reverence: deep respect tinged with awe.

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: personal, vulnerability | Leave a comment »

A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that I was forced to undergo some kind of a performance review led by myself at about age 10. I’m not gonna lie: it was pretty rough. She sort of folded her arms, gave me a skeptical once-over, flipped through my portfolio, and opened fire. In my defense, it wasn’t entirely a one-sided critique. She was wearing a nerdy sweater vest that I told her made her look like Rick Santorum. She just shot me her best “bitch, please” 10-year-old Jenny-face and told me to stop wasting time and to please just get my shit together.

I woke up that morning with a clear, pointed sense of real urgency, which was startling enough just for its own sake. I don’t do “urgent.” I do calm, I do go-with-the-flow, I do let’s-see-what-happens-and-take-it-from-there. I actively try not to second-guess my circumstances by imposing ideas like “urgency” on them, and have worked hard to learn how to do that. So urgency feels…a little odd. Urgency feels worth sitting with for a little while and examining. So, certainly, does a call to action from my inner ten-year-old.

I have been in hiding—in every possible way—for a very, very long time. There are a lot of reasons for that, none worth the energetic investment required to give them one moment more of attention. But hiding has had very real consequences. Hiding has kept me from the flow. It has kept me from the truth of everything I came here to do.

When I was 10, I sought the truth like my hair was on fire. I hid from nothing. Then shit happened, as shit does. I conjured a few saboteurs to protect me from shit, as one does. I lurched along for a few more decades, finding moments of real bliss only in complete openness and vulnerability when I allowed myself to experience genuine openness (which, let’s just be honest here, is the hardest thing we can do.) It took a lot of fear to shut me down for good, but once I got a big enough dose, I really burrowed in for a while, and have only very recently started poking my head back out to look around.

My story has its own particulars, but they don’t actually matter. All of us carry some version of this story around with us. All of us allow that story to govern our choices to some extent, and therefore to shape our entire life. We live largely habitual, reactive lives under the direction of the crude childhood strategies we built up against feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness. And all of us can heal all of it. All of us can burn that fucking story, and we can start immediately.

My ten-year-old self showed up in my dream because she desperately wanted me to remember that her wild seeking is the key to bliss. That the lived openness I can still recall from that age—and I do remember it, and can feel exactly what it felt like then when I get quiet enough to tune into it—is to live in a state of constant possibility and magic.

Staying open—remaining vulnerable—no matter what has happened to us is a kind of devotional practice. There is a real sacredness to it. The kind of openness where the magic happens—when we open to the flow of the work we are meant to do, the people we are meant to know—is not an intellectual decision that we can just make one day. It is a practice of cultivating that feeling within our bodies and staying with it as much as possible throughout the day. Vulnerability is a practice, and it is a practice I have committed to in 2012, full-time, full-stop.

There is a great deal more to say, which is a big part of the entire point of this post. But in honor of my ten-year-old, I wanted to at least get the ball rolling. 2012 is a BFD, little Jenny kicked my ass, and I owe it to her to start speaking some truth even when it’s still a little half-baked. (That goes for my dissertation, too, god help my committee.)

truth.

Posted: September 25, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this too, was a gift. – Mary Oliver, of course.

california stars

Posted: September 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time.” – My homeboy RWE.

Here’s the thing I’ve slowly figured out over the last couple of months of living with the World’s Best Dog in my Northern California stereotypical paradise (farmer’s markets, long bike rides with cute boys, every meal on my awesome treehouse-deck, daily trips to the dog park, more yoga, much hot tub time under the stars, oh yes more of everything please. Where the hell have I been all my life?)

The universe doesn’t recognize magnitude. Every choice matters just as much as any other. Every single choice, every single time. My beloved friend TR told me once he thinks of the universe as a “waiter with bad hearing,” and I think that is totally brilliant; we’re all packed into a crowded restaurant with a lot of confused shouting going on, and the waiter does his best with what he thinks he hears us order. And every choice–every single action, no matter how seemingly minor or hidden from view–is placing an order.

It’s just the eightfold path from another perspective: right view, intention, speech, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration. It’s paying attention to what you’re asking for, with full consciousness. Which sounds annoying, or tiresome, but what I’ve noticed more than anything is that actually things have gotten so much more interesting. Every moment becomes this incredible opportunity for profound information. The act of paying attention–really paying attention–gives you instant feedback to the truth of your intention, the validity of your action. There are no choices any more or less life-altering than any other; there are no dilemmas too insignificant to escape energetic notice.

P.S.: the thoughts we choose to believe count as a choice, just so you know.

here in california / the fruit hangs heavy on the vine

Posted: June 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I am so blissed and so blessed. So very grateful for my sweet little life, my sweet little dog. For everything that has happened to bring me here; all of the awful, awful grace of it. So much love.

berkeley.

Posted: June 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I just moved here for a new job that will still give me time to write and, in fine California tradition, a new start to shake pretty much everything up in my life. I am…deliriously happy. I have a little studio nestled in the upper branches of eucalyptus trees, treehouse-style, with a fabulous deck. This morning on a hike in the hills behind my house I saw two deer. I’m a fifteen minute walk from a fabulous grocery store and a farmer’s market; a mile or so from an amazing dog park with sweeping views of the bay and the city.

“Red-tailed hawk writes songs across the sky.” I think I have always known I would wind up here, one way or another.

“this is the evening of the two-fisted prayer.”

Posted: April 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: intro, personal, vulnerability | 3 Comments »

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. – T.S. Eliot

The snow is becoming unreliable, especially in certain places along the trails behind my cabin that lead to the lake. The puppy goes careening through the drifts like he always has, falling through the top crust over his head, and has to scramble to escape. He has a kind of panicky but wildly excited look on his face when he comes back to check in with me and tell me about it, and then trots off again with his little ass bouncing in the air like a small kangaroo, always ready for more. Every day we perform this ritual, and every day it gets a little more precarious. Every few minutes he falls through some invisible crevasse along the path and hauls himself back out, panting, thrilled. Today two snirt-colored hares went bounding across the path right in front of us, and the dog absolutely lost his mind, zig-zagging back and forth across the trail in hot pursuit. He’ll never catch one, and it was all very adorable, but when he gets deep back in the woods like that I start to worry about moose. It isn’t quite calving time yet, but it will be soon, and those mamas will fuck you up. His tiny little head is just about hoof-sized, and I love him very dearly but he is really kind of dumb.

I have been in Fairbanks for almost eight months now, and have fought it every step of the way. It has felt like a prison from the first, and not for any fault of its own, not really. I have made it a prison with my own thoughts about it, my own thoughts about my place in it, all the tiny choices I have made here that have collectively shaped my experience. I knew better, but I did it anyway. For the first seven months, I don’t think I entertained a single thought about my life here that wasn’t fundamentally rooted in resistance. Resistance to my work, resistance to the dynamics of every important relationship I have, resistance to my physical experience here–the particular circumstances of my home, the relentless darkness and horrifying cold, the crappy overpriced produce at the grocery store, the sudden disappearance of my beloved truck. (Okay, I’m still pissed about that.) Profound, profound resistance to the fact that this is where my father grew up, and his presence is everywhere here, and I don’t know how to deal with that, at all. I know less and less about how to deal with that every day, actually. Less and less as he gets sicker and more distant, and is all but unknown to me now. Less and less when I visit his mother for the first time in fifteen years, and she tries to pull me onto her 91-year-old lap, clutching chunks of my hair, whispering through blueberry brandy, accusing. “Where have you been.” There is no ground to stand on anymore, not even a nice comforting illusion of it.

What actually happened here, this year? Nothing happened at all. Everything happened anyway. The re-pummeling of my heart by the same man who smashed it the first time around, but on my watch and with my full blessing this time. Yet also the marvel of watching myself and my poor hamburger heart become even more open and vulnerable, despite everything, thanks to everything. A complete reimagination of my dissertation, like a righteous and very pissed-off phoenix rising out of very dead ashes. Another absurd, intense love affair, another betrayal, another ending. A harrowing car accident that I still can’t quite shake off. Several bad falls on the ice. A broken tailbone, a fucked-up knee, frostbitten pinky toes. Hitting bottom very early on, and finally making a choice to crawl back out, but not before hanging out there in the muck for quite a while. This winter has been about stark, brutal, relentless destruction. Fairbanks has been a motherfucking funeral pyre; a sustained purification ritual.

For months and months, I chose resistance, and resistance creates confusion, and confusion feeds depression. I wanted a prison, and I got one. I wanted tremendous isolation, and I guaranteed it. My intuitive-for-hire told me several months ago that I came here to “recapitulate the past,” and I went for it completely in the most Castanedan sense of the term–a complete blow-by-blow recreation of my shadow-childhood. Profoundly lonely, booze-soaked, the only possibility of escape in over-achievement and external praise. So: you recapitulate to neutralize. You relive the torturous banality of the experience to finally release it. Recapitulation saps the charge, the shenpa, and the story of the past no longer enjoys the privilege of interpreting the reality of the present moment. If a miracle is nothing more than a shift in perception, this is the stuff of miracles. Prayer is valid; everything is new.

Because, my god, this incredible preciousness that has snuck up on me. Where the hell did this come from? I can finally allow myself the space to actually look around and see the truth of my situation, and it is so astonishingly beloved and beautiful. Everything that has haunted and tortured me for eight months is now unspeakably poignant. The sunrises are heartbreakingly glorious. The northern lights are out every night, so vast and luminous that it seems like I should be able to hear them. There is a little less snow today than there was yesterday, and I don’t know if I can bear it. I watch the dog struggle in the drifts and know that this could be the last time he ever sees snow, and that is really always true about everything, and I feel like I have truly, finally, come back to myself, to something I lost a very, very long time ago. Fairbanks moving so slowly into spring is bigger than itself. It is taking me along with it, and I am saying goodbye to something I can’t even name. God is in the slush.