Right here, right now

There is no other place I’d rather be

Watching the world wake up from history – Jesus Jones

 

For all the terrible wreckage our world may seem at times, whether it’s our deep identity crisis as a species as we brutalize our fellow creatures and world or our cultural vacancies and familial breakdowns as our ideologies shift and sputter and breakdown in the middle of our lives, one thing heartens and excites me about this time of being alive. I feel like a lot of people are really asking the right questions, and that, in some ways, the hairy singers in Hair were right – this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Sure, it’s not an instant revolution of flower-sniffing, but there’s a general turning over of the consciousness topsoil.

I just finished Run by Ann Patchett. The whole novel is a great read – she manages to tell a good, emotionally engaging story without jabbing at you to make you cry – but there’s this really well-done passage that serves as evidence of how the general ideas about things are shifting, little by little.

The character of the priest describes his changing vision of the afterlife:

… he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live… In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed … that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone…. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy… this was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given.

Completely set within the context of a Catholic priest’s theology comes this vision of the sacredness of life that is usually find in Eastern thought, and it rings true. I love that.

And I feel like I find a lot of novels, music, art, thinkers, coming to this same conclusion. Whether or not they feel a conviction about next steps after death, people are embracing the present more and more.

It’s an exciting turn of events. If we can spread the notion of opening our eyes to each moment’s gifts, whatever they offer, a lot of changes will happen. To feel that you are witnessing, indeed, surrounded by God, changes how you treat other people, other creatures, yourself. In some ways, believing starts the seeing. As the passage concludes:

It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.

Dear Mr. Driver of the Snap-On Tools Truck that Idles in front of my House every week for Hours on End,

You are ruining the environment.

Specifically, you are ruining MY environment.

Your truck is noisy and stinky and I have been wondering for months now why in the world YOU CAN”T TURN YOUR ENGINE OFF WHEN YOU ARE NOT IN THE TRUCK.

Please. Stop. Idling.

Thank you,

Me plus all the little creatures (even the snakes) that live around here

UPDATE: I finally met the owner of the auto-body business next door. Turns out the Snap-On guy has an on-truck computer that he’s running on a generator the whole time he’s visiting. I don’t feel totally comforted but at least it’s not just pure laziness. And I think my complaint may result in the guy idling somewhere else.

Still.

Driving by the Vietnam Veterans Dogwood Memorial on 250

I’ve passed it thousands of times, I’m sure, without really thinking about it, but lately the sign has been snagging against my consciousness like a hangnail on a cardigan sweater.

“Vietnam Veterans Dogwood Memorial,” announces the little wooden sign, where it sits on the side of the bypass under a few random trees.

Huh?

My subconscious mind tried to piece together Japanese cherry blossoms and dogwoods – but not only are they not the same but Japan is a far cry from Vietnam. I guess dogwoods are a natural pick for a tree memorial in Virginia, kind of like your go-to running back on the football team – nothing exotic, but dependable.

But my suspicion is that someone just stuck the sign under some pre-existing trees to save money.

Which, if you think about it, is brilliant.

Heck, I could erect all kinds of memorials. A sign on my front lawn could say “The Blades of Grass AIDS Memorial” and I bet you a million bucks there would be some red ribbons tossed in the yard within a week.

Okay, maybe not. (Mostly because a lot of people these days don’t remember the red ribbon. And it was the first ribbon out there! Can you believe it? Yes, I’m talking about you, Kathryn! Hee.)

But really, think about all the expense and effort that memorials exact from well-meaning citizens, and consider this low-invasive measure of inserting signs on pre-existing structures (both natural and otherwise).  We could make Natural Bridge a memorial to 911 and it would only cost a sign.

You may think I’m against memorials, but the thing is, I’d actually be a huge adherent of them if they came with a little something more. Like some rituals. Having a bunch of information carved into marble can pique interest for further research, but I’d prefer more of an interactive experience. I want candles and incense, maybe a place to make an origami peace crane. A kite-flying contest. I’d like to go to the Vietnam war memorial under those dogwoods and discover a box to register to send money or adopt some orphans. Maybe a political book swap.

Because many of our memorials end up being meaningless. And really, we have memorials everywhere – every street sign points to something that existed before, the names of our municipal buildings honor someone with a lot of cash or status. But time passes and most of us have no clue why it’s called Seminole Trail or Cabell Library. We have signs that point us to our past but no idea what they are pointing to. We just drive by and sometimes one of us takes a picture and wonders what we’re seeing.

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.

I have it posted on my Facebook page that I’m the biggest Julie Andrews fan ever. I am also, I would contest, the biggest fan in existence of Alanis Morissette.

Sure, her first album’s attempt at profundity led her to fumbling hands in pockets and other half-contrived lyrics, but you can still see that she’s thinking - and I for one loved the fact that she sparked vehement discussions about the definition and types of irony throughout English classes everywhere. (And no, let’s not get into it now, folks.)

And then she went to India, and despite the risk of incurring an unforgivable overload of cheesiness and cliche from that trip and its following album, that CD is amazing. She skates past the hyperbole she couldn’t avoid in her first album with songs that rhythmically and lyrically soar outside of themselves. And then her third album is just brilliance.

On this third album is “You Owe Me Nothing in Return,” which serves, in my opinion, as the definition of unconditional love:

I’ll give you countless amounts of outright acceptance if you want it
I will give you encouragement to choose the path that you want if you need it
You can speak of anger and doubts your fears and freak outs and I’ll hold it
You can share your so-called shame filled accounts of times in your life and I won’t judge it
(and there are no strings attached to it)

You owe me nothing for giving the love that I give
You owe me nothing for caring the way that I have
I give you thanks for receiving it’s my privilege
And you owe me nothing in return

You can ask for space for yourself and only yourself and I’ll grant it
You can ask for freedom as well or time to travel and you’ll have it
You can ask to live by yourself or love someone else and I’ll support it
You can ask for anything you want anything at all and I’ll understand it
(and there are no strings attached to it)

I bet you’re wondering when the next payback shoe will eventually drop
I bet you’re wondering when my conditional police will force you to cough up
I bet wonder how far you have now danced you way back into debt
This is the only kind of love as I understand it that there really is

You can express your deepest of truths even if it means I’ll lose you and I’ll hear it
You can fall into the abyss on your way to your bliss I’ll empathize with
You can say that you have to skip town to chase your passion I’ll hear it
You can even hit rock bottom have a mid-life crisis and I’ll hold it
(and there are no strings attached)

You owe me nothing for giving the love that I give
You owe me nothing for caring the way that I have
I give you thanks for receiving it’s my privilege
And you owe me nothing in return

I’ve meditated on these lyrics quite a lot during the last several months – testing myself, testing the assertions here.

“You owe me nothing in return” can almost feel impossible to say to someone you love, whether it be a parent, a lover, or a child. I mean, don’t we all believe in reciprocity? Wouldn’t it be foolish not to expect and deserve at least an equal amount of energy and love in a relationship?Is Alanis proposing that she’s a weak doormat who will let the object of her adoration do whatever he wants, while she hangs around like a loyal dog?

No, she is not. What these lyrics speak about is true egoless love – which I actually believe/agree is the only kind of love there is. Love that isn’t true isn’t love. The notion of truth is part and parcel of the definition of love. Other feelings we have for people are about need, desire, infatuation – not that these aren’t powerful or valid emotions to experience and express, but they are about feeding the frenzied and fearful self.

There is possibly nothing harder than loving someone who chooses to leave you, who chooses to do things you find reprehensible, who cannot offer you the same open heart of acceptance and affirmation that you cannot help giving to that person. It is hard to forgive people their limitations. It is hard to stay open when someone slams a door in your face.

I am not suggesting that true love is playing a doormat. Healthy relationships do require reciprocation of trust, kindness, respect, listening.

But learning to love in the way Alanis describes is not about trying to make another person conform or perform, not about sustaining a relationship – it’s about letting another person follow their heart. If doing so leads that person into your sphere, great. If not – well, then you wouldn’t want them there anyway. Either way, if you truly love someone, the love doesn’t stop because they are here or gone or yours or not. That would imply it is conditional. And conditional love – love dependent on a condition – is not truly love.

True love is like getting disemboweled. It’s painful. It turns you inside out. It requires that you empty yourself of wanting and needing things to go your way before you can care and have compassion for another person.

I am working on my heart – kind of like needlework across a raggedy napkin. Stitching it together again with the threads expressed in this song. A heart that can be open enough to say those words and mean them all the way through can’t truly be broken. Love is never lost when it is true.

And that may be Disney-level cheese – but trust me, sometimes cliches speak truths – and that’s an irony you can stick in your pocket to keep.

Dear Strange Gnats that Fly Together Over the White Line on the Riverview Trail and Get in My Eyes,
The other day I was running and one or two of you – who can tell, you’re so small and swarmy – ran into (or I ran into you) my contact lens, causing my eye to smart and spill with tears. I had to stop running, remove the contact.

I’m pretty blind. So when I took out the one contact, the trees around me smeared into Impressionistic-type drools of color. I felt a bit dizzy. I kept walking , but slowly, and the chirping, heavy-scented throng of leaves on either side of me pushed in closer, it seemed, and I felt utterly enveloped.

And alone. And alive.

It was kind of like meditation, or sleeping – senses distorted – colors turned up to a scream -I could feel my whole self trembling and present, and I could almost, it felt, utterly dissolve right there and never reappear.

So, Strange Flying Creatures Hovering Over the White Line,

Thank you.

You disrupted my run, you made me slow down, you blinded my eye, you gave me a moment of purity, a purity of a moment,

oh you may not be very attractive or sweet but your annoyance oh, what a gift it gave me.

I was running down the Riverview Trail and literally ran into a woman I know from church.

[I love that my Unitarian Universalist congregation is called "church." It's such a crowd-pleaser.  The subtext works in two directions: To my atheist pals, I'm saying, "don't worry, it's Unitarian, you know, not really 'church,' - and to my religious pals, I'm saying, "see? I'm going to Church, not hell," and everyone's happy. And if you believe that, well...]

So, she’s out searching for ragweed seeds for some research study, and she randomly tells me, “Yeah, I carry my cell phone because several years ago a woman was raped on this trail in broad daylight, the guy was acting strangely, but you know,” and I looked down at my cell-phone-less hands and thought about the guy I’d seen a few minutes prior dragging some branches around for no apparent reason and started thinking, Oh, he’s making a place to rape people, and started calculating if I could run faster than a rapist.

I don’t even know if rapists run. I don’t even know how they rape runners. Do they trip them up? Do they use invisible wire? Poison darts? Do they ask for the time? Are they also joggers? Are they walking dogs? Do they rape women with dogs? Do they rape women who listen to iPods? Do rapists wear good running shoes?

I just don’t know. If I look like I’ve been running pretty hard, does that make the would-be rapist consider me an easier catch, because I’ll probably be too tired to escape?

On the other hand, when I’ve been running pretty hard I get really really reddish-purple in the face and sweaty, and though I know rape isn’t about attraction, I can’t see a snotty, sweaty, purple-faced person being much bait.

Then again, I’m not a rapist. And these are things I don’t know.

I’m also not sure how much a cell phone helps in situations like this. If a rapist corners me, will I have time to say, “Hold on while I dial 911,” or will I just speed dial a friend and hope they answer and hear what’s going on?

Or is the cell phone more to leave on the trail so the people investigating the crime have a piece of evidence? I remember watching “Murder, She Wrote,” and how the victims in those cases were smart enough to die with their hands in the shape of the letter of their murderer’s first name – or to grab a clue – or a piece of hair. I was pretty impressed. Still, on the whole I preferred watching “Scarecrow and Mrs. King.”

Anyway, it’s hard to know how much to worry about rapists when you go running. It’s hard to know how to balance wanting a break from the electronic web for some downtime in nature and the possible need to get help should a rapist or a snake appear.

Today when I was running it also crossed my mind that I could choke to death on all those little gnat-bugs. But I can’t exactly run without breathing.

I know, I know – there’s a harmony somewhere around being mindful and careful vs. paranoid – but I do find it difficult to achieve. Rapists aren’t like snakes; you can’t just ignore them, knowing they’re scared of you, too. Though wouldn’t it be nice if they were. It would be nice to think there was a way to identify them ahead of time, by their stripes, the shape of a moustache. I know so many women who have been assaulted by both strangers and family members – and no two are alike.

I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want the women I love to be vulnerable.

But being a woman often means you have a lot of factors to negotiate. And there’s a part of me that feels a lot of anger about that- that a world is shaped by trauma, warped by pain, and victimization gets passed from one person to the next. Trust is hard to achieve.

It’s kind of what I wanted to rant about to some young boys I passed on the trail a few weeks ago – they seemed to be on a field trip. I ran by and heard one boy complain to the other, “Why didn’t she say hello? Why won’t anyone say hello? What is wrong with these people?”

I almost pivoted on my heel to say, “Listen, kid; this is not the nice society you think it is. I’d love to believe we were all a polite community, too. But just try being a woman by herself – when you look a man in the eyes, or smile, wave, he thinks you are opening yourself up to him – giving permission to judge, to ogle – you have to keep boundaries up. And I don’t want to have to feel pressured to smile at people. Now think about that and go write a paper.”

I wonder – if you are a woman, when you are by yourself, do you feel more vulnerable? Do you have strategies to keep yourself cloaked, as it were? And do you have disaster plans?

We were at Northeast Park, crossing the wooden bridge over the little creek, when we spotted a deer. It let us gawk for a while, then moved on. We continued up the trail. My daughter running up ahead disappeared behind a bush – we heard some running, bushes cracking – then a scream.

The deer had run into my daughter – and luckily, only left a hoofprint bruise on her shoulder, hardly harming her.

The whole incident, as they do, only took a few seconds, and there was no way to prevent it, other than to have my kid roped to my body at all times.

Freak accidents – I particularly detest them. We work so hard to avoid disaster – car seats, arch supports, vitamins, looking both ways when we cross the road. A woman blithely pushes her child in a stroller down a sidewalk, and a car spins out of control and crashes into them. A snake bites a woman in her garden and she doesn’t reach her phone to call for help in time. A boy gulps too much water at the pool and dies several hours later at home on his bed of drowning. Even living in an impenetrable bubble or cement cocoon I have a feeling would be susceptible to an earthquake, a volcano, a knawed cord cutting off the oxygen tank…

There’s part of me that still thinks I can outwit fate. If I can interpret the signs, see what’s coming around the corner, I can jump out of harm’s way in time… dodge the bullet…

There’s part of me that gives a little “Whew!” when I hear about someone else’s disaster – “Wasn’t me!”- and subconsciously I file away on my list of Dangerous Activities whatever it was – like “Don’t walk child in stroller on sidewalk between 5 and 5:15 on Wednesdays” and “Don’t let child swallow water while living in Florida” – even though I logically know that these mishaps are not lessons, but accidents. True accidents don’t teach us safety lessons. They have no point or purpose. All we can learn from them is that we are all, at all times, susceptible and endangered. Life ends in death, and we have little control over determining the hows and whens of the termination.

After my father died, this reality felt to me like a hungry dog, invisibly breathing down my neck, about to snap its jaws on me and my loved ones at any moment. I lived in constant fear. I had no warnings my dad would die. I had dinner with him, and he went to bed and died. It was the first time I had seen him in a year and a half. It was the last time I saw him ever.

It’s only years later that I can understand that giving up the need to prevent disaster is the only way to live fearlessly. All the gurus find this freedom and peace – giving up the desire to control life and avoid pain. But it’s not something you read about in a self-help book and gulp down in one swallow. Finding a way to let go of the illusion that you can grab onto the carpet so it’s not pulled out from under you is one of the hardest things a person can do. That carpet is a security blanket. That carpet is the ground on which many of us walk. Even when you know that illusion is false, it can feel good to believe in it.

I know for myself that when it comes to grief and loss, I experience some anger. It feels like a joke, a setup – here’s this gorgeous world, here’s these lovely people, here’s a beloved, here’s a child – now, guess what? It’s all temporary. It all disappears. One by one it goes away. Then you go away.

The rabbit disappears and doesn’t show up again. Great trick. Some people have stories about how the rabbit gets resurrected, and then they argue about whether it really happened or not (and then they invent Easter).

And then there’s the argument that if everything were eternal, nothing would have any meaning. To which I initially replied, Bullcrap. (I think the first time I read this was in Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, a fun novel that deals with eternity and a wierd Irish guy.)

But I’ve started to discover that relationships and lives and other things don’t derive their meaning from their longevity – from lasting. Nothing lasts; to define worth by time amounts seems an odd valuation system.

And when I think of a child’s life, it is not worth less if it ends sooner rather than later. Or a father’s. Or that of a marriage. Or a business venture. Or the time of owning a house. The import of a love, a moment, an experience, may be affected by the time it spans – but that is not the sole factor.

When I spend all of my mental and emotional energy focusing on ’saving’ myself, my children, my relationships from ending, I abandon the actual living of life, the spending of the time together. And then – what am I saving?

The only way I have been able to comfort myself about the inevitability of loss is to let go of it, and drink in what exists now.

I still sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it, to take it, to make it through. I still miss my father, terribly, and feel robbed of his presence in my life. I still want never to have to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t like it.

I’ll never forget this one night when I was 17 years old. My first love called me long distance and broke up with me. I was inconsolably weeping. The rest of the house was asleep, but my father, night owl that he was, was up. He gave me a hug and said, “It’s not the end of the world.”

I was furious. Who cared about the end of the world? I didn’t – it was the end of my heart.

Poor Dad. Weeping adolescent. What do you say? And when he died, I wanted so badly to tell him – Yes dad, not the end of the whole world, but you dying is definitely the end of mine.

Seventeen years later, I want to tell him – Dad, I know what you mean. Things come and go, including you and I. It just takes so long, Dad, to get used to it – life being so cruel and beautiful at the same time.

No, no way to stop it. We can choose to try to – or choose to accept it. Choose to dive into life and accept that we will die, over and over again.

I scribble up my disaster plans, my strategies for escape, and then rip them up again, over and over.

I’m not getting out of it alive.

I’m dreaming.

I have a bucket of dirt, grass, muddy water.

A woman thrusts her hand in the bucket, swirling the thick water so that I can see – “There’s fish in here,” she declares.

This is a surprise.

She shows me that two are dead, two are living, one yellow, one blue.

“You’ll need a fishbowl, and a filter,” she tells me. We’re in a pet store, I suddenly see. I also see they are beta fish – the kind that have to live alone, because otherwise they fight and one always kills the other.

“Won’t I need two fishbowls?” I ask. Since I have two fish.

“Oh no,” the woman tells me. “This one – ” she points to the biggest fish, the blue one – “this one ate those other two, and it will fight and eat this yellow one, and it will get even bigger.”

I’m a little horrified. She’s cheerfully encouraging the homicidal urges and dominance of this fish. This doesn’t seem humane.

End of dream.

What does it mean? The elements that stick out to me:

- That in a bucket of seemingly useless dirt water, there’s something alive – hope and promise in the muck?

- To survive, some promises have to beat out others – this reminds me of the Elizabeth Lesser quote – you can have what you want, but you can’t have everything you want. For a potential to become an actuality, choices have to be made.

- The process of natural selection can seem harsh.

I had a beta fish once. It was a beautiful flashing blue.

I wonder what is in my bucket!?

In the recent edition of Yoga Journal, Sally Kempton writes:

Imagination – our ability to create images not available to the sensory system – is arguably our greatest faculty for evolving human consciousness. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we need to be able to leap out of the familiar and into the unknown. … the imagination can help us begin to replace our internal patterns, especially the ones that keep us limited and stuck. If we can reimagine our sense of who we are, we can change our experience of life. If you can imagine yourself, say, free of suffering, you’ve taken the first step toward that freedom.

Later in the article she connects our internal imagination with external acts, pointing out that:

If you’re spending time during your day imagining yourself as filled with compassion, it doesn’t take you long to notice that you speak to people differently and even treat yourself with much more subtlety and kindness.

So yesterday, for “shits and giggles” as a favorite person used to say – (I won’t go into the images that comes into my head when I hear that phrase – don’t want to sully your imagine and bring about the wrong kind of transformation!) – I “tried” “The Secret.” Caveat – I have avoided the book and movie or any other description of this completely – I only followed the vague idea I heard from my therapist – who was also skeptical, but did wonder what would happen if I tried it.

Item #567 you can do when you don’t have a job: Experiment with New Agey psycho- hijinks (next week, Tarot cards and a colonic cleansing).

I performed a kind of meditative visualization exercise and wrote down five things I wanted to happen that day. They were:

1. To be told “I love you” by a certain someone

2. For someone to offer a job or job interview

3. For sandalwood perfume oil to reappear in my life

4. To have a stranger flirt with me (reassure my ego!)

5. For someone from my past to warmly contact me and inquire as to how I am doing

The Results

Now, here’s the funny thing. Basically, all of these items “came true” or came to fruition – but before you get excited about the possibility of a magic recipe, let’s recall the insights from Kempton, summarized above – the act of the imagination in the mind can have force and expression in the body, transferring from the world of ideas to the world of actuality a wish, a possibility, a desire.

Example: The basketball player envisions the perfect slam dunk before the game, and her chances of actually performing that slam dunk “in real life” go up immensely.

So here’s basically how it went down.

1. I arranged coffee with the certain someone and though I had no expectations, the love was indeed reciprocated.

2. From the networking I’ve been doing through Facebook, a person I hardly know connected me to others I don’t know, and it looks like at least one of them will need me for work.

3. I went online and ordered the sandalwood.

4. I went out to a social gathering; someone flirted with me.

5. I spent a large part of the day beefing up my Linked In profile by writing recommendations for past colleagues, and indeed, someone from my past did warmly email me, as a result.

So, we’re not talking about mystical alchemy here. We’re talking about how writing down the things I wanted from the day in a positive manner – as in, I wasn’t thinking “here’s my goals to accomplish,” which would have pressured me with onerous tasks, but rather “here’s what I want, deep down inside, but who knows” – provoked me to take steps that made the things I desired occur. I wasn’t really focused on the outcomes I had listed. I just acted out of desire – to connect, to be near a loved one, to smell better.

This isn’t magic or rocket science. It’s kind of the principle of the book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow – ridiculous, but really when you engage in what you love and desire, when you – yes, here I go again! Joseph Campbell alert! – follow that stinkin’ bliss, but not for the accomplishment or the reward but for the love of the thing in itself – then you truly enter into the kind of fruitful relationship with yourself and your work/art/relationships that allows you to be fully present and ultimately fully satisfied.

One of those paradoxical laws that is so simple and hard, it must be true.

So, no: I’m not a “The Secret” convert. But this experiment did underscore for me

• the importance of giving so that you can receive – without expectations;
• doing what you love out of love;
• and sometimes, when you want something – well, you can go online and order it.