Snow Meditation

There it is

falling

like

it does

in pieces or, if you like,

as a whole

idea, drifting

down and down and down.

We’re not used to it, and everyone

I hear in the grocery store shakes

their heads in collective anguish, feeling

down. I was thinking today how

in the snow of 1996 it was Troy I would

have been talking to, and Fena, and Kim,

and how I don’t talk to any of these people

anymore, even though at that time,

they were my best friends. One night, with them, I

jumped over a spiked metal railing into the snow

circling the monument with the globe

and the seas at the end of our street and a hole

was punched through my coat. I was

delighted.

But that was years ago, and Troy is in New

York, and Kim in San Francisco, and I am just

here, alone. Funny how all this snow

can make you feel so alone, being buried

like this, can make you long even for

sharp things, risks, anything to keep

you from just the downwardness of this, this cold like a

padded room or styrofoam kiss

of an empty coffee cup, and

no one can hear you. “No man is an island” always

seems so tropical; here in the zone

of the white mounting foam one is prone

to disagree and believe whatever archipelago

an ego had envisioned, one strand of sand connecting you

to a continent of concern and kindliness, well, you know:

done in by the snow. Beauty can be sweet but

it is not a friend; the twinkling sheen shifting into place

around my windows glows but doesn’t listen, not

really. Moment by moment, each flake flies and fixes

and obliterates the hope of a sun, of a warm

day, of someone stopping by, of anything. Hope

suffocates. We have each sweet inch of the cascade

and no hope, folks. Begin with this, today,

as the surfaces impinge and bend in. Start

with your grief, this loneliness, your disappointment.

Let the whiteness cover it all, and let yourself

in all your starkness be bared

and exposed and scared and one

with the rest of the cold world. Jump

over whatever seems dangerous, darlings,

and be grateful for the people

around you.

Goldilocks in the Bathtub

Too hot – no! too cold – ack!

Open up the Zen book as

the cold suds smack you around and – oh,

it’s inconvenient as hell and heck, so much

for serenity – still,

diving right

into the reality of it and laughing because

No, it’s never the perfect temperature, but

Yes, that’s just

what it is, and Yes, she will keep on being

nosy and choosy – what’s behind door

number one?  How pleased she is with

herself,  her discoveries,

her full tummy, her dreamful

rest, even if

at the end of the story

she gets eaten – of course she does -

all up.

Who doesn’t? Here I am in the shallow

end of it, racing

from the ruins of my own attempts

at filling up the emptiness. Giving

up. Diving for

the covers. My life is a fairytale

of such disasters. And it is Just Right.

Movie Review: A Single Man

This was seriously one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

I felt absolutely, thoroughly wrenched; completely enthralled; deeply moved; utterly captivated.

And the fact that the movie dealt with so many small details and emotions – which usually turns the pace of a movie into the back of the line behind a jar of molasses – and yet it didn’t feel at all “slow” – instead, it seemed over way too soon – testifies to the careful, tasteful, well-balanced handling of each measure of each moment that comprised the film.

The plot: (and yes, I’m going to give it away so close your eyes if you don’t want to know what happens) follows one day in the life of a gay professor in the 60s whose partner of 16 years has died suddenly in a car crash. Because their relationship was invisible, so is his grief; he’s decided to kill himself.

Because he knows he is going to die, every heartbeat, every bloom of a mouth, every color that he encounters pops with intensified meaning. He pays attention to the pulse in a woman’s throat, to the blue of a girl’s eyes; he appreciates everything he sees and sees it as beautiful. Obviously a very restricted character, his vocalizing of these visions – like telling his secretary her hair is beautiful, that she’s gorgeous – shocks people.

What’s interesting is that the man doesn’t find these things to be beautiful and then think, “oh, I won’t kill myself”  – and he also isn’t feeling sorry for himself or being overly morbid. The knowledge of his death embues his life with a clear, tender quality that does nothing to alleviate his broken heart and can in no way prevent his demise. Yet those tiny moments of the essence of life that he experiences with such concentrated attention have a meaning and a joy to them the the man – and the viewers watching the movie – understand as fleeting yet the essence of reality.

This almost ironic relationship of death and life reminded me of a story I read in Everyday Zen this last week, about a guy being chased by a tiger. He’s running for his life. Then he reaches a cliff, goes over the edge, maybe he’ll escape – but there’s tigers in the canyon below. Just as he’s about to fall to certain death, he finds a perfect strawberry on a branch beside him. Lovely! He eats the strawberry with utter delight.

Of course the guy dies. The point is not escaping death. None of us do. The ending of the story, of the movie, is the ending for all of us. Yet we tend to forget it, and so we tend to treat the strawberries we come across – the moments of perfection that are all around us – with shrugging indifference. Feet dangling above tiger jaws, a gun waiting for us at home, we suddenly see the precious nature of every tiny bit around us.

The movie had all the potential to be about the man finding a new love, moving on, finding the beauty in the world, finding redemption. But it’s a very Zen movie. His broken heart remains broken, and he doesn’t escape death. All he finds are single moments of grace, energy, light, gorgeousness, joy – just moments that come and go.

They are all he has – they are all we have – despite the illusion that there is more to grab, to gain, to guarantee against disappointment, despair, unmet desire.

None of us have an eternity. And thank goodness. Death does us the service, if we let it, of limiting our time here.

So pay attention. Keep your eyes open. The tigers are real, and the strawberries are so very delicious.

P.S. Directed by Tom Ford, the fashion designer, the clothes and the scenes are just gorgeous. Based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, someone I absolutely must read.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff?

I love cliches. (And no, I’m not putting the little French accent over the ‘e’. You know how to say it.)

I mean, I don’t love cliches when used as filler to stuff a thought to save the work of original thinking – but I do love to contemplate and play around with the meaning of little aphorisms and sayings, tug at the loose ends and see what truth does or does not exist within it.

I feel like my dad told me once, “don’t sweat the small stuff.” I could be making this up. It seems like something he would have said. For one thing, he tended to get impatient with people getting all worked up about unimportant things – the problem being, of course, that people judge differently what’s important.

Don’t get me wrong, my father was very, very kind; people went to him as a mentor, father figure, friend, confidant, with all sorts of hard issues. But it was different for me, his kid, maybe because he didn’t want me to suffer, or felt somehow responsible, who knows? I remember having my heart broken when I was seventeen, and I was sobbing with young love grief – “It’s not the end of the world,” my dad said, the tone of his voice  threaded with the irked sound of “get over it.”

But I DID feel like it was the end of the world, and I was infuriated by his desire to sweep my feelings under the rug of his discomfort.

Still, over ten years later I find myself, for better or for worse (depending on the situation) similarly disposed towards that kind of easy-going attitude, bolstered by my casual dippings in Eastern philosophy.

You know – kind of like “Me? I’m not avoiding conflict. I’m just Zen. I’m just flowing with the Tao. I’m easy like Sunday morning. I’m not ignoring hard stuff; I’m in the moment. The kids are screaming? My life is falling apart? Doesn’t bother me. So stuff it. Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

That is, I’ve noticed that my “easy-going” nature often does a really good job of submerging and avoiding painful, difficult things – I’m not sweating the small stuff because I’m not even paying attention to it. I don’t even know the small stuff exists. (Thanks, Dad, for the loan of the rug.)

The thing about small stuff is if you ignore it, it can grow into big stuff. Like mold. Like athlete’s foot. Like a cough. Like hurt feelings.

On the other hand, if you get a splinter in your foot, the sliver will work itself out. There are times when letting things take care of themselves is a better idea than stressing and straining with a needle to force healing – you’ll only stab yourself a bunch of times and increase the amount of times you swear like a sailor in front of your children.

So let’s return to the cliche. Perhaps I’ve been misreading it. “Don’t sweat,” it says. That’s not the same thing as “don’t pay attention to.” Perhaps the effort and exertion of fixing every little thing would not only exhaust someone but go against the natural movement of things – and you wouldn’t be paying attention – you’d be lost in a microscope and miss the avalanche coming through your house.

And then there’s the second line that one often hears after the first – “Don’t sweat the small stuff – and it’s all small stuff.” Of course, my broken-hearted seventeen-year-old self would rail against this concept – my broken heart is HUGE! -  wanting her grief to be heard. But again, we’re not talking about not paying attention – we’re talking about not sweating.

We can only know the difference between a splinter that needs to be left alone and a sore that needs immediate attention before it festers into infection by paying attention, by the practice of observing, and giving our attention to each moment and what it brings.

Now that’s really Zen.

This kind of discernment takes our full attention and care – for all the stuff, big and small.

But for either the splinter or the sore, and for the infection or the broken heart or for the big tragedies of our lives, the kind of possessive obsession where we would be wrangling, contorting, attempting to battle the unwanted feelings and events into submission – the sweating – the worry, the stress and strain of wanting to control or avoid or circumvent or anticipate loss and suffering – this kind of exertion is not helpful. It doesn’t resolve the splinter or the death of a loved one. It doesn’t work anything out – it only works us up.

So, wow, it may be a cliche but I’m going to say it’s definitely holding a lot of truth inside of it. May you, may I, learn to treat all of our issues with kindness and attention, but may we be able to face it all by saying something else my dad used to say – must have been something about sweat in the 70s -  “No sweat.”

Weaning

To say my son didn’t want to stop nursing doesn’t quite explain it.

I’ve never had to battle anything quite so hardcore as his feisty desire, his adamant stance, his raging insistence – all the fury an almost two-year-old child can muster combined with the absolute heart-breaking scream of deep, soulful hunger that comes forth with all the power of pure angst and despair.

He got to the point where, if I didn’t show him the boob, he started to hit me. In the face. Hard.

So I zipped up my vest to my neck and cut the poor lad off.

My feelings shifted around over the next three nights, as I woke to his shuddering screams, his vomiting wails, his plaintive, mournful sobs.

At first, I felt like I was introducing my child to the first of what would be a long series of losses. I felt terrible. First, he had lost the security of my womb; now he was losing the comfort of my ever-present breast. His separation from me was only going to increase, inch by inch, until I died, and then it would continue, as his sense of being cradled by life gave way to the shattering of all delight, the dismantling of all love and connection with the final weaning, this time from the milk of life – his death.

To be the one initiating him into all this suffering, which seemed to snowball before him bigger and bigger, crushing all my hopes for his happiness – well, I felt like wailing and flailing, too. (And not just because I was tired, though that didn’t help.)

Life is friggin miserable, I felt myself thinking. The Buddha is right. I’ve been trying to tell myself there’s an upside that the enlightened one is missing, but no, he’s got the whole story. This really sucks.

As I thought this, and rocked my miserable child in my arms, I felt great compassion for his loss. I know, darling, I told him. This is so sad for you. And guess what? This is what life is made of. Loss and suffering and broken hearts.

I felt helpless and angry. I wanted to yell about how unfair and cruel it all seemed.

Yelling was not going to help either of us get through the night.

His suffering was not going to just stop. What could I do?

And sweetheart, I found myself saying, I’m going to help you learn how to suffer; I am going to support you through it.

I thought again about the picture I’d imagined of his future, one loss after another, and this time, as I sat there at 3 a.m., rocking him, talking to him, making him lay down and settle himself to sleep, the feeling that I was torturing and wounding him faded. Instead, I felt a sort of honor or privilege that I was giving him his first lesson in the compassion that can attend our moments of loss and suffering.

I saw that if I could teach him to go through this with gentleness and openness, then I was not only inducting him into a life of suffering – I was giving him the ability to face it and meet it with love. And I don’t mean that in a sweety-sugary way. Being open to suffering means being able to face the fact that it really hurts.

The shift in my thinking was probably related to the fact that at some point, he did start to get the idea about going to sleep, about not nursing but knowing that I was still close by, along with Blue Bunny and his kangaroo name Woof (yes, the same kangaroo who lost her baby several months ago, oddly enough).

But it was also impacted by the fact that I knew I had to wean my child – it just had to happen – and of course, because I love him, and empathized with his suffering, the feelings of compassion that transformed my view of his suffering – and of mine – flowed as swiftly as my breast milk had.

We can’t fight the progression of life. We can try and recreate the maternal womb by padding our internal walls with ignorance; we can pacify our oral emptiness with cigarettes or food; we can try to keep our mothers and fathers with us by marrying partners who will treat us like children. We can do a lot of things to avoid growing up, make a lot of attempts to shield ourselves from the losses that mark our passages.

We can try. But life will win. And if we attempt to lock ourselves into childhood’s protective cushions, we will miss being open to what comes to us after / with the losses, if we are open to them. Wisdom, insight, compassion, love, and true delight in being alive are just a few of the gifts that are on offer when we truly wean ourselves from our infantile desires for instant satisfaction and fulfillment – and when we truly give up believing that life would be better if we never had to wean at all.

Sometimes I think it’s easy to fall into this trap of believing that everything goes downhill after infancy/childhood – we idolize our youth – feeling almost cheated by life for pushing us further through time. Yet, if we stayed secure in a uterus, we would never get out and learn to run. If we stayed nursing, we would never get to have sex. If we remained adolescents, we would always have pimples. We would never get to the good parts of being 30 and 40 and so on, the parts that are so very good because through the suffering that necessarily occurs as we grow, we’ve learned just how precious and rare our lives are. An infant doesn’t know that. An infant has no clue.

Possibly we can learn these things even if we resist them – life sometimes hits me over the head with things, whether I want them or not.

But it’s much easier to invite them in.

Which brings me back yet again to the Rumi quote, possibly my favorite, about letting in loss and suffering, as they may be “clearing you out for some new delight.”

For my son, sleeping all night long and finding his independence and discovering my love does not only come in liquid form are some of the things this weaning will give to him.

And for me – well, I’ve lost my baby, but here is my son.

And there, oh there!, is my bed.

Express Yourself

I have a confession: I’m truly not looking forward to dying. I really don’t want to stop existing.I mean, the prospect of it is a pisser.

Also: I’ve picked up the Charlotte Joko Beck book again that I had gotten all huffed up about, and I love this passage:

It’s a precious opportunity we have, to be alive as human beings. It has been said that he chance of having a human life is ometing like being picked up as one grain of sand out of all the grains on the beac. It’s such a rare chance and yet somehow,…some error arises. Some of that error is present in each one of us – not fully appreciating what we have just in being alive.

I remember when I was about 15 years old, my vision of my future involved me as a kind of contemporary priestess in full Socrates-Sappho garb, wondering the streets and inflicting people with my manic excitement about being alive. As I studied religions and read the Tao te Ching and discovered goddesses and wrote papers on Eastern philosophy, I always harbored this feeling that the core of my spirituality is an unfailing awe and unburdened joy in the miracle of existence.

It’s a bit of a Julie Andrews-esque Polyanna-ish optimism  – and it’s what causes me to get my knickers all twisted when I read religious stuff that sounds so dour. Underneath all the burdens and grief, I am glad to be alive. Whatever pain or disappointment comes, I want to keep the fire of delight burning at my core.

I’ve been thinking lately about how each of us has a completely specific and individual experience of reality, of life. We each have the gift of this singular version of reality -  and when we express what life is like from our point of view, we are helping to co-create reality, shape it and share it. By honoring our individuality, we honor the deep source that we share.

Sometimes I feel frustrated that my experience doesn’t fit neatly with that of others around me, or that of the writers of Zen books, or that I can’t achieve the same feelings others get from yoga, or that I am not as giddy about Buddhism as I should be, or that I find flaws in things more readily than others…

But truly, how I see things matters. Not because I in particular am special, but because each of us sees something, and what we are seeing, how we are seeing it, is original, and the truth.

This is made evident to me when I read truly wonderful authors who express how and what they see  and are basically weirdos. Like Shel Silverstein. His works are so distinctly him. That is so precious – the ability to be loyal to your own version of the world enough to risk being radically weird, misunderstood…

I’m rambling. The point is, being human is rare, and it doesn’t last long. Honor your truth. Be loyal to yourself, and you are bowing deeply to the mystery within us all.

Be Kind While You Last

“Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”

I’m usually not a big fan of Deep Thoughts tucked to the bottom of email signatures. Not because it’s not fun to see how people have chosen to brand themselves, and not that I haven’t experimented with taglines myself.

No, I find them distasteful only for the same reason that I get irritated by bumper stickers and cute anagrams made out of license plate numbers: They get old really quickly.

Brands are for products, not people.

Like a neighbor’s license plate that says “TyeItOn.” I guess he’s a fly fisherman, though I always think it’s referring to getting drunk.

• First time I saw it – oh, how clever.
• Second time – oh, there it is.
• Third time – oh lord, can’t you change that thing? Is that the sum total of your existence?
• Fourth time – No, I won’t tie it on, I don’t even know what IT is.
  

It’s just my own nails-scratching-blackboard problem, I know. It really hurts my brain to see the same labels on the same cars day after day. I mean, you’ve really got to be committed to whatever phrase or cause you past on your vehicle, and then be happy to live with it day in and day out.

I used to live in a neighborhood where always, everyday, 24/7, an old junky wagon was parked around the corner with a bumper sticker that said “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.” Every day I walked my dog and read that bumper sticker. Every day I found myself having the exact same thoughts about who was the owner of the car and did they think we are aliens. SO irritating.

Okay, anyway, the point is, today I read the quote at the top of this post on my HR manager’s email and it really struck me. I love it. So, despite my antipathy for sayings and maxims and quotes and the like, I’m glad she had it there.

I love “be kinder than necessary.” I love the idea that we should spoil each other with kindness. Be extravagant with grace. Abundant with love and compassion.

It may require imagination – which is why  I think books – particularly novels – are so essential to a civil society – we need to be able to imagine the inner lives of people unlike us – you know, build a muscular empathy towards others.

Give others the benefit of the doubt.  Know that you won’t last long. Let kindness be what you do while you’re here.

Mean Old Lady, I Love You

So we got a snowstorm, and a lot of snow, and I had no snow shovel.

Walking down my street towards my car, still stuffed into my driveway with snow, looking like fragile piece of ugly Lennox packaged with styrofoam, wondering how I would dislodge it, I came across the woman at the end of my road busily clearing her piece of the sidewalk.

The small talk was friendly – something about the pointlessness of clearing the sidewalk when the roads were still unpassable – “a bridge to nowhere” – ha ha ha – etc.

Then I got up the nerve to ask if I could,when she was finished, borrow her snow shovel. After all, I lived a few houses down; she has seen me walk past with my children; I pointed out my snow-wrapped vehicle, my iced house…

“NO,” she huffed, furiously. “NO, I’m sorry but NO,” and she clung to her shovel, as if I were going to fight her for it.

“Okay,” I replied, weakly, confused.

“NO,” she said again, sourly. And I swear she HUFFED.

I felt shamed, humiliated, as if I had asked for something utterly personal, as if I had tread upon her delicate and private soul. I felt like something was wrong with me for not having my own shovel. She was so angry and disgusted with me. As soon as I got into my house I burst into tears.

I guess people on my street got a bit crazy about the snow shovels. The crutches-bound lady across the street from me had the dustpan that she was using to scrape the snow stolen by another neighbor, apparently – which explained why she was cussing and howling in the street one night, though the whole episode lacks some connective tissue of sense…

Snow shovels sold out at the tractor supply place around the corner. They were in short supply. People were, one guy told me, “hoarding.”

Still, I felt a lot of anger toward that old lady who refused me the use of her shovel. You can’t use up a shovel, and why would I want to steal it? And it wasn’t like she was out there all day… and I would have been happy to help with her yard, in exchange… grrr…

The next time I walked by her house, I felt a nasty fury whip through me.

I’m going to kick her garden, I said to myself. And this summer, when her flowers are blooming, I am not going to compliment her, and she’ll feel so guilty for refusing me her shovel. I’ll make her feel bad somehow. I hate her. I hate that mean old lady.

Hearing these words float into my head made me laugh.

Isn’t funny how we get affronted, insulted, cut off, cut down, or just plain cut by someone – a stranger, another driver, a neighbor, a salesperson, a person in line – and in our hurt, we fantasize about lashing out and finding justification – we want to assuage the wrong that’s been done to us with some dramatic come-back, a way to crush the enemy and be validated for what we have suffered…?

All very dramatic, when what has happened is usually a miscommunication or just the common, accidental bumper-car incident of one person’s bad day or Issues bumping into or rubbing the wrong way against someone else’s…

Usually, the person hurting us is not trying to hurt us.

And if they are trying to hurt us, they usually are not trying to hurt us – the real us. That mean old lady doesn’t know me. She was reacting to my public self, some version of me in her mind that has nothing to do with me.

Even if she didn’t want me to borrow the shovel because she thought I was ugly or she didn’t like my kids or was afraid I would steal her shovel – none of these things have to do with the real me. All of those feelings and assessments are hers.

And all of the arrows flung from her angry refusal – well, they weren’t really meant for me. Why pick them up and stick them in?

But it’s not just about not taking things personally. Part of my practice about seeing myself as a part of whole means seeing everyone else as a part of that whole, too.

That mean old lady and I? We’re part of the same whole. We are both

- separate entities with our own issues and

- not separate at all, but part of the same living force

And because of both of these things, I can offer her my compassion, forgiveness, and love. She deserves love just as much as if she had loaned me the shovel and sent cookies along, too. What if she were my mother? Or my child? Poor darling.

I can finally let go of my anger and hurt and desire to punish with revenge – I don’t need it to justify myself. I can have compassion for myself for how bad it felt to get slapped with that cold NO – and I can have compassion for her for how bad she must feel to be so mean. Instead of seeing it as her vs. me, I can know that we are not antagonists on the most crucial of levels. That is the illusion of the ego that we are warned about…

In relationships, from the very intimate ones with parents or lovers to the very brief, tangential interactions with strangers, we so often place ourselves in opposition to the other person. Other people’s idiosyncrasies, their awkward crustiness, their bad breath in the morning, their penchant for picking their nose, their annoying habits their lusty wills their undesirable and loathsome emotional ruts – we tend to find these so abhorrent because we feel that their existence impedes our own. We easily take them personally, see them as interruptions or barriers to our own happiness.

So what we must try to do is to let other people be entirely themselves, fallable, loveable entities living out their own experience… each of us are… and at the same time that we give each of us the space to be, we can choose to embrace each separate being as a revelation of life, a unique instance… connected by our shared humanity…

It is not always an easy practice. But offering this grace to another person is how one enters into a state of grace that many call “God.”

Who knows? Maybe someday someone will think to say to me:

Oh Mean Old Lady, I love you. Your garden is gorgeous, and I am glad for it. You are what you are. So be it.

Scott Darktreader

I had a friend once who was addicted to Romantic Notions.

Scott kind of looked like this

Case in point, as soon as he turned 18 he legally changed his last name to “Darktreader.”

He also had a habit of bowing to me and my friend Robin in the middle of our high school, doffing an invisible but obviously feathered cap, and saying “Mi Lady.”

He was entranced when our senior field trip took us to a performance of Scaramouche.

He was also, at 16, an avid Republican.

Still, I found him adorable. His hardcore arrogance and metallically glazed ideals mixed oddly with his coltish awkwardness, his too-skinny arms poking out of his outdated paisley shirts, the meager moustache grassing over his upper lip so tenderly budding you wanted to pet it. He wore a scowl and often sneered to undercut the sensitive shape of his bones. The effect was humorous, in a sweet kind of way.

He was convinced for a while that I was his soul mate; to that end, he had a past-life regression session where apparently he remembered us in Roman times, where I was a patrician and he a poor plebian, unable to get to me while I pitied him from my upper-crust window. And this was the story he liked to play out between us – that he desired me from afar, but could never have me – a plot he followed, to my annoyance.

He dreamt of going off to Alaska. And then he did, shifting into a “man of the wild” to attend college; he grew his hair into a bushy ponytail, took to wearing khaki, and supposedly lived illegally in a tent on campus grounds a whole summer.  He actually hated Alaska, but he was committed to Romantic Notions.

Some of the things he said to me included:

Your thighs are like watermelons

You are a goddess

You will never get married

You will die before you are 36

I’m going to turn 35 this year, and although he was quite wrong that I would never get married – I’ve done it twice – (though the goddess part resonates)  his pronouncement about my death haunts me.

But that’s what you get from a guy whose last name is Darktreader: Romantic Notions.

And the thing is, we all have them – grand and lofty Ideas, Big Fears, Deep Beliefs that have the look and feel of Absolute Truth, because they are so Big or because you have had them so long – but, once you blow on them, they fall apart, like the white puff of a dandelion weed.

Sometimes we don’t want to let go of a Romantic Notion because, while it may bring with it a sense of Doom, it is also attached to a desire or belief from the past that we don’t want to fork over.

For instance, I believed for a very long time that I was “special” and “talented” in a Big Grandiose Way – and that meant that I was always, in my adult life, failing and not living up to my potential or using my gifts wisely or doing anything right at all. Giving up this belief about myself released me from the pressure to perform – but it also meant relinquishing the shiny, sparkly illusion I’d been wearing in my imagination. It meant letting go of a cherished wish that had formed my self-image as a child – one that had been fostered and fired by the adults around me for years and years.

Another example: My first love. For the longest time, I believed she was not only my first love, but my only real true love, and while this prevented me from opening to anyone new, it also was a Big Idea that I relished. Pining after her through the years and feeling sorry for myself fed the dramatic Romantic story I wanted to tell about myself.

I have to be really careful, because I can easily get carried away by romantic stories. I can quickly believe that I will be abandoned by someone who loves me for a long, lost love – I can readily go along with a plot line of disaster, begin moaning and grieving the denoument, when it never in actuality happens.

It’s the Darktreader within myself, making Romantic predictions and then living them out, caught up in a story so much I make it true, whether or not it reflects the facts, or my true desires.

Stories certainly help us humans process life – even the totally fictitious ones we want to believe are real, like past-lives. But it’s important that we learn to reread our stories, retell them, let them shift and change, because what makes a story or a romantic idea a harmful notion is when it gets rigidly stuck in time – when only one version from one perspective or time period in your life is told.

Life constantly shifts; so must our stories.

Scott, by the way, did eventually change his last name. But, I have to admit – he’s still “frozen in time” in my mind. He will always be Darktreader to me. That may not reflect the truth – but it sure does make a good story.

Stumbling

Sometimes you stumble around, and it’s then that you bump up against

that doorknob you didn’t know existed

You fall into that room you’d never opened before

and it’s bigger than the whole house, seems like

I don’t always feel very graceful or put together, or that

I’ve cleared the path or know the way -

Even so, even in my awkward flummoxed moments of desire and self-pity

with a brain spout I can’t turn off but drips all night with sorrow and regret

The burnt-out bulbs of my intentions dimming

The house brimming with aches and sighs of my neglect

Even so, completely on accident,

I came upon all this love inside me

not sure how it can be inside me when it’s so much bigger than me

not sure how I never noticed it before

My goodness did not deliver it

My practice did not create it

But here it is

Where it’s always been

and it’s big enough to hold everything

every wounded piece

and yes; you, too

are invited