trust

From where I sit, the world is at my back. The circling, spinning, confused, anxious, incomplete thoughts that get distracted midway through expression, and fleetingly directed by the next untethered, unresolved "must-get-it-done-but-I-have-no-priorities" stream of consciousness that seems to be all too common over the holidays.

Is there a tactful, yet forceful, way to tell someone that no matter how fast they spin - they can't leave stuff behind?

Stuff... when we consider how to talk about our stuff, we select public icons, and they fit the times. The Material Girl (remember?) got overtaken in popular expression by the Spice Girls (although what spice they thought they were baffles the imagination); they in turn got replaced by general confusion about what ANYONE should feel about consumerism. The histrionics of Jade Goody seemed to somehow strike a major chord; the melee she stirred up post Big Brother (part one) then devoured her. The whirling dervish of media feeding consumed her just as surely as the dis-ease which she manifested and with which we all felt/feel/empathise(d). Happily, materialsim is not so easily bypassed: it can transform - and the Material Girl is still among us; moving to the mystical: wearing the Kabbalah and speaking such truths as she sees. Oddly - she is trying to be serious, while in the silliest of industries, and to the most mercurial of audiences. Her clothes and jewelry still get more airtime, despite masonic symbolism surrounding her. Her journey though, is just as valid as your father's, whatever it was that he thought he was/has been doing. Or mine. Or G.I Gurdjieffs' (he has the moustache of a titan).

Journey is what we do, whether travelling 10,000 miles or staying where we are (a la Harry Chapin). Even changing countries periodically is more about what the "I" finds curious than any intrinsic or extrinsic value about the life being lived. The destination is the same; the joy is the journey. No joy? It's the wrong path. Feel the force: There is no path to copy, there is no path to envy, there is no path to feel jealous about - there is only the path that feels/vibrates/resonates at a finer tune than yesterday.

Things in life will go well, and the things that don't make great stories. Nurse the stories, grow the stories, give life to the stories; let them gain maturity and bring them out in public whenever possible (let them order pudding). Let the stories evolve and give them independence; they may come back to teach you things.

A brilliant chain of stores in the former Soviet Union (remember?) still goes by the name "Consume." Nowt more straightforward. Go in, and be a consumer. (Or be consumed. Your choice.) They kept their "consumers" sane by limiting options, fairly dramatically. They sell /sold milk, among other things. Just milk. Unlike in the USA: there is .5%, 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, 3%, and 4%, plus flavours (naturally sugared or aspartamed; your choice) for the children; - no, Consume just sold milk. Not much anxiety about dietary considerations when choosing milk (want to lose weight? Drink less milk). It's a lesson learned. I apply it to the world behind me. No mere figure of speech - it really is behind me - reflected in the window. In the day it's the back garden (yard). Now, it's a moving image (like a Hogwart's portrait) of a family in the kitchen. Enjoying themselves certainly, as laughter evidences. Earlier in that room, thoughts were not finished, anxieties erupted and the logistics of the coming visitation brought all the material requirements to light: a virtual volcano, as logistics lay atop mountains of disregarded feelings, avoided truths and unacknowledged wishes for time to roll back just a little bit to say goodbye properly. (How can stressful logistics not leak whatever they are displacing?)

Opportunities to trust each other: met after trusting ourselves. Trusting our journey is the one we want; trusting a feeling is ok; trusting a priority really ought to be a priority (ignoring the voice of your parent/sibling/ grandparent/partner projecting THEIR journey onto your roadmap); trusting your story really is YOURS, and you can let it go out to the cosmos at the time you (and only you) determine. Trusting. Trusting that you are as materially focused as you need to be and that you can let those around you be on their path, without your interference. Trusting that the issues that bug you can be released and good vibrations can take their place. Find the groove, be the change. Yoda was right.

just a feeling

Do thoughts run you in circles? leaving you panting, confused, wishing for an escape? look away, toward the telly, toward the flickering consciousness that will give you respite, give you peace, give you fleeting reassurance, but leave you, at the end of the evening/day/night spent, vaguely depressed, with images flickering across your closed eyelids. Are there too many thoughts, too much information, too many expectations and never the time to do it all and certainly never the chance to get credit for doing it all? What does it take to get all those holiday cards done? Is it a pleasure or a chore? Do you enjoy the holiday season, or resent someone, somewhere, for foisting some of this on you? Is it you or someone else who ensures the office is decked out in holly? Which one of you feels more guilty, the doer or the not-doer? What is it about all this information rushing at you through the screen, through the phone, in the daily post, in the daily paper (do you subscribe?) that never seems to get finished, in the ongoing conversations that tell you who is going to Tenerife and what colour shoes she was wearing, but never tells you if he is as happy as he seems to be? It's just too much. We are not human-doings.

Can you identify what you are feeling right now? Can you tell me what you are feeling, when you are feeling it? Can you read my face when I am masking my emotion; would you know if your dearest friend was desperately unhappy if he/she did not tell you directly? when the stranger comes to your door asking for a can of soup, what do you feel as you decide to go find one for her/ for him and would you give them two if there was a child with them?

Logic and rational thought are important - they let us follow the rules of society and be part of the civilised world. but we need more balance with feelings: we need to listen to what is going on when our brain is quiet. when it feels like we should turn left instead of right, do we do so, or not? when we break something, what were we thinking or feeling JUST before it happened? and after? if there is nothing else to life beyond the visible, how come everyone seems to see and feel things differently? If air is transparent, why do we sometimes see things just out of the corner of our eyes....and its not in our direct field of vision? what's the feeling when the senses are suddenly heightened?

There's more to the world than our own energy levels; there's too much to grasp to spend time playing bejeweled blitz or watching reruns, again. Or, do you fancy a Groundhog Day-type existence. (What, run the same life AGAIN?) What if your sister were waiting for you? Not your flesh and blood sister, but your soul sister. The one you knew so long ago, that all you can remember is her. Would you still want to turn on the telly and forget? What if your father were waiting for you? Not the fellow who raised you this time, but the kind soul who you recognise from his eyes; the one with whom you feel real kinship, but are not sure you can ever really say so, because it sounds so crazy. Instead of tuning out, maybe its worth using your time to discover (slow down) how to tune in. Maybe I am wrong about all this, but perhaps I am right; there is no such thing, as "just" a feeling.

let go

We have so much invested in our own decisions we seem unable to accept the decisions of others. I was trying to tell a colleague about my interest in Steiner/Waldorf schools for my children and there was a barrier. She kept stating that the local schools are very good. They are, in fact, good: for what they intend to do, and good at doing what the parents who send their children there expect them to do. If I wanted my children to follow the philosophy of state schools, I would likely be sending them to the nearest school and be glad for the quality. The trouble is, I like a different educational philosophy. I am not telling my colleague she made the wrong choice, but it seems that by telling her that I am on a different path - I become an obstacle in her view of the world. This links so quickly to others in my life, those who have had stronger need to tell me what it is they would wish for me. I want to say:  Do not be bothered by my path, for it is mine; no reflection on you. We are different people, at different places, seeing the same things in different ways and getting very different meanings which then re-affirm or question our worldviews. It is difficult to let go of the need to manage others, to be the critical or nurturing or anything else parent. for those of us who have wounds from childhood, and seek to dress those wounds, we need to let go of the need for others to serve as our children, and slve those wounds.  Let us be adults together, in a way that I can speak my mind and not fear that my experience of the world will cause you distress. Let it be that you can admit that you never liked x because it made you feel creepy, without fearing that you will be labelled a social degenerate.  By admitting biases, anxieties and needs, let it be that we might all just be simply showing where we are on the path of experience. Let go the need to keep all non-normed (as we learn it to be) feeling and thoughts tightly bound in a coil in the base of our spine, to be seen only in the darkest rooms during our midnight visits, or to burst forth in a blaze of self consuming destruction, captured by tabloids for all the world to gawk. Let go judgement, whether justified by biblical quotations or Dawkins-esque flagellations: why on earth do we spend so much time reinforcing the material prison we already live within?

The Soviet state was the best metaphor of modern times for what we do, almost every one of us, to our own spirits: we keep ourselves locked inside: the rules and laws of our society are nothing compared to the self-strangulation we exert on our own richness. The Soviet state said the restrictions were to protect their citizens from the contamination outside - but they fooled very few. Unlike us who were "always free" - on the other side of the walls looking in: we have all been in the same prison. We ought take responsibility for the walls of our own creation, and we resist. We even resist admitting there are walls. In the UK we have given up our freedoms more than many, and almost enjoy being on CCTV cameras whenever we leave our homes. We seem to think being under observation is for our own good. That might be true if we were filled with evil. But we are not. The tragedy is that we hold our normal thoughts and perceptions in the centre of our vision, and present them to others as if that is all there is: we pretend there is no peripheral vision, that there is no African elephant to accommodate. As if marriage/partnerships and the children in our lives and the parents we care for (whether alive or in memory) and the career and the interests and the diversions - are ALL socially acceptable and good and wholesome. That it is all of a piece and that piece is homespun. But we deny coincidence, and the hairs rising on the back of the neck, and the unnerving stare from a cat, and the pain in our hearts when we consider the despair of the cousin who comitted suicide. We deny that our roads all have big honking potholes that sometimes rip the axle off the car - and that is as it must be. It's what we signed up for when we incarnated. We forgot and we deny that we are uncomfortable about some people, for reasons we do not wish to say. We like who we like, and we don't want to let go of safe and familiar things - but to learn, to really learn from our time in this life and to bring back those experiences to whomever sent us here to gather them, we need to open up our battened down awareness to the possiblity that it is precisely our scariest admissions that give us the most room for growth. And to be non-judgemental about others means believing, really believing that different paths really only mean different paths - it does not secretly mean better or worse. I had a friend who mouthed those words for years, and then when i could not help him, the judgements in all their unmasked glory came pouring out. It may be especially hard for a post-colonial (maybe not even post) class-based society to manage, orperhaps it is harder for a post-colonised society to manage, it is certainly not easy for any group to manage, but without letting go of the need to judge others, there will ever be only one yellow brick road, and far from leading to a wonderful wizard, it will only bring us to a guy behind a curtain.

like i wasn't there

I was talking to a friend after a Friends Meeting, and she noted that at the church she had been trying to go to, she kept having conversations with people who didn't seem to see her. It was as if what she was saying didn't quite register; then she noticed that their eyes quite frequently weren't really on her, but kind of off to one shoulder, as if they weren't quite sure where her centre was. "Like we vibrated at different frequencies" she said. At that point a fellow came up to us. He was one of those people with whom I have always thought I should have a real connection; shared interests and all that. But he did the same thing to me! I made a couple comments that are of the type that usually get a really good theological or philosophical or even mystical conversation going - and he just stared at me as if there was something transparent going on. When I was young, that kind of thing really left me reeling and wondering why I was so weird. But into my 5th decade I just stop and wonder at the vagaries.

I think perhaps if I cared more about materialism, I might get along more with the material-focused world. Perhaps I would not break so many plates and nice wine glasses; perhaps my bicycle would not get so many flat tires; perhaps when people speak excitedly about their town's or their family's Christmas decorations I might join in; it might even be that I joined a table full of people for lunch, rather than sitting with 1-2 confidants. I feel quite optimistic and positive about the world and I enjoy myself in a million ways, but I'm sometimes on a different wavelength. It's fair to say that the band of waves I am on is a bit esoteric, but I have a keen eye to identify anyone who shares even a part of the band, and to discuss whatever odd part of the universe we have in common. Given the opportunity, I find that usually find that slice of shared reality, but its difficult to do in groups and for those who are enamored of the trappings of vanity, we probably won't get the opportunity. My friend at the meeting said she used to say "poor me" when she got overlooked; now, with a bit more self-awareness, she says "poor them" - for looking past her. The thing is, even though some people never realise who I am, or what I am about, I still try to make the space they are in just a bit more calm, a bit more attuned.