnerability has the power to either make us withdraw or unmask.

I can tell you more about Sarah Lawrence days, though you knew most as-it-was-happening. Tell me more stories, too. Stories are the vehicles for most of what we don’t know how to say, or can.

I’m afraid you’ll keep yourself from opening up. Same goes for myself. I hate knowing that I know more than I can see.

M writes:

Hi again…

I want to write to someone who might appreciate…I’m not sure if anyone does or will…

Since as long as I remember, I’ve had a very ambivalent orientation toward spirituality, which I am hard pressed to define precisely at this second. For now, spirituality refers to the non-material, non-linear (even non-temporal), and non-strategic experiences that tend to exist inside of us, although we see external reminders and extensions (proof?) while in a “spiritual state.” Such a state provokes a feeling of closeness to a higher power, to use a conventional term (employed in 12 step groups) so that one in a spiritual state feels connected to something/someone bigger than him/herself.

Spirituality also provokes particular emotions that we identify, conventionally, as love, acceptance, willingness, and even fearlessness. It involves several simultaneous and paradoxical orientations–self awareness/selflessness; surrender/grasping; interior awareness/exterior strangeness…

People also reach a spiritual state via substantive/material objects–texts, drugs, physical stances/positioning, utterances, guides–provoking another paradox of attaining the spiritual via the material…or perhaps merging spiritual with material (as in “a spiritual molecule” as some scientists put it, those who study the effects of psychotropic drugs).

What, from my limited human perspective, becomes involved in a spiritual experience?

Setting–the literal, physical, symbolic, and safe place in which an experience occurs.
Disposition–the mental and physical readiness of the person to experience “a difference that can make a difference.”
Substance–the external and implicitly objective artifact that inspires an internal transformation.
Guidance–the care, observation, and mentoring provided by an other (or others) as one experiences spirituality.
Duration–the uninterrupted sequence of experiences required for spirituality.

I’m interested in how substance use (usually coded under the broad term, psychedelics) coincides with spirituality (which again, still remains ill-defined)…many people I talk to who have reported inspiration from such substance use emphasize the experiences while “under the influence.” It seems to me, such people approach spirituality from an extreme substance-bias, ignoring the importance of setting and guidance in particular. Even when setting and guidance become relevant, they seem taken-for-granted as auxiliary to the substance itself.

But most of all, I believe I am ready for a true spiritual experience…I want that. I have little-to-no interest right now in romance, drugs (in and of themselves), and even books. My interest in what I write for (a ver limited) sociological audience has waned considerably. I want to teach, but to be much, much better at it. I want friendship–true, true friendship that involves deep shared histories. I am afraid of what I really want and then seek other, more superficial substitutes, including isolation, to mask my desires. Why do I fear such things that seem not only harmless but fully human? Why do I fear myself?

We got back in touch…do such things merely happen or do they “happen for a reason?” On the surface, both, probably…but does something deeper get involved? I want some people in my life always…as a water wheel turns and returns to a point where I identify my existence…but people are not water wheels and our desires do not remain at the same points…

I keep reading the poem you sent me…it beckons me but I’m not sure where…or why…another hint…

One of my sisters-in-law is bright and extroverted, but has a low tolerance for ambiguity…she wants all things “spelled out.” I know many people who call for step-by-step reasoning…ranging from the brilliant to the idiotic…however accomplished, they lack intuition…you seem so opposite of that–obviously, you’re brilliant, but you seem to require so little in order to get the gist…and yet, you’re the person to whom I end up writing a lot…maybe it’s my contrariness…I sense a person wants more and I become quiet…I sense another needs no more and I elaborate…

____________________________________________________________________________________

I respond:

I do think we are in touch for a reason. And I like to think there’s
no such things as “getting back in” touch, because I think we always
were. Even before we were. This is where people like your sister-in-law
lose interest.

Some people need drugs. Or sex. Or even learning. The latter I’ve come
to understand has been a crutch for me. This wasn’t pointed out until
I had an almost psychotic breakdown at Sarah Lawrence–spending 12
hours in the library all day, writing, or trying to, or reading. Then
taking philosophy class, which, ironically ended up saving me, only
because my professor has “been there and back.” She recognized my
pattern. I was so in my own head and searching for exactly that:
enlightenment, or spiritual experience, when all I was doing was
running away from reality, Reality in itself IS a spiritual
experience. But we often are “drugged” with the everyday. And I don’t
mean the act of walking to and from or visual experiencing the world,
or driving our cars or talking to people. All those are and can be
enlightening. But our minds shut off to the moment. I don’t know why.
I don’t know. Maybe because if they didn’t have that mechanism, we’d
never be able to function as a society. We wouldn’t be able to “turn
off.” We’d all be whirling dirvishes and then that itself, the
spiritualness itself, would become so anti-spiritual. No extreme
should exist. But SOMETIMES they do. Sometimes we are lifted out of
our bodies and into a different kind of seeing or knowing.

But back to my point about almost losing it. I was using learning and
searching as a distraction. What I thought was the path was really the
roadblock. We can’t TRY. That’s the hardest part. And I say that with
hesitancy, because there is a sort of amount of trying to be done.
Trying in the way that we have to try to not be numb. It’s as though
we just have to set it out there, in motion. Put the thought out
there. And remembering to remember the power of intention. That sounds
new-agey and probably doesn’t make sense. But there is a reason for
ritual. Ritual didn’t just appear as a norm in societies for no
reason. There’s always a spiritual backbone to every behavior. I truly
believe that. For example. What I’ve found that works for me is
chanting. I have a chant in sanskrit and I use the mala, which is what
the rosary was modeled after, with 108 beads. Each bead, you say that
chant. I have no idea of the language. All I know is that I am keeping
an intention in my mind and setting it into motion for 108 counts. 108
because someone thought somehow that was not too long, but long
enough. Is there a special meaning behind the numerology? I don’t
know. I think that digging too deep into WHY of rituals or WHAT of
rituals is another way to find a road block, which I also say
hesitantly because I am an advocate for educating the self. But
education can quickly become a blinder, too.

I am not making sense and I am jumping from topic to topic. It is
late. I rode bikes all afternoon, which made me think of you and your
walking. That right there, without you knowing it, is a spiritual
practice, a sort of ritual. We all have them. Because I believe
intuitively and innately, we ARE spiritual beings.

And you’ve set in motion already a large part of what you’re seeking,
just by speaking it aloud (or typing it) to me. Well, mostly to
yourself.

Why are you scared of yourself? Why are any of us? That’s the thing
most people don’t realize. The thing we are most afraid of is the
self. I think because we know we are more powerful and complicated and
intricate than anything else out there. Why are some people in awe and
afraid of the dark, or of space, or of the unconscious or of another
human being or a race or tribe? Same. Or even of their own life and
death? It’s all wrapped up right there inside of us.

Then people use religion and ritual and distorted senses of community
to distract from what we already have right inside of ourselves.

Then they seek to look beyond that, sometimes, and use drugs or anger
or control or sex or power or money to get to or manipulate a
false-sense of reality. A false sense of what they are really looking
for–themselves (and thus the spirit).

Keep talking to me. I don’t know where I’m going either. I don’t know
anything. And that is the best part. But we all need each other. And
you intuitively already understand that, which is wonderful. And
scary. And often why you may hide away. I do the same. Mostly in my
own head or in books and sometimes with distractions. Because the
scariest door is to the self. So we swallow the keys and complain of
being lost. And then we get to the point where we don’t even know we
are lost. We think we’re more than lost, actually, we think there’s no
where to go. Or that there is no journey at all. But there is a
journey, and there is no journey. At once it’s all right here and
everywhere.

I can’t speak of anything with certainty. All I know is that my BEING
knows something. But I may never know it.

Eventually, though, we will. But by that time, most everyone will be
on the other side of the mountain and the winds will be too high and
will carry our words to the infinite silence. The people on the other
side, possibly, were never meant to hear. Though I think somehow they
(we) do in a way that hearing is silent.

My heart hurts mostly because I can’t try. And yet I do. And I want.
And I desire. And these things are distractions, but they also move me
forward. Nothing is good or bad. But we’re hard-wired to be afraid.
There’s a reason for that, too. Fear has a purpose.

I’m afraid no one will hear me. And when I say that I really mean that
I may never hear myself.

Keep talking to me.

I read today a quote by Nietzsche:

In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments. –Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

As I was driving back from the barn today, I had a thought. The sun was setting in the desert sky and I, smiling still from the feel of the horse, thought: Hope denies hope.

What Nietzsche wrote somehow rings true all the way to my bones. And I don’t know why. On the surface it seems so bleak, so devoid of what keeps us moving, thriving, even when all we want to do is bury ourselves in our worst fears or anxieties, when doubt, not certainty, wakes us in the morning.

But as I drove, watching the light and clouds change second by second, a tribute to time and its false body that surrounds us, I thought exactly this: Hope does not need its own name uttered. It does not need to be called upon, or recited into our kitchen sinks or mirrors. It is. It is itself even when in hiding. And it is always hiding. Hope is not for our eyes or even for our world. It is higher and truer and lies next to our Original Nature, eating plums and laughing and crying and tilling soil.

Hope denies hope because it is more itself than we can contain.

Even when we give up on hope, or take our own human minds and evict hope from our landscape, it is. It will be.

It carries us when we forget to be ourselves. When we refuse to be our Original Nature, it continues to be exactly that for us.

I am not a pessimist, so when the weight and shadows call for me, I listen. Sometimes I answer. Sometimes I even pack my bag and go into that desert. But Hope, knowing what I will never know, continues to be without being. And in that veil I am dancing, eating plums and celebrating every success and joy my ego, in its blind stupidity, refuses.

And thank God it does refuse. Thank God what tethers us to trouble slowly rids us, eventually, of ever needing to call on hope.

Like a blanket over a spinning world or a miniature landscape, the lostness quiets the wind, holds off the rains and stops things from growing, from speaking.

Only once have I felt resurfaced.  It rained for a moment and the desert let out a sigh, stillness and movement at the same time.  My body quickly found a compass, a sign to hope for.

I remember sitting on the back porch, drinking wine and smelling of lavender from the bath.  I remember all things hushed around me as though even trees prayed and then were answered and the call-back left the whole landscape in shock.

Our own echo thrown down.  Surrounded by what we most love and fear–hope-for.

The smell of an answer.  Lavender and wet.  My own sigh along with the desert, in chorus.

So all was hushed and honed-in.

It was as though, wandering for a time uncountable, the longness of it stretching on and on until it blanketed the compass that told both where to go and if one was lost, I had forgotten how-lost-I’d-been.

So I sat shaking in the answer-back, the lifting of the lost-veil, and cried.

But it’s back to drought and days that keep asking me my name, who am I, where am I going?

When the blanket of lost covers the landscape, spinning into a darkness where no light of even knowing-the-lost is visible, the heart goes numb.

I’ve lost my knowing-lost and my calling-out.

So now I sit and and try to remember even a slight memory of that longing-one-has-when-lost I have dropped somewhere in the dark.

What is the purpose of being lost if the heart doesn’t care anymore? Or is it protecting itself from a need so deep it doesn’t have to know where to call, it just stands still, blanketed in an unearthed hope that I can’t name?

I feel like running into the desert and cracking open the landscape, digging until the numbness in my heart tingles-out-of-itself.

I’m praying, not for rain anymore to quicken the search, but simply a moment, a second of recognition that there may be a buried hope that is un-nameable and that I have not forgotten or deadened the heart in learning how to long-for you.

Something tells me that in this stage of being lost is a lesson on the danger of hope.

Hope lacks. And hope steals. And hope carries the lost-girl into a cave and eats her map.

I stumbled upon an old Ways We Are Lost Blog soon after landing in Texas last week. I remember thinking “wow, how did I write this? Where is this voice? Where has the concentration and inspiration disappeared to?”

Change is, yes, good, but also difficult. It pushes and pulls our boundaries, our comfort zones. I’m finding that when this happens to ME, I get a bit lost and regress. I begin acting like I haven’t learned the lessons or matured up the mountain as far as I have in the past couple years. It’s like, in fear, I run down the mountain, or deeper into the forest like a child defying the power she cannot control, without knowing that she never had control anyway, and she’s just getting herself into deeper trouble than if she just obeyed, stayed still and enjoyed the crazy ride.

And everything so wrapped up in writing, because for me, writing is my compass. My touchstone. My prayer.

Since moving home, words have caught in trees on my wind shield, but I can’t take them into my body. Perhaps I’m not ready, or am simply in need of settling into some sort of routine. But it breaks my heart a little.

So I’ve resorted to reading poems and embracing them for the love of how they feel in my mouth. I’m lonely for you, I say.

Lonely for the connection I’m missing between myself and the creative flow.

I can hardly pray anymore. prayer being so closely linked to writing for me.

But I should wrap myself in silence and take it in as if itself was a poem. To appreciate silence is wisdom.

Sometimes I feel like a little girl in a wood, scared of making a noise, of breaking a twig, of even crying out for help. What if I make a noise and something large and overpowering comes out of the shadows and I don’t know how to calm it down?

Writing, Charles Simic once wrote, is the closest one can get to the psyche.

I’ve lost touch with mine. And oddly, not only have I suffered, but the people I love have suffered because of it. And the latter, in so many, many ways, is more important.

So I’ve become immature and impatient. And scared. I fill the void with useless worries or insecurities instead of standing in the void and waiting for what appears. I’m afraid I’ve not only run off my shadow, but also others who maybe saw me as a stronger person.

One thing I’ve been humbled enough to realize in this time of silence (and silence is such a beautiful birth-place) is that everyone comes into our lives for a reason, and everyone is God appearing to us and teaching us the most amazing lessons about our scars, our darkness and our imperfections, weaknesses, if we choose to see, if we choose to listen. The important thing is to learn, then let go. And not to hold on to anything as though it is our possession. People are not our possession, the images we have of ourselves are not ours to hold, our talent, gifts–what we think we’re “good at”–nothing is ours to possess. Things come, things go, in patterns and at the right timing.

Sometimes I’m at the top of my game. Sometimes I’m in tune. Sometimes I’m in touch. Other times I’m lost. And that’s ok.

Since I’m not writing anything other than short little poems that are maybe or maybe not beginnings or ends, I’m left to grab moments of reading and trying to stand still in the silence in the wood. So last night I read a poem by Charles Wright called “Clear Night” and a certain stanza caused me to feel strong again. In touch again. Learn to be grateful for those moments, I told myself. And, You will write again. You will find your strength again. Be kind. Be kind.

The stanza read:

I want to be bruised by God / I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. / I want to be stretched, / like music wrung from a dropped seed. / I want to entered and picked clean.”

After reading, I immediately wanted to write. My body tingled and I felt a longing for not only WHAT the poem said, but the ability to express how the poem expressed. So I sat there and waited. Then I wrote a few things out. Then I realized that it wasn’t about that. If I’m to be in silent-season (what I’m now choosing to call writer’s block), I’m going to honor it. Besides, what I did write was flat and stillborn.

I believe, at times, our subconscious recognizes shadows of things-yet-to-occur. And I think my subconscious leaped at those lines by Charles Wright because today, what those liens described, and the unfolding of the last couple months, is exactly what has been happening to me.

A cleaning from the inside out. Isn’t it painful? But worth it.

Being lost is painful, isn’t it? But I choose to believe it’s also worth it.

And the girl, afraid to make a noise? I think it’s time she start dancing. Let the wolf come. Let them meet. Perhaps he’s simply her shadow and is meant to make her stronger once they merge and forgive each other.