Against Longevity

We are mistakenly under the impression that thing obtain value by lasting forever.

The earth, for instance, and the environment; we (especially us on the ‘environmental’ side of things) have a hard time feeling that this planet ball has any worth if one day, as it shall, it will explode, implode along with the universe and everything in it.

Heaven, some believe, succeeds where earth fails, and is the place we all yearn for, precisely because it is never-ending. Eternal life – the grail cup each of us dips into our secret hearts, drinking in the hope of it, quietly, secretly.

Relationships: We speak of them as “making it.” “Will we make it?” To which I say – “Make what?” Of course our love songs are peppered with the words of eternity – always, everlasting, paradise, forever and ever amen. A good relationship is defined by its length. My grandparents, for instance, married fifty or sixty-something years. Wow, impressive, right?

And then we speak of our individual lives, too – about “I’ve made it to 80 years” or a child dying as being “cut off too soon.”

I’ve got some bones in this whole ideology of longevity as-marker-of-value to pick, lick clean, and toss.

Time-Less

For instance: Encouraging people to stick with relationships for the sake of trying to achieve a certain amount of time put in – as if it were a job, a jail, a retirement fund? Criminal.

Is it not true?: A relationship can change you, challenge you, embolden you, crystalize and shape your beliefs, inspire your passions, awaken your intellectual curiosity – and last only a month, a year, a semester.

Of course, time affects and impacts the nature of a relationship, whether it’s a parent-child, teacher-student, colleague-colleague, or romantic relationship. And I believe in the value of intimacy and trust deepening over time.

But I also believe there is value in a thing in itself, not how it performs as compared to a model of fairytale endings. We certainly don’t feel college is a waste if it only takes four years to complete; why don’t we similarly perceive a four-year-romantic involvement?

And time is not always an indicator of character or a predictor of impact; to use it as the only measure of the solidity of a personality or the importance of an impression ignores the complexities and possibilities that occur in our lifetimes. I’ll never forget Jade Richardson, a girl I knew fleetingly for two years in high school, and our good friend Marcus, who died right before turning 18 and graduating. They mean more to me and affected my life much more than others I’ve known for longer.

To feel that you have failed because a relationship ended is to negate the worth of the time that was spent. So instead of leaving a marriage richer, you leave it feeling poor. Instead of appreciation for the joy of a life lived, you weep for the fact that it didn’t continue ad infinitum.

I’ve noticed about myself that I experience a twinge of social shame when recounting episodes from my first marriage, which ended in divorce. It took me a while to realize I was hesitating to say “my first husband” or “my ex-spouse,” because it was like waving a flag in front of my face: “Failure! Divorced! Unstable! Disaster Area!”

But these judgments have little to do with the sum total of that relationship, which had many positive elements and good memories within it. Why does the fact it ended cast a shadow over the length of time it endured?

Considering My Dad

My father serves as a good case in point, on many counts. He was married three times, but it’s the one that lasted 8 years, not 15, that meant the most, that surged and bubbled with love.

He canceled a lifetime commitment to his ministry, but not because he was unsteady in nature or failed to live up to a promise; he left because he was being true to an even higher duty, to truth and to his faith, which continuing in that particular ministry had started to compromise.

My father died when he was 52, certainly before anyone expected. He was too young. And yet, when I think of his life, it encompasses a full range of experience and expression. My father lived.

And after he died, we received hundreds of emails and letters from people, many who had not known him very long at all, but all of whom had been touched by his jocularity, charisma, and warmth. He had a singular ability to make people feel listened to, appreciated, and loved.

I didn’t get enough time with my dad. What I wouldn’t give to soak up hours, days, years of him.

But having lost him when I did hasn’t lessened my love for him. Death did not diminish him in my heart. Leaving marriages and a ministry did not lessen his religious conviction. He was not perfect or unwavering in all things, and he didn’t “make it” to any invisible finish line.

But oh, to watch him run! He did it with all his heart.

Another Plug for Happiness

Running on the trail last night, I thought of another really good reason for why seeking your personal happiness is in fact of great benefit to the rest of the world: Because we’re all infectious. What we’re infectious with – happiness or misery – is the question. Which are you spreading?

When you come across really evil individuals, all you have to do is peek into their childhood file to find the root cause – some kind of mistreatment or lack of love from a parent or other caretaker.

But then you take that parent and you look in their childhood file, and you find the same thing. And it goes back and back and back…

When children go unloved, they grow up to be parents who unlove, and the cycle continues.

And when you’re feeling happy, fulfilled, abundant, it spills over, it’s easy to share, you feel free, and the more you give, the more you have.

So, if you didn’t get what you needed as a kid, your assignment is to fix yourself and find some happiness. Ok?

Do what you love, follow your bliss, open your heart, seek and you shall find.

Ok, easier said than done, but you know, my point is that I think some of us might find it easier to be miserable, because:

• it’s habitual, comfortable

• we’re more focused on being good or appropriate or responsible

• we’ve been trained to make others happy, but not ourselves
• we don’t feel we have permission to do what it would take to be happy (selfish!)

• finding happiness requires risk and facing some things that are really hard
• loving yourself is a challenge, and it’s often easier to conscript someone else to do it for you

And my point is, it’s not just about you. It truly is your responsibility to take care of yourself. Find your happiness! Let your light shine – the world needs us to do this. Children need to see us adults being happy, so they will see it’s possible, and okay. We need to be happy for each other, because then we are open and giving and sweet to each other.

Feel free to insert “compassionate” or “peaceful” for “happy” if that makes it seem less silly.

But whatever you do, feel free -

Have Courage

oh me of little faith, at least
you have a little – it’s something
to start with, a blue flame
you dreamt of, sprouting from
the center of your hand. It
may not warm you, but it will
warn you to take cover, by
flickering. The wick will burn
a little, but your skin is
thickening. No, there is no
torch leading you through this
wilderness, the dark desert
nights have only the moon
making the rounds, nursing
your wounds. You must move
forward and let this small fire
of your own desire illuminate
the path you are making. It
will have to be enough to
guide yourself, taking the risk
that you will never get to
the end of your wandering.

Oh, keep your hand
open, feed your faith
with your breath, go
into the blankness, and feel it
with all of your heart,
with all of your fear,
with all of your might.

Damaged Hearts

I saw a girl today with a t-shirt on that read, in big letters, “I HAVE A DAMAGED HEART.” There was the obligatory broken heart illustrating, but otherwise, the shirt was so … un-ironic. Honest. Sincere. Like a diabetic alert bracelet. It made me want to run up and hug her – very gently.

I kind of wanted one, and I kind of thought, Who doesn’t?

But sometimes it’s hard for us to remember to treat each other with care. We jostle around like boxers, we bump like bumper cars, we flick people off and we curse and we rant and we sneer, not because we’re evil, but because we learn a cultural norm of presenting hardened exteriors and then defending against those of others.

We’re conditioned for battle.

Certainly, we’re not as militaristic in our fashion or as routinized in our behaviors as some real and imagined societies – but if we compare even the most benign of our social interactions with those of some others, you’ll find that we Americans (with variations by class and subculture and region, of course) do have a cowboy/hardcore Puritan toughness going on.

I’m suddenly thinking about those Cuddle Parties I read about a few years ago that started to be the rage in bigger cities like D.C. You know – parties where adults could – cuddle, nonsexually. Have kind, physical touch.

I mean – gross. But on the other hand, how telling, that someone had to invent a party to experience human affection.

I have to confess, it was someone else pointing out the contrast between the Touch Ration of two  separate church congregations that got me noticing this rampant lack. The one church we visited was all hugs and pats and warmth; the other is kind in a remote, reserved, abstract kind of way.

And maybe I should be glad that there’s a variety of places to attend, so someone who doesn’t want to be hugged can have a place to go. But I feel like that guarded aloofness denotes a coldness I find in a lot of places, and that feels defensive and abrasive…

Infants fail to thrive when they don’t receive physical nurturing. Does a culture also fail to thrive if it doesn’t support individuals embracing each other, openly and easily?

Reach out and touch someone.

Honesty vs. Kindness

A woman told her husband of 13 years, I don’t love you anymore.

She was going through intense therapy. A few months later, she realized, No, she did love him. But it was too late. He’d been hurt. There marriage ended soon afterward.

The woman – my mother – was being honest with her husband – my father. And isn’t honesty the best policy?

This causes me to have one of those internal debates that then drives me to write before I start talking to myself in public. I can argue some opposing points:

1) In a relationship, you don’t always need to be 100% divulging all the time of everything in your heart. Keep your mouth shut. The truth might take some time to surface. If my mother had waited a few months, she could have avoided hurting my father and losing him forever.

2) It’s a good thing my mother told dad how she felt, even though it was hard, and possibly a passing feeling. The fact that he couldn’t hear it and handle it is proof that they needed to split up.

3) My mother told the truth, and maybe regretted it, but it was the truth, and she should have stood by it, instead of backtracking when the consequences hurt.

4) Mom should have valued his feelings and the relationship over her need to spill her guts out. The edit button is helpful to preserve relationships.

What do you think?

There are definitely times when speaking everything on your mind is just not the kindest way to be honest. Telling your boss her breath stinks, for instance. Telling your neighbor you hate the way she does her hair. Confessing to your spouse that you wish he would lose some weight. These may all be truthful, honest statements – but do they reflect the truth of your care and concern for that person?

The other thought here goes back to good old Jesus – love thy neighbor as thyself. Be honest and truthful to yourself. So this means, in my mother’s case, that she needed to honor her truth. Maybe that didn’t mean telling Dad she didn’t love him anymore – but maybe she could tell him she was in a really hard place. Maybe she needed some things from him to honor the process she was going through – or maybe telling him her feelings was indeed honoring her truth, conducting herself with integrity, and despite his reaction, she should be proud of herself.

I’m sure there isn’t – is there ever! – a black and white answer to this conundrum. For myself, I grew up very much pleasing other people whatever it took in terms of playing down or shaving off any rough edges poking through that might cause displeasure or provoke alarm. Speaking my truth with kindness for myself and others is a challenge I am just now learning to tackle.  Letting others be responsible for their reactions is a crucial part of it.

The truth can definitely be a sword.

Is it possible to wield it gently?

A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

I have some reservations.

My friend and I were talking about Native American reservations last night. Reservation is an odd word:

reservation

Noun

1. a doubt: his only reservation was, did he have the stamina?

2. an exception or limitation that prevents one’s wholehearted acceptance: work I admire without reservation

3. a seat, room, etc. that has been reserved

4. (esp. in the US) an area of land set aside for American Indian peoples: the Cherokee reservation

What a strange idea – reserve a piece of land, corral, fence in, set aside, here’s your pasture…

My thought today was how the Park is also a reservation, only it’s not fenced in, because what’s being kept there can’t exactly move: What’s being reserved here is Nature.

Kind of like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation – the park is not a place people visit for an hour’s recreation – Nature is something you go to, something separate, an entertainment arena, it’s not the environment you live in, the reality that circumscribes your life.

What strikes me is that when you set aside nature, you are not only restricting, delineating the appropriate area or zone for nature to exist, but in the same act restricting the experience of the people, too.

When we put human beings on a reservation, when we encircle animals within a fence, when we jail a prisoner, when we bound any population with restrictive demarcations, keeping something in, keeping something out, we effectively do to the thing on the outside what we’re doing to the inside.

We enclose the reservation; we are cutting ourselves off from that land, those people, too. It’s the inverse property of enclosure.

By saying of the world within the park, “Here is (public) nature,” I am conversely saying of my property and experience across the street, “Here is not nature, here is something else, here is something private, here is something managed for a different purpose.”

My friend was talking about the role of social workers on reservations, how oppressive the ideas can be that get enacted about what’s considered to be appropriate behavior for the wider culture, what’s defined as mentally and emotionally healthy, etc.

It is also interesting that the park represents the ideas of beauty and aesthetics of a small number of humans who decide what’s enjoyable in the park, what elements should be fostered or eradicated, what plants should grow, what trees get to remain, what makes it a nice setting. Seems like an odd arrogance, really.

We come from a basic assumption that our judgments have an almost godly justification to them, because they are based on science and study and learning. We can point to a book and say to a Cherokee child, You are out of line, or to a thorny bush, you don’t fit our strategic vision.

It’s been our problem from the beginning.

And because I feel when we slice and dice to make things nice we effectively hack away at ourselves, as well, I feel an empathy with the park. I feel like my humanity has also been corralled. I have been cut off of from Nature, I have been kept from the wisdom of the Native Americans, I have been circumscribed by conventions of propriety applied to society with the stamp of unquestionable authority.

We were talking about how people long for connections to old tribes, awkwardly so. It is a cliche to mention one’s Cherokee grandmother; it’s cheesy to put up a dreamcatcher in your window; it feels ignorant and condescending to want to read and hear and learn about the ways of people that had their world ravaged by our predecessors. It feels arrogant to want a neatly chopped and bug-free lawn for personal pursuits of peace, while not making any major sacrifices for the salvation of an environment we are continuing to desecrate and destroy.

But deeper than that is the fact that when the earth goes down, so do we (if not us before it); and the spiritual paucity we have inherited as consequence of the reservations we created for others has crippled us already…

This is a shared world. May we learn to share it, so that all of us can heal.

Patterns, and Weather Events

The trees in the park had been longing for snow.

You could tell – the irritation of the pressing cold – that kind of feeling of wet bluejeans rubbing on your skin – it gives a person a pinched look, and the trees were looking like that, burdened by the holding pattern of the weather.

I was feeling it – days and days of one kind of air – sometimes the patterns need to be busted – unclench the hold.

Which made me think about how patterns can be helpful or restraining, depending on how we use them.

We can let a pattern carry us, raftlike, through turbulence. It can be sustaining – like the daily pattern of breakfast, lunch, and dinner can provide a comforting structure to a person in crisis, eliminating the burden of a person having to wonder when she will eat, coordinate a mealtime with others, etc. Patterns provide expedience for repeated requirements of existence. (Though for things like urination, working on an as-needed basis remains a good idea.)

Patterns allow returning. We come again and again to a table, to a curve in the line, to a church service, to a holiday, to a practice – and the similarity of the occurrence reveals distinctly the elements that are not the same. We can see how we have grown and changed, feel time’s efforts and effects, so much more clearly when set against the unchanged, familiar scenery; this helps us come to know ourselves, our relationships.

On the other hand, patterns can also carry us away from raw experience, burying our senses in habit (cloaking us in a nun’s habit!), so that we don’t even feel our own hunger or thirst or desire or delight. And then we can’t recognize these feelings when they occur outside of the patterns. Caught in habit, or ruts, we  become desensitized  to  realities both interior and exterior, not noticing  subtle changes,  unable to respond creatively and appropriately to life.

I noticed recently, for instance, that I was caught in a pattern of tension in dealing with my children. I had needed a certain pattern or ritual for dinner and bathtime at one point, but the pattern existed past its utility – and I was tense about maintaining the pattern, but this persistence interfered with my ability to be myself and enjoy time with my kids. Just noticing the pattern’s stranglehold allowed me to relax, let it go, and be in the moment.

How welcome this rain, ice, and snow! I feel interrupted and refreshed.  Schedules are disrupted, expectations unmet; but I scrape my windshield joyfully, because I needed a break from the sameness, before I forgot to notice the weather all together.

Young Love

It was the end of summer, and the tiny piece of fluff yipping at my dog yanked at a leash held by a girl whose hand was held by another girl, and as they pulled away toward an obscure corner of the park, I realized I was witnessing young love.

I found myself craning my neck to look.

I found myself wincing at my obnoxious, kneejerk voyeurism.

I found myself ignoring this wince and inching around the trees with the surreptitiousness of a circus elephant, craving confirmation in the form of – yes, there they were, on the edge of the flat field – unmistakably kissing.

I was thrilled. I was like a bird watcher whose binoculars sight a rare warbler doing the cha-cha. Not only had I not seen any young lovers kissing in the park all summer – where were they?! – but I was irresistably awed by what struck me as that certain kind of courage  that shakes up daily routines and changes worlds. Love, the revolutionary, marching quietly and defiantly in my park.

I have to explain that my possible nosy prurience has its origins in memory, in another park 18 years ago on the other side of the continent not far from the Pacific Ocean where I spent my first two years in high school.

My best friend, Heather, was seen kissing a girl in a park by a gang of other girls from the Colonia area – literally across the town tracks. The girl left, and the gang confronted Heather. Beat the shit out of her. Broke her glasses. Left her knocked out in the grass.

Heather lied about it the next day, about needing new glasses, about the bruises. She mentioned a bike accident. Only years later did she tell me what really happened. What she had hidden, out of fear.

Now I’m an old lady with my dog and my kids in my neighborhood park, and when I see two girls in the daylight holding hands, I can’t help wanting to let out an encouraging cheer, shake their hands, tell them I’m proud. And then I want to pat everyone else’s backs, too – the muscular basketball players, the gossiping gradeschoolers lounging on the benches – I want to thank them for letting the girls be.

I want to lay down in the grass and be glad, and I want to weep for the past, even though it doesn’t exist anymore.

I want to protect all lovers walking in parks. I want to become their patron saint  who is also a superhero, leaping out from behind peeing statues to rescue the tender hearted from the aggression of the unloved. I want the park to surge and teem with happy kissing.

It’s winter now; I’ve been saving this story for several months. I wonder if the girls are still together or not. And how is their dog. Is Charlottesville a welcoming place to sexual minority youth? I have no idea.

I wonder about the Colonia gang. What happened to them.

And of course, the memories of my own moments of daring come: the perfect contemplation as the new year approaches, as I wish for the courage to be myself despite the possible ramifications, which is what is meant, I think, by following your bliss.

It is not easy, but it is true. May we all be like young love, upright and uncowed by convention. May we cheer each other on.

And let each other be.

Adoption

Today I contacted the City about officially adopting the park.

The response:

Thanks for your inquiry to adopt Forest Hills Park, as you may know the Park is in it’s final stages of planning for revisions to the Park. Unfortunately the revisions will be on hold due to current budget restrictions in the City. In the mean time Park adoption usually includes trash pick-up, (which you kindly already do) mulching landscaped areas, simple weeding etc. You may wish to only do a targeted task such as trash pick up. We can provide bags, gloves and a trash picker as we don’t recommend handling trash. At the point when plans for renovation of the Park are possible there will be many lovely landscaped areas to oversee and water when necessary. If you wish to continue on in your present capacity it would be greatly appreciated just let me know. When future plans begin there will be many more interesting tasks at hand and certainly your involvement will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

This is swell. But I cannot imagine myself with gloves and a trash picker.

Recently I’ve been bemoaning my age – I see the wrinkles around my eyes and realize that the good ole Ravages of Time have begun their necessary tasks to take me down, and I’ve been having visions of myself as an Old Lady – sucked dry like a hunk of beef jerky on a late-night infomercial, sitting tidily in my translucent box, happy to oblige the hungry, younger generations their need to preserve me and then chew me into pieces as a midafternoon snack.

But gaw, that’s still all in my imagination – a trash picker would really seal the lid on the tupperware deal. I’m all for eccentricity, but I’m already earning Neighborhood Goof title by singing out my buoyant, geeky Hello!s to the boys in the hoods. Give me a trash picker and gloves from the City and any aspirations I yet maintain to blend in will be trampled… and picked and bagged and tossed, like all the other litter awaiting its fate in the wintering grass…

I remember when I was about 12 I promised myself that, unlike all the other adolescents I’d read about /witnessed, I wasn’t going to fall victim to the illusion of immortality, ride high on any kind of faith in safety from my vulnerable human state.

But I did; not because I forgot about my promise, but because death not only feels remote and far away – something to worry about in what seems to be the very distant future – but there’s a weird trap that opens up in your mind, an argument that forms that says you are not like other unfortunate souls who suffer an early demise – you do so easily wrap yourself in an odd, demented sense of immunity…

As I get older, and the things that seemed so far in the future occur, smacking me silly with the flat hand of Time, I listen to my grandmother, for instance, talk about her loneliness, and I think, darn it, darn it, it’s all going to end in tears. Her brothers and sisters are dead, her husband is dead, and her best friend is so deaf they can’t talk on the phone the five times a day they have done their entire lives.

I can’t run away from it, aging, and death. But I can save the trash picker for the lonely times when eccentricity is all I’ve got. For now, I’ll pick up trash on the downlow and thrash out the end of my youth like it’s a mosh pit… you know… rage against the dying of the light… at least until it’s time to do tai chi and wear comfortable pants and then, however wrinkly and bereft I’ve become, I’ll have the trees to be with, because the City is leaving them up for now, and I’ll go before they come down.

That’s my hope, at least. The hope I’ve adopted.