31 May 2007

Jimmy and Cindy



Contemplating Cindy Sheehan's announcement, I am reminded of another hero--Jimmy Carter. I remember how my heart ached for Carter during his presidency. So often unfairly maligned while in office, his post-presidency transformation has inspired and instructed me.

There is life beyond the spotlight. My prayer and suspicion is that Cindy Sheehan is moving into and through a similar transformation. Both Sheehan and Carter were blessed and cursed to have the whole world watching while they underwent the greatest tests of their spiritual lives. The tests, the contexts for those tests and the risks attached were daunting. How could either of them help but be changed in profound ways by their experiences? Where else could they go but "higher" after what they have survived and seen and learned?

I feel blessed and privileged to have met Cindy in Crawford. Blessed and privileged to have wrapped my arms around her and been held in hers. I hope some day to meet Mr. Carter.

I thank them both for being in the world and doing the good work they do.

28 May 2007

Friendship: First Case Study

The question in play is “friendship”—and associated ideas like “trust” and “hope” and “love” and “lessons.” The following narrative is Part ?One? of the exploration.
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In 1983 I moved from Bloomington IN to Louisville KY. My first day in town I met R__. I was walking up Fourth Avenue looking for a pay phone and he was walking down Fourth Avenue hanging and distributing flyers announcing a poetry reading in Central Park the following weekend.


He was wearing the most unusual clothing I’d ever seen anyone wearing in public.
My memory has faded but I remember there were lots of colors and patterns, lots of fluid material and a shoulder bag that hung to mid calf. We caught each other’s attention easily on the nearly-vacant street. We spoke briefly and he gave me a flyer.

This first friendship in my new town would prove to last through many adventures, over much time and many miles. We made art together and nurtured each other through our separate artistic pursuits. In bits and pieces, and sometimes
in large chunks, we filled each other in on our histories—the parts we’d missed preceding our meeting.

We talked a lot. Philosophy and art and politics and gossip. Religion and anthropology and music and food. Education and parenthood and entertainment and
books. We drank together and ate together and smoked pot together.

We never made love. And I never went to his house.


We hung out at my place and in the park and at a unique neighborhood restaurant bar called The Rudyard Kipling. The Rud, as some of us came to call it, was big on live art. There were poetry readings and open mics, dramatic presentations and an
eclectic array of musical bands—jazz, world, rock, folk, country, pop, blues. I became one of the regulars as did R___.

The leader of a local world-music band, a small, very popular ensemble called Serpent Wisdom, was a friend of R___’s from high school. R____ respected the man’s art immensely and called him the greatest songwriter in Louisville at that time. He appreciated my
songwriting with similar regard. It was a shining, singular moment for him, the night he introduced me to J___--two of his most favorite friends, who happened to be his two favorite songwriters in the world.

It was a shining singular moment for me and J____ as
well. Of course we fell in love. Of course we performed music together.

Of course R____ was in love with me. The attraction between us was undeniable from the first moment we met but, for me, there was never a sexual charge. We were strongly telepathic with each other—eventually I only had to think of him or speak his name aloud and he would come to me or call within hours. We spoke in a kind of shorthand—so much was understood without
verbalization. I thought of him as the male version of the entity that I represented in female form.

I loved him and cherished him and trusted him as I had no one else, before or since.
My relationship with J___ was exciting, fulfilling and frustrating. It rocked and rolled and soared and sank for five and half years. In the end, it was one of
several reasons I left the Midwest for California. After a couple of years, R___ followed me.

He stayed at my place in Oakland for a few weeks on arrival. That was a rough patch for our friendship but we survived it. In part due to the geography and layout of the SF Bay Area, we didn’t hang out together as much as we had in Louisville. By the time he arrived, I had a circle of friends and acquaintances; he met some of them but soon began forming his own, distinct social circle.


After a couple of years—and it’s hard to remember exactly how it happened—we began
to play sexually with each other. Looking back, it’s easy to see why it didn’t last long, why it couldn’t last long. So much volatile history behind us. R____ had suffered unrequited affection all those volatile years I spent with J_____. And F_____ had entered the scene to become R____’s lover…only to break his heart and mine by getting involved with J____ while still R____’s “girlfriend.”

During a break in my relationship with J____, F____ and I had a brief affair—which also wounded R____. When I left for CA, R___ and F____ got married. They were only barely divorced when R___ moved to CA.

R___ and I joked that nearly everyone in our Circus had slept
with everyone else except for him and me so we had to become lovers to complete the permutation sequencing. But it was a sad, bitter joke.

After the sex, we remained friends but just as the relationship had changed after the relocation to CA, after the transition from sexual lovers to post-sex friends the character of the friendship changed again. There was an underlying tension that I could not define precisely.


My matriculation in a Bachelor’s completion program and then two Masters programs triggered a series of intense, difficult conversations between us. He was jealous. He suffered feelings of inferiority and competitiveness.


He was experimenting on an increasingly regular basis with a variety of up-tempo recreational drugs by then. We had a couple of intense, difficult conversations about what appeared to me to be an approaching substance abuse situation.


Just before I left Louisville, we had begun to shape a Vow between us. We were
trying to articulate the affection and devotion that we felt for each other, to formalize our tacit promise through acknowledgment and naming. We continued crafting our Vow in CA. By the time the intense, difficult conversations began, the crafting was still in process but we had agreed that we were committed to being honest mirrors to each other and lending loving encouragement to each other in our individual journeys toward personal “actualization.”

In the year before I began my nomadic sojourning, R___ and I had very little contact, very few conversations. I would call him after several weeks without contact for short conversations in which “uh-humph,” “yeah,” “oh,” and “bye” were the sum of his contributions. I was annoyed, angry, frustrated and concerned. He was less and less communicative with me, earning less and less and finally no money,
sleeping less and less and becoming more and more antagonistic and disgruntled with people he didn’t know like politicians, and a changing assortment of group entities like “white people” or “men” or “rich people” or “the government.”

By the time I hit the road, he never called me and I rarely called him. He never returned phone calls. There was no more email. I made one more direct appeal during a stopover in SF: I met him on a street corner and we walked and talked and I offered my plea for a revival of inspired engagement between us. His response was noncommittal.

I returned to the road. After a year, I wrote him a goodbye letter from Colorado. And I have never heard from him since. I have heard of him through mutual
friends—varying reports as to the measure of his wholeness.

R___ is/was my oldest friend. I felt a warm security when our eyes would meet across a room crowded with people neither of us knew well. Like we were lone flames in a room of shadows.


And there was a liveliness with us, like the whole-body refreshment I feel
standing in high wind. We went places together—intellectually especially—that were impossible to even imagine with most other people. We created a space where we could both breathe freely and deeply, inhaling and exhaling. Our friendship enlivened me.




So.

  • “trust,” or, more accurately, the process of its development, is instructive. It is an essential study in the evolution of consciousness. A vital exercise.

  • “hope” is a tricky thing. Positive regard tips easily and unexpectedly into noble, rationalized denial of reality.

  • “love” is the ineffable Answer, the everlasting inspiration and yearning in everything we do. We burn and collapse and reach and dream of Love, for Love, in Love…

  • “lessons”…so often, it’s hard to say, for sure, for eternity, what the Lesson is. In anything. I miss R___ less and less. I do not worry about him or feel sad when I think of him. I remember the rich times with him. Here and there I recognize a seed from that time in full fruition in my life today. I bless the time. And us. And, sometimes, him.

25 May 2007

Truth Be Told


A feature of my mythology when I lived in Oakland was the superstition that if I saw a pelican on Lake Merritt in the morning the day would be full of magic and good fortune. I don't remember how the belief first came to me.

Lake Merritt is reportedly one of the major North American hangouts for water fowl. Geese predominated but ducks, cranes, egrets, gulls, and many others whose names I don't know were also abundant and ever-present.

The pelicans appeared less frequently. On a walk along the lake, I would sense something large overhead and look up to see one or two or three brown pelicans gliding silently in large circles. With their great wing spans and pterydactyl beaks, they looked prehistoric, out of place/time. I marveled at how little actual wing-flapping it took to keep such a large bird airborne. Then one of them would splash-crash down to catch breakfast. Efficient, elegant hunting that still came off comic somehow.

Yesterday morning I was driving along US 90. A clear, beautiful day. Crews have made tremendous headway on the beach: it's much less cluttered and devastated now. Between here and Biloxi a couple of beach businesses have opened in the last month and each weekend there are more people playing on the beach. I'm shopping for a beach umbrella. Something special...

The wind was high yesterday. For the first time since moving here, I saw tiny whitecaps in the Gulf. Though nothing comparable to the great surging yawn and hiss of the Pacific, the Mississippi Sound (I'm told Gulfport does not sit on the Gulf of Mexico proper) was "chattering". I felt refreshed and energized and happy and whole, driving along with all the windows down. Mini-dunes were forming on the road. This was a new face of Gulfport.

Returning from my errand, sensing something large overhead, I looked up to see a quintet of pelicans flying in easy formation above me. I was delighted!! A first sighting in Mississippi. Even as an exhilarated grin broke across my face, I spotted another flock! Perhaps 10 or 11 of them flying over the water. An irresistible urge to be with all of This washed through me. I stopped the car and ran across the sand to the water's edge. I was still wearing my pajamas. The wind whipped my oversize sweater and baggy pj bottoms against my body. Sun, wind, surf, sand....bare feet...nowhere I have to be... This is affluence.

And I think I know how my superstition started: the good feeling that Morning, Water and Pelicans bring me transforms the world. It looks and feels different to me. It becomes a land of miracles that happens to be my Home.

23 May 2007

The Things We Do for Love


I drove DCE to the New Orleans airport today and met a friend for lunch afterward. It had begun to rain while we ate and was coming down pretty hard by the time we went out to our cars. Traffic was still moving but slower as I set out. Some great old school R&B was on the radio. I was suffused with good feeling--back in New Orleans again!, good conversation on the drive over, good food and conversation with one of my favorite people, and now cruising New Orleans! on a rainy Wednesday listening to Barry White. Yeah. Life is good.

I stopped for gasoline. A nice-looking male cab driver was getting into his taxi when he spotted me. He smiled and greeted me with some typically silky New Orleanian comment. I don't remember exactly... Something like "How you doin' Queen." He wasted no time. And I was absolutely charmed--though, as usual, I maintained some reserve... He gave me his number and asked for mine. I said, "I'll call you," and I think I probably will.

As I drove south on Airline the downpour grew stronger. I felt like I was driving across the bottom of a bowl. There was no serious flooding but water was standing on long stretches of Tulane. By the time I ramped onto I-10, the sky had opened. It was a deluge. Traffic was crawling. And the radio was still serving up a perfect playlist.

Who can say why or when insight comes? As I raised the speed of the windshield wipers I realized another reason I love New Orleans: being there pulls me down into my soul, makes my hips and heart feel broader. I feel beautiful when I'm in New Orleans. I'm moved by the place. Provoked. It awakens dormant intelligences and sensitivities. My awareness expands to meet the experience of being there. New Orleans is extravagantly generous, offers something for my eyes, nose, tummy, buttocks; inspires intellectual, sensual, artistic response.

At points on the road to Slidell, visibility was nearly nil. I was actually scared a couple of times. I remembered the last time New Orleans weather had scared me: a tornado-strength storm one night in December 2005 that plowed through the service worker tent city where I was living at the time. The huge tent, that slept 12 comfortably, imploded in the storm with five or six of us inside. I felt very much at risk and went into mild shock afterward.

My fear was not as intense today. I never even considered pulling over and waiting for the weather to break. It was not a question of thinking "nothing bad can happen to me in New Orleans--NOLA loves me." It was, and this is, of course, an inadequate translation of the feeling, more like "Whatever happens--life or death--where else would I rather be?"

This is a new experience, my "long distance" (about 75 minutes) love affair with New Orleans. In the past, all my lovers came to me; I never had to go to them.



16 May 2007

Assessing the Situation

The clock is still ticking but it looks like I'm not going to

have another baby
finish my M.Div degree
own a house or property
land a recording contract
try heroin
have waist-length hair
meet Joni Mitchell
marry Charlie Ellis
work as a prostitute
read every book ever written in English
commit suicide
learn to speak Portuguese
find my bronze-shoe baby picture
become a nun or a gangster

14 May 2007

The Song of War


I want the war to end.

More precisely: I don't want to hear any more news of war on the radio. The stories provoke a restless desperation in me. I frown and grind my teeth and wring my hands. I feel like my heart is going to explode and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

Turning off the radio is not a solution. It only supplants the misery of hearing the news with tense anxiety--like the little pigs in the houses of straw and sticks felt with the wolf jeering from the front yard.

This afternoon I tried another approach: when NPR began its report about the three missing soldiers, I moved to the piano and began playing Beethoven. With focused passion. A few minutes in and I was no longer "trying something" or wondering if "it" would work; I was just playing Beethoven. The distraction only worked for awhile. Eventually I remembered why I was playing and began to feel....weird.

Split. Not wholly given to either the music or the horror. Aware of both but touching neither. My mind engaged with both but my heart open to neither.


[I found this photo, a photomosaic of the war dead as George Bush, in a blog called Idealog. The 30 April 2007 post entitled "Talking Points on Bush's preoccupation with skin color and democracy" is a poignant read.]

I kept playing. Willfully directed my passion and attention to the music. Passages where I floundered, I practiced--took it apart, slowed it down, ran it and re-ran it, backed up a few measures and played into the place where I'd faltered. I worked this way until I got it right. Could do it right twice. Then continued the piece.

I felt that exquisite simultaneous exhaustion and exhilaration of body/mind/heart/soul/cosmic consciousness that comes now and then at the piano. At the end of the piece, I stood up. Listened to the wind and cricket and wind chime songs floating in through my wide open night time windows.

After a few minutes, I remembered the war. The radio was off. Nothing but wind and crickets and wind chime and my thoughts to listen to. I remembered the war now with no feelings of tension or dissatisfaction or desperation. Just a deep, enduring sadness, throbbing somewhere far away inside myself.

And I thought, Beethoven knew this feeling. In his deafness. A profound, inconsolable sadness throbbing in the only things he could hear--the music and his thoughts.

Today I heard some arguments for the U.S. continued presence in Iraq and marveled to feel my usual resistance to such ideas softening. My concession arose in response to an Iraqui leader's earnest enunciation of the certain disasters that would befall the country if the U.S. armed forces withdrew. His plea could easily be taken as a justification for continued fighting.

But I believe fighting only leads to more fighting. I believe there must be better, peaceful means to address his concerns.

I like to imagine that music might make some other approach possible.

My imagination stumbles trying to picture George Bush transformed by music. I feel split again, aware of the reality of George and aware of the reality of music as transformative medium but unable to merge the two.

Despite the Iraqui man's eloquent support for George's war, I must stand on the side of transformation. I must (re)turn to music. And hope that he is not as deaf as George and can be moved to an insight that entertains a non-violent solution to his concerns.

12 May 2007

Day to Day

Management stuck a note in the apartment door yesterday morning. A memo laden with typos, grammatical errors and misspellings announcing that in response to the "constant" conflicts about parking, parking spaces will be numbered and each tenant assigned a parking space.

This time last month, I could have tossed the notice into the trash. I didn't own a car. This time five months ago, any such notice slipped under my door would have been the result of a joke or a mistake. But I have a lease and a car now. So, let the fun begin!

When I returned home later in the afternoon, I pulled into a space, got out of the car and started unloading my stuff (except for my backpack, I didn't have any of this stuff either five months ago). As I approached my apartment door with my arms full, the landlady came out of her apartment. "Wait a minute," she said. "I don't think that's your spot." Of course, true to form, I'd chosen the one spot in the lot without a concrete marker sporting an apartment number. Actually, I hadn't even noticed that the markers had been painted. I'd assumed it would be a few days before we received our assignments.

"Oh," I said. "Sorry. Let me lay down my stuff and I'll come back and move the car."

As it turned out, I'd been assigned the spot I would chosen if asked: one of the only two shady spots in the lot. Plus, it's at the end of the row and easily accessible from my back door.

The landlady was still standing in the courtyard as I made my way back to my apartment. I'd stopped by Cane's on the way home and picked up some "home cooking"; I was looking forward to curling up on my bed with food and a Netflix film. "Yeah, we had to go on and number those spots. People are just mean," my landlady began. Like a lot of people here in Mississippi, she loves to talk. Especially talk of the local, semi-gossip type.

Is it politeness or compassion or just social awkwardness that makes me feel I need to stand around and listen for a bit? Whatever, I stood and listened to her report about the paint and what had happened to provoke the change in policy and who got which spot and which neighbors were nasty to her when she asked them to move their cars so her son could paint the markers... On and on. She's a nice person, just talkative.

"Well, Gail, my dinner's getting cold..."

"Um hum. I mean, they had four cars! And then to invite guests over and they've got three more cars..."

"Well, uh, sometimes we just don't think about other people's needs. We forget we have to share..."

"And he had the nerve to get nasty with me. I said I told him to get that broken down car out of here a month ago. He said...."

I began to walk toward my open apartment door. Sometimes I wish I didn't care...wish I could just be rude or oblivious or quirky enough to break free of people... When got about 10 feet away from her, she stopped talking. "Have a good evening," I said. "And if I don't see you, Happy Mother's Day."

"Um hum. Alrighty. "

I lose my spiritual cool in mundane situations like this. I wasn't feeling serenity or joy standing in the courtyard listening to Gail. I was feeling trapped. It is at times like that that I wish I was a nun or that I was back on the road or that I lived in the imagined ease and luxury of an intentional community of, well, of people more like me.

But I recognize that these are precisely the kinds of situations in which spiritual warriors earn their wings. Serenity and joy are much easier to find in solitude. Piece of cake. Walking in the world without being of the world is the taller order and boy do I still have a lot to learn.

To love God and love Gail. That was the responsibility in that exchange. Looking back, I can see I'm making some progress: I wasn't annoyed with her and I wasn't remotely angry. Just a bit anxious and distracted. I think that's an improvement.

The Road still calls me. And New Orleans still calls me. And I cannot deny that I see how important it is to the evolution of Consciousness, that I sojourn a while longer where I am; that I bless the lessons/work before me that are tailor-made for the edification of my Soul.


08 May 2007

The Sun

Each month the last page of my favorite magazine, The Sun, is entitled "Sunbeams" and contains quotes from famous and not-famous people on a particular topic. This morning, instead of hopping out of my car and onto a B-line to my desk, I sat on the low brick wall in front of "the house on Rippy" and read Sunbeams while I finished my coffee.

It was an odd morning: the sky wanted to rain but couldn't so the air was heavy with moisture beneath a bright gray cloud canopy. None of my "work clothes" suited me today so I dressed up. I looked like a black Barbie doll, in my low-cut, tight dress with high heels. I felt sexy and comfortably over-dressed and out of place.

I read

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did. --F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is our mammalian conflict--what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself. Treading that line, keeping the others in check, and being kept in check by them, is what we call morality. --Ian McEwan

Love...is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. --Iris Murdoch

We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. --Mark Vonnegut

If those who owe us nothing gave us nothing, how poor we would be. --Antonio Porchia

Over the weekend, I saw Marvin Hamlisch in concert. I looked him up in Wikipedia later and discovered that when he was accepted to Juilliard at the age of 6, he was the youngest person ever to enroll. Later, riddled with anxiety, he switched from a performance major to a composition major. He didn't think he was good enough I guess. What does it take?

An assumption deeply integral to capitalism...[is that there's] not enough to go around: not enough love, not enough time, not enough appointments at the food-stamps office, not enough food stamps, not enough money, not enough seats on the subway. It's pervasive. We learn mistrust of each other, bone deep: everything is skin off somebody's nose. --Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Maybe it's so pervasive that we even learn mistrust of ourselves.

03 May 2007

Shower Chapel

I lost The One on Tuesday. The piano had been acting funny so I called the store and they sent someone out. He attempted a fix that we hope will hold but in the process I lost both recorded tracks stored in the piano's memory bank. I consciously controlled my face and breath when the technician told me. The only tiny scrap of my composition efforts in something like ten years! Gone. I was momentarily devastated.

It's been this way nearly always with me: next to nothing of the "art" I have produced in my life has been preserved. In graduate school, it was something I contemplated with uncommon seriousness and regularity. What did it mean, that I had so little interest and made so little effort to "save" what I made?

It was intellectually and psychologically entertaining then to speculate, to form a postulation and follow it out and experience my emotional response...and then elaborate on the hypothesis. I think I even had conversations about it. With other students in my program.

Improvisation is an amazing medium. My pulse quickens just typing the word. Improvisational performance is thrilling and endlessly surprising and provides a fabulous workout that enhances my capacities in every media I play in. But since I discovered improv, I very seldom think about documentation. Mostly because it has felt too heavy-handed a notion for the ephemeral nature of improvisation. Or so I told myself.

I have not performed or practiced for a very long time. I miss it. The performance part, especially. I dabble in improv performance a lot in my "real" life. It's like blood actually: it courses through everything. I'm awake to it in everything.

Earlier, I took a shower and as I dried myself afterward I began to think about what I want to put on. What did I want to feel against my clean, dry skin? And I laughed at myself a little, thinking just enjoy This...this multiplicity of sensations on my skin as water evaporates in places and trickles down in others...and the thirsty towel drinking from my arms...and seconds of intense coolness that raise gooseflesh on my neck....just enjoy this...

This

And then I thought of Henry. He is still young enough that The Future does not exist. When he is fresh from his bath, his complete attention is there where he is. One day, he will be distracted from Now by Later. But not yet.

And I wanted very much to be with him. A surge of longing to be near him flooded me.

It's more of that thing I was talking about awhile back; about being with someone in such realness that it awakens the Soul to the presence of God.

The way the after-shower story and thoughts of Henry came to me is an expression of improv in my blood. As Zaporah taught me, improv is about noticing. Noticing and not resisting where attention leads. I learned through my own practice that the improvisational impulse is nothing less than Divine heartbeat. For me, doing improv is being with myself in such realness that it awakens my Soul to the presence of God.