Wayswearelost's Blog

Let’s try this again. Let’s start over. Breathe. Imagine snakes eating their tails. Break your arms. Kiss yourself. Whatever you wanted is still there. You could be lonely on 2nd street, fighting the dumpster trucks for silence. You could have a cabin in Missouri with forests as friends and still, the same door would remain closed. Wherever you go, whatever you’re doing, the same door waits.

You don’t yet understand how to see. How to look. Often you dream of snakes and oceans because you cannot trust yourself. There is a door and people are in your way. Thoughts. Try again.

Someone left you a note in your closet. It reads:

Take yourself. Look in the mirror. Place oranges in front of her reflection. Light a candle. Repeat the process of breaking your own heart, then feed it.

Let’s start over. Imagine the snake devouring its own tail. This is what the lost do. They keep hurting themselves, though they speak themselves false, until one day the door opens.

When it does, there will be another, then another. Look at your reflection. Destroy her. Then feed her something sweet to keep going.

I have a new post in mind. In fact, I spent half the night composing it out loud on my back porch to my shadow on the fence. I cried a little and I talked to the stars, too. One of the hardest things to do is realize that most of the frustrations or setbacks that come up on the path are usually created by no one but yourself. That’s the hard part: coming to that point of realization. But the good news is, once you get there, once you finally rest on the side of the road and recognize you’re lost, that’s when it begins to turn around. And nothing is ever lost, especially not yourself, or your strength. It’s those times in life that you’re really moving, though it seems you’ve taken the wrong road or walked backwards for miles. Have faith in this: you’re growing. And you won’t get to your destiny any faster wishing you had the perfect map or it all figured out from the get-go. You’ll get there. You’re getting there. You have to get lost to find out who you are–

Enough of that.

WaysWeAreLost is linked on The Useless Critic’s Website. And so is a picture of me as a kid standing not too far from where I am now. Just down the street. Funny. I still don’t believe I’m back in the one place I spent the majority of my life trying to run away from. I’ll leave again. But I think the hometown has something good to offer me. Some lessons that I think I’m starting to learn. It’s weird that the place people usually feel most at home and “themselves” is home, where as I feel most my self when I’m out in the world, anywhere, other than home.

Check it out: HERE

Dear,

The bracken is thick. My throat is sore. These things are related. I have a pen but no knife. I left it in a box near the kitchen so you could find it. I was afraid. You know what I mean. There are snails in my shoe. I put them there. You may find some in the cabinet next to my grandmother’s napkin rings. They like the dark. Give them a bit of moss. Though you may find it hard to gather any in the desert. It may rain. I think I felt it in my bones before I left. The desert welcomes it then floods. That’s what I’m doing. I stayed in the house too long. I need too much to go. This isn’t a normal story of being lost. I am not afraid. I was afraid, though, which is why I left the knife. While I’m in the bracken, I think of breasts. The kind that as I kid I wanted to learn to cut open. I never did learn, not really. I watched the other men do it. I hear you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Careful not to cut the intestines or it will contaminate the meat. Mostly I was good at reading books and diagrams and instructional manuals on the porch in the heat drinking Big Red soda that I stole from the freezer where the men kept rabbits and rattle snakes. I liked the look of things frozen. Whole. Sometimes there were trails of brown that used to flow in veins of whatever rodent or reptile, on the freezer door handle. Worlds came off their brown gloves. Bodies. I was fascinated and frightened, which I suppose should have scared me. But instead I felt alive. Even as the shots rang out. The men walked through the brush in heat. Happy. I knew in my bones a kind of thrill they breathed. Though I was a girl and sat on the porch and drank Big Red and threw horseshoes. I have a knife hidden in the cabinet. At night I’m afraid I’ll swallow it. There are reasons the desert swells after a long drought. And it floods because it cannot accept too much of what it longs for. Because of this I had to leave. My throat hurts. The bracken is thick. But lost I am safer. You know what I mean. Keep the snails away from the sun.

You said, “I like to think that when they let go, they still feel safe.”

Interesting juxtaposition to your resent barrage of deaths. This town, too, has seen a lot of death lately. No one I knew too personally, but it’s a small town, so I see the effects on others.

Do you wonder why some people keep everything inside? As if they can’t show emotion. And I guess they might release it in other ways, secretly, in the bath or on a walk. But what about those close to them? What if they never get to see that vulnerability, what if they never get to see them open to their pain? Is it a wall against shared intimacy if someone you’re close to never shows any sort of affect? As though they themselves are stone walls and take the crashings in stride, the whip of the waves as if they were ghosts, or sheets of wheat, instead of the invisible knife that is real life?

I didn’t mean to write about that. I honestly have no preconceived notions of what I will write when I write to you, although I did have something on my mind.

It seems a lot of contemporary poets like to write about their therapy sessions. I’ve been guilty of that in one poem. To bring that third person in–the therapist–against the backdrop of whatever emotional drama or scene is being played out. In a way, it clarifies the poets feelings of objectivity against their emotional life. As if to say: “This is how I see it when I detach. How do you (therapist) see it?”

Either that or the poet just wants to look cool: See? I have a therapist; I must be a (too) highly evolved individual within my inner-life.

But that’s a sort of detachment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about letting go. Releasing / Gripping. Knowing when, or when not to let go. And how BOTH can feel like safety as well as a fall into the unknown. A scary leap.

But I keep reading things like:

Basic Trust: an unspoken, implicit trust that what is optimal will happen, the sense that whatever happens is ultimately fine. It is the confidence that reality is ultimately good; that nature, the universe, and all that exists are of their very nature good and trustworthy; that what happens is the best that can happen.

That is from A. H. Almaas’ book Enneagram of Holy Ideas. It was given to me by my philosophy professor that was more of a spiritual guru than anything else. She gave it to me because I think she knew I was experiencing something like this:

The dissolution of that facet of the ego structure…is difficult in the process of transformation since it means letting go of part of one’s identity, and this surrendering can be experienced as a dissolution, a disintegration, a fragmentation, or a sense that you are falling apart.

Yes. Falling apart. From what? From what we build in order to survive in this world. The ideas of self. The ego.

You mention babies holding on and letting go, and still feeling safe. I think they must. We all have that inherent in us. I believe so, anyway. But we lose touch with it. Lose touch with BEINGNESS. Being connected to where we came from. And then maybe the spiritual journey is a retracing BACK instead of forward?

By the way, how did your meeting with Charlie (?) go?

I like that you mention meeting a spiritual leader that has that sort of radiance about them. I have encountered that but with secular people, not very often with spiritual “figures.” I think what they exude is that basic trust. And we see that they have it and we want it. It’s like they have picked up on a frequency that we distantly know, from long ago, but have forgotten. So we can’t place it. But something in our being (in our belly) knows it.

Our belly as a way of knowing. Our gut. I believe in that. And I like what you said about the recent scientific research that the neurons in our bellies aren’t necessarily wired like our brains. An inter-dependence? Or a mutual give-and-take relationship?

Where does the therapist and poetry tie into all of this?

I want to write but my brain won’t let me. Maybe my body? I want to translate what’s going on in my heart and in my gut but all I come up with are blocks instead of images. I try to open those blocks, but inside them are smaller blocks. So I chew on them.

Do you know anything about triggers? I’m sure you do, since you teach about addiction.

A strange thing happened to me tonight. I was running from the bathroom to the living room because a silly TV show I was watching was on, and I thought the commercial was over (embarrassing to admit), so I was sprinting and I knocked my forearm against the door frame.

Later on, I was brushing my teeth and saw the red mark (which will more than likely turn into a bruise tomorrow) on the arm, on top of the bone. I say on top of the bone because that’s how I imagine it. And something in my brain said, AHA! Do it again!

As I sit here, since I’m writing about it, my brain is focusing on it and I can feel the throb a bit. Like a leftover sting. A sort of itch on the bone.

Why do I want to do it again? Why, out of nowhere, do I want to hurt? Triggers.

You see, I’ve lived and walked this life so far quite healthy for a while. What is healthy? Maybe the trigger came about because the wound was combined with seeing an old teacher from when I was a kid today at the health food store.

I drove away and thought, I wonder how she perceived me back then, and how she perceived me after she found out I succeeded, went to Sarah Lawrence, kept writing. (She was the woman, my tutor, who told me to keep bringing her poems, even though it was math tutoring. She is, I think, a large reason I kept writing, (I was maybe 6 at the time and it was my main reason to live to see her smile and say “This is a beautiful poem Shannon!”).

I guess I could have gone a different way. I was very “bad” for a while.

It’s funny I say, that, too, because yesterday I got out of the shower, looked down, and my hands were folded. I didn’t even know I’d pray. But I noticed my hands. My body doing that thing. Why? I even knelt. I said, “I am good. I am safe. Thank you.”

I’m sorry I wrote so much about myself. But I see you often tell stories and maybe, where I say you “think too much” you actually share a lot. You tell great stories about your life. An oral history almost. I never do that. Sometimes I do, but then I stop. Maybe I’m ashamed to have a voice sometimes, so I hide behind pretty images.

It can be scary to tell real stories. That kind of letting go. But who’s scared and why?

Psychics tell us our own stories back to us. Therapists, too. In a different light. Poems do that. As to spiritual guides. Why do we believe it coming from them? Objectivity?

I think we’re more powerful than that, deep down. The ground we stand on is not water. We will not drown. All past selves are beautiful. And Letting Go is just another expression of Holding On.

“How do you/Love the unlovable. You just do.” As I’ve written before, your poetry has so many vivid images, but it also takes on the big concepts, such as love. Obviously, poetry would take on love, but you do it by surprise-amid a stolen cow and looking at a door made of bees. I connect to the surprise…then the feeling I get when I think that maybe we can love just about anything, even the dust.

My mind keys on death, but more now than usual. Over the past three Fridays, including today, three people I knew have died–one a former student who went back to school in her 50s, took my Death and Dying course, and wrote a beautiful paper on dealing with breast cancer, from which she died today. The other two were old friends. With their deaths comes my propensity to frame experience as mortal in its passage…and then comes the nostalgia…and all the while I wonder where all of the energy goes…

We had a memorial for one of the friends at a rib-joint on the outskirts of Fort Worth…on a table, his sisters and daughter arranged several hard-copy photographs of old, including one from the late 1980s, with “Mean Bill” (the deceased) standing alongside two married couples, one of them Maudie and I. Both couples are now divorced and I could not help but juxtapose the deceased with the released…

A young woman made the observation that among the many things babies do very early, gripping and releasing become continual iterations. Before acquiring language, the little humans experience the feelings of strident attachment and letting go after attachment. They probably sense things when doing both, but what? I like to think that when they let go, they still feel safe.

My writing…the last two things I’ve written and submitted for publication revolved around the concept of compliance, and in particular, the problematic nature of such compliance. Both emerged from lectures and crossing concepts with film/TV images. After a few years of tweaking notes and re-correlating concepts with images, I felt that I had the skeletons of two papers–on in regard to alcoholism films and the compliance dramas associated with the seemingly simple decision to have a drink and the other in regard to a particular TV drama (“Mad Men”) and the reluctant decision to conform to company policy. The conformity deals with, in part, the tension between creative individuality and structured group dynamics. A while back you mentioned Ayn Rand and one of the characters in the show also mentions her–in a way that accentuates the individual/group tension.

I have the same walk route today as I had 25 years ago. I walk down Trail Lake which leads to Foster Park. I make a semi U-Turn when I get to the edge of the Park and proceed into the wooded area, emerging from the woods and into Overton Park, which tales me past many trees, a couple of creeks, and a host of empty benches. After about four miles, at a pretty fair pace, with all the music I like blaring in my ears, I begin to feel that I am where I want to be…after seven miles, I feel where I need to be. Walking does benefit me and others in several physical ways, but I do it for the mood. I really believe I’d be a basket case were it not for long walks through two parks with beautiful trees against variegated skies, and all the music I like to hear.

But the “Buddah-like” mood does not last long–you wrote about it being OK to cry “even if life is good.” We cry and know that even a good life “is still hard and we are still lost and so separate from each other and alone.” In a way, walking helps me see such a world as a process of finding and discovery–but then I too feel the weight of separation and the harrowed grip of loneliness…but again, when the grip gets too intense, one can always let go…

We do live in opposition to norms–and maybe that is the equivalent of “living in sin.” A few years ago, a very smart and funny man, a medical doctor, told me that he really did not begin to feel connected until he forced himself to forget all that he thought he knew…in a way, he had to go against the norm he embraced, a norm of thinking that required linearity, logic, and systematic processing. It’s an important norm–a strong norm…but it can hinder us. Sometimes, as in the scene “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” we need to “clear the board of its chess pieces” and stare at its place left vacant.

If we had no norms, would there be no sin? In a somewhat analogous vein, Mark Twain asserted that if we had no suffering, we would have no humor-”there’s no laughter in heaven,” he wrote.

I’m going to take my own advice that I give to you, Don’t try.

I miss you and it’s a long day, always. You wrote how editing and finishing is a death.

What are you writing? Where are you walking? I think everyone wants to know how to get there.

So I’m not going to try. I was driving today and I tried to “catch” a poem or thought-poem that came into my head. It was windy and dirty and nasty outside. I was so tired from work and driving 75 miles to read court documents, so delirious that the day seemed unreal. And then a row of cows. And a bit of green. It’s ok to want to have a mind-meltdown, I thought.

Is it ok? I didn’t. But thinking it was ok to park the car, go to the cows and cry, for no other reason but that sometimes, even if life is good, it is still hard and we are still lost and so separate from each other and alone. Even when close. So just the thought of “giving permission” was a freedom.

Like the thought of sin, the opposite of what you were taught, is ok. That’s it’s just human. But isn’t it the same? That the thought of Losing It is a sin, a break from the norm?

But it’s not. And we are not our thoughts. But our thoughts are what makes us connect.

Right?
For example: this poem. Which I didn’t “Try-For” but maybe someone, or even you, will connect to?

How do you love a door made of bees? How

Do you walk into your own body, with a cow

stolen from the side of a highway after driving

all day listening to yourself break up with yourself.

You park the car. You stand next to the cattle guarding

The same question over and over. How do you

Love the unlovable. You just do. You just steal

The cow. You take him to your bedroom.

Tie him to your lamppost. Feed him letters

And bits of the plant that’s dying in the kitchen,

Stolen from a man who gave it to you for free.

The cow knows how to love everything.

Even the door of bees. Even the unmade body,

Stolen from a God who once loved a God

And still loves a God. And still loves. He does.

“Don’t try!” will serve as my mantra–I did not intend to “condemn” any process taking place internally to “unreality,” and I can only conclude that I did not make myself very clear–and my first conundrum presents itself as I wish to be more clear but “don’t try” to be so!

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?