2012: Bearing the Possibilities

M

On the edge of happiness there is a small blight of conscience.  It rests there without having been given any formal invitation and with an air of entitlement knowing that without it, you cannot reach whatever deep joy may be available to you.

Increasingly I'm finding it level me with an indifferent stare at each point in my day that is in any way inclined toward unexamined bliss or undeserved relief.
 
I can only assume it must be there for a very important reason.

In fact, I am recognizing that same specter of conscience restraining unearned joy from almost everyone I know, and I find it curious that it should now be surfacing in these exaggerated proportions all over the place.

Of course, conscience has always been there, but perhaps because we've chosen to live in such complete hedonistic ignorance for such a protracted span, it has grown more vociferous until now it has become a karmic hegemony under which all other emotions and thoughts are thoroughly subject?

It has been said by some that after December 21st, 2012 our world will cease to exist in its present form.

If this is true, I am wondering if the hardships that have escalated for so many of us might not be actual blessings; that they are preparing us for that point when letting go will not only be recommended but, in fact, mandatory or we won't be able to survive?

What I've noticed is not that happiness has been taken away from us or that there is no point in seeking it out, but rather that we are simply having to work harder to find and sustain it.  Additionally, we are asked to recognize it, treasure it and be grateful for it.

At the moment I cannot think of one single person I know personally who is not tackling an unusually  menacing beast of blockage or reckoning.  Judging from the circumstantial fallout, it would seem that the beast is the remnant of any shadow in life that is either destructive and has been overly indulged or one that holds much promise but has been denied nourishment.  It is now unleashing such a rapacious appetite it will either be fed by you or else you will become the meal.

Whatever the specific point of awakening, we have only two choices:  We can confront and control it or we can pretend nothing has changed and we will be torn to pieces.

The grace period appears to be over  putting us all under the gun of choice, and we had better do some heavy re-evaluating or we are liable to get shot in the head by the callous bullet of indecision.

There are many possible scenarios for the 2012 shift; some center on geophysical earth changes; some on societal, governmental and world changes; on fiscal insolvency or war.  Others bring us to a new paradigm of thought and are built upon the proposed quantum leap of consciousness that supposedly will occur once our planet passes through the Nuclear Bulge or Galactic Center of the Milky Way galaxy between Sagittarius and Scorpio on that fated December day.

The common upshot from all these scenarios is the ushering in of great change but one that comes with a certain amount of discomfort.  Of course, the metaphorical equivalent for this transition is the birth process.

If that is the case,  I think it helps to bear in mind the secondary process associated with birth, which is the willingness of the mother to endure the birth pangs and discomfort for the greater gift of what it produces in the end.

Before any transformation can begin, there has to be an absolute acceptance and a willingness to go through the labor pains with your only attachment being to yield a healthy, beautiful, bouncing outcome.

So, what I'm seeing in these varying levels of implosion in our lives are the beginnings of the birth process.
And what seems to be the central message to us is that our current state of denial about who we are and  the callous disregard we hold towards one another is no longer being treated lightly by the Cosmic Powers that be, so all those dark corners of our shadow sides are being driven out into the light for appraisal and either a redressing or re-calibration.

It is unquestionably painful but at the same time there is this sense of it being a purgative cleansing and intensely gratifying if we handle it with integrity and openness.

That is not always easy to do when you are in pain, I know.  When your marriage is imploding or your addiction is raging or your friendships are disintegrating or your finances are dissolving or your family is fracturing or your loved ones are dying; when there isn't a soft landing visible anywhere in your world and you are quickly burning up your last reserve of courage.

But those are the very situations serving as the crucibles that will either turn us into the victors over our worst selves or burn us to dark ash.

If we want to deliver a better future, the only real choice we have is to embrace the reality that if we  respond in love first, we will produce a healthy humanity and the resolutions that we arrive at with respect to our personal life situations will be in perfect alignment with grace.

Basically, we either give birth to the baby or get eaten by the beast.  It's pretty simple.  And that applies whether 2012 pans out like Y2K or not.

 We all got knocked-up by life and made some pretty self-centered, destructive and lame choices throughout our planetary pregnancy; but it's not too late to alter our habits and rise to the noble and sacred challenge of bringing this terrestrial baby to term with as much love, care and caution as we can muster in whatever time we have left.   And who knows how long that really is?

We may struggle now to find that comfortable position where we don't feel over-burdened by the weight of change as a better world kicks against our bellies and to ease the aching in our swollen feet as we gamely walk through our troubled days;  but while these impositions are necessary, they are also temporary.

Someday these shifts and challenges will recede into memory as we lovingly cradle the soft crown of a new and innocent humanity that requires nothing more of us than our gratitude and continued nurturing.

Someday, we will once more PLAY.


But for now it seems we bear the possibilities with the choice as to whether or not we will one day celebrate a new life or be crushed by the fissured and outmoded structure of the old one.

I guess we've got to do our pre-natal housecleaning to earn our post-natal bliss.

Maybe its time to start sweeping?

COMMUNICATION RESERVE

This is going to be one of those 'punch drunk' posts that I will likely later regret writing.  I've gotten very little sleep over the past three nights for a variety of reasons and have additionally been juggling balls of internal stress like a circus performer on psychotropic drugs; alternating tosses between denial and dismay with the occasional high throw of raw anxiety just to keep the show compelling.

And while this state of compromised functioning is not entirely foreign to me, it isn't very enticing or necessarily comfortable and it leads me down all sorts of roads that are not all fit for travel; at least not in the manner I prefer, which is without much preparation and only a small satchel of what I've discovered are usually all the wrong questions.

But it is what it is and being that this is an exploratory journey replete with candid opinions and often embarrassing  revelations, I see no other choice but to proceed with the public execution and let my fate rest on the conscience of integrity and intention, as I know my heart is innocent of any conscious or intentional wrongdoing.

After many hours wrestling the dark and to the detriment of my need for sleep, I've found there to be present in me a disquieting and superficially adverse actuality:  I don't know how to BE in this world.

What I mean is that I know what is expected of me, and I think I know what I am supposed to do or how to react and respond in most given situations, but that knowledge is far from natural and obvious and comes only after focused effort, conscious probing and much agonizing.  In other words, it takes a whole lot of intentional work and mental and emotional exertion to navigate the most mundane, routine and pedestrian avenues of daily life.

Part of the reason, I don't doubt,  has been systematically spawned from social failure, as it has existed  throughout all the years of my life.  You read somebody wrong enough times and you are bound to come out appearing somewhat socially retarded, if not downright stupid; and if it happens frequently enough, you begin to double-check your thoughts, words and actions with paranoid intensity in fear of repeatedly landing on your face with your foot squarely lodged between your teeth.

Of course, taking the time to do all that preliminary estimating and calculating gives an air of latency to your social skills; an immediate impression of cluelessness that then supersedes all subsequent reevaluations.  It's like being typecast as an actor.  No matter how divergent your current role, people will always see you as Superman or Mary Poppins and will forever picture you with a talking umbrella and bottomless carpetbag of delights or flying through the air in red leotards and dodging bars of Kryptonite.

But being typecast or misunderstood is really not the issue or the problem.  Of course, it can be a sore point, especially when you want to be taken seriously and you are met with the same regard given a jar of Marshmallow Fluff; but it is something everyone contends with by at least some of the people some of the time.  We are all guilty of prejudging and premature assessments at one time or another.  It is much easier that way because digging and paying attention require time, patience and interest, none of which come easily or in abundance these days.  Perhaps they never have.

And you can't really do much about the Other, but you can do a lot about yourself, which is where I find my thoughts right now; ferreting out the bottom line with the impatient constraint of an over-taxed C.E.O in a board meeting an hour before his flight leaves for his vacation week in Dubai.

I am anxious to figure it out, to get it right, and to find a solution before my time on earth is up.

 So, I look around and observe people interacting with one another without any hesitation or self-consciousness or second thoughts, and I am amazed.  I am often envious, too, knowing the amount of internal suffering and emotional flagellation I endure in the face of even the most casual exchange, and I wonder how do they do it?  How do they get out of their own ways and just BE?

For me, an ordinary conversation with someone has the psychological complexity equal to what it must take to execute a lunar landing in space.  I actually get nervous if I'm in a situation where I have to provide small talk.  I don't do small talk.  I can't do small talk!

Well, of course, I can but I suck at it.  I find myself so terror-stricken and preoccupied with concern over what I am supposed to say next or how should my facial expression be or do I have the right inflection in my voice or  whether I should make eye contact and demonstrate my sincerity or look casual and turn away or maybe just shut up and actually go away- that it makes my stomach tense, and I feel just as I did as a kid standing on that diving block ready to terrorize myself into winning another medal in freestyle.

And then there is the other side of my inability to BE, which is my fear that I won't understand; the unnatural terror that I am not computing properly and am misunderstanding or misreading the other person's words or signals, as so frequently occurs in spite of all my efforts.

Somewhere in the back left compartment of my brain is a group of frantic little neurons awkwardly colliding with one another in a desperate, bumbling attempt to transmit the proper protocols for human interaction and communication down to those waiting axons; and I can only assume that they are either improperly programmed to pull off the job or that whatever axons I have available are broken or seriously misaligned because, obviously, the instructions are not reaching me.

And as if these deficits in my inability to both cogently express and properly interpret information were not enough, there is the added but equally trying and exceedingly exasperating trait that has developed over the years as a means of rectification for the ineptitude of the others and that is simply the glaringly apparent problem of my excessive loquaciousness when pressed to converse one to one.

Seriously.  Unable to provide small talk, I will get on a subject that fascinates me but has little or no value to the other person and I ramble on like an automatic dryer spinning only an old pair of tennis shoes with maybe some loose change circumnavigating for additional volume and annoyance.

Though not being a complete human malfunction, eventually I do become painfully aware when that glazed, mesmerized, deadly bored look comes over whatever poor slob got caught up in the rinse cycle an hour before and just wants those damn shoes to dry so they can get the hell out of there and go back to the mall or the grocery store where the real people are.  But by that point, I'm unsure how to graciously shut myself down without seeming even more of a geek, so I just keep going!

The only real signal I am able to recognize as an alert that it is time to stop comes when I begin repeating myself....a lot.  By that point, I'm not only becoming thoroughly bored with myself, but also physically exhausted; so I can only imagine the debilitated state of the other person.  It must be like being rammed repeatedly by one of those little toy cars that hits the wall then backs up and hits it again and again and again until the batteries finally run out; only instead of the car and the wall, it is my words on the delicate inside chamber of someone else's brain!  I feel so guilty!

Perhaps I should work on not 'feeling' my way through every interaction.  My tendency is to invest my heart into the exchange first; to put it up as collateral against the possibility that something will go wrong.   I suppose I just want to make sure my emotional stock and intentions are public so I won't be accused of foul play or deception if communication breaks down.

Unfortunately, I've learned from experience that it really doesn't matter because if someone wants you to be at fault, they will find a way of making you seem so no matter how open or vulnerable you've allowed yourself to be; and all it ultimately ends up doing is threatening to bring your own heart to a point that feels much like bankruptcy.

Of course, no one can take from you something you don't want to give and nothing can deplete the limitless resource of love, so although it may feel like you have nothing more to give, it is only temporary.  Love is like fiat currency and your heart is the Federal Reserve.  If you find yourself a little low on funds, you just manufacture more only without the negative ramifications or penalties leveed at tax time.

Loving is always a win-win option in spite of the fact it doesn't always feel that way.

Communication, on the other hand, requires a little finesse and a great deal of trust.  With my tendency to lead with the heart and muck up the rest through pure, self-conscious terror and mental hysteria, there is a good chance I will continue to fail at relationships and that my awkwardness will be perceived as disingenuous or backward.

If this is the case, then I will assume that being among people in the traditional sense is not something I should be focused on because, possibly, I can be of more value and far more effective taking advantage of all this time I have alone, which is becoming increasingly plentiful.  I am comfortable here in this room communicating through my laptop and my artwork; with my dogs and all my books.  It isn't at all stressful and the dogs think everything I say to them is pure genius.

Most people earn their rich life lessons bartering with the currency of spoken language.
I store up a wealth of wisdom then distribute it through creative works and written words.

Sometimes it is lonely.  But the more I think about it, perhaps this is right where I am supposed to BE.

FACING DOWN THE DAWN

At or about the break of dawn this morning, I realized two things:  I realized that I had logged probably little more than two hours of actual sleep, and I realized that almost everyone I know, including myself, is in some way, shape or form an addict.

Addicts are not only those bonded to drugs, alcohol or abusive and destructive behaviors.   An addict can be anyone that allows a person, place, desire, activity, or thing to overwhelm and overpower all else; to dramatically disrupt the balance.  Who among us does not have something in their lives that takes more precedence than necessary and has the potential to send the natural order of our days a tad off kilter and detrimentally alter our objective perceptions?

This current of thought was startled to the point of flow by a conversation I had over the phone last night with one of my oldest friends about the current welfare of another who, for the second time in nine months is hospitalized and in a battle for his life.  The genesis of his most recent medical crisis  can be traced back to his long years of alcoholism with the only exception this time being the unfortunate additional hurdle of an addiction to pain medication.

In our youth, and up until a couple of years ago, this guy was the heart, life and soul of every gathering, large or small.  His humor and all-consuming passion for stirring the pool of pedestrian thought and diving head-first into the shallow waters of limitation and caution just to prove they were survivable were legendary.  No one could imagine a celebration without him.  Today he is in the raw throes of the DT's and trapped in the dementia that will hold him for days until his bones are once more clean.

And so last night as I watched the slow, methodical spinning of the ceiling fan above my bed, it brought my mind to a place of memory and the half-grown hopes of my youth; over-charged as they were with the surety of there being countless tomorrows full of enduring friendships, winning smiles and successes all heightened by the beguiling glaze of celebrations with all their concomitant thrills.

Thirty-five or forty years ago the idea of managing the insecurities of adolescence and our teen years by lacing them with periods of drug and/or alcohol use seemed perfectly reasonable given the undeniable tenor of rebellion and the climate of unrest and counterculturalism so pervasive in the seventies.

Thirty-five years ago our bodies could withstand two or three consecutive sleepless nights and still manage a solid 'C' on a mid-term, too.  Back then it was only the truly reckless among us who lost at the game.  Most of us knew when to quit testing the limits and go get some orange juice and a bowl of cornflakes.

And in time, most of us reluctantly learned how to face and solve our problems and not merely just cauterize our pain.

Or did we?

When I first moved back to the Midwest five years ago after a thirty-two-year absence, I was in heaven because at no other point in my life had I connected to others as profoundly and intimately as I had to those I'd known during the time I'd lived here decades earlier- from ages thirteen to twenty-two.

Those years, already so naturally vested in some of the most radically absolute and life-forming rites of passage; were made even more indelible by the fact that I genuinely adored every one of those friends marking their journey with me at that time.

I suppose it had to have been a bond preexisting life because there is no logical explanation as to why such devotion would endure in my heart decades after the story began and almost as long after it ended; but whatever karmic thread wove them so indelibly into my soul all those many years ago was strong enough to reel me back to where they still resided now.

Many of my friends have survived our crushing inexperience and the reckless test drive of wanton experimentation emerging into adulthood with only minor scars and a few major but decidedly cautionary tales to pass down to their own tempestuous teenage offspring.

However, many others have not and while no longer taking headers off Yamaha 350's into the rear windows of parked Volkswagons, they were still enslaved by the craven lust of an overly-productive party gene with the only difference being its present characterization.

Through the inherently ordinary and substantially disillusioning unraveling of time, the need for infusing each mundane moment with a celebratory cast had now become bound by the lesser, but far more desperate and somber imperative of escape. 


And as I lay there in the dark of my room last night, paddling my way back in time, I began not only to examine my own patterns and expectations and how they still seduce and beckon me toward the rabbit hole of denial; but also how inwardly I still seek some sort of calculable relief from the often grinding dysphoria that shadows even the most ordinary day with a sense of dread thinking, "This can't be all there is."

I suppose I have been fortunate, gifted it would seem with a constitutional grace that has been afforded me by design, as well as by an intrinsic fortitude and sensitivity to guilt; and because of these things I have never met a substance I felt I couldn't live without, so addiction in the traditional sense has never been a personal issue for me.

However, that doesn't mean that the huge desire for escape and relief has been cowed into abeyance.  I still salivate over the various pain medications that have come through this house after the surgical procedures of both my husband and youngest daughter, and it is only through an overwhelming sense of guilt and an even stronger desire to avoid depravity that I have refrained from indulging myself in those pressed-powdered get-a-ways.   Besides, yielding to the chemical cravings promising escape with my own beloved son having become his own victim by such means, would be like sharing a gun with two bullets and passing it between us; a question of who killed whom.

But it has been a struggle at times, no doubt.  When you come of age having flavored all your teen angst and antics with psychedelics, downers, uppers and everything in between, happiness becomes distorted after having been wrapped in the gilded illusion of euphoria. Of course, this is not true for everyone, but it is for some; and it certainly is for me.   They call it "getting high" for a reason.

Aside from any genetic predisposition to eschew chronic dependency (which would be pure luck as alcoholism exists on both sides of my family....although not in my own parents, thankfully), I can also count pure vanity as an ally.  Why would I want to daily indulge in a recreational drug that would give me the munchies and heighten an appetite that is already overly-healthy and demanding? Alcohol and drug use are never touted for their beautifying effects and image erosion by natural means is daunting enough to accept and ameliorate.  The last thing I want to do would be to hasten the declivitous process.

I have never been much of a drinker, but when we first moved back to town, there was a lot of socializing, celebrating and hosting of parties as I reconnected with my old friends and introduced them to my family and my life and vice versa.  I began drinking nearly every weekend because we were either going out, doing the Happy Hour thing or entertaining at home. Enhancing the night was a given.  I learned how to party that way when I was fourteen.

After the first year the drinking the had initially been contained to Friday and Saturday nights had been expanded to include Thursdays; sometimes Wednesdays.  It was around that time that noticed something.  I noticed that, aside from the twenty pounds I had gained without half trying, I was becoming less and less content with life when NOT drinking; and, although I never followed through, I found myself thinking about how early was 'too early' to have that vodka and whether I would be able to slip some into a plastic water bottle to drink from while I was going through the mechanical and agonizingly boring process of preparing dinner.

I'm not sure what triggered it but at that point I got wise, tied a knot in the loop of intoxication, took myself to the gym and also renewed my commitment and efforts towards unity with the Divine, discovery of Self and my obligation towards others.

But what became obvious by today's dawn is that we are all addicts of one sort or another until we let go of all attachments and priorities that are not right here in the present moment; that Be Here Now principle.  There truly is no better place to be, and it is the only place where discontent and unrest can be adequately dissolved by the energy of being fully focused and present to whatever comes your way.

It isn't always easy and often unsuccessful but it is always the better choice.

I know lots of addicts.  There are the ones in obvious trouble with alcohol or pain medications or other substances, but there are also the seemingly innocuous kinds:   the ones addicted to perfection, physical or otherwise; the ones addicted to food; the ones addicted to the past; work; gossip; religion; television; sports, viewing or participation; and probably the most toxic, damaging, saddest and most difficult addiction of all: the addiction to denial.  

At one time or another and on some level, we all take a hit from that cunning rig, but in chronic users you can recognize it because it is loaded with exceptions and excuses and leaves telltale tracks of unreconciled regrets and wasted time all up and down the appendages of the life.

You can't reason with addicts of denial because of their ardent belief that the are the exception, and as long as they are grafted onto this toxic delusion, they will remain stagnating in the refuse of the dark present they don't see and unable to grasp salvation in the healthy future they won't survive without.

I won't abandon those friends of mine mired down by both dependency and denial and neither will I give up hope; but I won't participate in their undoing either.  Whatever it was that compelled me fall in love with these beautiful souls and to return to this place has put me in a position to witness the various degrees of self-sabotage for a reason and it also compels me to remain; but with one striking difference:

When I initially left this place I was still blithely tethered to the bones of dissatisfaction and despair seeking only to loosen the binding with pills and potions and temporary anodynes as they circled the restless waters of the friend ship.  Now, thirty-two years later, I have returned with a sturdy lifeline and an entire fleet of prayerful intentions strapped to my heart, and I'll continue to throw them out there as long as necessary.  I know my friends would do it for me, and in many stunning ways they are.

That is the wonderful thing about lifelines.  They work both ways.

ANY GIVEN OR TAKEN SUNDAY

Today is Sunday; presumably the one day of the week when rest and relaxation are allowed to be plumbed guilt-free.  I mean, if someone asks you tomorrow what you did on Sunday and you respond, "Nothing really.  I slept late, read the 'Times' and pretty much just laid around all day." they wouldn't think twice or feel the least bit inclined to pass judgement.  In fact, they might well simply answer, "Me too."

However, if someone asks you on a Wednesday what you did all day on Tuesday and you gave them that same answer, they'd likely have an entirely different presumptive internal response and might assume you are either unemployed, chronically indolent, or perhaps have an issue with substance abuse.

About the only requirement on Sunday, for those vested in the ritual of prayer and reflection in a more formal setting, would be church attendance; but even that obligation usually concludes by noon at the latest leaving the rest of the day open and devoted to rest and a possible muffin, eggs over-easy and bacon at brunch.  It's all good.

We are expected to be occupied Mondays through Saturdays, and unless one of those days is legitimately our one day off from work or we are lying in a hospital bed, we'd better have a good excuse for any evidence of a laissez faire-attitude or endorsement.

Sunday is a blessed day for secular reasons, too, as it offers grace even to those not of a mind to attach any sacred or religious values to the day.  Perhaps we should view it as the space-time continuum's version of the Parker Brother's "Get-out-of-jail-free" card in Monopoly; although now that I've said it, I find the comparison between the Cosmic Designer of our galaxy and two brothers from Salem, Massachusetts (who also produced a couple of  patently racist board games in the early 1920's) extremely disturbing.  It was only the the 'free-pass' element I was intending to focus upon, just to make that completely clear.

But on Sunday we've got carte blanche and are, without exception, entitled to exercise that pass-card and escape from whatever form of physical, emotional, cerebral or psychological incarceration we are bound by the remaining six days of the week.  It is a cosmic law, I think.

If you really examine our perception and expectation of Sunday, you'd realize that just like nearly everything else we humans concoct, deconstruct, impose and abide by, it is really all in our minds.

WE are the sole creators of the concept of Sunday, and of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all the rest of the days.  We even gave them cute little names to correspond with the celestial bodies most representational of each specific day; and those celestial bodies were, prior to that, named by the ancient Romans after the mythological gods they felt most effectively jived with the nature of the specific planetary energies.  Somewhere in between those rounds of naming, the Germanic people interjected their own linguistic spin on the names using the Nordic gods corresponding to the theme and energies of the originals but keeping the concept firmly intact.

Like everything else, God didn't construct the fine details of our world.  He gave us a template and the bones of it all and just let us go to town.  His request of us was simple and uncomplicated:  To love and honor Him first, and to love each other as we would ourselves.   It seems to me that we were the ones to conceive of the laws and rules and strictures as to how, when and why these basic tenants should be carried out and under what conditions would they be deemed acceptable and viable.

I don't think He expected us to lay around the house and love Him more on Sunday or is as petty as to remand us to everlasting hell fires if, by necessity, we had to report to work that day in order to make the rent or mortgage payments.

In fact, until the exodus of enslaved Jews from Egypt under the command of Moses, there were no recommendations or edicts from on High mandating that we set aside one day in particular to worship and give thanks; and when that came about, it was merely to signify the pact between God and the Israelites.  Unfortunately, I think they might have taken it a tad too seriously and the penalty for violating this mandate of Sabbath observance was death.

Of course, the Sabbath Day was on the seventh day; Saturday.  Once Christ came and delivered the 'New Testament', there was no further mention of any specific day of religious observance.  Basically, it comes down to each man, as it says in Romans 14:5-6  "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike.  Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind."

There it goes; back in our court again.

We lay so much unnecessary guilt upon our psychologies.  We are the ones who felt compelled to bend, twist, designate and carve up time within our linear parameters and call it organization.  But as the great sophist philosopher, Antiphon, said, "Nature is envisaged as requiring spontaneity and freedom in contrast to the often gratuitous restrictions imposed by institutions."  He also said, "Time is not a reality but a concept as a measure."

So, we gave ourselves days of the week with attributes and corresponding duties, which, in turn provided us with just that much more reason to fret if we fail to conform and comply.  Friday night is 'pizza night' or 'date night'; Saturday you play, go to the park with your dog and a Frisbee, clean the yard, go to the mall; Sunday you attend religious services, rest and relax (or if you're Italian, you have every family member within a fifty-mile radius over for a pasta dinner); Monday, you get back to the grind...etc., etc..  We even gave ourselves a modest, mid-week reprieve designating Wednesday as "hump-day", which basically declared it a non-day.  Poor Wednesday; overlooked like a middle child.

Frankly, I find the whole structural mess we've made to be a bit stultifying, even though I am also well aware of the need for a certain sense of order in the world.  I just wish we'd put more emphasis on our Internal order and less on what day of the week we decide is laundry day or errand day or the designated day for worship and rest.

Why can't everyday be UNCONDITIONAL LOVE WITH ALL OF MY HEART DAY?

Thomas Chalmers had the right idea when in the mid-1800's he said, "We redeem time and do not merely use it.  We transform it into eternity by living it right."

But the ultimate characterization of time still comes from Ford Perfect in Douglas Adams' book and screenplay, THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY:


"TIME IS AN ILLUSION, LUNCHTIME DOUBLY SO."


With that in mind, have a great day!

BIRD ON A HARDWIRE OF INATTENTION...Among Other Thoughts

Seventeen years ago when my son was only ten, his basketball coach recognized certain impulsive behavioral characteristics in him that were consistent with those of his own son who had recently been diagnosed with ADHD.

Being a very kind man,  the coach suggested to us that we take our son to a group of psychiatrists and therapists in the adjoining town who specialized in this area.  Being responsible and loving parents (also a hair's breadth away from exhaustion ourselves due to our son's utter in-exhaustion), we readily and immediately complied.

I remember this day well because I ended up heavily implicated as the sole contributor to his genetic misfortune, and I wasn't sure whether I was at all prepared to add yet another square of maternal guilt to the substantially dense guilt-quilt I was already in the process of manufacturing.

Unfortunately, I owned that large square with the small blue dots and purple stars.... well, not actually purple; more of a soft lilac color with little rings of gold that were stripped with crimson red but not the bright shade like you see on fire trucks although some fire trucks are a deeper shade of red than others but at least the firemen can be distinguished by their odd hats, although I wonder if they are expensive and whether they have to cover the cost themselves or do they get the hats when they graduate from fireman school, but I don't suppose they call it "Fireman School" because it sounds pretty ridiculous but ....oh!...  Look at that bird!

Did I mention the background was teal?

The first question the doctor posed to my husband and I was, "Which one of YOU has A.D.D.?"

He looked first at my husband who had on his lap the requisite index cards he carries with him religiously every single day listing all of his upcoming and pressing activities, phone calls needed to be made, items to be picked up at the grocery store, bills to be paid, as well as his datebook, and his teacher's planner.  His shoes were shined (a thrice-yearly ritual), and his attention was focused.

Then all eyes turned to me.  I didn't notice at first having moments earlier become quite captivated by a painting above the sofa as I was bending down to tie my shoes (after realizing I had forgotten) because that painting had such a peaceful cast to it it set me to wondering if that sofa was the one his patients would lie on to relate their dreams and sorrows, and how many various textures of both skin and material must have made contact with that fabric but did they have a satisfactory vantage point when reclining to benefit from the tranquil nature of that beautiful painting or were they probably in SO much pain that their eyes were shuttered from any tactile forms of consolation and it might just make them too tired to speak anyhow, which would defeat the purpose of all the money they were shelling out to visit a shrink, and I wonder just HOW much money the doctor actually takes home versus the insurance companies and does he use it to take elaborate vacations, and I wonder if he loves his wife and....oh!....Look at that bird!

The following Tuesday evening I found myself sitting in a circle of women all having psychological issues of one sort or another after having been unanimously fingered as both the culprit in this hereditary misfiring, as well as possibly in need of a healthy dose of behavior modification myself.

I was not happy.

Before the session began, the therapist and moderator suggested we go around the room and have everyone state their name and give a brief statement about why they were there, etc..  As long as I went last, I could handle that.

We began with the woman on my immediate left; a frail slip of a thing about thirty-two years old with thin, mousey brown hair.  She gave her name and in a voice barely above a whisper said that she was there because of an eating disorder created as a result of issues revolving around something of a non-sexual nature that happened between herself and an uncle once when she was twelve.  She lived alone and was thinking of getting a cat.  She had been coming to this group for ten years.

Next in line was a stout, matronly-looking gal in her early sixties who had been having difficulty asserting herself in her marriage to a man with a large appetite for other woman but little regard for the one who bore his children and picked up his laundry at the cleaners for the past thirty years.  She would be at one moment smiling and releasing an abnormally tinned and staccato-paced laugh, then the next be glassy-eyed and folded over unleashing a desperately hollow but positively subterranean bellow of moans and sobs such as paid keeners at an Irish Wake could only hope to imitate.  She had been in therapy with this group for twelve years.

And as the tales were told one by one, I couldn't help noticing two stark, recurrent facts:

The first being that entirely without exception not one of these women acknowledged or inserted any sense of ownership for their present situations.   They each described their specific situations and issues lacing their words with syllables of defeat as though they were nothing more than the ragged human refuse washed up upon the shore by an indifferent and unkind tide and without aptitude nor inclination to learn how to swim nor walk.

The second blatant commonality were the sheer number of years these women had independently and collectively devoted to this roundtable of battered hearts with their varying levels of indulgent self-pity as well as with an intractable reluctance to let go of the past and grow some cojones!

  This was a progesterone-catered pity party with dainty finger sandwiches of victimization served with estrogen punch spiked with tears.

By the time the circle had moaned its way to me, I was already hungover from drinking too much whine, and somewhat unnerved at the professional impertinence of the therapist who, after I stated my name, that I had three kids and the fact that I was married, quietly interjected, "But she shouldn't be."

It was then I understood that there was an accepted, albeit silent, collusion between these women and the therapist, who, however well intentioned, was unwittingly enabling the feelings of victimization to thrive within them to a certain extent and it was also quite likely one of the reasons why the tenure in this co-dependent klatch of sniveling womb-holders was so radically over-extended.

So, when I was asked if I had any questions, the only one that came to mind was, "Does anyone ever graduate from here?"

For a moment there was silence at our psychogenetic soiree, then some muffled coughing errupted in the far corner of the dimly lit room, which shifted the focus once more to the cowering domestic keener who had yet to stop blubbering and whose hubby was probably out getting laid at that very moment; only at this point, he had my total sympathies.

Out of devotion and in deference to obtaining clean psychological passage for my son, I attended these dark, group sessions for several of months and was even game to play a little one-on-one.  Yet in the back of my mind was the clear understanding that for me this was little more than an exploratory adventure, as it  it seemed that was inadvertently designed to break down autonomy and foster dependency through mutual consent, which was about as distant from my vision of authenticity and definition of empowerment as it could possibly be.

 I decided to find purpose in my deficit of attention and use it to my best advantage, which should be true of all who suffer with the supposed disorder.  I also opted for the belief that the best change agent we can hire is ourselves; and while I don't argue the fact that, of course, there are legitimate disorders, dysfunctions, phobias and psychological conditions that require professional assistance to manage and/or conquer, there are equally as many, if not more, challenging physiological and psychological states that can easily be mastered and navigated with just a little help and a lot of determination.

Yes, my mind wanders incessantly and I find it to sometimes be a nuisance.  But most of the time, I find it takes me to shores of thought I never would have discovered if it were not in my natural wiring to let myself travel down that current of ideas and explorations.

I think of stories to write while on that damned elliptical and paintings to paint while vacuuming and all manner of things to build and design and concoct while driving the car or preparing a meal or standing in the shower.  So what if I forget to shampoo my hair or burn the occasional chicken?

I'm harvesting all the random blossoms of miraculous, creative grace and putting them into form to share with whomever is inclined to sit under my tree in whatever the season; although it could get a little chilly in the fall and I wouldn't suggest a visit in winter because the snowfall index has been quite high the past couple of winters, but autumn would be fine if you wore a sweater; which reminds me of the one I wore to the Fourth of July fireworks at Winged Foot when I was seven because it was white with these tiny mother of pearl buttons and always made me wonder how they got those pearls out of those oysters....or are they clams; and oh how I loved going clam digging in summer in Shinnecock Bay out on Long Island in Quogue; but summer, of course, is always favorable unless it happens to be a rainy day in which case you'd need to.....oh!.....Look at that bird!

FIT TO LIVE

Forget what I said a couple of entries ago about my thumb being on the mend.  I was misled by the visual.  However, after a visit to the doctor yesterday, two courses of antibiotics and a Tetanus shot, I'm good.

Damn dog.

Some lessons take longer to learn and some realities are harder to fully recognize, I suppose.  I am only surprised because I am old enough to be more savvy and to have evolved well beyond this point.

 I should know better than to have labored under the constraints living with an unpredictable dog demand, entertained disingenuous people calling it friendship and believe now that by enduring exceedingly long hours punishing my body on that damned elliptical I am going to somehow preserve or restore my youth when in reality, it is going to get me in the end.  I will never again be twenty-eight or thirty, but my knees and joints will eventually wear out, if I don't exercise some restraint instead of reckless abandon.

A 'happy medium' is in order.

Yesterday I did make some strides in that department by taking myself to the doctor for my thumb, thereby recognizing I, indeed, had a problem; and by getting up early to meet my friend, Shelley, at the park for a walk.  Not only did my body appreciate the change of pace from that machine of torture upstairs, but I realized a whole different set of muscles were being engaged when walking briskly and that I was taking some slack off my knees and thighs as well as amping up those muscles in my derriere.   Who, at any age, couldn't use a tighter ass?

But the question should really be, "Why do I care?"

Being healthy is all well and good, but the rest seems only relevant and achievable when you neither care about it as much or need it at all.  Think about it.  How many hours did you spend on treadmills or ellipticals  or engaged in other toning, ab-chasing exercises when you were in your prime?  How about, NONE!

I know I didn't.

And the real irony is that at the ages and stages of life when we are naturally fit, resilient, outwardly fresh, toned and strong and can most readily and easily handle these grueling tortures in our quest for enduring physical attractiveness,  we don't need to!

 We only need to once we are at the point when the external elements of feature and form are becoming lax; where torn ligaments, sprained muscles, and damaged joints are most likely to occur without a whole lot of provocation, and when the possibility of actually achieving the restoration and rejuvenation of our former glory is.....well, impossible!

But it makes us temporarily feel better about being older when we can still run faster, jump higher and leap tall buildings in a single bound in comparison to our aging competition; not to forget the inevitable comparisons externally.  It seems only the brave and the inspired who willingly embrace gray when bottled blonde or brunette are so readily accessible;  to embrace baldness or drooping eyelids when hair transplants and brow lifts are possible or to wear those fine lines and wrinkles when botox and other procedures are available?

The sad element to our collective compulsion to hold onto our youth, aside from the obvious, freakish appearances of those who can no longer recognize the difference between a naturally youthful face from that of an inflated, pulled-back look as though your face has been frozen at the point of descent on a really, really steep roller coaster, is that by doing so, we become more imprisoned by the limitations of this world than ever before.

There is something incredibly and profoundly liberating when you reach mid-life and make the choice to fully BE and to accept who you are and at what stage you are without reserve and with excitement.  At no other point in life do we really have it all quite as generously as we do in our middle years.

When we are very young, we are busy growing up.  When we are moderately young, we are busy raising families or careers.  When we are elderly, we are busy processing and reflecting and preparing to bring things to a close.

But right now, smack dab in the middle, we are privileged to indulge both ends of the spectrum.  Generally, our kids, if we have any, are at ages of self-sufficiency to a large degree, we still have a lot of energy and stamina, our minds are sharp and our experience, long.  These are all good things, and if recognized and heeded, can lead to a wisdom and a freedom so profound we'll never want to look back.

If you put any faith at all into the idea that there is a deliberate design in and a much larger purpose for the process of aging, you have to conclude that the only logical explanation would be to attempt to inform us of the power inherent in letting go of the ways of this earth and to organically but forcefully instruct us to begin putting the energies and accumulated wisdom we've gathered from our earthly tenure into the ways of the spirit and all the transcendency that exists from the point of heart and beyond.

The shift of emphasis would go from our forms to forgiveness, our abs to absolution, our Body Mass Index to Being More Illuminated; and the muscle we would exercise the most would be our heart.  At that point I think we'd be of much more value and service to our younger counterparts and the entire planet as compassionate mentors for them rather than competitive agents against them.  We are designed to lose at the latter anyway.


Obviously, I'm not advocating sloth.  I think it is important to remain active and conscious of how we walk through the world making sure to do so with grace and compassion as well as in the best possible health.  However, whatever beauty exists within the qualities of grace and compassion has far and away a more enduring power to beguile and transform than any toned bicep or lifted jowl.

That being said, I don't plan on foregoing my ongoing exercise routine.  As I have alluded to before,  my time on that damned elliptical is as much a time to plumb the depths of my soul and my imagination as it is to push to the limits my ripened bones; and my personal issue has to do with staying focused enough on what I am doing so as not to remain in a state of heightened movement too long and to the point of injury.  I daydream to a nearly unfathomable degree.

But I've tried not to let the declivitous effects of time on my face and form undermine my confidence and overwhelm my thoughts.  Some days it is definitely harder than on others.  And there is always this lame and underlying concern that those who knew me before the ravages of time had made their mark, will be disappointed in the mature version and will not give me the chance to restore my faded image with the internal and heart-funded version I've been working so diligently these fifty-four years to cultivate and feature. That they will just say, "God!  What happened to her?  She didn't hold up very well!" and stop there.

I guess it is my hyper-awareness of what is important and impressive to most people that causes me to react to the restrictive conditioning, which puts more emphasis on the least important aspect of ourselves; how we appear.   I don't want to care, but I do.  I care about how I am perceived, and I make internal calls based on the initial appearance of others.

Happily, I've gotten to the point where I quickly shut those perceptions down and immediately open up other channels when meeting someone for the first time or assessing someone I've known.  But it took a long time to get there.

Sometimes I wish we were all just floating bubbles or formless wisps taking each other in by essence alone.  It would eliminate so many of our misguided impressions and unfounded prejudices and expedite our journey towards enlightenment and our return to embracing love alone.

And the best thing would be that I could finally get rid of that damned elliptical.

LETTING GO OF THE WHEEL

What is it about the principle of letting go that is so difficult for most of us to engage?  You would think that laying back and riding out the waves of life in compliant, complacent abandon would be just about as easy an approach as anyone could take.  It would be the existential equivalent of a salted, tanned and healthy surfer dude only with less skin damage and more natural introspection.

Today I am very unfocused and adrift without an agenda; but the urge to write is pressing leading me to understand that should I choose to yield to the latter activity, I had better have full confidence in my ability to successfully operate under the conditions of the former.

I don't always, of course, which again gets back to that whole principle of letting go.

Before I ever began this creative writing experiment in the blogosphere (still to this present moment having NO idea of either what a blog actually is, where it goes or who gives a damn), I held as one of the main tenants and esoteric substructures within my eclectic belief system, the idea that beneath our obvious dialogue with ego and id lies the much more powerful and profound connection with The Divine; and that if given half a chance it would lead us all back to our angelic roots and celestial family of origin as well as to the concise and perfect fulfillment of our ultimate purpose for being.

I have been fortunate enough to witness many times in my life verifiable evidence of this radical truth, and I am sure almost anyone else who has worked to become a vigilant observer of self can also attest to similar revelations.

However, it has been an unexpected but pleasantly obvious fact that this same principle of gently subduing the ego and yielding to The Divine has practical and profound implications even in something as ostensibly meaningless, random and patently narcissistic as writing a blog.

At it's earliest inception, this particular blog was supposed to have had one aim:  To attract readers who would eventually navigate their way to the Website that I was in the process of building with Johnny Asia, my webgod.  It was to be a minor adjunct to a major enterprise, that being my artwork.  And so in those first couple of entries I struggled to conceive and subsequently develop a theme for each.

I mean, I really sat down and thought about available subject matter and whether I knew enough to craft a sort of shallow and somewhat entertaining thesis about whatever final topic was selected.  The whole thing terrified me especially when I was forced to come eye-level with the reality that I don't really know a lot about too much that is either educationally enlightening, esoterically uplifting or philosophically provocative.

But even in the face of that apprehension I knew one thing without question:  I wanted to keep on writing.  I HAD to keep on writing.

That is when I realized that the only way this passion would find expression would be if I just LET GO.
I'm not talking about the kind of letting go I have referred to before where you are letting go of a response to something taxing or otherwise unpleasant.  I'm talking about the whole enchilada version of letting go.  The version that plants you firmly in the hands of God, the universe, the Holy Spirit,  angelic choirs, spirit guides, creative forces or all of the above without reservation, pretension or any overriding agenda or intent.


Wanna talk about scary?

Yet I was willing to give it a shot because, as I stated, I am simply not smart enough to contain my thoughts to only those few brilliant themes, principles and philosophies I've read about in books, and my blogging enterprise would hasten to a short and pathetic end long before I'd succeeded in my initial goal for recognition and to lead an eventual clientele to my website.

If nothing else, operating under the liberal reigns of unlimited restraint has bought me some more time.

Some might suggest that is ALL it has bought me.

But at the very least I've been able to watch the magic of serendipity and improvisation collide in nearly every post as it spontaneously erupts from my soul.  From the first sentence to closing I have little idea where I am going or why, yet by the time I finish, there before me is a coherent, cohesive and (usually) beautifully laid-out essay that almost looks as though it sprang from a detailed outline crafted the night before.  Given my limited abilities, I find this nothing short of a literary miracle and a profound grace.
My gratitude is immense.

What is more, in all but a few entries I have been able to illustrate each post with just the right drawing or painting or, as in the case of my son's story, the perfect photograph to enliven the text with visuals and color.   Many of these drawings were done years earlier and without the remotest idea that they would one day be utilized in this way, and I don't know until the post is complete what visual example I even have available to use.  But I always find one.

Of course, this can't continue indefinitely because I don't have an unlimited supply of artwork to accommodate what I hope will be a long compositional affair.  But for now it has been an encouraging and unexpected convergence of word and image so perfectly appropriate that it could have come only from a source much greater than the one between my ears.

I may never know why I am so drawn to language and communication and the development of each as they can be shared in this vast, vague and abstract venue of cyberspace, but that is alright.  If I'm going to let go, I am going to LET GO.  The whole object of faith is to be committed to the process without any assurances as to the purpose or the plan.  We all know we have one.  Usually multiples of them.

But there is something kind of exciting about navigating the linguistic hairpin turns and curves at break-neck speeds, half blinded by the glare from the rising sun of consciousness above the dashboard of mundane consideration.  You know that at some point if you are true enough to the moment and allow the acceleration of thought to drive you faster into and around the next bend, you just might find yourself  involved in a spectacular crash with no survivors.

In the past such collisions have been given names:  Don Quioxte, Catcher In The Rye, Grapes Of Wrath, A Farewell To Arms, Moby Dick, One Hundred Years Of Solitude and War And Peace, to name a scant portion.

Obviously, I don't presume to have anywhere near the sacred and creative genius of those mentioned and I can only aspire to such a colossal death in my dreams.   Yet no matter how illogical my compulsion and in spite of the brutal odds against it, I simply cannot ignore my crazed drive to keep on the road, lay off the brakes and just LET GO.


And if I run out of gas, I'll walk.

NAKED IRONY

It is early in the morning but I am awake and exercising my lean digits across my well-worn keyboard.  I've already punished the rest of my body on that damned elliptical and decided it only fair to exercise them as well.

 It is necessary to make mention of the lean composition of my fingers because they are the only part of my entire body that totally conform to that descriptor, and I need to remind myself of that visually redemptive fact sometimes.  Particularly now that the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated has somehow found its way back as a fixture among the other, less threatening periodicals in the master bathroom.

Until such time as it becomes passe and I notice that Consumer Reports or Men's Health have worked their way once again to the fore of the magazine bin on the floor, I am doomed to absorb the stark contrast between the reflection of myself in the mirror and whatever nubile goddess (who, as every year, has been ordered to hide her breasts and hold her swim top) graces the cover and is reflected behind me like some petty, vindictive, under-clad angel of Christmas' Past.

Not that I was ever a contender for the job even in my youth, but at least age gave me a fighting chance and the laws of gravity were squarely in my corner mopping my brow and giving me that rousing shove to continually get back in the ring.  It is obvious that at some point the bell rang indicating the match had ended, but I was probably too busy packing lunches for my kids or attending little league games or scrubbing toilets to notice.

However, based on the battered visual I am left with, it would appear it was a knockout and not one in my favor.   Now I'm left with a body that has taken one too many c-sections to the groin, sleepless nights that have registered as dark half-moons under my eyes and days, months and years of female stoicism  carved like a fine-lined, topographic map of domestic and personal upheavals and restorations on my baleful scowl.

And as I awkwardly maneuver my naked body to the shower while my glossy-papered nemesis gloats in all her tabloid glory from her corner of the lavatory ring, I am thinking that even Rocky Balboa must look better today than I do.

I know that when a door closes, a window supposedly opens, and in theory that is true.  I've discovered such windows flying open right and left as I've watched the corresponding slamming of both the doors of options as well as those of action; which leaves me wondering whether God has perhaps some obsession with irony.

Why would it be that just as our eyes have adjusted to the consequential glare of the benefits in living by the Golden Rule and the brilliant logic behind the principles of letting things be and rising above pettiness and the advantage of focusing your energies on giving more than we receive, would He also arrange the commensurate deterioration of our bodies?

Just when we reach the age and stage where we can finally say we've got so much to offer, we are also at the age and stage where nobody wants it.

The social and cultural preoccupation is decidedly fixed upon the character and form of the Sports Illustrated swim suit models and whether or not they can actually put those swimsuit tops on themselves or is the complexity such that they require assistance.  What subtle treasures of coherent thought even these beauties may harbor between their perfect ears is of little or no consequence and less so from anyone grazing the edges of gravity's tenacious grasp.

I'm not entirely sure why this is the imaginary road my brain ambled down today.  I don't really care about the swimsuit models and am fairly well tenured in the art of acceptance; at least enough not to let myself become seriously disturbed by anything radically defined by the laws of physics and biology.

I suppose that, in part, it is because I don't want to explore anymore dark corners for a while and felt that a little bit of levity was necessary.  After the last few entries this blog was beginning to resemble a really bad country western song where its always raining, you're misunderstood and dang lonely, the kid's in jail, the dog dies and your man's done run off with the check-out gal from The Piggly Wiggly. (I made that last one up.  We don't have a Piggly Wiggly here.)

Not only do I want to avoid sounding as though I can only see through a glass darkly, but I would rather be roped to a honey tree in a forest of Black Bears than believe my words bring to mind the refrain of some song belted out at The Grand Ole Opry.  My sincerest apologies to any and all country music aficionados out there.  For whatever reason, it just ain't my thing.

Actually, I'm still looking for my thing, and given the image reflected in my mirror this morning, I'd better get my ass in gear.  Time is definitely flagging me with a perceivable deadline, which is a little annoying considering the fact that I feel I've only just gotten started.

I wonder how biblical greats like Noah and Methuselah so greatly exceeded what has now become our rather short expiration date?  One thing is certain:  they managed to live hundreds of years a piece without the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

In light of our present state of cultural and spiritual deprivation globally, we might want to consider the benefits from doing without it as well.   Loin cloths might even become a fashion mainstay once more....

God forbid!

ARLO'S PARTING GIFT

Just a shade over an hour ago I had the mournful duty of taking my thirteen-year old dog, Arlo, to the vet for the last time.  I knew on Tuesday night that he was in trouble.  When an old dog whimpers at every odd move,  it is a clear indication that those carefree days of unlimited mobility and rowdy displays of affection are gone.

He had been hosting this declivitous passage for a few months having lost his hearing in early fall with his eyesight in close competition, and more recently, drinking copious amounts of water (which is usually a sign of kidney failure in old dogs); but until the other night, he was not in any perceivable pain, had a healthy appetite and a frequently wagging tail.

So I let him be and merely observed.

However, I knew this day was not long off and began preparing myself for its arrival in small ways; one being to continually absorb the reality that already he was no longer the dog I had weaned on a bottle from two weeks old and the one who, ever since, has rarely left my side.

He could no longer hear me so that the comforting cooing from me to him and eager responsiveness from him to me was no longer possible.  Often he would stare off into nothingness looking tense and concerned, which made me think how lonely and afraid he must be without the use of all his natural instincts and senses.  But he how slept a lot.

So I let him be and merely observed.

It is a little surprising to me that I am right now able to sit here calmly without tears and put this into words, and I know my family was worried about how I was going to handle this day when it came.  This dog had been my dog and mine alone for all these years and was the last of our dogs to have made the journey with us from Connecticut through our years in Arizona and finally to our present home in Missouri.  He was the last readily visible and living link to those other parts of my life and a part of every event from the mundane to the miraculous for well over a decade.  He was my loyal buddy and my constant companion and pal.  He was MY dog.

He was also the most difficult, high-strung, neurotic, hyper-attached and temperamental dogs I have ever owned in my entire life; destroying countless pieces of furniture and assorted objects when he was young; utterly and completely losing all composure during thunderstorms and otherwise windy, unpleasant weather days; and utilizing the unfortunate defense strategy of nipping or biting when feeling threatened or fearful.  Unfortunately, the latter was a trait he never outgrew (his recent deafness ended the thunderstorm hysteria) and which was lately made more of a conspicuous problem commensurate to his increasing level of discomfort.  It could only get worse.

But I let him be and merely observed.

The joke had always been that Arlo had bitten everyone in the family except for me.  The joke can now be abandoned.

This morning after he had been initially sedated, with his warm, limp body draped across my lap as we both sat on the floor of the examination room, the vet and her assistant came in to shave his back leg and apply the final dose that would ultimately lift him out of all his pain.

In those wrenching and protracted minutes before their return to the room,  I remained motionless; stroking the side of his old mutt face, studded with the white hairs of a useful passage.  Right then within my body I held twelve years of gratitude, elation, forgiveness and sorrow bound up like padded wounds in the soft void of my next breath; so that my breathing, now thin and shallow, was in perfect measure a  mirror of his own.  Yet in every other way I was doing as I had always done at every point of rest or moment of quiet for longer than time could understand; silently loving my good dog.

And as the assistant gently reached for the old boy's hind leg to prepare it this final step, without warning and in a state of typical, neurotic, Arlo panic with the defensive drive of a cornered beast, he frantically lifted his head and clamped down full and hard on the thumb of my hand that had yet to cease its furtive caresses.

He bequeathed me a stunning blood-blister bruise on the nail side, a neat little puncture wound on the other and a royal throbbing pain that now extends from my thumb wrapping around my wrist, down my arm and continues to this very moment.

Of course, he had no idea that it was me he was attempting to censure or even precisely what he was doing, but in some small way the visceral and excruciating nature of his parting gift has made it a little bit easier for me to sit here now and remember the tension and challenges loving this dog presented; which, in turn, has given me a slight respite from the bellowed suffering of pure, unadulterated grief.  As much as I adored him and as devoted as he was to me and to my every movement; it has also been thirteen years of apprehension wondering, "Who will Arlo attempt to bite next?"; particularly when someone came to the front door.

I suppose my worn little mongrel did me a favor by yielding to his neurosis one last time and leaving me with an aching, searing reminder that sometimes death brings with it a mixed blessing:  I have released him from a lifetime of anxiety and a dotage of pain and infirmities; he has released me from perpetual worry and the underlying stress attendant to the ownership of such an unpredictable animal.  The pain of injury to my wounded thumb has blessedly mitigated some of the pain of loss in my temporarily unconsolable heart.

All these thoughts gelled like a healing emotional balm in my mind as I continued to cradle Arlo's head in my lap and wait for the second sedative injection to take effect.  (It was decided after the biting that this was the next best course of action.  Anything was better than a muzzle.)

And by the time the final injection was given, what had first been for me a nearly uncontrollable outpouring of raw grief and bottomless despair had now become a bloom of great calm and gratitude for his long years of devotion, and a willingness to accept the loss of him while at the same time embrace the unrestrained freedom each of us would now own.  It was his parting gift to me at the perfect time.

So I let him be and merely observed.

CRUCIBLE ADDENDUM

The sun was shining most of the day today and it brought a heartening current of promise to probably just about everyone sharing it.  I know it did to me.  Who doesn't welcome the spring equinox and that cat-stretch of daylight hours yawning deep into evening giving us all more time to see and to remember why we are alive?

I've backed off the blog for a day or two in deference to the fragile and deeply personal content of my last entry.  Between the tears and caustic burn of recounting even those cursory details about my son's journey and the woefully intensive effort to respectfully, honestly and gracefully say all that needed to be said with as much perfection as I could muster; the whole process exceeded ten hours, concluding just before midnight.

For the following two days, Easter Sunday and yesterday, I was played and felt almost hollowed out.  It wasn't the dark kind of hollow where apathy reigns.  It was the blissfully exhausting hollow after a mighty purging, and I just wanted to remain quiet for as long as possible.

I also wanted to let that post stand all on it's own for a time; undisturbed and available.

But yesterday a wonderful thing happened.

About four weeks ago I decided to install a stat counter on the blog.  My logic being that it would help motivate me to keep writing if I could actually see and prove that my mother did, indeed, show up every few days to read it.

Of course, I am being somewhat facetious because I know that there are others besides my mom who, for reasons either of curiosity, accident or boredom, do occasionally sweep in and get that much-needed eye-lulling to put them right off to sleep sans any bothersome prescriptions.  As I have said before, I will take anyone I can get.

So, what happened yesterday was nothing short of remarkable as well as ineffably touching.

I began this literary compositional jouncing eight weeks ago and have been faithfully posting an entry about every two days.  I don't know how many or how few readers showed up at the start, but I do know that since I've installed the counter, I average about eighteen to twenty readers a day on slow days, and up to forty or more on holidays and Sundays.  (I've discovered that boredom is universal on Sunday nights.)

I posted the entry about Griffin in the wee hours of Sunday morning.  By ten o'clock Easter morning already twenty-six people had read it.  By the end of the day, forty-seven.

On Sunday evening I received a facebook message from a very sweet and sincere friend of Griffin's from high school telling me that she had re-posted my blog about him on her facebook page and asked if that was alright.  She now teaches in the same town where she and Griffin attended high school and said that there is an enormous heroin problem among the teens there.  She went on to say that by giving the drug abuse problem a 'face' in a person many in this small town knew, it might carry more of an impact.   She also told me that within minutes of re-posting the entry she began receiving emails and phone calls from his old friends who wanted his address so they could write him and send words of encouragement.

Yesterday one-hundred and eight people from all across the country had read that blog.  Of course, I assume that most of these are friends of Griffin's and I am deeply moved by their interest in and support for him after all these years.

As fate would have it, he also phoned me yesterday evening and I was able to share with him the reaction of his friends to his story.  I could hear the soft and lightly broken strain in his voice as he expressed both his shock and his gratitude, and he said, "  Oh brother.  Well, even though it is humiliating;  if my mistakes can help somebody else, I think it is worth telling.  I plan on telling it a lot when I am able to get on with my life."

In spite of everything, Griffin continues to have hope and embrace his gifted and healing sense of humor.  I received a letter from him the other day and will share a part of it, which illustrates this:


I am writing this because, due to the stunningly high collective I.Q. of the general populous of the **** County Jail inmates, a few Einsteins got our tier locked-down for the rest of the day.  Hence, no phone calls, T.V., Pinochle or basketball; for they thought it a wonderful idea to steal some delicious lemon cookies off of a tray at dinner.  
Anyway, this has now become my life; feeling like the alpha male in some paleolithic-era society.  Next up for my band of cro-mags is 'fire', then perhaps, 'the wheel!'
Yes, it is like this.  I know that I have no one to blame but myself, so I try hard to find the humor in whatever I can. 
Maybe I will compose a novel of sorts about my trials and tribulations at the various different county jails I have tenured.
It would be a great tragi-comedy......"


The rest of the letter was much more humorous, however, it revolved around a description of an exchange between himself, a friend and one of the less than brilliant guards whose name figures prominently in and is a necessary component of the story; so it will have to remain untold here.

But I am sharing a bit of him in his own voice for those of you who 'looked in' on him yesterday and would remember and enjoy a taste of the Griffin who is winning his way back.  Thank you for caring and please don't give up on him.  Don't judge or give up on anyone in his position.  There is always a person behind the addict and usually there are also a whole lot of small hurts that stew together to yield the depraved feast of addiction.  And while an addict is not a victim in the sense that they consciously choose to take the first step down that road, the fact is that it is a road open to the good and bad alike.

I think it is worth remembering that there are more good people who do bad things as a result of their addictions than bad people who become addicts because it feels good.

Onward and upward................

THE CRUCIBLE OF TRUTH

Whether or not you are religious, Easter time holds the same promises for everyone:  It holds the promise of renewal, the promise of hope and the promise of new beginnings; and within very the season it inhabits, it holds the evidence of survival and the promise of new life.  No matter how long or harsh the winter has been, there comes the lush transfiguration in the organic countenance of the planet to make us all feel strengthened and lighter.

Now while courage and renewal are not necessarily synonymous, there is a level at which they are required to conjoin if true resurrection is to be the result.  It is a level where honesty prevails and where there are no dark corners; a level that reveals the most vulnerable truths about ourselves and our lives and which is also as utterly and devastatingly terrifying as it necessarily and profoundly liberating.

It is the level that nails you to the cross.

Up until now in this spiritual, silly, narcissistic, humorous, indulgent, querying and candid blog-journey; I've skillfully (subjective opinion) danced around an area of my life that in many ways is my life but for reasons that will become obvious to any reader shortly, has remained deep in the soft, holding cell at the frayed and care-worn center of my heart.

If you go there, you will find every cell, fiber and microcosmic tissue throbbing harmoniously with the unifying thrust of unconditional love protecting the essence, image of and ultimate hope for my son, Griffin.

My son is a drug addict and has been so in one degree or form since he was about eighteen years old.   In late August he celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday under the same conditions in which he has celebrated all but one of his birthdays since 2007:  as an inmate in a state correctional facility.

Given that he is a man of extremely high intelligence, he managed to fund his addiction by a cleverly-executed scheme of prescription fraud.  This is what he was sentenced for.  Again.

The first time around he spent eighteen months at different correctional facilities in two states and several counties satisfying the various infractions in each; but at no time in any facility did he receive any sort of rehabilitative counseling or aid.  None.  And they wonder why recidivism is so high.

Two years ago in the pre-dawn hours of Halloween he was released from the county jail, yet just over one year later he was on his way back in.  For the first few months he was doing well, but over time as those same buttons were being pushed and still without  any recourse to viable coping methods, he slowly retreated to the only form of consolation and escape that he has known:  prescription pain medication.

Griffin is a charming guy; a massive charming guy standing nearly six foot six and weighing in around three-hundred and sixty pounds.  He was a huge baby and a huge child, although a very congenial and loquacious one and I would often have to warn him not to speak to every single person, down every single isle, about every single thing, every single time we entered the Supermarket.

Because of his size people assumed he was always much older than he was, which put a certain amount of pressure on him from a young age.  When people assume you are five and yet you behave as though you are two and a half, they tend to draw some unflattering conclusions about your emotional maturity and mental capacity and unfortunately, many had no reservations about voicing their asinine opinions and observations right in front of us.

People can bring astoundingly damaging energy to the function of opinion.


If Griffin has one weakness of character, it would be his incessant desire to please and an even greater need to be loved and admired.  He is a Leo, after all.  But for as far back as he was aware, he was not able to live up to those desires, and the harder he tried, the more abjectly he would fail.

When he was very young, his peers were afraid of him due to his massive size and exuberance and had a tendency to run from him.  Bringing him to the nursery school playground would sometimes evoke  scenes similar to the ones where Godzilla enters Tokyo and sends diminutive Japanese denizens scrambling frantically in every direction.

 As he grew and the other kids realized that he in no way regarded his physical presence as an advantage and a tool of intimidation, they took the opposite position and he became the goat.  He was a sweet, affable, sometimes gullible and gentle giant; just what the predatory types like to consume whole.  Nothing makes a small bully feel more empowered than by taking a larger kid down.

He played baseball and basketball in elementary and middle schools and excelled at both; especially baseball where he still holds the record for home runs hit clean out of the local ballpark and into the woods.  But because his size so greatly exceeded the height and weight requirements of the Pop Warner Football league, he was not able to participate in the one sport most suited to his monolithic frame.

That all changed when he reached high school.

By this time, too, he was so eager to find peer acceptance that I do believe he would have taken up wing-walking or bull running if it would have earned him their regard.  But he didn't have to do anything that risky.  All he had to do was to be big, put on a helmet and knock people down on the football field; simple as that, and he did so readily.

Suddenly, he was a hero and with his brilliant mind, gregarious nature and quick humor he quickly became one of the most popular kids in school.  However, within his own mind absolution did not fully come and the reality of his earlier years kept him a prisoner of disbelief and insecurity and feeling as though he still needed to be continually vigilant in his quest to please or he might just as suddenly find himself once more the target instead of the bullet.

But for the time being he was the largest bullet any high school coach in the history of the school had ever seen.  Not only that be he was fast, and scouts from colleges all across the country were coming to take a gander.  He was a mammoth,  treasured, testosterone-fueled commodity.

So, when he hurt his shoulder during a fall practice in his senior year and the team doctor (who had formerly been so for a professional football team in another state) began prescribing him injections of steroids and pain medications, the ramifications escaped our notice.

Sadly, they didn't escape Griffin's.  What these jock-cocktails provided most was a steady emotional lift with an undercurrent of invincibility and euphoria.  He was happy and a part of the team, only now if anyone didn't like him, he didn't care - not consciously anyway.  What he gradually discovered was that as long as he was under the influence of these substances, he felt good about himself.

Then, when news of Griffin's bad shoulder was leaked to the colleges courting him, one by one they dropped their offers and as the offers stopped, so did the attention.  By graduation day the glory days had ended, but not his dependency on the glory drugs.

In the years after high school I watched my son disappear.  He had a few unsuccessful attempts at college, culinary school and a variety of fairly respectable jobs but all were undermined by his increasingly insatiable dependency on chasing happy. 


 It wasn't happiness he was after.  Happiness is a state of being; a subjective emotion that wraps around our outlook like a sacred ribbon around our best day.  Griffin was chasing some sort of safe boxed thing:  a stagnant puddle of compartmentalized indifference;  a chunk of calm ringed by bursts of artificial joy;  a hollow parody of self-confidence.  He had never fully known happiness and the congenial rush from trustworthy peer support, so he didn't really know what to look for.

Of course, over time all the concomitant ills of addiction came into play:  the nearly pathological lying, stealing,  manipulating, chronic irresponsibility and connivance.  He was no longer recognizable by habit or attitude and after a couple of suicide attempts, neither were we.

Our lives had been voluntarily hijacked because we could not turn away and all that we had emotionally, financially and prayerfully went into trying to help him find his way to a point of peace and a place where he could start over.

Ultimately, only Griffin can heal Griffin, and for a long time that did not seem as though it was ever going to happen.  No matter how sincere his wish nor valiant his efforts, without long-term professional rehabilitative help, the healing would not take place and all the half-starts and nearly-theres were simply not good enough.

I've discovered that if a pattern continues long enough and you are able to fool yourself into believing that you are in control while in reality you are playing both sides of the game, eventually you will become buried by not only your addiction but by your deception, as well.  Soon every single out-breath you release becomes toxic until nothing whole and good can stand in your presence and those who try to do so either become victims of your declivitous game at self-destruction or they become casualties of your indifference to anything except satisfying your pharmaceutical craving.

But as anyone knows who has by fate or circumstance been beguiled into courting hopelessness, there really is no such thing and the saying, "Where there is life, there is hope." could not be more true or more worth believing.

Griffin has been incarcerated this time around since early December; and while the deep sorrow attendant to his situation as a recidivist addict and offender and the purgatorial consequences of his actions never leaves me for one minute, I can honestly say that at this moment I am not only filled with hope for his recovery, but I am filled with pride as well.  I am also filled with great happiness because he has been accepted for admission to the two-year inmate drug rehab program and will finally get the intensive help he needs and deserves.

He is ready for it now.  For the first time he is facing and assuming full responsibility for everything he has done to bring about his present fate.  This may not sound like much, but denial is a huge part of addiction, and I have heard him blame everyone but the Pope for his problems in the past.

I still grapple with ragged grief over the situation in general and missing him in particular.  On my visits I am not able to hug or hold him or come any closer then the bullet proof glass partition will accommodate and our conversations are over a phone receiver.  We have come to greet and leave one another with the ritual of pressing our hands together and matching them up against the glass that separates us.  Even though he is a man, his giant hand remains that of my child and as it engulfs and extends well beyond the silhouette of my own, I am reminded only of the corresponding enormity of his great and loving heart.

 But his heart suffers physically now, too.   As a result of his years of excessive abuse, he has developed cardiac arrhythmia and has already had two mild heart attacks; one before he was taken into custody and another a couple of weeks ago.  The concern for his health has driven me to my knees more than once and keeps me firmly grounded in prayer and awake deep into the night with predictable regularity as I barter with God and the angels and any celestial intercessor who will listen for the restored health of his body and his soul.

 And, of course,  there is still the pathetic ignorance and prejudice from people who routinely expose their profound insensitivity by malicious gossip and impudent judgments all based on their smug belief that because it has never happened to them or to one of their kids, they are immune from and above all moral prosecution for their craven tongues and are righteously defended in the eyes of the world and of their God.

Sadly, they pass this loathsome trait down to their children as my daughter experienced the other day at her job as a hostess in a local restaurant when the son of a former friend of mine entered with a buddy.  He recognized my daughter and they chatted offhandedly as she seated them.  But as he was leaving, he stopped at her station by the door and inquired about Griffin.

Being the honest soul she is, she told him the truth about her brother's incarceration adding also that we were very encouraged because this time he was finally going to get help for his problem.  He responded in full voice and without the slightest compunction that he stood also in front of her supervisor and co-workers and said, "Your brother is a real scum bag.  No offense."

No offense?

She was quite naturally stunned and felt a retort was out of the question because she was at work, so she said nothing but goodbye.  Then she fell into tears.  Her boss was more than understanding as were those co-workers within earshot, and they all rallied round her until she regained her composure promising covert retribution on her behalf should he ever show his face there again.

Composure, as a form of emotional rebounding, is something that I have come to master over the years with frightening acuity and could probably teach a college-level course on both the subject and the techniques.  It is only unfortunate in that it has become a necessity rather than a choice.

For a long time I could not look at a ball field or a large boy or a young family in church or any such reminders without it bringing my son into my thoughts with such searing regret, guilt, longing and shame that I could barely breath let alone hold back my emotions.

But with the years came strength and also a resolve not to let the darkest aspects of this lesson infect the rest of my hope with that kind of fruitless anguish.  Slowly, I developed a strategy of disengaging when these black holes were opened and to defer my reaction until a more private circumstance afforded me the opportunity to express my anguished heart.

What other productive options do I have?

I am committed to love and lift my magnificent son out of this wretched pit of abuse, self-sabotage and transgression just as he did for me.

Twenty-seven years ago I was spiraling out of control on a chemical vortex of drugs and super-charged apathy after leaving a grossly ill-conceived but blessedly brief, nine-month-long marriage of violence and abuse.

At twenty-five years old and in the aftermath of yet another one of my many compendious failures, I had no hope and saw few options and had returned to the derelict risk-taking of my teens with brash abandon and little regard as to whether I lived or died.

That is a pathetic tale all it's own, but the fact is that in the throes of this crash-test of my sanity, I became pregnant and from the moment this reality became known to me, so did another life-saving conception.  The birth of PURPOSE.  Suddenly, I had a goal and a purpose and a reason to rededicate myself to seeking the transcendent in life, and I named him Griffin.

Today my son and I have a victory to chase and there is nothing in heaven or in hell that is going to prevent me from finishing this formidable journey with him.

And as for those with distain who sneer and try to hold my son down in the muck of their pond-scum judgment, shame on you!

Oftentimes the most magnificent recreations are made of shame and ash.  This Griffin will soar again.