Relaxing into the fall

[From August 20] I have a friend who just fell a ways down a mountain. She didn't get hurt. I relaxed into the fall, she said.

I'm having to relax into the fall, too. I noticed the aspen leaves changing this morning, as I pulled a shawl around my shoulders. I experienced the sensation of change with my eyes and the chill-induced goose eggs on my arms and I didn't like it because I've had a wonderful summer and don't like things to change. Next my mind had a thought: This is not good. This is cold. I don't like this. Next: action. I dove into busy work. Against the rapidly changing backdrop of an autumn sky, my ego plays the role of a tearful mother. She sees things changing around her and decides to bronze the be-jesus out of every moment -- every love, every bit of joy. That way, maybe we can hang onto things.

So today I broke the pattern. I relaxed into the fall.

Swimming, schnauzer-style.

I laughed out loud last week while watching my five-year-old niece swim. When she jumps from the diving board and goes under, I hold my breath with her. I tense up. But she always wrestles her way to the surface, and then to the safety of the side. It's like watching a Schnauzer get across a pool. Sometimes I'll see only hair plastered across a face poking up through the water, and sometimes only a tiny nose above the water line. Fatigue occasionally pulls her under, but fierce will always hauls her back up again. I see only struggle. I think she sees success.

I bet that's what I look like to others when I'm going through something tough. We don't have to do it perfect, or even pretty. However we get there is the right way to look. Even if we look like a Schnauzer.

Raspberries and popcorn by the pool.

A couple of days ago I was in an RV campground and park -- no tents, but lots of RVs with signs posted by the doors that said things like, We don't skinny dip...We chunky dunk. I noticed a smell. I was sure it was residue from firecrackers. No, said my Dad. That's sulfur. I smell gas, my mom said.

Later, by the pool, the smell got stronger.

I smell raspberries, I heard a thirteen-year-old with flippers and a snorkel say (no mask). I smell popcorn, my nine-year-old niece said.

Mostly I was wondering how no one could agree on this smell, but one of every three residents of the park had managed to buy the same chunky dunk sign.

This calls for careful reflection.

The bear smells the bacon

Today I was running and smelled bacon. I suddenly wondered how I would find where the smell was coming from. I thought about the bears. If a bear were trapped in an urban environment -- houses and apartment complexes everywhere -- how would it find the bacon?

Probably the way I'm finding my purpose in life these days. Snout in air, sniffing. One step toward the smell. Then another. Then a correction. To the right. Avoid that person. Straight ahead. Oops, too far. Okay, yes, this is the way...

Directions

Maybe today you could write a poem. I know, I know. Writing poems and sharing them feels too much like asking for lambchops at a meat counter while my pants are down around my ankles. Cringe.

It's time to forget about the classmate who laughed when we read our poem about the petunia growing in the pavement crack. Take in an experience today like its grape juice concentrate from the can: Drink it in short, careful sips. That's what poets do. Someone said they're the athletes of language. I agree. From nouns and verbs, they create energy that is so much more powerful because they are containing and directing it in a bounded space. Their own playing field.

Your home is your sanctuary. Have you ever considered writing a poem about finding your way home? I'll share mine with you. Pants down around ankles. Argh. After reading it, you should write yours. Promise?

Directions
after Billy Collins, and Connie Wanek

You will know you have found it
when the gray, worn asphault says,
Uncle, and green and gravel stand
triumphant, holding up
my home, a brown bird house
high outside the aviary.

You will not so much observe
its post and lintel construction
as you will feel the logs, a quilt, positioned
over and around you. Snug.

The road is long,
God, I know.

The asphault and concrete may
start to wear, to sand down your purchase
on earth, and water, and fire, and sky -
numbing your forward sight - ‘til
you desire only to pull over, murmuring
nothing. at the end. of this road.

You might even drift, for a time,
across the center line.
Maybe a wheel slips the edge, an axel shudders.
Don’t hope for romance, a moose, perhaps.
Rumble strips work just fine.

Just let yourself be jerked, if you must,
awakened before it’s too late.
Because then, if you follow
the songs of the birds
you will find the trees thickening
and thrumming.

And there I will be.

It is nothing, I know
like what the hungry architect had in mind,
when she bent herself over the drawing,
letting the nape of her still neck be used
by the fluorescent lights, a dance floor for their buzzing.

Don’t bring wine.
We’ll drink the trees.
You and I.
When you arrive.

Getting intimate with God.

Do you ever watch old couples in a restaurant? I do. I think they’re teaching me how to pray.

I've had so many great dates with God -- everything all whistles and bells and chemistry, with God showing me things about life and myself that no one has ever shown me before. That's part of the problem. It's hard to accept the slow dates, the ones without much talk – just lots of silence and stillness, forks scraping plates, knives cutting pork chops. Chewing.

I used to fear those moments. Where has all the intensity gone? All the great talk? I couldn't accept the stillness. So I’d succumb to my thoughts, checking them and responding to them like they were text messages pinging on a mobile phone I hadn't shut off.

Now I'm learning to enjoy the sound of chewing not as an interlude between more important sounds, but as the sound of intimacy itself.

Riding out the itch.

I.
I had a great aunt who carried a Portals of Prayer with her wherever she went. Having arrived, she would find a chair and shove that tiny prayer magazine under her left buttock. Once she forgot it. Someone offered her a Reader's Digest. No, she said. Too thick. Only Portals could give her spine the balance it needed.

The family made jokes behind her back, of course.

But lately I've been doing a lot of talking, and from a chair. Chairs can put the pinch to my short legs, cutting off blood flow at the hamstrings. I found myself shifting and jerking incessantly, until I started keeping a stool under the chair. I use it when I need to raise the floor to meet my legs.

I kind of wish we hadn't made so much fun of the Great Aunt. I'm thinking how nice it would be to carry a stool around with me.

II.
I sat next to a man yesterday in a meeting. He couldn't stop twitching, shifting, reaching for gum from his briefcase and, later, for chapstick and his smart-phone. That's what I used to be like, before I became aware of how strongly my body, mind and spirit argue. One of them is always rushing off, sulking and pulling my mind with her.

People have different names for this thing. Some people call it The Committee – nay, the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee. Anne Lamott calls it Radio Station KFKD – or K-Fucked. Other smart people call it ego, or self-identity, or karmic conditioning, or conditioned self-talk. A friend of mine calls it the thing that lives in her head that would kill her if it didn’t need her for transportation.

It's a thing that used to carry me routinely like a bicycle away from whatever was happening in the moment. Yes, bicycle is the apt simile. It carried me, but I agreed to do the pedaling. It was – and still is -- an itch that begs to be scratched; but when I scratch it, the poison spreads. The itch grows. I'll be in the middle of a meeting about budgets and I'm thinking about whether I should sell my wall-mount kayak rack on E-Bay. What kind of price would it fetch? Would I miss it? I was such a dunce to buy it. And in a nanosecond, I've managed to end up in the mental equivalent of Zambia -- wondering how long the tires on my car will last, and should I sign up for AAA this winter?

It's like carrying Ratatouille in my hat. I’m being jerked and pulled involuntarily by this invisible thing that I’m convinced is helping me out.

III.
Once upon a time I wasn’t even aware of that my body, mind and spirit were never in the same place at the same time. I just knew I was miserable and suffered. I couldn’t get comfortable. My spirit felt like a spine that was one Portals of Prayer short of being in alignment. This was Stage 1.

Then life intervened. I arrived at Stage 2: the recognition that this thing lives in my head. I started becoming aware of its voice -- the various pitches and tones of its calls, the shapes its arguments take. It's like the colleague or student who always plays devil's advocate: It simply resists whatever is. That's the only thing it knows how to do. It tries to convince me that the thing I'm thinking, feeling, or doing is unacceptable. It wants my default position to be resistance. If I wake up to hear birds chirping and feel richly blessed, it will convince me that this feeling is unacceptable. You're being lazy, it will whisper. Look. It's 8:04 a.m. How are you ever going to get that project finished if you lie in bed listening to birds sing all the damn day?

It snorts in disgust. I cower, my back again against the wall. Tell me what to do, I whisper. It smiles. Go yell at your kids, it sometimes says.

On a good day, it compliments me just enough so that I want to keep it in my hat. Like, it might tell me that I am really good at opening soup cans with the can opener. The next day, though, the honeymoon is over. I'll go to open another soup can, expecting to hear the compliment. But this I get this: That thumb still causing you trouble? Too bad. Looks like your career as a triathlete is over. Oh, and you'll never find a mate with that arthritic stub. Before too long it will resemble a woody knob on an old oak tree. Good luck finding a mate with that thing. Best you can hope for is a guy who wears leather vests without a shirt underneath.

Then, in Stage 3, I became aware that this thing is not a friend at all. It’s the meanest, nastiest, sickest family member I've ever had. I consider kicking it to the curb. In the end, though, I reconsider. My conditioning tells me that it is hard on me, sure. But so was my best track coach, the one who pushed me beyond my limits. If I stop struggling, I'll stop aiming for perfection. I'll slip. Sloth and atrophy will follow. Do I want to be the loser shoving a Portals of Prayer under my ass at the family reunion? People would laugh. But I’d be too busy listening to the stupid birds to hear them. Next thing I’d be so interested in my own comfort that I’d start doing odder things -- maybe carrying a foot stool, hairbrush and water pick to work meetings and laying them on the conference table before me.

At that point, I recommit to the relationship. This was Stage 4.

But I couldn’t un-see what I’d seen. And I’d seen a bit of the truth. This is nothing more than resistance, twenty-four hours a day. And the resistance isn't working. It doesn’t make me happier or safer. It doesn’t bring the peace and security that it promises. It doesn’t help me nail down joy; joy will occasionally get up and walk out. There’s nothing me or the thing can do about that. The voices, I realized, just make me suffer. If I’m living in fear – of losing something I have or not getting something I want – then I’m easily controlled. This thing controls me by keeping me in resistance and fear. So what if I start carrying a Portals of Prayer with me. At least I'd be comfortable. To hell with the people suffering because they've got something stuck in their molars and no water pick to flush it out.

This awareness brought me to Stage 5, when I accepted the pervasiveness of my conditioning, the pervasiveness of my resistance. It’s no simple matter of telling this creature to piss off. It is woven too deeply into fabric of my minds. All I can do is roll up my sleeves, identify with compassionate awareness, and say yes, even to the creature when it shows up. After all, that thing kept me entertained all those years and provided the only safety that I knew how to accept. But now it’s time to move on. Find better voices. Move aside so this thing can find a better friend.

Want my advice? Don't even give it the satisfaction of resisting it. That's what it wants.

Wait for it.

Why haven't I been worrying about rising Chlamydia rates in Minnesota or whether the BP "static kill" takes? Because other people have been. I, on the other hand, spent most of June -- and the better part of July -- obsessing about whether these berries were Juneberries or chokecherries.

Most of my people would laugh if they knew. If the berry ripens in June, they'd say, it's a Juneberry. And we'd eat it. If it ripens at the end of July, it's a chokecherry. And we'd leave it. Without a cup of sugar to wash a chokecherry down, the tannins will strip the inside of your mouth and then turn what's left inside out.

I waited because I wanted them to be Juneberries. I wanted to eat them. Also, I'd diagnosed them in May using my rudimentary leaf identification skills. I didn't want to be wrong.

The same kind of thinking held up an article I was trying to write. An editor I know had asked me to write a piece about something topic -- a bike trail. I wanted to do it. That trail has served me well. I focused and thought hard. But the piece wouldn't happen. I couldn't find a message that mattered to me.

Then I remembered the chokecherries.

If, today, you're struggling to see something that is reluctant to show itself -- the answer to the question, a memory, perhaps the next sentence in the story that you're living or writing -- then it's not the right day. You don’t have all the information you need. Stop looking at it. Breathe. Pray. Wait. Turn away from the berry and look back toward life.

Then shut off your caller ID. Don't try to stop life because you're waiting for the right thing to show up. Accept what comes.

That's what I did. I laid the article down. I Breathed. I prayed. When my phone rang, I answered it and said yes to a friend who was asking me to have a firsthand experience with her -- and nowhere near that bike trail. That experience resulted in the piece that wanted written. The editor loved it. Everything ripened when it was time.

Look at the chokecherries and remember that the answer, when it ripens, will be exactly the right one and will arrive exactly on time.

The rhythm of acceptance

Today I'm getting an opportunity to practice acceptance, and not, as I had hoped, with fame and celebrity as my teachers. Today my children will be my teachers. More specifically, the one who just used a DVD as a Chinese throwing star will be my teacher.

While sitting outside I heard the first stirrings of a familiar symphony. The voices, coming from inside, were slow and quiet, like the string section being warming up. Child 1 saying something to Child 2. Tempo speed-up. Request denied? New sounds. Developing fury. Hissed insults. I hate you. You're stupid. The base sounds of physical contact, but what kind? Skull against stomach? Palm of hand shoving at leg? Then: crescendo.

I felt its percussive intensity in my chest, which is where the emotions of anger, confusion, fear and frustration always show up. The internal voices started shouting. This is not acceptable. What if the neighbors hear? What if someone gets hurt? Do something. Knock heads together, if you must, the way your dad did.

In the past, I gave in to those internal voices and acted on their advice. Today I don't. I know that they are conditioned responses. They only know resistance and struggle. And their advice always leads to the same self-defeating, action loops.

I never understood in the past what people meant when they said we make real the thing we defend against. Now I do. When I'm afraid of what is in front of me or in me, I tense up. I direct all my energy toward opposing it. In the process, I become exactly the thing I resist. The frustration, anger and rage that had once been outside me now move in me.

That's why acceptance is always the answer.

I let go of the held breath and relaxed my muscles. I surrendered to this thing. I didn't even bother labeling it cacophony. And, in a couple of minutes, the movement was over. No one got hurt. No one needed my help.

I went back to writing.

Finding my road...

At present, I'm having a hard time finding my way to Stone House Lane. Road construction crews have torn up the asphault, sheared twenty meters of trees from each side of the road, and removed all the road signs. They'll be straightening out the curves, adding shoulders, and laying new asphault. In the meantime, all roads look the same. I'd grown dependent on signs and markers that no longer exist. I feel like I'm in la-la land.

And I couldn't be more pleased. I'm having to learn to navigate by feel. I'm forced to look for new signs, new ways of seeing, and new information. If I'm spending too much time looking for old ones, I'll miss my road.

It's scary, doing it this way. I'd conditioned myself to believe that I needed to know where I was going, have directions for getting there, and travel the straightest route possible. The ego-thing that lives in my head -- the one that would kill me if it didn't need me for transportation -- is always droning on and on about failure, poverty, degregation and the like. For a time it had me convinced that wrong turns mean lost time and fuel -- perhaps also frostbite, starvation, suffering and death. Worse, people might laugh at me.

In the past, therefore, so much of my energy was tied up scanning the horizon for road signs and anticipating the next turn that I couldn't see the road right in front of me.

Let your story happen. It already is. You're not at the wheel. Your Creator is. You might as well relax, stop being a backseat driver, and enjoy the ride. You'll know the road when it shows up. It will be right there, in front of you.

We are what we read

One other thing Dillard says: The writer "is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know." I guess that explains why I'm reading David Sedaris. Anyone fearless enough to write about getting crabs from thrift store jeans is playing the edges of the court and letting joy be the power behind his play. You? What are you reading and learning?

Do you want to learn what you think? Start writing.

Do you still think you have too much to learn about the craft of writing before you start figuring out your story? Are you spending more time at the store picking out your notebook than writing in it? Are you waiting for your teacher to show up, the one who will show you how to begin? I do this too. So who will teach us to write? Who will teach us how to begin? "The page," says Annie Dillard, "the page, that eternal blankness...which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act." She said more, but I stopped reading so that I could start asserting my right to ruin a page. Question: Why are you here with me, now? Exactly how bad do you want to find freedom?

Change of perspective

Let's stay with the theme of changing perception. Today, if you're still stuck, maybe try taking something that you've already written and write it from a new perspective. For example, if you once wrote about how you walked out of your marriage because you couldn't stand your husband's feet -- it was like they had miniature horses in them that snorted and farted every time he took a step -- try rewriting it from his perspective. See if anything shakes loose.

This calls for careful reflection.

Dragonflies

I was going to suggest a snappy and sassy writing assignment. But funerals are going around.

So maybe, if you're stuck today, you could write about something that grabbed the axle of your mind and jerked it out of its standard rut of expectation and taking-for-grantedness.

Like, have you ever looked closely at a dragonfly? I hadn't. Then last week I found one sitting on the front seat of my car, waiting, as if it wanted to get to soccer practice. Except it was dead. When I picked it up, one of the wings broke off. I looked at it.

I had expected geometry, symmetry, and precision. I don't know. Something like what an aerospace engineer might put together for REI's kite division. Not something produced by a six-year-old having her first go with a ball-point pen. God's design for flight. Humm. The amber dye must have been cheap: It produced coloring unevenly, the way coffee dries on the bottom of a white cup.

It scared me. Too much right now seems aimless and accidental, like that wing. I pondered that for a while. Then I saw it. If you stack that wing directly on top of another, you'll find the meticulous, miraculous message. The divine design. You should look for yourself.

Or look for your own thing. But write about it, please.

Erstwhile

Okay. Maybe Dolores didn't pan out and you're still stuck. Try this. Recall a moment when you had learned a new word and muscled it into a conversation. Write a scene about that. I know you've done it. I have. I spent four months of graduate school trying to work "limn" into every conversation. Someone else I know used "erstwhile," but got the definition wrong. He thought it meant esteemed. He set off a scandal at work by going around talking about his "erstwhile colleague" in the finance department.

whirligigs and knitnoise

If you're stuck today hearing your story, maybe you could write about a woman named Dolores. Maybe Dolores had a husband who was a professor with important friends, so she used to give him the arm rest at the movie theater and hold the popcorn, too. He's dead now. She still won't claim the arm rest. But when her friends are outside each morning, watering their phlox and listening for the nuthatches, she sits at her kitchen table, dictionary open, looking for new words. She loves new words. Like slash and antimacassar, whirligigs and knit noise. Words. Beautiful words.

Do you know anyone like this?