A search for "ugly trees" reveals a ton of gorgeous trees. Not sure there ARE ugly trees.

My disgust roots in on the:

a) ugly aesthetic that shaped the evenly planted pines

b) nondescript shrubbery and shabby grass, lacking any care or attention

c) obvious treatment of the fauna as accessories, belying a lack of care or love or relationship to the other life on this planet

d) cheap, boring construction

e) fact that I have to live in a contemporary society that builds these ugly areas of commerce

My aversion feels so strong, I feel a hatred for this industrial society, for this western culture, for myself, even, for my participation in it. I want to run away somewhere idyllic and beautiful, I don’t want to live here, I want to belong to something lovely, where I don’t resent my environment, where the People in Charge care about beauty and everyday experience instead of the bottom line.

Kind of an awful feeling.

Today, however, something different happened.

I was on the same road, in the same traffic, viewing the same row of straggly trees edging the same lousy grey store fronts. Instead of the usual twinge – there was the memory of my son’s amputated plastic frog.

The Ugly Frog

Every so often, I sift through the constantly mounting collection of toys and sticks and paper scraps in my kids’ rooms and move them to the basement – a kind of staging area before they leave the house for good.

Sometimes when I do laundry, if I’m not careful, my son Sam follows me downstairs and ‘discovers’ old favorites that he’d completely forgotten about and the enchantment with the toy or stick or scrap revives.

Yesterday, he found a once-treasured rubber frog.

It is a very, very ugly frog. It is rubbery in a slimy way, neon orange and yellow, dirty, and full of holes. But Sam hugged it to his chest in delight.

Upstairs, however, his face crinkled up.

“His leg is gone,” he cried, holding up the nasty little thing and showing where a back leg was indeed missing. “I don’t want him anymore.”

“You can’t love him with a missing leg?”

“Noooooo….,” he wailed. And threw the thing to the ground in a huff. 

I should have been relieved.

Instead, I was kind of disturbed for the poor, ugly little frog.

And that little, mishapen, unwanted, and hole-y hunk rose in my mind like a flag when I saw the boring ugliness today. 

My heart, awakened to compassion for the rejected frog, was still open, its doors hinged with compassion. 

Loving the Unloveable

Maybe the landscapers and developers who plopped these trees down, poured concrete slabs around them, plugged in those bushes, maybe they didn’t love these life forms, but – how could I not? Love them despite their conditions, despite their ugly situations, despite their predicament?

Even as they are, broken, ordinary, each tree has its own movement in the little bit of wind, its own graceful leaning, each stretch of grass and bunch of bush sparkling a little in the sun. No, the scene wasn’t beautiful as such; I could not scrawl edits over them, pretty them up with lies about their poses. But I could love them as-is. Take them for what they are.

This was not a feeling I forced into myself, tried to feel, or a state of mind I attempted to install. Rather, I believe it flowed naturally from my practice in compassion and mindfulness, my practice of accepting and loving What Is.

It’s not an easy practice. 

We want our toys, our people, our lives, our shrubbery, our surroundings, our relationships to be whole, lovely, easy, complete. A toy with a broken leg, a person with a sour disposition, a coworker who cusses, institutional plants, divorces, unrealized dreams – these don’t only leave us dissatisfied and disappointed. They often make us feel like things are Wrong, to be escaped or avoided. 

When we love someone or something, we open our hearts to it, we connect with it, we claim it, in a way, mark it as loved. You can’t really love someone and at the same time offer a disclaimer to the world that you have no association with the beloved.

You know – that’s why people have their Likes on Facebook pages, and bumper stickers on their cars that say “I love hiking.” What we love defines who we are.

If you say, “I love the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains,” or “I love the south of France,” others will nod in appreciation, concluding you have great taste. 

If you say, “boy, that’s a nice stretch of trees at the strip mall,” others will think you are deficient in numerous ways – as deficient as the strip mall itself.

To love something that’s broken is to allow for brokenness. You are connecting to it, claiming it, holding it, cradling it. And you are implicating yourself – guilt by association. Someone might see you loving the ugly thing and think you are therefore ugly. Someone might judge you to be unworthy of love.

Loving truly requires bravery, and honesty. For if we are honest, none of us is without broken parts, disfigured features, unpleasant qualities. We’ve all been besmirched by some run-of-the-mill imprinting by our commercially focused society. 

Love is…

But love, as the Bible says, heals all wounds. For in love, the idea of wrong or right really don’t matter. Love is not a moral judgment. Love is not an aesthetic appraisal. Love is not about the worthiness of the beloved. Love is about the worth of all that is. It is the big open space that accepts all things within it. 

Learning to love those trees, to accept them, not only unbinds my heart, but reveals something to me truer than my judgments of ugly or beautiful. There’s an intimacy, a feeling of belonging that blossoms, or begins to. Part of my aversion to the ugly things meant separating. Instead of turning away, but accepting them for what they are, I am accepting reality. I’m here. I live here. I live around these trees that are like this. It doesn’t mean I’m blind to the situation. It means I really see it, I really see them, in the clear light of compassion, which I am suddenly seeing and believing is more truthful and accurate than the cold harsh logic of teethy judgment that I was brought up to believe was Right.

This is a huge mental reversal for me. 

A Guide to Action

And of course, when it comes to considering proper or right action, which is the best guide? Judgment, hatred, disgust? Or love?

• Acting out of disgust for this landscaping, I might just run away, call for its eradication, want it leveled, have them all killed. Or just ignore their plight.
• But acting out of love, endearment, I will want to feed and save the trees, I will want to plant more plants around them, I will want to make this mall this town this world a more pretty and beautiful place, out of love, out of a sense that this is my home, that I care for it, that I want to treat it tenderly. 

I honestly have never wanted to care about ugly malls, or boring tasks, or dumb subdivisions, or annoying eco-unfriendly highway construction – I’ve just wanted to hate it and hope it doesn’t get too close to me. I haven’t wanted to pay attention to it, because I hated it all so much.

This aversion feels like a dull pounding of a hammer in my head. When my heart opens, that pounding ceases. Things aren’t ugly and boring and abhorrent. Even the people in charge of their creation aren’t. The frog’s leg doesn’t reappear. It’s still a frog with a broken leg. But through love my perspective changes, and they are loved, not because they deserve it, but because it is the way I am learning to perceive everything – as connected, as one, as part of each other – and loved for their very virtue of Being. Loved for existing. In whatever battered shape they happen to exist. In the way a mother loves her new baby – the baby has done nothing to earn that love but be born. 

Could it be – our very nature – the very nature of being – is love? 

All Worthy

Of course, as I write this, I can’t help but have hovering in the background the many instances of conditional love – of love taken away – of judgment dressed up in a false costume of love – that I and my fiancee and many people around the world have experienced. These instances teach us the entirely wrong thing. We grow up believing we aren’t worthy of love.

But there is no such thing. We are all worthy. 

And so I am thankful for that ugly stretch of stores on my daily commute I have always hated passing, for that frog I had shoved in the basement, hoping it would be gone from my sight forever. Look how important they have become for me, what great teachers they have turned out to be! Proving again, how precious even the smallest, crudest thing can be when we give it our attention, when we see it for what it is, as something that exists, and therefore deserves, as we all deserve, love, kindness, compassion, happiness. Each and every one of us. 

squatting on the rug  obscured

something even worse – a giant

hole. You know what I’m talking

about if you’ve ever had a party and

suddenly you’re counting heads to

see if you should run for more

beer and oddly, someone, but you

don’t know who, is missing. And then

you’re not sure if you even remember

the people who are here, acting

like your friends, and maybe you are

drunk or maybe you haven’t been

paying enough attention. I haven’t

wanted to talk about it, the vacancy,

the pit around which I’ve skipped and

jived like everything’s fine, no, just

don’t mind that, it’s an elephant, it’s

no crisis, everything’s fine. But then

my children were licking lollipops

and I couldn’t recall how they got there,

and in the mirror I, too, seemed

vaguely familiar, but also possibly

a stranger who had wondered in looking

for a good time. Who did I leave

behind, all these years? My father’s

immortal on the mantle, my mother’s

out on tour; and the family portrait’s

faithfully interactive, faces appearing

and fading as they have, as they do.

Oddly, yesterday, the vibrations of the

singing bowl quivered gently the edges

of my home and a song could be heard,

coming from the blank space: I’m here,

I am here, everybody. I could feel

myself very cautiously with my hand on

the knob of the door – to exit, to enter, to

let the unknown fully form and not resist

it – that is where I am, I notice – right

here. It’s quite clear that the door, the

presence behind it, has always been

cracked open, and that I can decide to

arrive, if I want to, instead of hiding out

at my own soiree, keeping my distance from

my own furniture, checking out of

my own life. I’m here, the voice is

calling, and I think I know who

I am, long lost and lost long. I think I

I’m ready to risk showing up

for my life, admitting it’s mine, even if

everybody leaves and it’s just me

here, open for the welcoming.

I nodded, out of empathy.

Peace has often not only felt elusive to me – but not very desirable.

What is it exactly, anyway? Something warring countries say they want but don’t ever achieve? Long hair and potchuli? Muzak and mechanical waterfalls?

Peace = boredom. Impossibility.

Yoga Fail

I will never forget the first time I took a yoga class – the sparks of fury igniting along the edges of my skin as the instructor encouraged us to relax, feel peaceful, let go, breathe deeply, stop our thoughts, etc. Everyone but me sighed into a shared calm. I wanted to hit somebody.

I didn’t want to cooerce myself into something that wasn’t real, didn’t exist. I resented the instructor (and the world, really) for assuming that relaxation was something easy anyone could enter, like a pair of pj pants. As if everyone owned pj pants. That fit. I didn’t feel peaceful, so I felt judged, unacceptable. My thoughts, instead of stopping, raced faster against themselves in a frenzy of self-hatred.

Everyone else lay there on the floor, soaking in the piped birdsong, breathing and sighing in ecstasy.

I felt murderous, stiff, and ashamed.

Yoga twisted me into a self-conscious straightjacket. I hated it.

Faking it Won’t Make it

When I think back on this incident, and on others similar to it, my misery seems quite rational. The process goes like this:

1. It seemed I had to feel something I didn’t
2. Since I didn’t feel it, I had to make it happen
3. The way to make it happen was to ignore, “let go,” of all the knotted up, angry, sad, critical parts of myself.
4. These parts only clung to me harder when I tried to dump them out of the aircraft.

What I’ve noticed about peace from my mindfulness practice is that it is not something you can force or fake your way into feeling – precisely because they are not peaceful actions. Forcing amounts to violence; faking installs a screen of lies. Neither of these forms of control honor the truth.

You can’t think your way into feeling peace, either. Applying logic to internal commotion is like trying to reason with a toddler; it’s an act of futility. Telling yourself “there’s nothing to be upset about” or “worry gets you nowhere” or “crying doesn’t do any good” might all be factual statements (and haven’t our parents told us these things over and over, impatient with our overblown value ascribed to  a lost doll, a hurt feeling). But emotions don’t give a lick about clear-minded solutions.

So how does one find peace?

A Way to Peace

You can’t make yourself feel peace or think your way to it, but you can choose it.

You can choose to act peacefully, just as you can choose to act with love, compassion, presence – whether you feel them in your body, heart, mind, or spirit or their exact opposites.

I know, because I’ve experienced it; and I have been trying it, because it made sense when I heard it described by Tara Brach in one of her podcasts.

But I’m not one to believe or trust easily – I did have to test it.

Making the choice is not an act of didactic logic or emotional hijack – it’s not a forcing. It’s free choice, it’s free action that one practices with the whole self. In the act itself is where you find the freedom of the act, and it is also where you find – where you generate – peace.

The Act of Peace

If I’m feeling unpeaceful, and notice that – no, there is not an ounce of peace anywhere inside me – I can still choose to listen to what IS there without judgment or the intention to change it, kick it out, dress it in a costume. I can treat my feelings with an intentional attention – and there’s the peace, there’s the love, right there.

Your rabid heart is like a toddler whining, “Pay attention to me, look at me, watch what I’m doing.” No, don’t get distracted by what you think is more important, or to the parts of you that seem easier, more well-behaved, better trained.

Listen to your strain, your aches, your bitterness. Find out where they come from, what keeps them alive. Discover what’s at their core and in the roots – and have compassion, and acceptance, for what you uncover.

In this act of paying attention, you will illuminate within yourself all the peace, love, lovingkindness that is already within you, even if just as the seed of a memory, a cloud of possibility, a faint dream.

You won’t just feel peace. You will be peace.

If this is confusing, remember, peace has been described as “passing understanding” for a reason.

pads, transparent layers stacking

image upon images, delivering

a sequence, a scene, with a quick thumb

flip. And so it is – you start on the first

page, see yourself there by the window

frame, holding to the sash for

dear life, afraid you’ll fall, knowing you

can’t fly. The sky is a wide and wonderful

place, but it’s not yours to taste. And then

comes the second lamination. The landscape

has changed because you can see you have

wings now, and all you need to do to test

them is let go. This seems impossible to

avoid. The next clear sheet and what you thought

was a window, a wall, a house, all of it

is just a cloud’s shadow, shifting ambiguously. You

are already flying, already hovering in mid

air. You thought the challenge was to stay safe,

or to let go – but now you see that the story

asks an even harder question. Can

you accept that you are already floating? The next

frame will be the last, summing up what you

do – either  swim through the blue in the full glory of

who you always were or – huddled again, against

an illusion, wishing to fix yourself against

a ground that never shifts. Oh beautiful one, I

wonder if you will choose to accept

what exists, and let yourself loose

to the gifts of the wind?

Some of interest today:

Mindfulness healing cancer patients - my post for the UVA Blog about MBSR at our hospital

Embodied writing – posts at the intersection of writing and mindfulness - this woman is so interesting!

Mindfulness and different kinds of therapy - a very accessible blog

Elephant Journal – this post is about the ego – this site is chock-full of awesome articles

Poetry Therapy

Healing Poetry

And here’s a list of poetry books used in mindfulness trainings at UCSD

I also recently learned about Emotional Brain Training, a program that uses mindfulness-type techniques based in scientific work to help people find the present moment and thus lose weight, shed stress, etc.

And of course, there’s the work of Tara Brach, Dan Siegel’s Mindsight, Gabor Mate, attachment theory, etc.

To utter an epitaph for you – too soon,

too soon, and always too late – would require

not only

credentials I can’t

offer, and more than the memory of

the ink and smoke

plumage trailing you that

was my instant image of your

name, a name I’ve known since I can

recall anything. And your smile

that could have been a wince – oh you

were the opposite

of our dramatic masks, our

homage to your ancestry’s claim

on theater’s inception – comedy and tragedy played

themselves on your thin lips in a tug of war over

your teeth and what they held: lit. I was a partial

observer, even of those afternoons, the thumping

printers pumping out

the leaflets and fliers and

letters I’m not persuaded you ever

thought much of -

you weren’t a follower, a believer, but something

even rarer, a man with hands and a clear

understanding of what he can and cannot do

with them. This is not, I know, the opposite

of holiness. My father loved you. Who

didn’t? I remember, sometimes, I would bug

you with questions, trying to understand the

machines and the colors you fed them; you didn’t

really put up with me more than you put

up with anyone else. I never

minded. You were there, always, along

with the sky, democracy,

California. The thing about you, old

man, dying perhaps, in the same house where I

visited long days, where I ate my first

perfect exotic apricot, where caterpillars

spun, where once your son showed

me the giant plastic bags of

quartz and rocks

you had collected together

on a hike with a flashlight and it

seemed unbelievable that such

riches could exist,

could persist under a carport like yours, stored

in everyday garbage

bags and glittering - what

I would say of you – then,

now – is not that you were kind or nice

or upstanding, though possibly

you were those things.

But I don’t think you cared about that, and I don’t,

either. Imprinted here

something more solid, more dear, more

dear than I would like to admit, these years

in the future that seem impossible, and

the predicament of an end arriving

before I’ve even understood

how the middle is

going – (it occurs to me, there is

no way to construct a eulogy about

someone other than

yourself, and your own grief – who

am I mourning, who is really

dying?) -

how you were quite

plainly unadulterated with anything that was

not-you, and truly, how much closer to

the sacred heart of things can

we get?

I cannot say that any statue I’ve

met, any radiant figure or

transcendent star of

the spiritual path can claim it

in quite the same way.

And so – what, sweet soul, can I say? but that

your daily fulminations, ministrations of

gears and wrenching, gleaming arms -

grinning and

discerning who-knows-

what through the haze of your rhythmic domain -

who knows what you were

really thinking. What

I cannot speak

is what I want to say – and what I want

to say is unspeakable – perhaps you, too,

would agree, run it

through a machine, and to diminish

any argument to the

contrary, deftly and without

affectation but with the utter grace

that recedes from us when we try to

reproduce it and force it and

work it- you would have me, I think, roll

this up

and smoke it till it’s ashes, till

the rest of it is ashes,

because the rest of

it is ashes, isn’t it?

from those messy waters? As you stood

on the dock, facing the chopping jaws

of the ocean, did you

wish for a deity surfing on a

lotus, pray for a god to come

skiing like a pro in his bare

and holy feet? Were you secretly

hoping to spot the endangered species

of your loved ones, cruising in a pleasure

boat, tooting plastic horns and inviting you to

come aboard? Instead, she came, trumpeting

a moo, dumpy and farmish and totally

ridiculous, flapping flat hooves. And without

the warning of an eel’s flash

or a shark’s sharp flourish, the cow bit

down and knawed your finger

to a raw pulp of purpling welt. Maybe she

could smell your disappointment, wanted

some appreciation, some due respect. Tired

of swimming your skull,

serving herself up in a bowl of cool milk

and a plate of sacred meat, sick

of tipping over generously

like a teapot, her lifeblood

steaming into the hungry human

night. Is this a fear, dreamer; a mirror? As her

big docile teeth clamped down, did you

shudder? Will you

sink or shrink or offer her up

for domestication before you can think about

what part of you has been

so willing? Why

did you expect so much from the ocean,

sweetheart, but never consider

the simplest of desperations you

had framed within a fence

as if you could contain

her fierce desolation forever?

kind of

prayer – no

whine or bleat,

just

there -

your feet

folded

simply, neatly

in the middle of

the chaos and

combustion that

is morning

rush – landslide

of cheerios, the howls

from combs nipping

knots, socks tossed

into hockey pucks

across the

floor – the time-

tethered clock

chasing me

over the nerve’s

edge – then

your calm

soles and how i

thrilled,

a kind of

ecstasy like

mary dousing

jesus with

oil, lathering her

long hair

against his rough

and dusty

arches i could

also kneel and

kiss those perfect

undersides that

open to

the hall light like

a pair of four

o’clocks

who sigh into

the throat

of afternoon

about to

taste the moon who

brims with a

tender

answer that

glitters yes in

every perfect crease

of each beloved

callous, of each

sweet

foot

remember 16 the way you’ve always remembered it:

Linda’s hands snaking over her head, her long

black hairs delicately looping the shampoo

bottles, her house smelling of ginger, holding her

hand. She hasn’t changed any, except, maybe

to become a little more dear, a little worn

through, moth-eaten, stained with finger

prints from my earnest remembering. I

smell stinging hair dye and see Jade and her almond

eyes that never winced or cried. Fresh

grass, charred ashes in the grill, cold firs,

the gummy stuff between the slabs of concrete -

the thing is, as I understand it now, these things

that form within me form me – Linda, ginger, hair

dye staining the kitchen sink; as the years

rise and sink, yanking me around, I get taken

in by the illusion that I’m changing, that nothing’s

the same, that the past is hanging by the loose

thread of a thinning, grey string. What a laugh.

I’m never rinsed clean, even as the cells flatten

and the skin fattens and the heart tightens and

the mind fights for every spark its got. Like any

spiral shell or thick knot, I keep going but really

am just growing around the shape of myself.

No such thing as a mind and a body, it’s all one

piece, and the memories laced them together – nose

and smell, eye and sight, the lips with the kiss

that was never uncovered from the mix but hovered

beneath the surface of my skin, wishing; the eclipse

of the moon by her placid, empty face, edging out

of the picture I had made; you can find them in

and on me, if you touch me the right way, if you

look soft enough, if you listen to my breathing

when I sleep and hear the purring of the car

that took us out across the park – you can taste

the ginger, you can feel the scars I touched along

her arm, hold the space with me that is also

the world as I know it – the geography

of mirrors and fingers and you, now

looking and seeing how you’re turning

me round another bend and taking

me in for another spin of the story. Where

does the reading end and writing begin?

And what will we make of each other,

with all these sincere intentions to fashion

out of  this salvaged material – the waste, the want -

a present and everlasting love?

We were a roomful of disapointed, pudging adults, shiny snowflakes pinned to the cubicle walls, winking at our sulking faces.

Santa Claus the fake. Wonder stabbed with the arrow of truth and leaked of all its life.

It’s funny, the myth of Santa. The obese elf delivering free toys to good kids once a year. A magical mystery tour around the world in an old-fashioned conveyor pulled by flying deer.

It’s such a fitting myth for a culture based on consumerism. The miracle of Hannukah is about oil staying lit for eight days; the miracle of Easter is a guy rising from the dead.

The miracle of the modern Christmas is free toys, no matter how rich or poor you are. And the reality it is covering up is that someone has to actually pay for the toys. Likewise, the myth of consumerism and capitalism is that if you’re ‘good’ enough, you have access to the goods and service ‘bad’ people can’t afford. The truth is, you have to pay for it, having nothing to do with your moral or ethical resume, it has to do with money.

And both the myth and the reality are grounded in the base idea that the most desirable thing to dream of and desire is the acquisition of unnecessary material goods.

It’s not really that wonder-full, really.

What’s sad to me is that this is what we focus our children’s innate sense of wonder upon – the flying Uncle Sam-Lookalike annual deposit into the American dream. And we accept that built into the system is the loss of wonder – when what can open our hearts and source our joy and spike our curiosity and infuse rote daily living with love but wonder and awe at the beauty and mystery that surrounds and forms us?

The innocence and joy that we tend to view as purely a function of childhood actually is available to all of us. It’s not age-dependent; it’s a function of the ability to wonder. It comes naturally to children, to whom the world is new. But how in the world do we ever think we have learned and know everything there is to know? All our wonder hung with the stockings by the chimney, when taken down it takes down the rest of our spirits?

There’s so much that could fill us with spontaneous awe and wonder that is real and could therefore sustain us through our lives, into the darkest and greyest of cubicles.

Don’t believe me?

Just go sit in the grass in your front yard for a while – eye-level with the grass. Watch. At first you might find yourself disappointed, bored. But look closer. Whole worlds and communities of existence thrive in that grass patch. The crazy dramas of spiders and photosynthesis spin and flame. It’s pretty amazing.

Or go to a museum – natural science, art. Pay attention – not to the tour guide, not to what you’re supposed to learn or remember – there’s no test. Just contemplate the things you see in and of themselves, see them for what they are.

Stare in the mirror. For a long time. At the arteries in your eyeballs. At the hairs in your nose. At your own self, looking at you.

Within the real, concrete things existing around you are more wonders and miracles than you know. And they are delivered to you, gifts from the universe, daily. It just takes clearing your calendar to make time and space to see the revelation at hand – on your hand, throbbing in your wrist, coursing through your body. Opening the eyes within your eyes to undo the illusion you’ve been under that there is nothing wonderful to witness or look forward to.