breathing is dearest
left in sweet neglect
or craved when spare and fleeting
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
II. Love
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished?
The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it. Nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. –Victor Hugo
Our bodies feel pain at the site of injury. They also block the surrounding muscles from repeating any actions that might reproduce that pain. We are hardwired to protect ourselves, preserve life and limb and everything between. We can also consciously retrain our defense mechanisms to surrender to new patterns, and reclaim the actions and reactions we’d shut down. Intervention is an appropriate way to think about creating that healing: breaking the cycle of what we expect, and what, some would say, we create.
The Law of Attraction isn’t the first philosophy to claim it, but its potency is current and worth weighing. “Whatever you’re thinking about is …like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you’re planning.” Now you can worry about all your worrying actually being planning… Or put a Buddhist twist on it and train yourself to observe what arises in your parcel of mind stream, let go of what’s negative, and feel powerful about manifesting the positive. No matter how many times you hear that your external experience is only a reflection of your internal universe, there’s always some rational, practical counterargument on the objective nature of reality (war sucks, chocolate’s delicious). But do we need to change the world, or our experience of the world?
A few folks sent some wisdom on this: Man on the Mountain wrote of last week’s question re: fear and love, “Who is the asker? That guy under the tree said find the answer and fear disappears on its own.”
Who is it that's thinking the thoughts in your head?
“If the Buddha was right then there's nothing at our core that we need to protect. And if there's nothing to protect nothing can scare you.
If there's nothing to lose there's nothing to fear. Or as Chugyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you are king precisely because you are nothing but a grain of sand. The universe is yours because you have let everything go, even the false idea of the permanent self.”
Row Ashore wrote about a longstanding fear of flying. Her aunt told her "I'm not afraid of flying because I'm not afraid of dying." Row realized the root of fear is “often anxiety about loss, and we wouldn't be anxious about loss if there were not things that matter to us to lose. So now when I am able to look fear in the face, I try to use it to examine and celebrate the thing that I love that matters to me.”
m2 wrote a keen parable about the characters Karate Chop Anderson and La Grincha, drinking cups of life from the river one day. They sampled myriad ambrosial flavors, but the most unpleasant and acrid of them all was fear.
La Grincha, on the other hand, couldn’t get over the taste, and stopped drinking entirely. m2’s moral is that fear can either determine who you are, or who you aren’t. And it leads me to the crux of this debate: the opposites – fear and love.
My husband doesn’t agree that they’re opposites, although he didn’t explain why. But he implicitly encouraged me to share what I’m learning about opposites. Yin and Yang teach us best, even or especially through the ubiquitous symbol that we learned to take for granted as teenagers but can revisit until our dying day: there is always the seed of one in the other. They don’t exist without the other. They depend on one another; they are so close to each other that they make up a whole (lotta nothin’...) So if at the core of fear is the closing of our hearts, a loss of trust in the universe – at the core of love and just around the corner from fear is an open and vulnerable and powerful heart. A trust in the universe that’s so great that nothing is defined as bad or good, but all is seen as learning. Pema Chodron taught me in the book Start Where You Are that it’s easy to drown in the manure of our lives… but that muck and grime is also fertile ground for the seeds of awakening. And I’m hard pressed to think of anything more beautiful or inspiring than loving oneself and the universe so much that no matter what happens, you keep dancing with that indomitable pair, keep tipping over, keep returning to the wide-eyed terrifying reward of waking up.
The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it. Nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. –Victor Hugo
Our bodies feel pain at the site of injury. They also block the surrounding muscles from repeating any actions that might reproduce that pain. We are hardwired to protect ourselves, preserve life and limb and everything between. We can also consciously retrain our defense mechanisms to surrender to new patterns, and reclaim the actions and reactions we’d shut down. Intervention is an appropriate way to think about creating that healing: breaking the cycle of what we expect, and what, some would say, we create.
The Law of Attraction isn’t the first philosophy to claim it, but its potency is current and worth weighing. “Whatever you’re thinking about is …like planning a future event. When you’re worrying, you’re planning.” Now you can worry about all your worrying actually being planning… Or put a Buddhist twist on it and train yourself to observe what arises in your parcel of mind stream, let go of what’s negative, and feel powerful about manifesting the positive. No matter how many times you hear that your external experience is only a reflection of your internal universe, there’s always some rational, practical counterargument on the objective nature of reality (war sucks, chocolate’s delicious). But do we need to change the world, or our experience of the world?
A few folks sent some wisdom on this: Man on the Mountain wrote of last week’s question re: fear and love, “Who is the asker? That guy under the tree said find the answer and fear disappears on its own.”
Who is it that's thinking the thoughts in your head?
“If the Buddha was right then there's nothing at our core that we need to protect. And if there's nothing to protect nothing can scare you.
If there's nothing to lose there's nothing to fear. Or as Chugyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, you are king precisely because you are nothing but a grain of sand. The universe is yours because you have let everything go, even the false idea of the permanent self.”
Row Ashore wrote about a longstanding fear of flying. Her aunt told her "I'm not afraid of flying because I'm not afraid of dying." Row realized the root of fear is “often anxiety about loss, and we wouldn't be anxious about loss if there were not things that matter to us to lose. So now when I am able to look fear in the face, I try to use it to examine and celebrate the thing that I love that matters to me.”
m2 wrote a keen parable about the characters Karate Chop Anderson and La Grincha, drinking cups of life from the river one day. They sampled myriad ambrosial flavors, but the most unpleasant and acrid of them all was fear.
It was a pity that such a wonderful drink had such an unpleasant kick to it, they could both agree on that. But as Karate Chop, who was well taught and thoughtful about such things, continued to drink in slow and steady sips from the sup, he began to notice that he grimaced less and less the more he drank in, and that the taste of the fear, while still not all that appealing, actually began to diminish as he went. In fact, to his amazement, a certain euphoric buzz seemed to follow every time the bitter taste disappeared, and he began to even welcome the taste a little, as he knew that without it the rest of the flavors would not taste as vibrant as he drank them. He slowly began to realize, as he finished his first cup, that fear was as much a part of the drink as electrical wiring is to a robot stegosaurus, and without it the rest of the drink could not exist. And he smiled at that and then took another cup.
La Grincha, on the other hand, couldn’t get over the taste, and stopped drinking entirely. m2’s moral is that fear can either determine who you are, or who you aren’t. And it leads me to the crux of this debate: the opposites – fear and love.
My husband doesn’t agree that they’re opposites, although he didn’t explain why. But he implicitly encouraged me to share what I’m learning about opposites. Yin and Yang teach us best, even or especially through the ubiquitous symbol that we learned to take for granted as teenagers but can revisit until our dying day: there is always the seed of one in the other. They don’t exist without the other. They depend on one another; they are so close to each other that they make up a whole (lotta nothin’...) So if at the core of fear is the closing of our hearts, a loss of trust in the universe – at the core of love and just around the corner from fear is an open and vulnerable and powerful heart. A trust in the universe that’s so great that nothing is defined as bad or good, but all is seen as learning. Pema Chodron taught me in the book Start Where You Are that it’s easy to drown in the manure of our lives… but that muck and grime is also fertile ground for the seeds of awakening. And I’m hard pressed to think of anything more beautiful or inspiring than loving oneself and the universe so much that no matter what happens, you keep dancing with that indomitable pair, keep tipping over, keep returning to the wide-eyed terrifying reward of waking up.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I. Fear
I said I didn’t want it to be the dominant emotional vibration in my life, that it wasn’t that “useful”. He said fear is the reason humans exist on this planet: an evolutionary necessity that saved our hides.
I had to question my choice of the word “useful”.
Is there a difference between making decisions based on fear – of what might happen as a result of our actions or inaction – and the understanding of what consequences result from our actions or inaction? Thirty-year olds don’t put their hands on hot stove tops. Because they fear the impending sensation, or know it?
Or remember it…? Unclear as to whether the initial feeling of fear that surrounded learning the sensation of burning skin is separate from the seemingly uncharged knowledge we currently own; few of us sweat when approaching our cooking appliances. That would potentially change drastically if we were approaching the rubble of a building that was bombed while we were inside it. I’ve only begun to dig into research on this - parts of the brain involved in fear-based learning, fear’s role in our development. But apart from the science of it, there must be some insight we’ve gained from experience: how valuable is fear?
The word itself has many synonyms (courtesy of thesaurus.com:)
abhorrence, angst, anxiety, awe, bête noire, chickenheartedness, cold feet*, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, dismay, disquietude, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, horror, jitters, phobia, presentiment, recreancy, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry…
Some clue us in to the multifaceted nature of fear (foreboding…), some are hard to believe (reverence?). It’s comforting that it isn’t all definable as cowardice, which brings to mind the spectrum of experience on which we can learn to recreate a physiological or behavioral response of confrontation or avoidance. I don’t feel jittery about failure, but I know the angst of its potential advent has foiled many a hobby, performance, story. Hardly advantageous. Not knowing where my next job was coming from at NPR elicited dread, worry, anxiety. I did everything I could to change that situation, but the eventual acknowledgement that it’s beyond your control is paralyzing. Can not say it was beneficial, considering the conventional mantra there (“Something ALWAYS works out.”) proved true, and my nerves were already threadbare.
However – fear has always been a great teacher, in that the more I recognize it, the more determined I am to not let it stop me, control me, or shake me from my center. It consistently challenges me to discover where my boundaries are, and why my mind has the habit of seeing a limitation as solid when it is illusory. It shows me the line between courage and carelessness (a friend’s book on Hawaii reminds travelers not to fear the water, but their bad judgment). It urges me to question what is rational and what isn’t; it illuminates and clarifies the depth of my desire and determination. And in deference to perhaps the most crucial part of our evolution: it is the contrast, the antonym, the opposite of love. Fear is an immediate reminder that love exists, and -I would argue- is much more powerful.
Agree?
I had to question my choice of the word “useful”.
Is there a difference between making decisions based on fear – of what might happen as a result of our actions or inaction – and the understanding of what consequences result from our actions or inaction? Thirty-year olds don’t put their hands on hot stove tops. Because they fear the impending sensation, or know it?
Or remember it…? Unclear as to whether the initial feeling of fear that surrounded learning the sensation of burning skin is separate from the seemingly uncharged knowledge we currently own; few of us sweat when approaching our cooking appliances. That would potentially change drastically if we were approaching the rubble of a building that was bombed while we were inside it. I’ve only begun to dig into research on this - parts of the brain involved in fear-based learning, fear’s role in our development. But apart from the science of it, there must be some insight we’ve gained from experience: how valuable is fear?
The word itself has many synonyms (courtesy of thesaurus.com:)
abhorrence, angst, anxiety, awe, bête noire, chickenheartedness, cold feet*, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, dismay, disquietude, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, horror, jitters, phobia, presentiment, recreancy, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry…
Some clue us in to the multifaceted nature of fear (foreboding…), some are hard to believe (reverence?). It’s comforting that it isn’t all definable as cowardice, which brings to mind the spectrum of experience on which we can learn to recreate a physiological or behavioral response of confrontation or avoidance. I don’t feel jittery about failure, but I know the angst of its potential advent has foiled many a hobby, performance, story. Hardly advantageous. Not knowing where my next job was coming from at NPR elicited dread, worry, anxiety. I did everything I could to change that situation, but the eventual acknowledgement that it’s beyond your control is paralyzing. Can not say it was beneficial, considering the conventional mantra there (“Something ALWAYS works out.”) proved true, and my nerves were already threadbare.
However – fear has always been a great teacher, in that the more I recognize it, the more determined I am to not let it stop me, control me, or shake me from my center. It consistently challenges me to discover where my boundaries are, and why my mind has the habit of seeing a limitation as solid when it is illusory. It shows me the line between courage and carelessness (a friend’s book on Hawaii reminds travelers not to fear the water, but their bad judgment). It urges me to question what is rational and what isn’t; it illuminates and clarifies the depth of my desire and determination. And in deference to perhaps the most crucial part of our evolution: it is the contrast, the antonym, the opposite of love. Fear is an immediate reminder that love exists, and -I would argue- is much more powerful.
Agree?
Monday, March 2, 2009
insipid ruin
The granite island was never pristine, but it’s been sullied with the detritus of a shipwreck for too long… the floating crumbs of sesame seeds shed from bagels and flecks cast away by bread crusts are tiny, stubborn, and are still visible in the murk of grey and black…that is the least offensive garbage, except that they multiply overnight like swarms of shrimp, and all the scooping away is futile. The provisions are sad: two glass jars made in Italy, one with a pile of stiff tri-colored pasta, the other with a layer of brown rice that barely coats the bottom. Behind them floats a plastic doll the size of a palm, a pink strawberry girl with a square head of tofu; she was made in Japan. She stares with slanted eyebrows at the serpents, untangling themselves for a breath, snarling in and out of portals. Green, white, black, blue. Cannot be controlled.
There is a radio that survives… it tells the time, announces the news, soothes with music, annoys with silence. The navigation systems still blink with lights, some still – some fervent. A grass green bird perches on them – nature’s dippy effort to conquer silicon chips with feathers, a heartbeat. Most likely the bird will starve there if it doesn’t escape. We needed these machines, although not for survival… and now they take up more space than the food. They are not beautiful.
At first, the people nearby searched the wreckage… At night, the ghosts pilfer, unsatisfied. A set of keys, waterproof colored pens, a pack of gum, some newspapers that no longer belong to the day. All feel powerless to clear the scene, for lack of clarity on what is refuse and what should remain. Emerson sent Thoreau to find Margaret Fuller’s floating manuscripts; instead he found bones, and a button.* * *
Spring will decide. She has the vision, the impetus, the artful solution to bail out the landscape. Unfettered by tragedy, buoyed by possibility. That the ruin of a journey is waiting to be discovered as treasure by the next traveling fool…
* * *
*From “A Button and a Few Bones” in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake, published by Penguin Compass in Arkana, 1999.
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