Aligning Chakras, or Seven Brains (not)

A friend asked me to explain what I now know as my own personal (agonizingly slow — forty-one years so far) course in miracles, conducted by Professor Ariel, Great Lion of God: The alignment of my spirit with that of the Conscious Universe.  In that context I wrote back thusly (it must have been channeled, but what do I know? A lot less than I ever thought):

Well, Ariel clarifies (sort of) the job of the chakras thus: it’s really more a question of focus than “thought” or “process”.  Each chakra has a point of view, and one’s power center (each of us operates for good or ill mostly from a single chakra’s emphasis) determines most of the personality.  As one grows in alignment, beginning at Chakra 1, up the body/mind, around the bend, up again at the next master level, etc., the intensity and acuity of the object/thought/action increases. 

I’m surmising that one is handed an issue, like an arithmetic problem in elementary school, and one processes it from the point of view of one’s power center.  The product of the process reveals the driving interests of the solver.  The sophistication of the solution depends on the alignment status of the solver; the higher the frequency, the more sophisticated the solution, yet still from the point of view of the power center.  (Imagine Obama, for example, dealing unobstructed with Netenyahu about West Bank/Gaza, rather than this jerk.  Viz.: the level of sophistication of the solution.)

Failure or even weakness in one chakra cannot be compensated for by “sharpening” another chakra — as we are apt to do with our local 5 senses (the blind hear better, the deaf observe visually more clearly, etc.)  Each chakra has its unique job, and only through alignment can integration of these points of focus take place.  Energy travels ever upward, its path a spiral.

The Dog Trot Mind

 In the Southeastern United States there is a traditional style of house called the Dog Trot, or Breeze Way or (my favorite, though less metaphorically useful) the Possum Trot.  The house begins as a perfect square, divided in half -- one side for communal living, dining, visiting, Picking & Grinning, etc., and the other for private sleeping, etc. etc.  In between the halves, running from the centered front door to the centered back door is an alley, or the Dog Trot, which allows whatever breeze might show up, or the dogs hot in pursuit of, say, a 'possum, freedom to flow in either direction.

I was struck this morning by the similarity to the human brain, its construct as left-half (intellectual, computative, competitive and ego-driven) and right-half (creative, dreamy, intuitive, serene).  From the left half, we deal with worldly matters, come together with other beings, sometimes in peace and common purpose, sometimes in strife with accompanying pain, betrayal, loss.  Here is where our internal conflicts emerge, and here is where we find the least effective resources to handle those conflicts; the ego is happiest -- at least it is most comfortable -- in anger, and offers fear and grief to support its goals of supremacy.  Our left hemisphere tells us We're Right, They're Wrong and They must be fought vigorously, to the death if necessary.  Doors slam, access to the sleeping, resting, restorative, creative bedrooms is abruptly cut off.  Worst of all, the Dog Trot, where we can push that gunk out of the psycho/spiritual house, gets clogged up.  Dogs pile on each other, sluggish, inattentive, snarling.  God knows what new critters are threatening us with those dang dogs not taking care of business!

(I’m revisiting this draft from a year and a half ago; I haven’t figured out what to do about those dogs in the trot, but I’ll certainly let you know when I do.)

Jack Kerouac and me

(I have no idea what’s happened to the fonts, etc.  Could it be that Blogspot is no longer a useful, not to say FREE, forum?  Really hard to get consistency, but then I am not famous for my consistency, either, and all this is probably best explored in a whole ’nother blog.  End of excuses.) 

So, I recently re-posted on Facebook what I called the best thing Jack Kerouac wrote; for reference purposes, here it is:

The Dharma Bum

Concerning the message that was transmitted to me

under a pine tree in North Carolina

on a cold winter moonlit night.

It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry.

It’s all like a dream.

Everything is ecstasy, inside.

We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.

But in our true blissful essence of mind is known

that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

Close your eyes,

let your hands and nerve-ends drop,

stop breathing for 3 seconds,

listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world,

and you will remember the lesson you forgot,

which was taught in immense milky ways

of cloudy innumerable worlds

long ago and not even at all.

It is all one vast awakened thing.

I call it the golden eternity.

It is perfect.

We were never really born,

we will never really die.

It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea

of a personal self,

other selves,

many selves everywhere,

or one universal self.

Self is only an idea, a mortal idea.

That which passes through everything, is one thing.

It’s a dream already ended.

There’s nothing from staring at mountains months on end.

They never show any expression,

they are like empty space.

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away?

Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space,

which is the one universal essence of mind,

the one vast awakenerhood,

empty and awake,

will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

   —Jack Kerouac

Cool, huh?  So far in my explorations of dot-connecting, I haven’t exactly nailed what this means to someone momentarily trapped in Earth’s web.  However, here’s what came to me while I was sucking up coffee and trying to get inside the chakra system’s system:

***

7 Brains? Not that, either.

The chakras (I’m informed) operate thus: it’s really more a question of focus than “thought” or “process”.  Each chakra has a point of view, and one’s power center (and each of us operates for good or ill mostly from a single chakra’s emphasis) determines most of the personality.  As one grows in alignment, beginning at Chakra 1, up the body/mind, around the bend, up again at the next master level, etc., the intensity and acuity of the object/thought/action increases. 

I’m surmising that one is handed an issue, like an arithmetic problem in elementary school, and one processes it from the point of view of one’s power center.  The product of the process reveals the driving interests of the solver.  The sophistication of the solution depends on the alignment status of the solver; the higher the frequency (one’s frequency rises with the increase in alignment), the more sophisticated the solution, yet still from the point of view of the power center.  (Imagine Obama, for example, dealing unobstructed with Netenyahu about West Bank/Gaza, rather than this jerk.  Viz.: the level of sophistication of the solution.)

Failure or even weakness in one chakra cannot be compensated for by “sharpening” another chakra — as we are apt to do with our local 5 senses (the blind hear better, the deaf observe visually more clearly, etc.)  Each chakra has its unique job, and only through alignment can integration of these points of focus take place.  Energy travels ever upward, its path a spiral.

That’s today’s, or rather yesterday’s, aha.  

Divide by Three

My mother (the fount of almost all of my wisdom) told me that when I'm tired, I must divide everything by three: my obligations, my list of chores, my speed at addressing them, my sense of how perfect the job needs to be when I can comfortably leave it, and so forth.  Most of all, I must divide by three all my hurt feelings, all anger triggers, all fears, and forget about judgments entirely.

I've been more than tired lately; I've been experiencing vast, unquenchable weariness right down to my bones.  Sometimes I sleep well, usually I don't -- waking up around midnight for no particular reason, and again between three and four with horrible anxiety about old, very very old, dilemmas, or imagining new monsters that I have yet to challenge properly but need to face or they will kill me.

And then there's the weeping.  I am on the edge of tears pretty much all the time: I cry at commercials; I cry at movies I've already seen many time over; I cry when seeing animal pictures and short videos whether they're describing awful abuse or loving care.  I cry with a friend's sorrow or happiness, I cry from sheer exhaustion or frustration or anger or from the touch of a friend's hand on my shoulder.  

When I went into psychotherapy a million years ago during a nasty, bruising divorce, my therapist asked me the last time I had cried, and after some thought I guessed that it had been about ten years.  We both sat with that for a while in wonder; we all expect that kind of stoic denial from men, of course, but women are supposed to cry and God knows we have plenty of reason to.  I certainly did at the time (cold, controlling husband, four small children, panic and near psychotic break), and yet... and yet.

***

It seems that human beings think about things -- a lot -- and then they feel about things, reluctantly or even refusing to acknowledge said feelings all the while.  Overthinking is a popular topic for discussion and contemplation these days, and like multitasking it is another place for the devil to lurk.  Overthinking is exhausting (I know a lot about that) and very quickly begins to loop back in on itself, tangling up with various bromides leftover from stuffy collegiate philosophy courses, and women's magazines leafed through while a child's eyebrow is being sewn up.  There just isn't time nor place to wail and chew scenery when your children are trying to kill each other or your boss is insisting on a ridiculous deadline for a pointless report; let's set the feelings aside and just get the goddamned job done.  

Next thing you know it's ten years later and your emotional warehouse is either empty and echoing or so jammed up with unexpressed anger/sorrow/pain/frustration that it threatens to explode.

Or spring an inexorable leak.

***

My current psychotherapy must be working -- there's a slow leak in my front tire (sorry about the switch in metaphors; some days....).  Maybe each of us is allotted a particular number of tears in a lifetime, or possibly a particular number of occasions of losing it entirely (screaming, shrieking, wailing, punching couch, taking a hammer to the front lawn -- I had a friend who resorted to that; she claimed it was very successful).  Conversely, perhaps we each get a particular number of occasions of catatonia: absolutely unable to move, to lift a leg by the thigh and swing it over the side of the bed, then the other, and then to contemplate actually standing upright on both legs.  Impossible.  

I am much closer to the end of my life than to its beginning, so I'm running out of time to use up my allotments of emotional release.  

If I have to pick, I guess I'll take the slow leak, even though it is alarming to some if they see me in, say, the grocery store, or pausing at a stoplight.  They're just going to have to deal with it, because I don't think I can; I've already divided my feelings by three, while carefully avoiding overthinking (unless this blog is exactly that, in which case I've at least dumped the more annoying contents of my left brain).

So, like Paul Simon in "America", I'm just trying to get some rest.  When I can't, I'll divide by three, my darling; divide by three.  

This year's No, Duh!

At the beginning and at the end of my reproductive years, when my hormones were most active, most troublesome, most unpredictable, least helpful to my daily life, I had migraine headaches.  I don't remember the course or treatment of them at puberty -- except that my mother was so concerned that she insisted I be given an EEG.  I don't know the results of it, but I do distinctly remember the excruciating pain, the degree of which -- other than in childbirth -- I did not experience again until menopause.

Those latter migraines, which I endured almost weekly for three or four years, were simply dreadful.  Each lasted exactly 56 hours, during which I puked -- or wanted to puke -- constantly whenever awake.  I was told that my color was almost a cartoonish green, except for brilliant yellow around my eyes.  The pain was hollow yet penetrating, circling around my right eye/temple/ear/TMJ.  It was only close to the end of the four year siege that a drug was released that relieved the worst of the symptoms; it was of course hideously expensive, and those were the days when I simply could not afford health insurance, much less the individual injection packages which cost $40 apiece.  (In 2023 dollars, that's $88, or $350/month.  Impossible for someone barely making the rent of a California house.)  For the period during which I was unemployed, two of my sons paid for the drugs.  I'm not ashamed to say that I begged for it.  Had either of them actually witnessed one of my attacks, I wouldn't have had to beg.

At some point, I taught myself to leave my body for a few hours at a time, just to get some rest and a brief reprieve.  It was a useful trick, and one which I can invoke to this day, should circumstances require it, which they don't very often.  Nothing -- nothing at all -- since then has approached the extent of the agony of those migraines.

The frequency of the attacks decreased over time, down to once a month or so.   At the same time, living in California had become entirely unaffordable, and we decided to leave it, moving to Atlanta.  The reasons we did so, while possibly capricious, seemed reasonable at the time: the definitive earthquake (Loma Prieta) had rattled us down to the soles of our poorly shod feet; the children were gone into what we could technically call their adulthoods; the love of my life had finally behaved like the rat he had always wanted to be and left the household; jobs were hard to find; Mary's true professional love Robert Shaw was still alive and directing the Atlanta Symphony; I had some odds and ends (mostly odds) to clear up with my Deep Southern heritage; and living was distinctly cheaper  -- at that time -- in the greater Atlanta area.

We packed up all our worldly possessions into a huge rented truck whom we named Rocinante (thank you, John Steinbeck and Miguel de Cervantes), herded two cats and one dying dog into an un-air conditioned Honda (who needs air conditioning in a car in Northern California? nobody, that's who -- MY GOD what awaited our naïve little hearts in the Deep South, indeed in the Midwest leg as well) and took off on a harrowing, high-summer eight day odyssey across the country.

That trip deserves its own blog chapter; somewhere in the detritus of my previous writing stabs, using one of my old computers there's the beginnings of one.  If/when I can find it, I intend to edit it within an inch of its life and post it here; it's a story every bit as peculiar and episodic as those of the Ancients.  It deserves better treatment.  Suffice it to say that it was a hellish experience, but clearly, and in more ways than this one, AFOG.  (See: Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth.)

One of those hellish days greeted me at six in the morning with the familiar and dreaded eye-stabbing precursor of what would be a good old-fashioned migraine.  Terrible timing.  We had not an extra penny to spend on the truck sitting idle of two and a half days, much less pay for those days in a motel -- handy for puking but certainly not otherwise commodious; I could hardly go through with my familiar body-leaving trick while driving a massive truck across country (I think it was at the time godforsaken Kansas); and of course I had none of the drugs that had kept the worst symptoms of the headaches at bay.  (It had been a couple of months without an attack, and I thought they were over.  Besides, the begging on my aging knees to my haughty sons was wearing on me, so I decided to go without.  This is just one of my many, many poor decisions in those times.)

**

Obviously I made it through that day because I needed to.  Perhaps I discovered a different way to leave my body: to separate myself, my reasonable ego, from the pain, and get in the truck, drive it all day, check in to the next motel, etc.  I have no memory whatsoever of that Day One of Migraine; I don't know Who or What was in charge, but the "I" that I know, or thought I knew, definitely was not.

I do know that "I" started to return to the scene when I pulled my little old Mac (you know the one: It was a character in Berke Breathed's comic strip "Bloom County"; look it up) out of the car, put it on the desk in the motel, plugged it into the phone line (remember those?) and started typing.  I didn't go to bed and alternately puke and moan, or even leave my body in the way I usually did at such times.  It's rather that I went INTO my body, past the pain ("Excuse me, Monster Migraine, but I'm going to take care of some business here....") and into whatever mode it is that allows me to write, to set down my thoughts, occasionally say something brilliant, or report from a channelled Source.  (Yes, Source is yet another blog chapter, but not now, I'm Concentrating!)

By the time I had finished writing -- I don't know what I wrote, can't find it, don't know how I knew it was finished -- my migraine had relented.  I didn't need to puke, I was not in unbearable pain.  I did need to go to bed, and soon -- I was exhausted from whatever wrestling had taken place in my Self -- and so I did.  I woke up the next morning fairly normal, and proceeded with the exercise of getting us across the country.

I wrote myself out of hell.  And now, today, twenty-eight years and three months later, it's a massive No, duh!  Exactly who was running my show is the question.  Margaret Mead said that anthropology, all human existence on the survival level, has to answer only two questions: 1 -- How much do you love me? and 2 -- Who's in charge?  I have to love Me first and foremost, and I'm in charge insofar as whether I listen to (and obey) the shrieking and whining of my body, which is merely doing what its timetable tells it to, or get out of its way and live my Real Life.  

Writing is Real Life, for me.  For Mary, Music is Real Life.  For a couple of dear friends, spiritual children of mine, Art is Real Life.  See what I'm getting at?  JULIA PRESCOTT CRESSWELL (this is my mother's voice, making itself clear and present) Do you see what YOU are getting at?

I think I do.  I think I'm on to something.  

***

Here's a start:  Ego is what has been blocking my writing -- Ego is not at all interested in art, all Ego wants is control, and is willing to sacrifice its own vehicle to keep it.  Hell, the Ego of the Collective Unconscious is ready to sacrifice the planet and everything in it to keep that control.

The Perfection of Victimhood

 If you’re determined to be a victim, then go for it — go all the way to the end of the track, i.e.:

• Ask for help, and accept it when it comes, but abandon it as insufficient as soon as you can.
• Be fully transparent, expose your psychological/emotional pain right alongside and equal to your physical discomfort.
• Discuss all of it at great length, ignore all efforts to change the subject.
• If you begin to lose some of your audience, increase your efforts, go into greater detail. Whine a little.
• Say, “Yes, but…,” to all your would-be rescuers, until they all give up in frustration.
• Begin all over again with new would-be rescuers.  They abound in this world.

All of my years have been formative: Mississippi

 I'm strolling my way through Ann Patchett's latest "These Precious Days", pausing at this or that immutable truth, or inviting idea, or gazing fondly at some of our shared landscapes.  The Deep South is one of those landscapes, and while I spent three of my four high school years there, and then eight of my post-middle age, that storied and story-telling culture is firmly but ineffably implanted in the middle of my bones.  It does that, the Gothic South: it sneaks in there, implants itself, and never leaves, like one's elderly maiden aunt.

Patchett's husband Karl VanDevender was born and raised in Meridian, Mississippi, and I can vaguely remember spending endless and lazy, indulgent summer days at the local country club swimming pool with either him or maybe it was his brother.  He could execute complicated dives, I recall, and he was of course Netherlander blond, getting blonder, increasingly tinted with chlorine green over the summer months, like me.  We were never part of the same crowd, but the name was odd enough in that part of the country that it, and its bearers, stick in my memory.  

Just seeing Patchett write a scene set in Meridian jerks me back to an adolescence fraught, as are everybody's, with drama and longing and rage and appalling risk-taking.  I imagined myself a rebel in the land of The Rebel: it was, and continues to be upside down, inside out, and horribly lonely.  For a world of Rebels, there was remarkably little room for a singular rebel, and I was barely tolerated, but always the subject of fascination -- maybe like an albino rhino in a zoo.  I am sure I scared the living daylights out of the gentler Rebels, while I intrigued the more socially and intellectually curious of them.  The nigger-knocking, red-neck underclass just watched me from a distance; they left me alone (except for one brief interlude where I dated one of their second-tier leaders, probably just to get my father's attention -- as I am wont to say, I think I'm still grounded for it).  

Where do you put the relief?

 It seems that my long-estranged daughter has been diagnosed with cancer; I can tell because -- although one of them alluded to it in a recent Facebook post (he never has been able to keep his mouth completely shut, that one) -- neither of her brothers who still communicate with me will answer my queries for clarification.

I say to them that I need to know these things, whatever the daughter's feelings about it.  After three days, I'm no longer sure I do.  If I am to respect her demands for complete disconnection, then, whether I need it or not, I'm not going to get it.  If I found out any details, what would/could I do about it?  

Certainly she would find no comfort in a visit, or even a phone call/email/text from me.  It would be painful for me in any case because of overt rejection and God knows what kind of a scene.  (All my kids are drama-queens; I can't imagine where they get it.)  (A) 

   (B), though I am a very competent healer, I know she would reject all of my efforts in that direction.  (I do know that healing operates from any distance, with or without the consent of the wounded, but there is a particular etiquette to it that I am honor-bound to obey: I.e., stay out of other people's heads and hearts unless invited in.)  

    Further (C), it's not kind of me to observe the implicit requirement of putting third parties -- the brothers -- in the middle of a transaction; no matter how they got there, either by way of their sister or the "helpfulness" of the brothers themselves, it's just not psychologically healthy to be, or to use, go-betweens.  It might relieve some pressure on the primary and tertiary, but it's cowardly and exploitative, and I can't justify participating in it myself.

I have only recently become detached enough not to moo at the thought of this truncation.  There is yet another brother (how COULD I have consented to so many children?) who long ago divested himself of connection with me, and even to a certain extent from his siblings.  (Though the rejection of me was not quite so pure that he would not take free room and board for an Atlanta layover on his way home from St. Barts, or relatively free use of my family's vacation house in Martha's Vineyard.  Mustn't be snarky, but there it is.)  I accept and even hardly recall that son's rejection; it might be personal, it might not be, but it's fruitless to beat that particular dead horse.  I'm in the process of putting the estrangement by my daughter pretty much in the same tidy storage box, resting on the very bottom of the garage shelving.  Almost got it shoved in, when this possible life-threatening diagnosis came up, and now that the damned box has been reopened, I find myself picking through the foxed and tear-stained contents all over again.

Then there's the relief.  I'm beginning to think I never should have had children in the first place; I wasn't very good at it (just ask them), though I did what the essential contract with their father laid out:  I was, in turn, the brood mare, then the wet-nurse, then the governess, all the while imperfectly maintaining the house and household while he went on the road.  With his (reluctant) help, I got them all through school and bachelor's degrees; none of them has been arrested (well, detained anyway), none does harmful drugs, all support themselves, for the most part all have what they want from life.  I don't take much credit, but I don't deserve much blame for their failures either.  Besides, passing the age of thirty means one has to take responsibility for the state one is in; parents are irrelevant unless they actively enable one's infantilism.  God knows I haven't done that.

So there is within me a flicker of relief; this is the good part of estrangement: I don't have to fret and pace in sleepless worry.  I don't have to monitor symptoms, wading through insurance papers; I don't have to comfort, spoon-feed and change diapers on the invalid.  There's that.  What a relief!  I can live my own life.

Time Does It to Matter

Time Does It to Matter

I.

A friend of mine has done a great deal of trance-channelling, most often of a disincarnate being (one who has never been incarnated).   He/It/They call themselves Ariel, Great Lion of God, and we’ve been in touch with them for several decades, learning a lot about consciousness and spirituality in general, and a whole lot more in specifics. (As you can imagine one would with a direct line to, well, God, really; I mean what would YOU ask if you were on that line?  Over the last 35 years of baffling, chaotic life on this planet?)

The information we’ve gathered is probably the subject of a book, or several books, if I weren’t so lazy/blocked/overinformed/intimidated, etc.  What brings me to this forum now is what I just found out about time.  Or Time.  And Space.  And Expectations.  And Physical Matter.

Once in California, my friend decided to channel in a public place — the beach — without telling anybody, just so Ariel could experience a day at the beach asitwere.  (In those days, Ariel was curious about conscious life in a body, and occasionally asked us to show him around.)  We took my dog Bette, and a blanket, and were sitting there sunning ourselves, when I suggested that Ariel take a run along the shore to see what that felt like.  He agreed, jumped to his feet and took off.  The dog automatically followed, uncharacteristically NOT coursing back and forth in the path of the human (?) runner, just staying alongside.  (The dog was a German Shepherd — it’s what they DO: they take care of a situation.)  I sat still, holding the Ground, trying to be patient and not worry.  After about fifteen minutes, they both returned, Bette gasping and panting, Ariel not winded in the slightest.  He spoke normally, said he enjoyed the run and would probably like to do a lot of it if he/they/it had its own body.  I put a mental bookmark in the incident, told my friend about it when she came back to the body.  We said to ourselves, “Hm,” and went on with life.  We were used to puzzling things happening around and about this odd endeavor.

II.

Fast forward to September 2021:  Today as I was reluctantly doing my daily pedal on my stationary bike, I was listening to a podcast from RadioLab entitled “In the Running”.   The podcast tells the story of a woman who is phenomenally successful at “ultra running”, which is foot races in excess, FAR excess, of mere marathons: fifty miles, a hundred miles, cross-country running in exotic terrain, in absurdly challenging weather.  

This woman, whose name is Diane Van Deren, had been subject to severe grand mal seizures all her life, probably because of one massive seizure she had had as an infant.  Over her life, her seizures increased in frequency and intensity and she found after years of various treatments short of surgery, that one thing that could interrupt a seizure was throwing on her running shoes and literally heading for the hills — the foothills of the Rockies behind her house.  She would experience an aura, foretelling a seizure, and for quite a while it was enough warning to give her time to get the shoes on and head out; she could outrun her seizures.  She would return home unscathed, to the great relief of her family.

Eventually, the length of the auras shortened to the point where Diane didn’t have time to get out on the run, and once again her seizures came back with a vengeance: they were MORE frequent, MORE intense.  She taught her three children how to drive very early in their lives, in case Mommy had a seizure while she was driving; her parents and husband and friends tried to make sure she was accompanied everywhere she went, whatever she was doing, so she could be taken care of while she was seizing.  

It was an awful way to live, and her medical team said it was probably time to investigate surgery.  Clearly one part of her brain was malfunctioning, and they might be able to remove it and possibly give Diane a life without seizures; they just didn’t know where in her brain the dead or injured segment resided.  To establish that, she agreed to be hospitalized and wired up (sixty-four different electrodes and their particular wires were glued to her head), with a video camera on her 24/7, and a medic with her throughout.  Her seizures were frequent enough that they were all pretty sure they could get a record of a seizure within a day or two.  Sure enough, they got it. (There’s an audio of that seizure with the interviewer narrating the video part — it’s pretty gruesome.)  And they found the defective part of the brain; it was in (as I recall from one listening) the rear right side, in the temporal lobe.  (I’m not sure of the details of where and what in all this; I just remember that the senses of time and place were what was on the table.)

Then came the decision to do the surgery or not; the risks are evident, but Diane was fed up with her life as it had been and told them to go ahead, she was happy, even, to take the risks, possibly die in the attempt to get relief from the seizures.

When they opened up her skull, the offending segment of the brain was obvious: it was a kiwi- or golfball-sized area, a sickly gray color.  What is already known about that part of the brain (among other things) is that it is where memory and sense of time (temporal cognition) reside; they had no idea whether or how much those functions would be affected if they removed such a large piece of Diane’s brain.  With her advance permission to take it out no matter what, the surgeons removed it and hoped for the best.  

Diane’s recovery was also pretty gruesome: she had debilitating headaches for days and days, plus the usual aftereffects of such dramatic surgery.  She did NOT, however, experience any more seizures; not in the subsequent days, weeks or months, not one.  What she found she had lost was, increasingly, her short-term memory, and an allegiance to time.  She would be late picking up the kids from school, or even remembering that they needed picking up.  She could see someone in the morning, see that person later in the day and not even remember who it was, or that they had met a few hours earlier.

She took up running again; she had missed it, and she found she could win just about any race she entered.  It didn’t matter how long the race was, the nature of the terrain it covered, not even the prevailing weather.  (One race in Canada, through the Yukon, started when the temperature was forty-three degrees below zero; her running shoes froze on her feet.)  She won them all.

The RadioLab interviewer asked her why she was so successful, what was it that gave her the advantage over the other runners?  She replied that it was probably that she had no sense of time or distance; she had lost the ability to read a map, for example.  She often got lost in a race because of it: she carried with her a pink ribbon, and when the trail forked and she had a choice of which path to take, she’d leave the ribbon at the fork, and go ahead in one arbitrary direction.  Either one.  If after a couple of hours (!) of running, she felt she had taken the wrong fork, she’d turn around and go back to the pink ribbon, pick it up, and go off on the road not taken, having added several hours to her own private race.  And winning it.

As for her loss of temporal sense, while racing she lived entirely in the moment, with no idea whatsoever of where she was in the race, or how tired her body SHOULD be feeling.  She thinks that the psychological difference is the entire handicap.  She also doesn’t seem to care if she wins or not; since there was no particular effort in the execution, then there isn’t any particular sense of triumph.  Or failure if she should lose, which she doesn’t.

****

I’ve drawn some tentative conclusions from these two tales:  

1. Time and Space really do a number on our idea of the physical world we live and strive in. 
2. We are barely able to conceive of Time and Space beyond our clocks and maps; they are, we’re told, the same thing, in the cosmic scheme, but we can begin to grok it with examples like these. 
3. We really do THINK ourselves into and out of success and failure, merely by our expectations.
4. It is likely that the release of the grip of our IDEA that Time/Space limits our existence, our physical competence is due to Grace.
5. Grace, said the poet Denise Levertov, is easy:

The Avowal

As swimmers dare 

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them,

so would I learn to attain

freefall, and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

The beginning of the end

Today Juneteenth is a federally mandated holiday, as well it should be.  What a long, horrid road we still have to travel in its honor and its shame.  

More personally, it is the birthday of my third child; this year it marks his fifty-second birthday and the twelfth anniversary of my official and universally applauded expungement from the family.  My daughter Sarah, my youngest, had been on a crusade for that accomplishment for several years, and for Justin's fortieth birthday surprise, she huddled with Ann, Justin's wife (another person who actively has disliked me from the first), and set up a gathering of the entire family, including spouses and children and good old friends, everybody they could think of, with the notable exception of the birthday boy's mother.  By my count, close to thirty people traveled from far and wide for this occasion.  

I never knew what hit me; I didn't even know it was happening until I stumbled over it in a Facebook post by my eldest Billy (never known for keeping his mouth shut) about how thrilled he was to be nestled in the arms of his entire family again, on such a momentous occasion etc etc etc.

Almost entire, that is.  Except for the other person who had been in the room when Justin was born, i.e., I.

Oh, my anguish, tears, fury, hastily written accusatory emails.  Months, years spent in impotent rage, agony at the effrontery.  Good God, I didn't think I'd survive it.  

Today, today, finally, today, the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, I am grateful.  Before today, I haven't realized the full import of my exile, which is that I am declared free from guilt.  Of course, as a mother I was flawed in many ways, and tried very hard -- as hard as I could -- to raise my kids in a horribly turbulent time for myself and for the world in general.  Slightly crazy Sarah blames me for pretty much everything, and she is free to do that; she is free to do whatever she has to, in order to deny responsibility for her own failures at achieving perfection.  Justin is free to do as he will do.  So is angry, self-absorbed Billy.  So is isolate Andy, wherever he is.

And so am I.  Absolutely free.  What has been the most difficult part of freedom has been believing it.  I should not have had children in the first place; motherhood is a lousy vocation for anybody, but for someone who is missing the nurturing gene; missing the gene for admiring everything every child does, no matter how silly, inept, ugly, doomed, self-serving; as well the gene for absorbing without complaint every wound inflicted on her; and probably missing the gene of offering unconditional love to the little monsters, it is a nightmare.  Ask any mother, and listen to her lie in her teeth, before she finally admits, yeah: Motherhood Blows Chunks.

Sure, I miss the company of my kids: they're smart and funny, and good company for those upon whom they do not spit.  On the other hand, I have a lot of smart and funny friends, and they don't spit on me!  They love me, they enjoy MY company, and they tell me so, mirabile dictu.  

My Juneteenth coincides with that of Black Americans: it's not over, of course, and the repercussions of the abuse continue to vibrate on the soul, but I take possession of my freedom today, and happily accept my new job: believing it and operating from it.  I recommend it.  Rejoice, y'all.  Let the kids fuck up their own lives, and try not to gloat -- that's just not worthy of our liberated selves. 

Lost Nerve III

And then, when it's all just too much to deal with alone....

Lost Last Nerve, II

II

Well, that didn't take long.  In dreams, as you probably know, when you turn and face a demon that's been chasing you, it immediately diminishes in size and threat, and that's that.  Same thing here: I FACED FEAR, wrestled with it for a day or so and realized after a bit of a struggle that it was not a big deal at all.  Fear is just something I don't have much experience with, it was only frightening because it was unfamiliar.  As I wrestled, however, I very quickly got to know a lot about it.  Here's what I learned:

1. Yeah yeah yeah, one should face one's demons (see paragraph above), but that doesn't necessarily mean that demons are always something to be conquered, exactly.  It was just my warrior upbringing that formed my context of how to deal with unknown, vaguely or even overtly threatening things: challenge them, and take them down; the Marine Corps instills in its recruits the mantra "Engage the enemy with overwhelming force and take away its will to fight."  So that's what I've always done.  Sometimes just facing them, as in the flight dreams, will do the trick; sometimes it requires a little bit of wrestling to get the point across mostly to oneself, that battle is not the only way to survive a contest.  But, it's true: it begins and only ends with facing the demon.
2. A spiritual mentor once told me that it's really a four-step process, neutralizing demons: a) name it; b) know it; c) accept it; and d) go on.  Here we have big bad Fear, that's its name.  I got to know it by sharing sweat and effortful wrestling with it -- it's not all that tough, but it is resilient and only endures if it is denied.  Ignore it and it is always just at the edge of your peripheral vision, snapping and snarling, eating away your courage and resolve.
3. Know it: know its properties, its power, its ratio of contagion, how it operates, how it can be used for temporal power.  Also know its limitations,  its weak spots.  And know its usefulness.  It's not as if Fear isn't a rational and reasonable response to life in this world; there are, God knows, plenty of things to be afraid of, and if one is a woman, factor that by millions.  Fear is everywhere, and it should be.  It does not, however, deserve to run anyone's life; if it is accepted as reasonable, rational, understandable, then it is acceptable in its existence.  It's the most basic requisite to living in a world of sabre-toothed tigers, or a church full of Inquisitors, or uncontrolled Republicans.  It's first chakra stuff: take care of the body first and foremost.  Acknowledge it as it passes, and it always does, and it always will.  It's part of life.  Like cockroaches and maggots, which do serve a useful purpose at the same basic level.
4. Accept it, that's the ticket.  It won't go away; there will always be things that go bump in the night, ghosts in the closet and under your bed, things your friends have become frightened of that in turn, because of your desire to sympathize, even empathize, you take on as frightening to yourself.  God knows the press is trying to scare you: it makes you hunger for more and more scary stuff in the news, and it's really trying to scare you into following its own agenda, which these days is mostly to vote Republicans into/out of office.  Not a noble agenda, but one we can understand; we just have to remember that there IS an agenda in the press.  There is always an agenda in fear-mongering, and once we find out what it is, it has no more power over us.  See how this works?

So let's all just get a grip here; we get scared by what's unknowable right now.  We are scared of what could happen, we can't know what will happen, so we are hard-wired to imagine the worst so that we won't be disappointed when the best doesn't happen.  Well, here's something that Marco Place told me twenty-five years ago that has saved me a lot of anxiety and grief:

The best always happens.  It may not LOOK like the best at first blush, but it is -- it is the best for the greatest number, and it is the best that could happen to you.  You don't have to like it right now, but it is
For.
The.
Best.
Always.

The Lost Last Nerve I & II

Part I

Last fall I had a number of heart attacks, none of which I remember (they all happened within twenty-four hours, during which time I was sedated to the point of induced coma).  Once I was stabilized a defibrillator was implanted, all sorts of drugs were prescribed for me, I went to rehab for a couple of weeks and then was sent home a couple of days before Thanksgiving.  (Thank GOD my stay in the rehab facility was well over before Covid-19 hit.)  I happily pursued all the regimens recommended by my cardio team, and never for a minute thought I wouldn't recover, get back to my old self in a matter of months.  The damage to my heart was minimal, and the overriding atrial fibrillation was nicely controlled by the quarter-sized machine sitting just below my left clavicle.  Life was good; I was a survivor; I had not suffered conscious trauma so I was tough and ready to do whatever it took to get better; I was a courageous woman, had always been so.  Nothing was too frightening to contemplate, no denial necessary.  Hear me roar.

My medical team stood by and watched me canter through PT and the steady, incremental resumption of my previous activities.  When I insisted to them that I felt just fine, fine, they all agreed I must be fine, fine, and that I must nevertheless keep my expectations low, not be impatient for full physical and psychological restoration.  Impatient?  I?  Feh; purely realistic, I, and knowing what I know about mind/body/spirit (a great deal, actually), I persisted in my optimistic outlook.  Fear is the great demotivator, we all know that, and since I had no discernible PTSD from the heart event(s), then fear had no part in my day to day activity.  It never does.

Feeling so good, so psychologically untouched by recent trauma, I decided to experiment with psilocybin.  I had read (twice) Michael Pollan's book "How To Change Your Mind", and been mightily impressed by his investigations.  The revelations I picked up from it were that psilocybin was a work-around of the ego: among many other effects, it cancelled the ego's judgmental intrusions into the creative process, and, blocked for most of my life, I hungered for some solution to my damnable internal editor.

NOTE: I have written before in this forum how crippling is the Ego/Editor to me; it stops me in my tracks from ever going near a blank screen/sheet of paper, from writing truthful and engaging observations of life and love that I am constantly ruminating on in my meditative moments.  I know I have a great deal to say, an intriguing way of saying it, all I have to do is do it.  But it's risky, says Ego, and you could hurt people if you write truthful things about them, and next thing you know, you'll be abandoned by your closest and most cherished connections.  Besides, your writing isn't all that great to begin with; look at all the editing I have to do to make it logical and interesting!

So I contacted a friend with connections to the world of entheogens in her study of Native American rituals of shamanism and other spiritual seekings.  She agreed to find me some guaranteed-not-to-hurt-me psilocybin, research the dosage, and to "hold my space for me" while I took a little trip with it.  I never did LSD or 'shrooms when it was popular ( at the time hallucinogens were easily available, I had young children and not much money and was working daily with some dangerous woodworking machinery), but had smoked a little dope, gone through a cocaine phase until it proved too costly, and so wasn't particularly worried about the effects of The Next Step in drug research.

My psilocybin experience was not successful, to say the least.  For one thing, it was contaminated by a simultaneous case of food poisoning from a take-out carton of Hungarian mushroom soup -- oh the irony -- and any of the shamanic puking I might have necessarily endured was enhanced by a factor of I don't know how much.  In between puking episodes (all night long) I was visited by very unsettling nightmares, most of them set in Gothic cathedrals, and hallucinations I don't even remember except to know they were dreadful.  My friend commented on how vigorously the ego resists being side-lined, and I may have told her to fuck off.  I was shaken to my boots overall, and stayed that way for days.  Maybe weeks.  Maybe still am.

God and my impulsive nature had found a way to inject the missing factor of fear in my growth process.  I had successfully found fear, the erosion of my natural built-in courage, a loss of nerve.  I quickly developed a tentative approach to all things new, abandoning my usual sangfroid anything life- and world-altering (such as a global pandemic).

In these recent trying times, I have even felt near to throwing an all-out, all-in nutty, a hissy, whatever one wants to call hysteria. Yes, I.  I have always been if not stoic, then certainly the adult in the room, the let's-all-just-take-a-breath director.  My mother was the descendant of a pair of naval officers, admirals, both of whom earned a number of decorations for valor, skill, cool temperament.  My father was a Marine general, for God's sake, a survivor and Navy Cross recipient after the Battle for Guadalcanal.  Witnessed first hand, his PTSD rages were frightening, a cautionary tale against releasing the demons within.

The other two models in my childhood household were my two older sisters, the elder of which was a very beautiful (if Rubenesque) princess who seemed always to be on the edge of either tears or black rage, and nobody wanted to get near those reactions, so we all agreed to keep calm for the sake of overall peace.  I had not the slightest wish to follow her example: the attention she got seemed to me not worth the isolation (and contempt) the rest of the family imposed on her.  My other sister -- the Middle Child (MC) -- was the Iago to the eldest's less than noble Othello.  A brilliant intellect trapped in a small, bony, inept and unattractive body, MC was outraged that I existed at all, and perpetually seeking revenge on the eldest for her beauty and manipulative behaviors.  MC was sneaky, too smart for her own good, and there were times when my mother truly felt MC was The Bad Seed, irredeemably, psychotically murderous.  She may have been.  But she never made a scene, and even though she was riddled with fear every day of her life, she dared not reveal it in the house of a flag officer of the U. S. Marine Corps.

We weren't allowed expressions of grief either; that part of the military culture is almost entirely practical.  In a formal battle of any kind, the combatant just can't afford to grieve the loss of any of his fellows: it would sap his energy and his courage, take up valuable time when the unit (or ship) could be seeking and asserting its advantage, and most importantly it would never end.  (Besides, if combatants cry, it might make their officers cry, and then whatever would we do?)  So, no mourning either, and there was always something to mourn: another household move to a new posting; giving up hastily made but deeply held friendships; death of a pet; and worst of all, the death of a Marine or sailor we all loved dearly.  Move on, never mind, let it go.  Worry about it later.  (Never was a later.)

Ticking off the boxes of the Three Great Disconnectors, that only leaves anger as an expressible emotion.  That's all we had.  I got really good at it; when something scares me not a nanosecond goes by that I don't flip it to anger.  Aside from my physical size, strength and a degree of agility, I am capable of very nasty, penetrating sharpness of tongue, having studied carefully all my family models -- a little Southern Gothic acidity from my father, some quick and withering wit of my Anglophile mother, the threat or actual release of wild rages from my elder sister, and stooping to the vilest scorn and sarcasm of MC.  At some point (probably in my adolescence) I let it all go at someone, and the reaction to it was so horrible that it scared ME.  I have buried the incident itself so deeply in my psyche that I don't remember it.  I only remember horribly wounding someone, someone defenseless, someone certainly undeserving of such venom. The possibility of ever again inflicting that kind of pain has inhibited me ever since.  Choke it off; push it down; sublimate it.

I can't help but mourn, but I don't express it, ever.  There are gallons and bushels and tons of it sloshing around my midsection, and I am granted weeper movies and some commercials and a few books that will allow a scattering of quiet tears, but the great mooings that are harbored within just aren't allowed up.  They come downstairs at bedtime for a goodnight kiss, but that's it: spit spot off to bed, now.  Too scary to indulge for long.

Anger I'm good at, and it doesn't scare me.

But fear?  FEAR?  Well, let's explore that a little.  Stay tuned.  Watch this space.  Shouldn't be long now; we approach the beast.

*****

Grounding the Zaps

One of the things we are is an electrical system; if we were houses, we'd have white wires strung through holes drilled in our studs, connected at various points for diversion to various outlets, which then would power such intricacies as coffee pots, computers, perhaps old-fashioned vibrators.  Our nervous systems perform pretty much like those wires, conducting our physical, mental or psychic impulses to the appropriate activator, walking to the garage for a new roll of paper towels, kicking the car's tires while we're there, pouring soup from a can into a pot, just generally getting our business done, or whiling away our free time in the pursuit of happiness or at least quelling boredom.

Continuing the metaphor, if we were houses, we'd have our electrical power strung in from the gods in the form of PG&E or ConEd or some such, through a box that counts its increments and contains it, but before it does either of those things, it Grounds the Power.  If it didn't, we'd blow up all of our favorite devices, and, of course, ourselves.  Ungrounded electricity is pretty wild and woolly, searching everywhere (like lightning) for some ground but in such a way that when it finds what it's looking for, it blows it up or burns it down.  (There's a second lovely metaphor here, all about being careful what we wish for, self-destruction, sabotaging relationships and so forth, but that's a whole 'nother blog, isn't it?)

Now we know perfectly well what it feels like to be an ungrounded yet sensate creature: dizzy, a little frantic, clumsy, afflicted with free-floating anxiety, fretful, snappish, almost seasick, right?  It's not pleasant, and it absolutely doesn't serve the creative or even the productive impulse.  Everything starts with being well grounded, and if we're not, nothing gets done and people start avoiding us; we'd avoid ourselves if we could, in fact that's what we're trying to do because lack of ground erodes or obliterates any self-esteem we might have built up in our solid states, and we just don't like ourselves much at all.  So, well, ick.... Gotta get grounded.

I was born lucky in this respect, because I am almost always grounded.  I am so grounded that it is difficult, even painful, for me to elevate my thoughts, my spirits, my attitude; my default psychic tripwire is depression, and it frightens me more than I care to admit.  For this reason, I really can't say from my own experience how to GET ground when none seems available.  I do know from observation, however, and I've been told by my more lofty-minded or giddier friends that the very first thing to do when the ground is slipping away is to stop.

JUST STOP.  That increasingly mindless, hamster-wheel racing of the left brain is the most common form of giving up the ground, and there's no way we're going to get back to ground if the sound of our own wheels is exactly what's making us crazy.  (Thank you, Jackson Browne and Glen Frey -- clearly they knew what I'm talking about.)  When we finally grind to a halt, we can begin to hear and see again; life stops whipping past us in that frightening, colorless blur, and things clear up a bit.  We can even feel our own breath, which is where everything lives.

BREATHE.  In, out, repeat.  We're doing it anyway, so we might as well be deliberate about it, and count it.  I found a trick (on the old Oprah show, where a surprising number of enlightening processes were revealed to anybody paying attention) about breathing, and that is to count out a series of breaths, like so: 

• First, breathe in to a count of four: this is distinctly not a deep breath, it's a short one, but it brings in enough oxygen to sustain us for the rest of the exercise.  
• Second, hold that short breath for a count of seven: holding the air still and quiet allows it to collect from within our system all manner of toxic gases that our fearful, angry, frenetic pace has created.  (There are always biological consequences to crazy thoughts and acts, and this is one of them.)
• Third, breathe out slowly and evenly to a count of eight; on eight, give a little puff to expel that last bit of the air: breathing out more than we breathed in at the beginning gets rid of all those toxins, ridding the system of the remaining yuck that crazed us in the first place.
• Fourth, repeat those three steps four times, to steady and cleanse the system.
• Fifth, just breathe.  Breathe normally, evenly, and listen to its rhythm.  Pay it very close attention for just a few minutes, and thereby find some peace.  

My father, one of the funniest people I've ever known, would yell, "I just want a little goddamned peace around here!"  Obviously, he didn't get it with this tactic, but he craved it, as did we all, living with old Mt. Vesuvius as we did, as do we all today in this time of madness.  Grounding brings us peace, even if only for a little while, and when we know it and claim it, we can start over, yes?

Of course yes.

Falling 2018

For those of you new to my blog page, a word about the title “Angel on Bulldozer”: The phrase comes from an old acquaintance, standing next to me in a painful rehearsal of a tiresome Respighi choral piece.  Mary Badarak was conducting, and doing her damnedest to extract a light, descantic sound from the sopranos, asking them to sing like angels; my friend, an alto channeling her whole section, said, “Yeah, angels on bulldozers.”  Big laugh, from everybody, even including a couple of sopranos, and it really stuck with me.  It’s rather how I think of myself — I have good intentions always, but on occasion am apt to be heavy handed.  (I’m so sorry for that, my dears; all I can say is that I’m working on it really hard.)

Several years ago I wrote a blog that I thought my friend and brother Keith Fox would enjoy, and so sent him a link to it.  Later I thought he might not know who authored it, and so I emailed him asking if he knew the Angel-on-Bulldozer was I, and he replied, “Who else COULD it be?”  So, well, there we have it.  Along with a pensive Hobbes the tiger as my Facebook portrait, I have not yet come up with a better self-characterization.

*****

Falling 2018

I’m prone to emotional sagging in autumn, exhibiting symptoms that range from ennui (dragging around, sighing heavily, snapping at my nearest and dearest for no particular reason) to real depression (immobility, weeping, dredging up old slights, neglecting people and things that depend on my attentiveness), so this year I thought I’d try to blog on a regular basis, to write my way out of the worst of it, as I once wrote my way out of a migraine (I really did — it was a miracle!).

Here’s my first effort on my own behalf.  Thenk yew fer yer suppoaht.

*****

The Best Always Happens

One of the most hellish periods in my life was the third quarter of 1995.  Mary and I had made a harrowing midsummer drive from Aptos, California to our chosen destination of Atlanta; we drove two cats and a heroic, dying dog in an unairconditioned Honda Accord and a 20-foot Ryder truck.  The truck was throttled at 55 mph, fully laden with all our earthly possessions, and the Kansas segment of the trip alone was horrific — slow, gritty, dusty, endless, and I had to keep the steering wheel steadily at the 10 o’clock position to fight the much steadier north winds — but the pain continued once we arrived in Atlanta.  We were broke; unable to find jobs or a place to rent, we relegated ourselves to a Motel 6 in Gwinnett County for five weeks (the dying dog and the cats gave up and spent most of those weeks under the beds); unable to provide proof of permanent residency, we could not establish a bank account, or a mailing address; we were reduced to begging for cash from friends and relatives to pay the daily cost of the Motel 6 rooms.  We dreamt of finding ourselves dirty, homeless, giving up the animals to the local pound.

When we finally found a rented condo in Midtown Atlanta, when Mary had landed gigs as a leave-replacement assistant professor in the music department at Georgia State and as a choir director at a nearby Methodist church, when I was hired at Emory University as a part-time department secretary, when the weather had barely cooled to a damp 75 or so, and we thought we were finally safe, mortality struck.

My nephew found himself in the end stages of AIDS, and was forced to find refuge at the home of his estranged parents in Eastern Kentucky. 

• Note: His case was not unusual at that time in history: many, many gay men who had been driven out of conservative Southern communities to live rootless and dangerous lives, finally wandered home in their last hours, reconciling (or not) with those who had raised them in shame and rejection.  These sickly, desperate men had to have some kind of palliative treatment, and had no other place to go but "home".  (See “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story” by Abraham Verghese, Vintage Books 1994.)

It was an opportunity for all to come to terms with life, real and earnest, and I think my sister and brother-in-law did so; they welcomed home the prodigal son and buried him two months later.  Now living within a few hours’ drive from their place, I was a small part of that process; I went up to Kentucky as often as I could on weekends, to try to help ease the burdens.  I don’t know if I succeeded; the whole saga was just dreadful.

At the same time, back in Atlanta, we finally had to put our dog down.  A typically task-oriented German Shepherd, Bette had pulled herself back from the brink of death to accompany us on this journey.  She had stayed the course through the toughest parts of it, and when we had finally come to ground, achieved our basic requirements of shelter and sustenance, she in effect told us she really needed to go on her way.  We honored her by helping her die.  Euthanizing such a companion, such a source of comfort and distraction, over so many trials was, as most of you know, agony.  Mary and I know in the depths of our hearts and souls that nothing dies, that we will see her, will see all of those we love and miss, again.  And again.  And yet….

Mary’s brother Marco, of all who knew her, loved Bette the most.  He sent his deepest sympathy, along with a beautiful photograph of her taken at her happiest: under a Christmas tree in Marco’s apartment, merrily shredding the careful, beautiful wrapping of her very own present, a brand new tennis ball.  She was looking up at his camera and smiling in gratitude, Christmas paper hanging out of her mouth; on the back of the picture, Marco wrote to us: The best always happens.

Thank God for Marco.  That aphorism has probably saved our lives and psyches a hundred times since then.  I didn’t believe it then, so heartsick I didn’t want to try, rejected the comfort over and over, but under the advice of my own heart, I acted as if it were true, and over time, comfort was given unto me.

The best always happens.  Always.

The Thai Boys' Rescue video

Children

I guess my original sin is that I don't get children.  I don't grok children.  I am not sure I ever was a child myself. As far back as my memory goes, I was always trying desperately not to be a child: to catch up with my sisters (five and seven years older than I, respectively), to make my mother laugh that deep chesty chuckle she had, as they could do so easily; to articulate perfectly, to use flawless grammar, to speak several languages, with perfect accent, at least well enough to impress the casual listener; to be tall and strong and athletic; and always to keep my brain and body under perfect control.  That's all I know about being a child.

Well, that and getting beaten up by one sister, and being the subject of withering sarcasm (and also being beaten up) by the other.  All I had to do was be born: the beating and the diminishing and the perplexing rages ensued and continued, year after year, until one day I was about five feet, seven inches tall, weighing in at a muscular 130 or so, and it stopped.  After that, it was pure psychological abuse, year after year, until one day, after I'd read one more book, and listened carefully through one more session, studied closely the practice of verbal violence, that I opened my mouth and hurled it back.  In spades, in trippingly light and devastating phrases, accompanied by an unwavering and challenging stare.  Come and get me, assholes; try it now.  Then it stopped, and they both, each in her own way, retreated into kissing my ass, and going underground to subvert my every discernible wish. To thwart that last assault, I kept my wishes and dreams to myself, so well that eventually I lost track of what they were.  I had detached from my tormentors, and, sadly, detached from myself as well.  They almost won the war, but eventually I found myself again, and just in time.

So being a child is not a good thing, one.  Two, while you're a child, keep your head down, avoid others who wish you harm, retreat to a hideout, read a book. Three, learn fast to control yourself, don't whine, don't cry, don't attempt to compete until you've reached good size and supple mind.  Four, if you have to be a child, get over it as fast as you can.

-----

I do know that children are not contemptible; I figured that out once I was no longer small myself.  When I became a mother, I found that they're just mysterious, and frequently out of control; they bear watching, and if they fall under one's care, the watching and listening and teaching must never -- never -- relent.  They hurt themselves, they get sick, they do great harm to each other (don't I know that!), they fly into rages, they retreat into peculiar and painful depressions.  They must be fed nutritious and ample food; they must be bathed and then clothed impeccably and fashionably; they must be vaccinated, and medically checked regularly, and stitched up with alarming frequency; they must be taught good manners, respectful demeanor, please and thank you, the latter in longhand if possible; they must be educated, broadly and unceasingly, in art, literature, music, history, sociology, math and science (God help me); schooled in the beauty and folly of religion, the peace of spiritual practice.  I wonder if anybody in the history of the world has ever done all of this well and at the same time given to the little bastards the unconditional love they crave more than anything else.  And lived to tell the tale.

Children cannot be forced (my mother so wisely stated) to eat, drink, shit, or study.  (Note: They cannot be taught to love the parent.  To be loved and admired by one's offspring is not in anybody's contract; to expect it is absurd and doomed to failure.  Only my mother could pull it off, and she was only loved and admired by me.  My sisters were, again respectively, too intimidated and overshadowed by her to offer their love.  My mother's reward for doing all of the above better than anybody else I've ever known, was the easy mutual admiration and friendship she shared with me the last few years of her life.)

In raising my children, I gave up on physical persuasion about a third of the way through -- it just didn't work, it made them resentful and even more obstinate, and it made me feel like a bully.  Where I could, I used rational argument; sometimes that worked, but when the real issue (not the putative I-don't-want-to-do-my-homework, but the real who-the-hell-is-in-charge-here issue) raised its ugly head, sometimes I let go of the reins, and resorted to letting empirical data teach them.  Go ahead and do the dumb thing you want to do, and observe, if you will, the natural consequences of said dumb action.  My kids are smart, no question, and sometimes the let-it-play-out approach worked.  Sometimes it didn't, sometimes it took an outside force to make the point: a teacher giving a failing grade, a vice-principal threatening expulsion, even a couple of times a cop collaring and scaring the bejesus out of the kid.  And the mother.

I do know I did the best I could, day and night, beginning to end; exhaustion and frustration, and eventually my own dangerous depressions, are what kept my best from being enough. 

And after decades of reflection, and parsing of evidence, and studying other parenting techniques, I still do not understand children.  Hell, I'm only now beginning to understand myself, and that in itself is the work of several lifetimes.