Ukulele Contemplation

I belong to a group that meets monthly to study teachings and practices given by Hazrat Inayat Khan and other Sufi masters.  The circle gathers in a comfortable room in a center for Vedic studies that’s housed in a big, one-hundred-year-old Victorian house in Denver.  As the days get longer, our evening classes begin while sunlight still pours through old-fashioned stained glass windows, the sort that decorate the entryways and living rooms of the former homes of the barons of industry.

 This month we began to explore the topic of Contemplation.  For myself, I am truly just dipping my toe in this ocean of wisdom from which teachings and practices come.  But as the woman who guides this class shared a series of quotes describing the way that some Sufis understand the nature of Contemplation, some of the words resonated with me, and a string of lights went on in my brain as it associated these suggestions with other areas of life that have had my attention lately.  For example, she read:

 Contemplation is about relating to something, moving from outside to inside.  The highest form of contemplation is relating to the divine.  Contemplation engages the heart and the sense of meaningfulness.  Love always focuses us.  No one has trouble being concentrated on the Beloved.  Seeing with the eyes of the soul is a good doorway into contemplation.  If the beholding is experienced fresh, if there is an unveiled encounter with the object, then it is a portal into a deeper connection and meaning.  We long to live our lives not just on the surface.  The process of contemplation is the way in to the center.  (The attribution of this passage is “From Ischtar and Gayan.”)

 I think I first felt my spirituality through relating to objects, elements, and plants, the non-speaking, (mostly) non-moving energy entities around me.  I felt a special connectedness to materials like the bricks in the wall of a building (especially if they were old), or the water in a lake, soft and vibrating with life against my skin.  In the long walks I took around my town as an adolescent and teenager, I frequently felt the urgent impulse to stop and touch things, to meet and experience them with the flat palms of my hands and all of my fingers stretched out and receptive.  These interactions opened parts of my being that had, at that time, never stirred in my relationships with human beings.  In fact, I recently started to understand this part of my personality as a capacity to actually be in love with the non-human.  (Now that adds another dimension to polyamory!)

As I continued to follow this pull toward the inanimate world, and to relate with objects as beings, the impressions that formed in my mind began to express themselves in poetry.  This remained a strong theme in my writing in that format – the exploration of ways in which we can see ourselves, our ideas, and the divine reflected in both natural and human-made things, and the existence around us of a variety of beings that we don’t typically recognize as alive.  Though it’s been a long time since I regularly wrote poetry, since I have been doing the practice that I wrote about here, I’ve also found this aspect of my creative self reawakened (to my great joy!).  When I saw the National Poetry Writing Month challenge, I had the strong feeling that it would be really good for me (and my mental health) to participate.  I haven’t written every day, but I’ve written poems on a lot of days this month, and the awareness that the part of me that thinks in poetry is waking up, stretching, and reintegrating itself into my life is – well – awesome.

So all this was the background as I heard the passage that I quoted above.  It hit at least two bulls’ eyes in my heart: the place that has always honored relating with things as a pathway (one among many) to understanding life and the Divine; and the place in which poetry has just woken up, famished, after a long hibernation.

As part of this class, we have exercises that we are supposed to do at home during the month between meetings.  The ones from this month were reviews of previously learned concepts around Concentration, and introductory “first steps into the ocean” of this new topic of Contemplation.  They are designed, it seems to me, to prepare us for and open us to the possibilities of explorations to come.  And one of the gates through which we enter this realm is a practice in which we choose an object to contemplate, and, through a combination of breath, concentration, and interest, get to know the object – inquire as to what its nature is, below the surface of its exterior.  The does not mean to think about the materials or parts that make it up – or at least, not only to do that.  Rather, it’s asking what this object is about, what it’s here for, in the world and in our own vicinity.  It’s becoming receptive to messages and teachings which this object may carry to us from Spirit.  For, after all, as the foundational truth of Sufism, la ‘ilaha ‘illa allah, states (in one way of understanding it, anyway – as always, one among many), there is nothing that is not part of Allah; all of existence is part of Allah; there is nothing that exists that is outside of Allah; there is nothing but Allah.

So today I sat down to try this at home.  I hadn’t pre-planned what object I was going to try contemplating.  My eye first fell on a large conch shell that I brought back from the Bahamas, which now sits on my altar.  I thought it would have a richness of impressions to offer!  But then my gaze wandered over to the right of the altar, where I keep my musical instruments.  And I thought, Hey.  I’d really like to get to know the inner essence of my ukulele.  ‘Cause we work together.  And maybe we could work together even better if I was more aware of what it wanted.

I positioned it (okay, I really call it her) on my bed, far enough away that I could see the whole thing without having to move my eyes, close enough that I could see the grain of the wood and my fingerprints on the body from the last time I played her.  I fluffed up the comforter at one end so that she’d be resting on her side at a jaunty angle, and so I could clearly see each of the four tuning pegs.  Then I closed my eyes and watched my breath for a while.  I tried to clear a space in which I could receive whatever awareness she wanted to share with me.  When I opened my eyes, I tried to keep a softness in my vision, allowing for a little blurring of edges, not just of the physical object I was looking at, but of the boundary between ordinary perception and the other, energetic senses.  (I think of Lynn Woodland’s teaching that when we are engaged in spiritual or deep internal inquiry, what comes to us through our imagination is often a communication from our higher self.)  Here are some of the ideas that came to me as I contemplated my ukulele.

First I got some images of the journey of the wood from which the instrument is made.  When my old ukulele broke (it was a very cheap, but very cute, model, with a rainbow and a palm tree painted on the front), I asked my partner’s mother to bring me a uke from Hawaii, where she travels from time to time.  She did bring me one – which, to my amusement, turned out to have been made in China.  No matter, I thought; it had been on the island, it had absorbed something of the vibe, which I could access when I played her.  Now I felt the distance from which the pieces had come, and some trace of the hands of the people who had assembled it; I even got a little notion of the power of the glue that held the parts together. Then I felt the wholeness of the ukulele as an instrument.  I sensed that in her utilitarian design, plain but much sturdier and more resonant than her predecessor, she reflected to me an awareness of the growth and strengthening of my own spirit and my development as a creative person offering words and music to the world.

 I noticed that the shape of her body is like mine: round at the shoulders, round and wide at the hips, with a lot of fretting at the head, and a big hole right over the heart, which is simultaneously the most sensitive, undefended part of both of us, and the only place from which the healing sounds can emerge.

I imagined us just being together, tuning to each others’ pitches.  I tried to hear the music she wanted my to play on her, the pressure of my fingers on her strings that would feel just right to her, and allow her to express what was inside of her.

I got the sense that musical instruments carry an energy of potentiality about them.  At rest, they are still always poised on the cusp of sound.  They are like cords that connect us – the amplifiers – to the divine, say, lead guitarist.  When we take them in our hands, we plug ourselves in to that source, so that the song that is always already being played may flow through us and be heard by others.

But then, she reminded me, we humans are not just amplifiers but also instruments ourselves, not just in our art, but in our whole lives.  So really, my uke and I are more peers than I thought.  Something I read recently on the website of the International Sufi Movement about the heart as an instrument came back to me.  I believe these are the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan, though it’s not stated on the site:

Krishna is pictured in Hindu symbology with a crown of peacock’s feathers, playing the flute. Krishna is the ideal of divine love, the God of love. And the divine love expresses itself by entering into man and filling his whole being. Therefore the flute is the human heart, and a heart which is made hollow will become a flute for the God of love to play upon. When the heart is not empty, in other words, when there is not scope in the heart, there is no place for love. Rumi, the great poet of Persia, explains this idea more clearly. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life, are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed, and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute, which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music that He constantly wishes to produce. But as every reed is not a flute, so every heart is not His instrument. As the reed can be made into a flute, so the human heart can be turned into an instrument, and can be offered to the God of love. It is the human heart which becomes the harp of the angels; it is the human heart which is known as the lute of Orpheus. It was on the model of the heart of man that the first instrument of music was made, and no earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality.

 The instructions for the object contemplation exercise conclude, “We allow the object that we perceive to touch us.  The world is full of meaning when we listen.”  I believe that this is so.  I think that Spirit has many messages for us, and that guidance is ALWAYS there, all around us, in every aspect of our existence – if we are able to read it, hear it, see it, get it.  I believe I’m aware of about one gazillionth part of the continual stream of divine guidance that is beamed directly to my own personal internal satellite dish every microsecond of every day.  But on the other hand, every additional gazillionth that I’m ever able to recognize has an inversely proportional impact on my life: that is, it’s huge.  So the value of contemplation, regularly practiced, is immeasurable.  It puts me into a mindset of wonder, which helps me to make myself, and all the potentialities with which I was born, available for God’s purposes.  In that state of mind, I don’t need to know how the song goes.  Like the ukulele, I just need to be.

Finding Courage Through Surrender

This post may be a little woo-woo-sounding, but it’s about something I’ve been going through and how I’ve been dealing with it — including looking to God for guidance, and the guidance I received, and where it may take me.

I’ve been struggling with this one class. Of the eight that I’m teaching right now (four college, four ACT prep), there’s just this one that I can’t seem to get into the flow on. It’s one of the ACT prep classes that the district has made mandatory for every kid in certain schools designated “underperforming” (code for all kinds of other adjectives having to do with disparity of resources).  Most of the classes of this type that I’ve taught have been challenging but ultimately rewarding for me as a teacher, and the kids have seemed to get something out of them too.  For this one, though, uh-uh.  Even though individual sessions may go well enough, given that the kids didn’t choose to be in this class and most don’t want to be there, there’s this palpable antagonism coming from the students that goes beyond mere not caring.

I had this group before. I get them for eleven days at a time, not all in a row, and I haven’t been able to shake the role of outsider. They hated the (pre-set) material and I felt like they hated me.  Their classroom teacher didn’t seem to like me, either, and that didn’t help.  She seemed to have sized me up in the beginning and dismissed me as ineffective and not worth her time.  I tried not to take it personally, but it took a lot of emotional energy to keep going in there, to keep smiling, to keep looking for ways to get them engaged.  I rotated out to another class for a while — a great relief — but I knew I would be going back. Man, I sweated it. I seriously did not know how I was going to get through the hour each day, let alone offer the students something that would actually be useful or helpful to them.

But it turned out that this was actually a good place for me to get to.  Because when I realized I was at the very end of my power to get through something that I knew I had to get through, a light finally came on.  If I recognize my powerlessness over life circumstances, I know my only choice is surrender to God.

I was drawn to a little book of daily meditations by Hazelden called In God’s Care for a message from my higher self.  The message was this:

“A consciousness of God releases the greatest power of all.” — Science of Mind Magazine  ~~ Just thinking of God as we go into situations we’re uncomfortable with or perhaps even fearful of will relieve our troubled mind and lessen our anxiety.  Carrying God in our thoughts means we don’t have to, for that moment or hour or day, feel alone.  Quite miraculously, we’ll know that God can help us handle what we could not handle alone.  Most of us dwell more on negative thoughts than on thoughts of God.  And our life is far more confused and complicated than it needs to be as a result.  To replace one thought with another is really quite simple.  A quiet reminder to stop negative thinking and remember God is all that’s necessary.  We may have to repeat the process many, many times, but patience brings the result we want.  God will strengthen us and take away our fears if we remember to remember.  ~~ I will keep God in mind today.  I will concentrate on remembering.

Whew!  Yeah.  As soon as I read these words, my heart remembered and knew their truth.  I felt the blessing of them immediately.  So I did this.  I clung to that message as to a lifeline.  The first day that I went back to this class, I concentrated on remembering that just thinking of God would release a new energy into the situation.  When I went into the school, I inwardly spoke God’s name.  In the classroom, during a lull, I tried to turn on my spiritual awareness, to sense God’s presence — and of course the presence was there, as it always is, everywhere. And here’s what God showed me when I tuned in to God’s perspective: the stress, the distrust, the shields, the fear, the worry, the isolation that these students carried.  I felt the atmosphere as one of tension, of deep, deep guardedness. I knew that I could never know what types of circumstances and home lives they had experienced.  And all I could feel toward them was compassion.

And toward the teacher, I simply felt friendliness, a new openness that surprised me, that came to me without my trying.  If there had previously been a power struggle, my end of it dissolved.  I felt no hesitation about going up to her at every opportunity and asking her for suggestions, or what she did in her own classes.  I couldn’t make her like me, but I could send the message that I liked her, respected her, and wanted to work together.  After this, the vibe definitely shifted.

Since then, I have relied on God to get me through each class. I’ve been giving it everything I’ve got in terms of teaching ideas — there’s pretty much nothing I won’t try at this point to make the class worthwhile for the students.  But at the same time, I’ve surrendered the outcome and my own will and effort to the power of God — and I’ve needed to, because finding the courage to face it continues to be a daily challenge.

Yesterday, I was still having a tough time.  As I walked into the school, I imagined God walking with me, throwing an arm around my shoulder, encouraging me.  I got through the class; the activity I’d come up with was semi-successful (which is really saying a lot, compared to past experiences!).  And as I left the class and headed out of the building, I found myself still connecting to that feeling that God was right there with me.

God as I meet God through recovery literature is a lot like God as I meet God in the Baptist church: Real. Personal. Walking beside me. Speaking in direct and unmistakeable words, right into my heart. The Infinite One who still has both the time and desire to talk to me, the lowly straggler. I guess that must be part of the Infinity. This is the expression of God that I can have a conversation with, the one that will give me guidance, straight up.

So I asked:

Am I doing all right?

God answered:

You are doing fine, kiddo. That feeling of security and warmth that lets me know when I’m hearing Spirit’s word welled up under my rib cage.

I asked: Am I doing what you want me to be doing?

The answer came instantly: Honey, I don’t want you to have to be working so hard.

I felt the beginnings of tears as I climbed the long hallway ramp, heading out of the building.  My current seven-days-a-week teaching schedule has been taking a toll, and I’ve been feeling depleted of emotional energy.

I asked: What can I do to change this? I’ve been so stuck in this rut, working so hard and not making a living wage.

God answered, gently but firmly: You need to respect yourself. All the guidance about publishing your work is part of this.

Me: (Silence; reflection.  It’s been an ongoing crisis all spring.  I’ve been doing a daily practice to “remove obstacles” between me and the sustainable and creative work life that I want to manifest.  The practice had led me strongly toward writing.)

God: And when you learn to respect and value yourself and the unique gifts I gave you, I will place you where I want you. Don’t worry about figuring out the “right” job to pursue. I’ll put you there when you have learned this lesson.

As I passed through the door and walked to my car, I noticed the warming, fresh-smelling spring air.  I reached up to touch a branch of one of the gorgeous, thick-trunked pine trees that ring the school grounds. God will place me where God wants me, eh?  I felt a smile begin in my heart and extend across my whole body.

I know I don’t respect and value myself as God does, or as God wants me to.  And sometimes I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to.  But I’ve grown in this area, certainly, over the past many years.  It’s one of my life lessons.  In my family, it’s transgenerational.  Part of the purpose of my life is to heal this wound of self-unlove that has stretched so deep and wide.  This conversation with God made me feel like I had the inner permission to take another step, or more, into self-value, which would really be a step of greater closeness to God.

The Box: A Reunion Story

My partner Sam and I moved from Missouri to Colorado nearly three years ago.  We procrastinated on packing, and ended up pulling two all-nighters in a row, emptying out our apartment and setting out in our cross-state U-Haul-pickup-truck caravan, let’s just say, later than we’d planned.  And though I remembered packing it, distinctly remembered placing it in a larger box that held a bunch of other random stuff, one thing that never turned up in the unpacking process was the shoebox I’d had since college, which contained all of my most treasured souvenirs of my travels, beginning with the year I studied abroad in Spain — postcards and small artworks,  bumper stickers, poems, and newspaper clippings, the things I bought or collected to remember places and times, when I was traveling on a very tight budget.  Then there were some love letters, some scenic pictures from calendars, and possibly a scrap of fabric from a certain Taco Bell flag that was minutely vandalized during a statement against cultural imperialism.

During those three years in which the box was missing, I was of two minds.  On one side, I thought I should not be attached to things, even those gathered with passion and tenderness, as presents I bought myself to celebrate moments of perfect contentment or exquisite bittersweetness.  I had a surprising degree of success with this.  I felt wistful but accepting when I thought that the collection was lost for good; even this outcome had a certain romance to it.  But maybe I had such an easy time accepting the box’s absence because, on the other side, I never really stopped believing that it would be uncovered yet, nestled down in some yet-to-be-unpacked box.  (Yes, even after three years, there are such boxes in our house.)

Well, long story short, I did in fact finally find it the other day, and was reunited, with great joy and delight, with a relatively small but personally important bunch of markers from my own history.  And I thought it was interesting that I found this right after I was writing the last post, and going back and actually thinking about the insanity, and also the survival, and also the fun and the learning of those years.  The hands that gathered these mementos, the eyes that selected them, are similar to and different from those with which I see and touch the world today.  I am still in a process of reclamation, of gradually becoming able to face and meet all of those parts of myself that I’ve denied, been afraid of, run away from.  I want to reconnect the electricity flowing to the creative and strange and engaged parts of myself that have shut down for various reasons over the years.  That’s my vision and intention for spring rebirth.

This box!!!

What would Wellstone do, indeed???

I stand by both of these.

My big shopping splurge was in a department store in Bilbao, where I bought A TON of tourist stuff that said Euskadi or had the Basque flag because I was totally in love with the Basque Country. … That’s just the kind of nerd I am.

These are some of the postcards; the postcard-shopping experience was part of how I narrated my experiences abroad to myself.

I received this cloth painting of Kali as a gift at my graduation/30th birthday party — then she was lost for three years. I guess it’s time to really welcome her ferocious energy in! Where will it take me? Let’s go!

Irish In Recovery

No, I’m not recovering from being Irish, as that title might imply.  I’m not even a “recovering Catholic,” as so many members of my family are – I guess I detached from the mass (so to speak) early enough that it didn’t leave any lasting trauma — just a fond memory of the smell of candles.  But seven years ago, just before St. Patrick’s Day, on a very snowy weekend in Minneapolis, I did give up alcohol for good.

The circumstances that led to this turn did not actually have anything to do with St. Patrick’s Day, though they did have to do with a certain Irish bar on Nicollet Mall and my reckless behavior there and thereafter.  And it did happen to be the beginning of spring break, which was also the week in which I had to write my preliminary exams, based on which I would or would not receive permission to proceed with my dissertation.  That was not a good choice of week for waking up in the hospital, not knowing how I got there, and not feeling (or looking) very good.  Soul searching, meeting going, and eventually essay writing, ensued.  That first SP day, four days after deciding to get sober, was a 24-hour period in which I stood outside myself, unable to touch what I was feeling.

One of the books I read at that time, called How to Quit Drinking Without AA (they had it at my local library in Northeast Minneapolis!), said this, which made a big impression on me: if it’s true what they say, about every cell in the body replacing itself over a period of seven years, then an alcoholic who stays sober will, after seven years, have a body in which not one cell has ever actually had alcohol.  Even though it’s a little cheesy, and biologically misleading, the whole image of a clean cellular slate appealed deeply to me.  Hesitant, as I always am, about any kind of lifetime commitment (somehow tattoos are exempt from this??) I remember thinking, OK, I will make seven years my goal.  At that point, if I make it that long, I can reevaluate the situation.  So seven years was always my big mountaintop in the distance.  And now, as of March 13, I’ve actually reached it, and now here I am hanging out with the view.

I’ve always had little celebrations over the various anniversaries, sometimes a private ritual, sometimes a gift to myself.  This year nothing really came to me in terms of an outward recognition, nothing seemed to appeal; I think I have just been experiencing the moment of attaining that specific goal on a more inward level.  It affects me in ways that don’t really express themselves in words.  I didn’t feel drawn to go to any meetings, because I just didn’t feel like conversing about it.  It’s more like an egg of light that I’ve been quietly honoring within myself.  But finally, one thing did occur to me as an appropriate celebration: I decided to do something to explore my relationship to St. Patrick’s Day from this new perspective.

Even though I only have one grandparent who was actually Irish, it was the grandmother after whom I was named.  She and all of her kids, my dad and my seven aunts and uncles, just seemed to embody that heritage to me.  I can’t really say why I was drawn to it, but I felt a heart connection with Irish culture, and it developed into a whole complex of things within my personal identity narrative.  Maybe I just needed something to organize that narrative, and Irishness seemed to do, but I really did love and passionately embrace and receive creative and spiritual and political inspiration and nourishment from a lot of things about Irish culture.  I didn’t go about it half-assedly; I traveled to Ireland twice in college.  As a leftist nerd into history and literature and folk music and drinking until four a.m., I pretty much found something in my interest in all things Irish for every part of my personality to do.

I don’t mean to be cliché about the connection between alcoholism and being Irish.  I’m not the only one in my family who’s encountered this particular challenge.  I know that historically there have been reasons, and those reasons have led to results.  I also know that I purposely adopted a certain stereotype as part of my persona.  I’m not outgoing by nature, and my childhood and school experiences did not equip me with any confidence or self-worth.  Maybe I thought, if I construct this “hardcore” character, a stereotypical drunk girl who’s into Irish stuff, people would mistakenly think they already knew me.  And they might talk to me.  And that would be a miracle.

The whole thing wasn’t insincere, even if it was partially constructed.  I was drawn to Ireland as a creative influence.  I identified politically with the resistance to British rule; I’ve had a long-standing scholarly interest in the meaning of “terrorism” in nationalist struggles.  And I loved going to live Irish music shows in American Irish pubs and rocking out.  I wanted to write ballads too.  And I honestly thought Guinness was the most splendid and tasty and aesthetically pleasing beverage in the world.  And I declared repeatedly that St. Patrick’s Day was my favorite holiday, because it honored all of my favorite things.  And it really was like a punch in the gut, the St. Patrick’s Day that fell four days after my first committed sober day.  I felt disoriented, realizing how deeply into the foundations of my sense of self alcoholism penetrated, or beginning to.  It wasn’t all about St. Patrick’s Day, but St. Patrick’s Day stood in for a lot of stuff.

In the years since then, I’ve mostly avoided this holiday, with that form of ignoring that is still attention.  To me, it was just so much about drinking, even sober events held the association.  But what I’ve been working on in the past year, as I’ve been revisiting the AA approach to serenity, is dropping the fight, dropping the last vestiges of the fight against things I felt uncomfortable around, like my previously-sober partner starting to drink now and then, or like St. Patrick’s Day.  This holiday, though strongly connected with drinking (for me), had also held other meanings that had been important to me.  But I had a suspicion that I needed a new connection to it; I needed to discover whether or not the holiday held any significance to me as the person that I am now, both the same as and different from the person I was seven years ago.

So I thought I’d begin with paganism; I thought maybe there was an ancient Celtic holiday around that spot on the calendar, over which the Christian conquerors had plopped their saint’s day.  And the sources I read said sure – Easter.  But that’s more often linked to the Pagan festival Oestara.  For St. Pat’s, pagans (and patriots) may wear snakes instead of shamrocks, representing those supposedly driven out by the missionary (for “snakes,” read “traditional Irish customs and beliefs”).  Upon reading which, I thought, as some women in my family might have said, oh hell!  I don’t want to adopt a protest instead of a holiday; although I agree with it, that just doesn’t sound like the kind of extra-positive healing energy I was looking for in this celebratory gesture of rebirth!  And call me sentimental, but I just don’t have much of a desire to observe holidays that commemorate colonization, exploitation, and religious oppression.  So I will probably do, as usual, nothing.  But I guess (or I hope) at least it will be a slightly more peaceful, conscious nothing.

In the end, maybe this was what I needed to “reevaluate” on my seven-year anniversary, as I’d told myself I someday would.  I don’t, after all, need to consider whether permanently quitting alcohol was the right decision for me.  It definitely was.  Even after seven years, the horror and the fear of experiencing another night like that last night is remarkably fresh and real to me.  On the other hand, I still don’t feel totally at peace with my relationship to alcohol in the culture that surrounds me.  My main reason for not drinking is still “I don’t want to die,” and somehow that seems to bring the fear and the resistance and the powerlessness right along with it.  I wish I had a more positive reason for this commitment, but when I think about calling it a spiritual pursuit for its own sake, I know I wouldn’t have chosen it if I didn’t have to, and I’m still too afraid of the substance to name abstinence from it a virtue.  And yet, the journey has been nothing if not spiritual.  It’s led to soul-searching and honesty and lessons and transformations that have been valuable to me beyond fathoming.  I am so grateful to have had this source of learning in my life; so let this, and my blessings to all who read it, be my St. Patrick’s Day tribute.

Twice-Told Tales

Last Friday I went to a workshop organized by my department, called “Stop, Write, Reflect–Teach!” They pitched it as a chance to take time out, return to the writing that nourishes us, and think about why we became teachers. I was really excited for this because I’ve been feeling a renewal of interest in and motivation for writing lately, and the opportunity to have community support for my writing is just not something I’d pass up right now.

In this workshop we were led through a process of exploring our personal histories, specifically with regards to teaching, as narratives. The facilitator diagrammed a plot arc on the board and asked us to think about the initiating events, the conflicts, the moments of heightened tension, the crisis and the denouement of our teacherly lives. She had us do little five minute writings in which we would write continuously for the five minutes — a shorter version of what Natalie Goldberg calls writing practice. And as I was writing, I kept thinking about how “these are my stories…” as in, the stories that have congealed over the years into episodes in a narrative that I’ve told, I feel, too many times. These supposed standout points on the plot line of my life — I felt like I was watching once again a VHS tape that had been rewound and replayed too many times.

Natalie Goldberg was one of my first true heroes, one of maybe three writers who seriously influenced my intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development when I was in high school. I wrote about her in my college application essays. I still consider her mode of writing practice to be the foundation of all creative writing (for me), and I share her “Rules for Writing Practice” and “Beginner’s Mind, Pen and Paper” at the start of every single writing class I teach and probably always will. People who take more than one class with me get to read it multiple times.

Maybe it’s because of the ideal implanted in me when I first read her book Wild Mind in tenth grade, or maybe it’s just my own neurosis, but I am always striving to write something that’s not boring. I was afraid my teacher narrative (which is also to some inevitable extent my grad student narrative) had crossed the line from vibrant, illuminating, impassioned, to boring, processed, twice-told. It just felt like the same old stuff, and I felt ready to let go of it.

I think those memories, the “turning points” (in plot-speak) that I identify as part of my “story” of how I came to be an adjunct community college English teacher with a Ph.D. In American Studies, are important, and some of them even make good stories, but it’s just been so long that I’ve been rehashing them. I learned a lot through both living them and analyzing them, and now I’m wondering what it would be like to try on a different narrative. Like trying a new hairstyle, it could change my whole personality. I’m curious what it would be like: a story that would read my past a different way, and maybe thus shed light a little way into the future.

It feels like a story that hasn’t been written yet, and like all blank first pages, it’s a little daunting. But it came to me again that I need to imagine the teaching job that I actually want, and it makes sense to reimagine the context in which it — and I — would exist. A new read on my past; a new theory of why I care about teaching (and what else I care about, and why): It’s so — so — lit analysis circa 1998!

What first comes to mind for revision is this whole category of memories filed under “failures.” These mainly have to do with a. social missteps (large and small) resulting in hurt feelings (mine or another’s) or embarrassment or both, b. social ineptness related to shyness and insecurity, or c. lack of proper career development. Those are, of course, arbitrary interpretations of ultimately neutral material. I would like to free myself from those calcified, crusty stories, with which I punish myself whenever a random reminder causes them to rise in by brain. How I handled myself when a friend moved away. Various lies I told or petty acts of revenge I committed in high school. The reasons why I didn’t get promoted. These and unbelievably many other negative stories about myself, I haven’t yet been able to let go of. But I feel like in this go-round, at the writing workshop, as, out of annoyance, I struggled to find some new interpretations of the material if memory — that grip cracked open just a little bit. As a result, at least part of me feels not just ready, but straining to release those beliefs about what a failure I have been.

I’ll share an example of an episode whose moral I need to rewrite, one that has come up since the workshop: my relationship with my dissertation advisor.

I sometimes have moments of clarity when I realize that in general, I habitually see almost every aspect of my life as evidence of another dismal social failure, or maybe the next installment in one epic social failure that began exploding on my first day of preschool and hasn’t yet ceased to be a continual disaster. As I review my actions and my days, it’s automatic for me to think of how I screwed myself over by not being willing or courageous enough to initiate, or skilled enough to maintain, conversations, friendships, relationships. I just feel I suck at this and always have. It’s, in my estimation of myself, one of my greatest flaws and sources of shame.

Well, when I was in grad school, the process of finding and working with an advisor took me way longer than most people, because I just couldn’t steel myself to ask someone if they would be my advisor. It took me even longer to get a committee; my department actually started harassing me to to get these established already before they dropped me from good standing (it was close!). I ended up asking this wonderful woman, a queer Chicana who’d gone through the same program as me, and who shared my political orientation, to be my advisor in like my third or fourth year. It was really hard to do. But she said yes.

Then, I always felt like a crappy advisee because I never checked in with her about my dissertation. Unlike my colleagues, I never sent her chapters as I finished them, never workshopped anything or got her feedback or suggestions for revision. I barely talked to her except when I had to meet with her and get a form signed every semester. I thought she was great, I really looked up to her, but I couldn’t stand the idea of the possibility of her not liking my work. It had happened enough times — maybe someone thought I wasn’t theoretical enough, or didn’t claim my argument strongly enough. What if she thought my work was unworthy of my program? I literally couldn’t take the thought of it. So I didn’t send her a thing until I was about a chapter away from totally finishing my dissertation — then I sent it all to her and asked if she thought I could defend it in a couple of months.

Unbelievably, I got away with that! She barely had me to any revisions — said she liked it, and arranged for my defense. My committee members were all pretty hard core about what they liked and didn’t like, yet somehow they all gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up. I had never heard of anyone avoiding their advisor, writing their dissertation with practically no input from anyone, and then passing like that! I considered my way of doing things a major failing; I continually berated myself for not taking advantage of the opportunities for intellectual development and friendship that can come with the advising relationship. I simply could not make myself do it.

As a result, I always assumed that she thought little of me — that she didn’t think of me at all. I figured I was a blip on her radar, an unmemorable experience, and I more or less tried to forget about what I thought if as my failure as an advisee.

But the other day, my partner, traveling several states away to our alma mater, actually ran into my advisor, and according to him, she said she really missed me. I thought, how could she possibly miss me, with as little as I talked to her? Yet apparently, whatever I thought of my own actions and appearance, she remembers me as a smiling person who wrote a great dissertation. She said she actually refers people to my dissertation as an example, and that she strongly hopes I will still publish it because some people need to read it, in her opinion.

What does it serve me to hold on to this idea that I was a sucky grad student? So all these writers and academics passionately loved and hated their advisors, were pounded into greatness by their advisors, went to barbecues with their advisors … so what? I always look at that as the standard, and see myself as deviant. It’s the same with so many things involving social interaction. I just feel like such a loser.

But could it be possible to really rewrite my story in a way that values what I did do? I’m wondering if there is a way for me to re-remember those years and determine that the way I went about grad school was just fine, it was just the way I personally did it, and it was a success, and I did everything exactly as I should have, in the right and perfect way for me. I didn’t develop into an academic superstar and I never became truly comfortable or confident in those intellectual-social-collegial circles, at least not in MN, at least not at that point in my growing up. But dang it, I pushed myself a lot; I didn’t hang around in my comfort zone. For as terrified as I was, I navigated the tricky situations and survived, academically and spiritually and physically (and there was some doubt about all of these at one point or another). I did get straight A’s (ok, one A-). I got a bunch of really awesome people to be on my committee. And the author of the book I based my dissertation on loved how I used her work. So maybe I didn’t totally wreck it, my grad school career. Maybe I could start being proud of myself and stop being ashamed.

… And now I have a sneaky feeling that the diss needs to be published. To which I respond: Oh, shiiiiiit. But returning to and finally finishing that project would be the perhaps the best dramatic rewriting of the old advisee story, the one with the sequel, “I’ll Never Publish my Diss.” It requires facing the same things again that scared me before: submitting for approval, exposing myself to criticism, plus revisiting stuff I’m out of the flow with, and my fear that revising that diss for publication would take all my time and I would dangerously overwork myself even more than now, and I would have a mental breakdown of some kind.

But something has shifted lately, maybe because I came to a crisis point in my life recently which has convinced me to be open to any guidance or any possibilities that I feel led to — especially, or really only, things I have not tried before. I just got simultaneously fed up with both the stagnation of my quest for a living wage and the worn out methods I’ve tried repeatedly with no success. So whatever I do, it had to be something different. And I have never seriously tried to publish my dissertation before.

Ok, although I have a whole ongoing string of thoughts and reflections I’d like to post here, I’m aware that this is already a really long post about my mental process — so if you’ve read this far and you really are interested, well, I’ll be writing more in other posts.

If you’ve stopped reading, although you won’t be actually reading this, namaste. And if you haven’t stopped reading, namaste, and thanks.

Snow always makes me introspective.

Guns and Paradigms

It’s Friday afternoon.  I’m driving home from the school where I teach (way on the other side of Denver from where I live), moving slowly, because everyone’s doing what I’m doing at the exact same time.  It’s been a long week and my brain is fried.  The news is playing on the car radio, senators are debating gun laws, but it’s really more of a background noise for my drifting thoughts.   At this point, in this mental state,  I wonder if it is really about more gun control versus less gun control, or about our collective, cultural willingness or unwillingness to find new, nonviolent, empowering, peace-promoting, effective responses to whatever it is that makes humans want to shoot or otherwise harm other humans on ANY scale, from personal assault to mass murder to war.  Maybe this whole debate is a distraction that keeps our national attention away from other, deeper, more entrenched problems.  Eh?????

One one point, at least, both sides are the same: they both envision a world where guns are necessary for wielding against other people, or against other beings.  One side wants to reserve the right to use guns to prevent other people from using them against people (themselves or others).  The other side wants to reserve the right to use guns against the people on the first side, if it should ever come to that.  And yes, there are many sub-arguments on either side.  I honestly see where both sides are coming from, and I see both as having valid concerns within the framework of the current conversation.  But they are both based on a worldview in which it is necessary to have guns and to have the right to use them against other people in certain specific circumstances.  And I do not believe that that worldview is either necessary or predetermined.  I do believe that as a group, the direction we humans need to go in is beyond the debate about whether and how to regulate firearms and who can use them and how and when, and what happens to us when we break those rules.

Earlier, on the way TO said job on the other side of the city, I heard this archeologist talking on Science Friday about the work of figuring out what exactly made the dinosaurs go extinct, and he made a comment to this effect: that though we can’t do something now, or even imagine how we would do it, that’s no reason to assume we won’t be able to do it in the future, possibly even the near future.  He noted that even scientists tend to underestimate the magnitude of advances we’ll make, and how quickly we’ll make them.  That’s in the field of research technology, of course, but I think the same is true of any area of human learning, any field in which we increase in understanding over time.  We don’t know what we’re going to be able to do, we are unable to picture what it would be like to do a thing, and then suddenly someone experiences a paradigm shift, and is able to see it, able to conceive it, able to actually do the thing that did not even have a name before.  This was the first thing we learned about in the H.C. at IUP: Thomas Kuhn and the idea of the paradigm shift, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Back then my professor took me out for pizza because he thought it was so nutty of me to apply that theory to the spread of Christianity in my final paper.  Since that time, though, I’ve seen repeatedly how true it is of any area of human development or spiritual evolution.  To make dramatic shifts in consciousness, in understanding, to let go of problems and let them be transformed, we need to look for, cultivate, and encourage the conditions under which paradigm shifts are likely to occur.  Such shifts are possible when, and only when, we believe they are.  Although we cannot see the next step on our path, or even that there is a path, and not a gaping void, we can’t (and we don’t) let that stop us from walking forward.

So how is this related to gun laws?  The debate will play itself out how it will.  If there really are specific regulations or liberties that will lead to fewer acts of violence being committed, then I hope those are the ones that get passed.  From what I have read (like this piece), it seems like the most powerful players in this game are the gun manufacturers, and they aren’t interested in liberty OR saving lives — just money.  So I’m just saying.  The whole debate is taking place on the surface of the issue.  I’d love to see the profit factor be acknowledged regularly in the public debate for the huge force that it really is.  And at the same time as we (at least those who are participating in this conversation in good faith) are collectively looking for the best, most responsible ways to manage the use and sale of guns on a practical, this-moment basis,  I would ask Americans to also do whatever they can to open their minds to the idea that the real issue might be something else, and that by meeting and addressing and solving this real issue — the real causes of violence, of fear, rage, the urge to hurt others or ourselves — we will solve so much more than just “the gun debate.”  We need to look for solutions to the suffering that exists, and take responsibility for our roles in causing it.  It will necessarily involve advancing in our understanding of how connected we all are, and how if we harm any being, we are truly and literally harming ourselves.  That goes for you, too, corporations.  ESPECIALLY for you.

Ok, that’s all I’m going to say on the topic.  May peace be with us on Earth.

Say a Hare Krishna for Me

This really should have gone up days ago.  During Kirtan with David Newman at The Yoga Room in Idaho Springs last weekend, I was inspired to write this poem to the Divine in the Divine’s aspect as Lord Krishna.  I didn’t know what to do with it, so I thought I’d put it here.

***** Winter Poetry Warning!!!*****

O Krishna, Heart of the Universe,
whose compassion propels the planets through their orbits,
whose smiling glance draws a soul from the ether and gives it life,
whose seed is flute song,
Your expansiveness accepts even this idiotic, forgetful lover
who, though she tells everyone in the street how much she adores you,
doesn’t call you at night, or bring you honey,
or seek you in the starlight.
She is not even faithful to you,
not for longer than one second every week,
but you are patient with her and hold her to you;
in your abundant mercy
you let her believe
that those seconds of adoration are enough.