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.