We Sing You Good Heart

Essays / Nonfiction










We Sing You
Good Heart



Essays from Oregon,
Mostly About Love
And Not Always About the Lover






John E. Darling

Vol. 3 of
A Gathering of Voices




To my children
 Heather, Hannah and Colin

I sing you good heart









John E. Darling
Jdarling@jeffnet.org
Ashland, OR



c. 2011 by John Darling. All essays appeared in periodicals 1997-2011
All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher, except for quotations in critical articles or reviews.

Published by Oregon Darlings Press, Ashland. Printed in USA

Darling, John
    A Gathering of Voices: Essays from Ecotopia
Love ... Relationships ... Romance ... Falling in Love ... Heartbreak ... Children





About the Author . . .

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others.  John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.

He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.

He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.

He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis.  He also writes and performs weddings.

He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University.  John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.


                                                  Contents 


We Sing You Good Heart
They Eat Your Brain, But It’s a Good Thing
Tears, Love, Champage and The Force
It’s About Love, Silly
I Got Me, Babe
In Search of Enlightened Relationships
We Men, We Happy Band of Brothers
Women Will Save the Earth
Pulling Them Back Into the Village
Trust (and Love) that Blank Page
Roughly Slouching Toward Adulthood
Keep Your Tubes Outta Me...It’s a Good Day to Die
The Gift of an Apple
A Place at the Feast
The Greening of a Generation
The Making of a Home Where There Was None
A Heart in Fallow
Woman - Dreams and Nightmares
Love Ho’s Cuddlling in a Time of War
Story - and the Soul of a Tribe
Love in Your 80s: It Feels Exactly the Same as in Your 20s
It’s a Learning Experience: Like a Long Skid on Black Ice at Night
The Lover’s Fight: Mirror or Door?
Shinin’ Times at the Ronnyvoo!
A Long Slog Through the Gender Jungle





We Sing You Good Heart

In the endless piles of papers the kids bring home from Lincoln School there finally came this jewel asking parents to drive the fieldtrip and overnight campout at Lava Beds and of course I said the beautiful word – yes. 

   I am falling in love this spring and as we drive over the drizzly Greensprings, my stomach is rolling with the hairpin curves and I am trying to breathe and focus 1-2-3-4 my mind but for those who push into the fathomless netherlands of the heart, all the old meditations are found to have been taken over and laced with thoughts of the beloved and with fear.  Who says you can fall in love without fear does not know.

   Driving a minivan full of 11-year old girls through the mountains is like driving a small box full of monkeys and otters.  Hannah and the girls don’t speak, they shriek.  They never pause.  Why is it so soothing?  I smile and let it rain on me.  That voice that tells me what’s important and good in life tells me this is that.  I want to say to them: never let go of this. 

   We lose ourselves on the vast, sunny edges of Tule Lake, find an animal brochure at the ranger place and dally, barking out the names of egrets and creatures leaping out of the water.  Up top of that petroglyph mountain, where the girls have led me, the sign says go no further, this is native sacred space.  They run down the hill and leave me there, where the wind is making the sage dance about and yes, we’re going into their world now, where they have left a big silence.

   Walking the lava stronghold where, only a handful of decades ago, the soldiers besieged Kientepoos (that “Captain Jack” thing just sticks in the throat here) and the Modocs.  I stumble about in cold caves where the defenders slept, ate and talked for months with their women and children, sick at heart, wondering what they could do against an endless supply of white soldiers who wanted them gone from all this desert. 

   Here remains a stone circle, the lava rocks piled where the Modocs left them, their ritual space, the brochure says, where they danced and sang wildly all night before the battle, calling down medicine to make them proof from white man’s bullets.  But lead is big medicine, too. 

   The circle is well-walked. It draws you in.  It is full of Nike footprints.  You want to water it with tears, as they must have.  You can’t be here and not feel them.  And the last line of the brochure says: here a culture was wiped out “so white men could pasture a few cows.”  It is a stunning line for an official U.S. government document, penned by the descendants of the soldiers.

   After that delightful ritual of pitching tents and laying them with pads and cozy sleeping bags, the grownups make burritos, tell river and mountain tales and crack open their beer and wine, all made wildly delicious by the wilderness, while the children, self-segregated now into gender camps, play and eye each other across the chasm of adolescence.  Some of them still come to parents for hugs, a thing soon to fade and we know it.

   I find my dear friend Alison.  “I need your wisdom,” I say.  “Let’s open my wine and walk,” she says.  We have for months been trying to get together over a glass of wine and now it happens in the desert, as sunset glides purply-gold over the Modoc stronghold there across the desert floor.

   I feel I’m going crazy, I tell her.  I’ve met someone.  I’m crazy in love.  It’s obsession, all the time.  And fear some days - all day today, a knot in my stomach.  And I just plunge on with it.  Is this part of love?

   She smiles.  Of course it is.  Love is all that, everything.  Yes, I see.  You can do it without those upsetting parts.  You can slide into relationships and still stay in your shell.  Happens all the time.  Is that love?  Or just arrangements?  I don’t know.  That doesn’t seem to be happening here. 

   We sip the pinot in paper cups.  The wind starts getting down our necks.  We put on our coats.  She understands.  What price a savvy, loving friend.   Like magick, I breathe once again, and laugh.  You’ve saved my butt, Alison.  Anytime - just call me and we’ll talk.  By the way, you’re lucky to suffer this.  I see.  Fear is just a veil, not a wall.  The goodies are all behind that veil.  We, of course, like to go where there’s no fear.  Human nature.  But there’s no new stuff where there’s no fear.

   I feel Kientepoos again, think of him hanged by the soldiers and I nod respect to his stronghold.  It strikes me – how bizarre this love travail of Western white folks set against his travail. 

   We all make s’mores and tipple into the meteor-threaded night.  I get that dirty good wilderness feeling where I don’t want to wash my hands, where I’ll stir the stew with a stick off the ground, where I never want to go back to the lowlands and I know it with a fierce, undeniable knowing.

   We cave on our bellies next day and do souvenirs at the ranger place, where I find a magazine telling the Modoc tale.  I look at the byline - Cheewa James.  We went on many a story together working in Medford tv news a few decades back.  I knew she was Modoc, but she never told me her story.  I sit in the van and read it all.  She is great-granddaughter of the ones who died here.  Survivors were exiled to Oklahoma and allowed to return to Klamath Agency in 1909 and from them, dear, bright Cheewa my friend was born. 

   In her story, Scarface Charley talks.  It is just after their defeat, 1873.  They are doing a healing rite for a girl.  He says, “We hear sing…She sick – no, got bad heart, want good one.” 

   So that’s how it works.  You feel bad heart and your people sing you a good one.  I will take this with me.   ~





They Eat Your Brain, but It’s a Good Thing

I was driving my mom to Portland after her visit to the Rogue Valley and, because of the extended, close space in a car and probably us not being able to directly face each other, we got to talking about deeper things.   She was obviously reflecting on the way Helena and I treat our small children, which is the way most parents in town treat their children. 

   “You know,” she said, “no one ever said I love you to us when we were growing up.  And no one hugged us.  You just said I love you if you were in some romantic passion with someone, but that was it.  It was that Anglo-Saxon thing of holding in your feelings and being self-sufficient.  No one questioned it.” 

   It was a remarkable statement.  My mother and her whole generation never confided things like that.  The first thing out of my mouth was, “I love you, mom.”  She had just let me know that no one told her that for decades and, gosh, well, here’s one for you, though I had started saying it to mom and dad about 20 years ago, whether they wanted to hear it or not.  And I put my arm around her. 

   What a waste, I thought.  I remember the ethos of my growing up: you didn’t want to spoil someone and make them soft by giving them love.  You had to be strong, like Steve McQueen clenching that cigarette in his teeth.   No one ever said it to me either, until I was, like, in my twenties and, like, in love.  And then, of course, I didn’t trust it, didn’t know what it looked like, didn’t know how I might deserve it or reciprocate it.  It took a lot of work to get straight on that.  Also known as pain, loss, therapy.

   But many of us baby-boomers who grew up with that “Anglo-Saxon thing” decided, after our fling with peace, love and mind expansion in the sixties and our therapy of the seventies, that we were just going to open the floodgates of love for our children and to hell with what happens.  If love makes you soft and spoiled, that beats $10,000 worth of therapy.

   This may be the first generation in the history of humanity where large numbers of children are being exposed to constant love and hugs, where the last thing they hear at night or when they get out of the car is, “I love you.”  It’s an experiment whose outcome is unknowable.  It’s probably the first generation where hitting or even spanking is taboo.  Where losing your temper and yelling at them is considered a problem for the parent to work on, not the other way around.  Where fathers are equal providers of affection (and housework).  And where children are included in the daily round of adult life, turning up with them at coffee shops, potlucks, everywhere. 

   A generation ago, children had the run of the neighborhood and would disappear on their bikes for hours, while parents were able to go about their lives.  Today, kids don’t have neighborhoods so much as networks.  A generation back, parents didn’t even have to know the other parents.  Today, they are brethren.  Every time parents meet at the market or picking up kids at school, the talk is: let’s get the kids together, when, and your place or mine?  Kids don’t go out and find each other today.  You make dates for them.  They don’t take off alone until they are past age 10.  They are driven there.  Small children don’t walk home from school.  They don’t go off to the playground for baseball; they are on teams at the Y and parents spend enormous amounts of time driving them there and watching the games.

   Parents have become a much closer community, while the larger community out there has become less so.  Children have become more part of the adult world (and vice-versa) because the love is not being held back and because the world out there is more dangerous.  More psychos are not in jail and random tragedy can strike.  It has struck right here.  You don’t take chances.  You leave your child with other adults only if you trust them completely.  The slightest doubt – forget it. You don’t take your eyes off them in the park when they are just three.  If you lose sight of them momentarily, the fear starts to slam you in the chest after a count of about five.

   The psychological sophistication of parents today has given rise to tactics of diversion and negotiation.  We have developed tools to let every one win, to share the power and, above all, to have kids learn to use their own power.  It used to be that no meant no and that was it.  Parents had all the power.   The flexibility and freedom for kids lay in the area of stretching the rules, also known as lie, cheat, steal.  Today, if kids want something and you don’t want them to have it, you don’t say no, you can’t play in the mud, you say, hey, let’s go get a video.  Or you offer them choices: do you want to make some cookies or rent a video?  And yes, they still have to earn rewards.

   It’s a different world.  It’s not just the kids getting love now, it’s the parents.  Many have remarked that the love they know with their children is the most complete, unconditional and healing they have ever known.  “I wasn’t prepared for it,” said Helena.  “I just had no idea.”  Ditto moi.  It’s such a paradox: any fool can make a baby and yet it offers itself as the big accomplishment of life.  I finally sense that this, not the PhD or the book published or the Everest climbed, is the reason I’m here.

   We were talking about all this one evening and Helena, noting all my learned books sitting on their shelves, said, “I wonder how many or these people who wrote these books, mostly men I see, have ever raised children and loved them.”  Probably not too many, I said.  “Hmph,” she observed, “then they don’t know shit.”

   That one profound and profane truth marked me deeply.  It is the only reason I believe someday there will actually be no war.  Men and woman are loving their children and raising them equal and up close.  It is the big change in the world, maybe the biggest since the agricultural revolution and it is the source of 99 percent of whatever wisdom I have acquired in life.  No men who do this could ever do Hiroshima or Holocaust or anything even close and, today, no women will let them have the power to do it.  A world safe for children is a safe world.

   And finally, it’s fun.  To a friend thinking of having a first baby, I said, well, it’s the greatest, but they do eat up all your time, your wealth and finally your brain.  We chuckled.  They rewire you completely.  They have no use for the past or future and they make you go there, too.  The first thing they do, if you’re lucky, is totally wreck your self-obsession.  They do this with their own self-obsession, which is completely pure and marvelous.  They make you know in your cells why you work for a living and what to do when you get off work.  They hold open the secret door out of all the stress and serious nonsense of adult life.  They make all my books look silly, because, all I ever really needed to know, I learned from these people who hadn’t yet spent a day in school.   ~





Tears, Love, Champagne and The Force

We get to the part in their wedding where she repeats after me: to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness…then her throat catches.  Tears fill her eyes.  She looks to me, the minister, for help.  I smile and whisper – you’re supposed to cry.  It’s good luck.

   That part “gets” a lot of people who are marrying, the words about sickness and health, richer and poorer.  I’ve had some couples ask me to leave it out because it’s “negative” and you don’t want to affirm sickness and poverty.  I’ve responded – are you sure?  Do you really think you two are going to get through life without those or something just as challenging? 

   You want a friend in life.  Sometimes, maybe most of the time, that, not romance, is what you have.  Sickness and poverty in the vows are just metaphors for them loving you as they go deeper into learning about your fears – and all that stuff that lives in the depths with your love.

   The bride gets back on track in a flash.  Then she says, this is my gift to you.  Forward comes Aunty Malia, the hula teacher in Ashland, dancing the Hawaiian wedding song before the couple.  Her movements are of utter voluptuousness mixed with shyness.  She’s a feminine shaman, smiling, summoning, holding and unveiling the ancient powers of love, nature, community and happiness.

   The groom, dressed in sporty black, wearing a goatee, gives his usual understated, twinkly-eyed smile.  At the end, he bows.  We all do.  It’s instinctive to bow to this.  You lower your head to efface the ego, to open to the universal that touches us all.

   The guests cheer and as we break out the champagne, I converse with him in his native Greek, the few lines I can remember from when he schooled a small group of us at my house every Tuesday night, with many a toast of ouzo.

   “E matera eine kali,” I say.  This is what I always say when I see him – and about all I can remember from the classes years ago, though I still enjoy reading the classics with bilingual pages.  It means: mother is good.  Only fitting I would remember those words, sprung from the land of land of primordial goddesses – Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis.

   As the “liquid stars” (champagne) imbues happy cell receptors, I find myself seated between two men I’m getting to know.  We check out each other’s occupations – professor, screen door installer – and they seem to know what my work is.  You seem a very sensitive man, says one, referring to my writing. “You betcherass I am!” I retort.  We all crack up.  I can’t stand solemnity.

   With that, we’re off, one relating a tale of a cab driver in New York last week who cut right to the core, wanting to know who he was, what he valued in life, how is love showing up in his life, then got out of the cab to give him a big hug. 

   Yes, things are changing, we say, the world is opening up, people are being more honest, opening their hearts to…it’s hard to put words to it, but we all know what we’re talking about. One cites an article in the Vancouver Sun last week saying Ashland has become the spiritual mecca of the West Coast.

   Well, a newspaper would say that.  A “thing” has to be happening in a place at a time.  As if Ashland were where you came to be spiritual.  But the taxi driver gives lie to that.  It’s happening where it happens.  It happens inside you.

   That evening, talking with my friend O., a Star Wars freak, he says, hey, strong The Force is with me, but big cycles of anxiety and depression I keep having and something wrong with me I keep thinking there is – and tell me that, a lot of my friends do.

   I giggle at his Yoda-speak and, letting The Force surround and penetrate me, I venture, hey, keep your focus on the thoughts you are having because, as Yoda said, the Dark Side of The Force lures you in with fear – fear creates hate, hate creates anger and anger creates suffering. 

   Things are changing, I remind him.  This is not like it was 10 years ago or even five.  Just look at the geopolitical scene now – it makes Star Wars look tame. 

   Behind it all, The Force grows stronger and demands more of us, while it gives us more.  If we can handle it.  If we can’t, it comes across as stuff like anxiety, depression, confusion, self-esteem issues, feeling uneasy about being different.  So, there’s nothing mental about you.  We’re all going through more and it’s forcing us to learn how to use The Force.

   Gets it, he does.  Relieved, he is.  With all its anxiety and depression, is this journey not better than sex, drugs, religion, likker, tv, prozac a new girlfriend and all the other fixes?  Well, he allows, some of those can be fun in the short term, but over the long term, no, nothing can touch the life of a Jedi warrior.

   And what does all this do to romantic love, which so often seems the center of the universe?  Why do the Jedi or Zen monks and the shamans of don Juan’s lineage rarely, if ever have spouses?  We don’t know.  It’s changing.  It’s hard.  I’m finding more people say they love more but want the form less.  They have to keep to their center and love themselves first and always, then two such people can share that – and only when they can both share it.

   Is this the work of The Force?  What isn’t the work of The Force?  I search the term on the internet, finding it has parallels in all religions, ancient and modern, whether used to mean nature, God, wisdom, love or Tao, the ineffable “way” of things.

   Elusive, answers are.  Worth a thousand answers, a good question is.  Then, in an email from Zane Kesey, come these words from his dad, Oregon’s badboy tripper wizard Ken Kesey: “The answer is never the answer.  What’s really interesting is the mystery.  If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.  I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer.  They think they have, so they stop thinking.  But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”   ~





It’s About Love, Silly

Ancient philosophers searched for the summum bonum, the highest good, and they never mentioned love, but of course they were all-male gatherings and maybe they didn’t want the guys to think they were silly, which love always makes you be.  Silly and wise.

   I can say for sure that love is one of the highest goods, probably the highest one, but paradoxically if you set it as a goal and pursue it, it can be very elusive.

   All they say about love in song and myth and movie is true, all the amazing good stuff, that is, and all the achey-breaky stuff is also true but if adopted as a way of looking at love, it effectively blocks it, and just gives you more achey-breaky.  You get the booby-prize of cynics: you get to be right.

   Love is a self-fulfilling energy system. No matter how many times you break it, if you tell your heart there’s always more, always better than you ever dreamed possible, then that’s what it gives you.  And if you put all kinds of conditions on it, it just gives you all kinds of conditions right back.  If you say I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy, it says ok fine.

   Nothing hurts like a broken heart and it’s perfectly named because that’s what it feels like, turned to stone and covered with corrosive acid and crushed and it goes on for month after month of back-to-back bad days and when I was there, I remember thinking death would be better because it’s final and over and then you have control, right?  But then, I also remember thinking, when I loved again, that the achey-breaky really gave me all the information and awe and gratitude and hope and that’s what it takes, really.

   I learned I never wanted to love someone who hadn’t had that experience of a broken heart, of lost love, that awareness that something can be so big and good and ecstatic and then, somehow come to nothing, all gone and you crawl off wanting to understand why it went away and wanting to be sorry and yet not to blame.

   To come back from a broken heart, you really have to get to that place where, even though you don’t want to or can’t bear to think about the past love, you know you loved fabulously and so did the other person.  And no matter how ill-starred it was, it really had to happen for you to become who you are now.

   Love is “it” and yet finding love resolves nothing.  You continue each day, still having to get up and do and learn the same amount, still having to cope with the same insecurities.  You’re still you.  And there’s the stickler.  If you lose track of you in love, you lose love, because, to love, you have to keep being you, evolving and changing and taking the risk that maybe the beloved won’t like who you’re becoming. 

   I perform weddings and only once or twice has the couple asked me to say that they MUST keep to their individuality, must take time for themselves and that love does not mean submersion into some homogenizing machine that takes away all lonely pain of freedom and individuality.  I started suggesting this to all couples and most said, well, yes, I’ve been wanting to bring that up.

   I really think love is changing.  I think people are coming to realize it’s not about how much I love you; it’s more about how much I love me.  If I love me and you love you, it all can happen.  That’s why it’s so good in the beginning: you still have your edges and unique energy and momentum. 

   In the practical realm, love is a set of behaviors built around having a lot in common and having a lot of respect and patience and yet being willing to tell the complete truth and let the chips fall as they will. It also calls on you to have the innocence you probably left behind as you entered the cool of adolescence. 

   Yet, when I love, it fairly shouts that it’s not so much something I’m doing as an energy I’ve been welcomed into and that’s why, I think, people say they’re “in” love.  There’s me, there’s you and there’s it – love.  That’s why the ancients found it so easy to assign a deity just to handle love and sexuality – Aphrodite.  She’s big and she’s generous.  After all, she’s in charge of that which generates everything, including us.

   Love is bigger than both of us.  That’s the sensation – it’s out of my control.  It’s some kind of vast, conscious energy that knows what it’s doing and only vaguely respects the defenses and savvy rules you’ve set up to guard your perimeter and you learn that as love peels back the layers of each of you, you’re going to find amazing things out about the other person and yourself and not all of them are going to make you comfortable.

   At the peak moments in life, love clearly presents itself as the intelligence that creates the universe and that death does not end it.  And love can hurt because it makes us look at everything inside us that’s incompatible with love.

   Love, the universe, opens itself  like a dazzling flower, and you can look at any part of it -- a mud puddle, a nova, my lover’s face – and behold all it has to tell you and what it has to tell you is all about love and that everything is already perfect and eternal and integrated into it all and that includes you and that’s love.    ~





I Got Me, Babe

I got a kick out of this 70s folk song talking about life’s three great illusions – and eventual disillusions: politics, religion and love.  In that order.  In fact, we don’t really lose faith in these things, but in the structures built up around them.  This happens when the structures become more important than the content that created them. 

   It’s easy to tell when form has outlived content -- the cry of social collapse becomes most shrill.  In fact, we all still believe in solutions worked on together (politics), we still believe in spirit (but a spirit we find by ourselves) and, of course, we still love. 

   However, love as we’ve known it is dying.  Love’s old form will struggle on for another century as the content empties out.  It’ll be frustrating.  It’ll seem we’ve lost faith in love -- or in men/women.  But love knows what it’s doing and can’t die. 

   It’s important to remember that the old ways we loved weren’t instinctual or handed down by gods.  We created them 1,000 years ago, when the Anglo-French aristocracy came up with deliriously falling in love, finding the One True Love of my life, regarding true love as a rare and near-divine miracle and by living in a state of creeping fear and jealousy about possible loss of the love.

   These roles and dynamics marked that era of troubadors, grail quests, fair damsels adored from afar and Tristan and Isolde, who gave all to love and, with its loss, died for it.  Message: to the extent romantic love has miraculously favored me, to that extent shall I suffer from its possible loss. 

   The rise of romantic love parallels the Christianization of the West, which offered similar dynamics: adoration of an idealized, external, unattainable being, elaborate ritual, a hoping to be worthy and a dread of loss.  This is the stuff of codependency, psychic slavery and misery.

   This romantic gaga love spread all over the world, democratizing down to peasant classes and displacing the more commonsensical love based on felicitous respect, gender roles, property, raising children, good old healthy sex and passing on tradition.

   But then that dang Renaissance-Enlightenment happened, vastly enlarging itself in the crazy 20th century with gender equality, labor-saving technology, general health, easy contraception, easy divorce, prosperity and a revolutionary new ratcheting-up of consciousness that finally made “pursuit of happiness” Job One.

   Now, the individual is at the center of the universe.  You no longer need a spouse for economic stability, to get respect, to raise children or even to survive. You can run a house in one hour a day, not 12.  You can have the joy of sex and not parent. If the partner turns out a jerk, you move on.  You work anywhere, doing anything, for good money.  You’re free and make your own choices without condemnation.  It’s your life.

   These are revolutionary.  No people have ever had these freedoms. It’s a big shift of power from institution to individual.

   We’re being good campers and trying to make the old forms carry the new love we feel, but it’s like trying to make analog do digital.  We can waste years flagellating: I’m not very good at relationships, men/women are so this/that, I’m not into commitment, he/she did this/that to me and of course, I’m not worthy.

   You’ve heard that expression: a pattern gets its worst just before it lets go.  That’s what’s happening now.  But the shift has already started and gained critical momentum because enough people have found it on their own, in hard-won personal, mythical, heroic journeys.

   Romantic love has been a fabulous, wacky, ecstatic ride, but the downside was horrendous.  First of all, there’s the truth problem.  In truth, you’re not the only one I can love, you’re not the most important being in the sweep of my life and there’s a 50-50 chance our individual growth will someday carry us apart.  And when it does, the truth is that no one’s to blame, as required by romantic love.

   Also implicit in the romantic love script is that True Love with the Right Person completes me and that if I lose or never find my One True Love, then I’m alone and that’s bad and I’m miserable.  But it’s not bad.  It’s imperative to be alone – and love it – in order to love.  That’s because when I’m alone, I’m not alone.  I’m there.  I got me, babe.  That’s the Source, the gist, the mojo, the completeness I bring to love.  If there’s a “meaning” to life, that’s it.

   Love isn’t out there.  It can’t be found, lost or won.  It’s in here, inside me.  It’s inherent and immanent in the universe.  Underlying this is the new understanding that – whatever the divine/sacred is – it’s made of love and all individuals are a hologram of it and, therefore contain it all.

   This is called getting a spiritual life.  And this is what makes it possible to love as who we are, rather than as a function of an institution of love/marriage.

  Love is best in the beginning, because we’re free.  We try to give up that freedom, like a calf we sacrifice to love.  But love doesn’t want your freedom, because only free people can love.  If love/marriage makes you unfree, you’re doing it wrong.  Love is a big, beautiful mystery, but the bigger mystery inside it is – how do I stay faithful to me?

   Once a friend told me of her previous partner who proclaimed: if you ever touch another man, just shoot me first.  She thought this the ultimate declaration of love.  I replied I thought it showed a lack of inner direction.  It was codependency embodied.  To have you, he must have himself.  To have you, ironically, he must be able to do without you.

   I once taught a seminar on love, roles, truth and relationship patterns and a guy asked, well, how do I find the right person?  And, without thinking about it, I said, you can’t.  It flashed like a comet in my mind that whole lifetimes are wasted hoping for this but there’s no there there.  I said, you can only become the right person -- and then like attracts like.  When you get a life, you suddenly see others who have.  Before then, they’re invisible.

   Romantic love seduces us into thinking that, when marriage gets rough – flash! – it’s because you’re not with the Right Person, so it’s vital for you to leave and find them.  Ah, but happiness can’t be found with the Right Person, because the right person, my friend, is you.   ~





In Search of Enlightened Relationships

Almost always in my life, a man has been here -- a friend (sometimes two, even three), a growth warrior to talk to, someone with whom I could say and hear anything, ruthless, no buffers, no couching or mincing anything, yet maintaining gentlemanly courtesy, drawn together by the inexorable beauty of truth – whatever truth we could best attain to as who we were, ever reaching for the Universal, yet always willing to drop down into that yeasty, personal, wounded version of truth, too, laughing as we went at our folly, anger, pain, fear, then speaking the truth to that too: look at me, behold this vague, wounded shadow child, crying alone.  And you, my friend, can hear him. 

   The other night, in his backyard, smiling in the rain and whipping wind of this most perfectly blustery spring, so matching our moods, our quest, our confused, groping pain – hey, “bring it on, man,” we always say -- Miller and I, pulling on the deliciously biting cigarette we share, we speak of love and the other Great Mystery, the quest of the soul, ah, no matter the grinding pain, for the truth.  The personal truth.  And the other kind: the stuff Spirit gives to you, as Aeschylus said, “drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will comes wisdom.”  Bring it on, Spirit.

   Coming out of a relationship, too, he’s at the peak of middle age, fit, a hunk, a catch, rich in experience, one of the best minds I’ve ever engaged, resilient, facile, ever willing to call his own stuff, marvel at it, find books explaining it, ‘fess it up eagerly to me, meet it with a big grin and pour a wee bit more wine.  We are temperate.  As Socrates said – wine full strength to celebrate the pagan joys, but dilute it by half with water when Truth is to be the guest.

   He says he won’t do it any more, this romantic pairbond thing, this coming together so deliciously with all the young soul’s hope, this gradual crashing and being crushed on the shoals of ego and mind.  And emotion: the body’s reaction to mind.  He’s quoting Ekhart Tolle – The Power of Now: the mind builds the ego, an actual sense of “self,” but an illusion.  This is not the Self.  The mind’s processes may go on and on, repeating its past stories of shame, its fanciful nonsense of future fears and hopes, but two such minds coming together as lovers – how can they “love?”  There can be no love, only the ego defending the mind’s house of cards.

   I won’t look at him as he rants.  He asks why.  I say I’ll look at you when you stop lying.  (Guy warriors can talk like this to each other and take no offense!)  I tell him:  I think he’s afraid of love, unworthy of it (like most of us), more comfortable living in his head, his ‘spirit,’ protected by his self-improvement books.  He’s ‘ascending’ as Robert Bly (Iron John) said, rising above the messy, painful work of feelings, of hanging in there with a lover till all the self-rightness dissolves in the sheer, sobbing need for love, till all your projections (so convincing!) come home to you – and the defenses give up, the heart cracks open, so it can function.

   He’s smiling.  He hears it all.  He just doesn’t agree.  That’s not what he’s doing.  He tells me I’m projecting, because I want to drown in that safe, familiar addiction again.  He calmly explains he’s never going there again, but will beat the house of cards.  He’s going to go out of his mind.  Up, out of it, into what?  Into those promised places we touch so rarely but are possible to live in: Being, Tolle calls it.  Higher consciousness, comprised of soul, heart, awareness freed of time.  The Great Self, in Hindu. The Oversoul, to the Transcedentalists.  It’s possible to train the mind, so we can live there.  Then we can love all people, all things and creatures.  That’s how you know you’re there.  It all shimmers in the ineffable Now. 

   Nice, Miller.  I’ve been there, spent whole evenings there – and not on drugs.  It was beautiful, I tell him, and I’m looking forward to it when I die.  But for now, the authentic, passionate pagan man will not try to love everyone, will not retreat to some cosmic concept, but will love the one person, right in front of him, rife with human flaws and, like him, only able to visit the Great Self once in a while.  I tell him that cliché, that “love brings up everything unlike itself” and the dysfunctional relationship one is in happens to contain all the keys to unlocking and freeing the heart center.  Self-help books and meditation won’t do it.  I quote Emerson to him: “Give all to love, obey thy heart.”  I imagine myself eager to plunge back into it, knowing the blissful half-year of getting to know the person, aka dating your brains out, then comes the real stuff and the journey must be about accepting the other completely as she is.

   Ach, give all to love, Miller says -- done it!  Pain. He tells me he can now imagine a life never having another pairbond relationship, not the romantic drill, anyway.  It must be an emotionally responsible love between two conscious people doing the deep work.  On themselves.  He meets many appealing, intelligent women at work, he says, but within a minute or two, all the gender games are laid bare and the toxin of romance stands naked.  It’s lonely, but the deeper journey must go forward.  Anyway, it’s getting rather nice, all this freedom.  And this phenomenon of never getting under anyone else’s skin.  In coming days, I think much about his words.  Something really opens my eyes.  I talk to this woman newly in love.  She says it’s working because he needs her.  I clearly see the reverse is true, too.  She doesn’t mention that.  She knows ‘need’ has a shady reputation. 

   For a whole afternoon I grok (Heinlein: grok, to understand, embrace and love new information or experience so deeply you become it, even if briefly) this and believe this is my blind spot.  I’ve never really needed whoever I loved.  I couldn’t do that.  This has not been greeted with universal acclaim.  But usually my pain-on-parting reveals the fingerprints of addiction.  Ach! I was indeed not taking care of myself, not being responsible for maintaining my personal power, not telling the truth, most of all to myself.  If you can’t be honest with yourself, you can’t really know or love yourself and you then can’t be honest with or really love anyone else.  The mind-driven ego is free to project – then blame the projections it beholds.  Your standard romantic – and most unconscious – relationship.

   What, then, is this self-love we hear so much about?  It’s not loving yourself when you’re having a really nice day, I tell Miller. Anyone can do that.  Sorry, but self-love is loving the Shadow, no matter how mocked as me-generation self-obsession.  All our great poets and writers have done it – Henry Miller, Walt Whitman – “O me! O life. Of myself forever reproaching myself, for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless? O myself I sing!”

   I present it to Miller, this need thing.  He pretends to barf.  Whatever consciousness is, need is its opposite, he assures me.  I am put in mind of an old (1911) Ambrose Bierce aphorism which I quote him, “Marriage, n. -- the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.”  That defines it – codependency, we call it now.  Cynical or truthful?  You decide.  Do we finally have no choice?  We have to grow our Self?  It’s consciousness or bust? 

   I’m not going to get away with it, this wanting to believe in need-as-love, am I?  There’s no escape from freedom, though we human sheep long for it.  I talk with Heather, my daughter, in her early 30s now.  You’ve got maybe three months, she says.  Then the real person emerges.  I thought it was six months, I said.  Sometimes a year.  No, it’s down to three now, she says.  It’s coming out faster.  And meaner.  I tell her I’ve been having whole ten-year relationships – charming beginning, mistrust, betrayal, big fight, explain big fight, apologize, feel I’ve been dissed, can’t take it anymore, divorce – all crammed into a couple emails, a phone call and one café meeting.  You’re lucky, she says, you can get through it so fast.  Ya, I do it all on five to 10 dollars tops.  We laugh.  But I realize, hey, I’m joking but there’s that kernel of truth to every joke, isn’t there? 

   I go off to grok it.  I’m interviewing some New Warrior honchos for a story.  One, trainer Dennis Mead-Shikaly, tells me that men maintain dishonest relationships with women.  Behind the mask of strength, ego, domination, all that patriarchal posturing, men unconsciously relate to women from fear, dependence and mother-fixation.  It’s all in the Shadow, says Bill Kauth, one of the founders of New Warriors.  The Shadow contains the shameful and uncomfortable parts of our minds that, because they are denied, will rise up and destroy our best-laid plans and relationships.
 
   Embracing the Shadow sounds noble, almost fun, until we read Tolle. He calls it the pain body -- a deep and dysfunctional sense of abandonment or incompleteness in all of us – and the main function of Mind, as it’s developed in us, is to cover it up with incessant, self-justifying, repetitive thought – which imprisons us in the past and future and denies the present, where everything real is happening.  The pain body is “the dark shadow cast by the ego.”  It’s an entity with its own agenda and motivations, chief of which is to survive and to justify its existence by hanging onto childhood pain and manifesting new pain in relationships.  As such, the last thing it wants is for you to live in the present.

   But that’s the way out.  The instructions are simple: you watch your thoughts, all the while realizing “I” am not my thoughts.  I am Soul, Being, Presence, Higher Self, Oversoul, Great Self, whatever – and this Presence lives only in the now.  Miller says he’s able to do it for up to 30 seconds now.  Wow, man, I say, I can’t go that long.  I’m up to maybe 15 seconds.  But I keep doing it over and over.  And once, it happened, I tell him.  I shifted up into Oversoul and it went on all day.  I didn’t know what to do.  I didn’t care, either. I just lay in my bed looking out at the amazing blue sky, the red blossoms on the crab apple tree, the new, green leaves coming out, the hawks circling.  Ah, and there it is: I experience complete love and acceptance for all beings, things and situations, exactly as they are.  Miller claps his hands, grinning like a fool for growth.

   But it’s more than a personal high – and Tolle sums it up:  “What we’re doing here is part of a profound transformation in the collective consciousness of the planet…We are breaking mind patterns that have dominated human life…It is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness, as well as our only chance of survival as a race.”   ~





We Men, We Happy Band of Brothers

We men, whenever we see a natural, tribal male on PBS or the face of Sioux Chief Gall or something even close, like Jim Morrison singing or the plays of Sam Shepard, we see and feel something lost. Women see it, too.

  These men I know as hunters and dancers at the fire, as cave painters, myth-tellers and shamans, as ecstatic lovers and wise, happy uncles of all the tribe’s children. I know them in stories of ritualized single combat, where manhood was coup-counting with the whack of a stick.  Descended from the Celts and cave-dwellers of Northern Europe, I know and come from that happy band of brothers. 

   Before the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago made us farmhands, men knew energy and happiness limitless and beautiful and good for the earth, good for women, good for children and I know this in my cells and nerves like I know nothing else.

   Some 5,000 years ago, civilization brought territory and overpopulation and technology and war – the hunt gone bad.  The concept of property invaded sexuality: monogamy ensured man’s children came from his seed.  It ensured women access to the now male-controlled means of survival.

   Man’s savage, happy, sexy beauty was suppressed and put in service of domination. As Wilhelm Reich points out, suppressed sex underlies all violence and fascism in men. Still, men a century ago saw war as a glorious proving-ground of manhood. 

   But simply add an explosion of technology and whatever seemed heroic and glorious about the Civil War with its muzzle-loading, walnut-stocked rifles, becomes in just 50 years a nightmarish, automated slaughter of millions by the machine guns of World War I.  In yet another quarter-century, men create the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Cold War, where with straight faces they speak of Mutually Assured Destruction.

   Whatever was left of man’s innate beauty finally slips away, leaving a stain of guilt and a groping sense of emptiness.  With the 20th century gone, it is indeed the End of History (his story). The story was tragic.  Maybe it was humanity’s adolescence, full of abuse, pain and lessons, yet necessary for the power of adulthood. A new story now begins.

   Deftly led by women, society deconstructs patriarchy, demonizing the one-time male prerogatives: rape, sexual harassment, child-abuse, racism, environmental destruction, colonialism, genocide, slavery, trashing native spirituality and shellacking it over with monotheism.

   Men now look at these curses on manhood and know their fathers and grandfathers did it and that it’s all quite mad and that somehow we’re part of it and that the sin is not Original Sin, but something we’ve done only as civilized folk.

   Today, man is between stories.  He’s often found in tv coma, pouring such passion into football that his mate can only imagine he might have for love. Maybe it’s all he has left of his manhood, this communion with gangs of highly trained thugs slamming into each other and during this time she can’t get in.  It’s just him and the boys.  Girls play soccer and baseball and basketball, but man, they don’t play football.  It’s his thing, his hunt, his lodge. And carried to its extreme, the angrier she gets about it, the deeper he seeks out this men-only place.

   The incessant car ads on tv tell us that one of the main purposes we live is to work for this phallic steed, which is not really transportation but rather a transcendent shift in consciousness, a liberation from all that’s normal and dreary, a gate back to that free, wild place Out There in the hills and it can be yours if you go to your cubicle and work for it most of your time.

   Our alpha-male models, these insufferable presidential candidates tell us power is attained by staying “on message” no matter what bothersome realities the journalists or citizens throw at you and that the message is shaped by the handlers and garnered not from what could or should happen, but what polls say will get you in there and, yes, the tv bill for that message is paid for by those whose will you’ll work when you get in there and under those conditions, no one can be taken seriously.

   Still, we began the new story.  We stopped that war.  And for years, back in the 1980s, we did men’s groups and “wildman” retreats where, with drums and painted faces, we would reach achingly across that abyss of time for the souls we left in the hills, for the camaraderie of the fire and the hunt, for the joy of the ritual dance, for the wisdom of lost grandfathers, oh, and so deeply, so weepingly, for the lost love of our own shadowy, sad and absent fathers.

   How quickly men would bond, would reach across from blue to white collar, from hippie pothead to straight accountant, would take down each other’s phone numbers, would raft and hike and share deepest fears, most hideous wounds of marriages, of joyless careers, of children lost in divorce, reaching, reaching and so often ending up hitting the wall of political correctness, of phony sensitive maleness, of feeling, like a neutered pet, things so deep, yet not knowing how to really touch them or move with them. 

   Still, we began the new myth that will guide our sons and grandsons.  We’re giving them fathers who love their children as the central wonder of life.  We’re giving them men who love women. And other men.  We’re giving them males whose church is this earth.  We’re passing on a legacy of men who trust their instincts and know them as good.

   It’s an amazing adventure as men and women become truthful and equal in all things and welcome each other beyond role and gender.  This has never happened before.

   And where does man go now, this uncanny, delicious creature, this witty clown-warrior, this egotist with dark, magical body parts, this lover of women and speed and gadgets and night?  We’re hunters still and now we hunt just that – we spin the first threads of our new story and stalk who we will become.   ~





Women Will Save the Earth

Women are different than men in ways that I think make them wiser, more compassionate and frankly better than men. I know it’s only p.c. to say we’re equal, should be partners and all that, but the fact is, the Age of Guys is over.  We’ve screwed up the world and it’s just time to let someone else do it.

   I think a small committee of women and a token male should run the government, in fact all governments, corporations and especially religions and that the good old boys who built all the missiles, logged all the hills and wiped out natives everywhere should retire to their own special table at the back of the tavern, play rummy, smoke cigars and grouse about how that crackerboy Bill Clinton won by promising women stuff like good education, environment, health care and gun-free streets.
  
   Women have more resources, patience and understanding and men are just beginning to realize it and learn from it. I just read in the paper that women don’t have the supposedly universal fight-or-flight response to stress, that this whole thing was dreamed up in the 1930s by male researchers using mostly male subjects and even male rats and was only true for men. Women, in stressful situations go into “tend and befriend” mode. They tend their children and befriend their network.

   Science has traced these skills in women to estrogen, which magnifies the effects of the calming hormone oxytocin. However, the male hormone androgen diminishes oxytocin so guys think good coping means bash it or scram.

   Biochemicals create behavior, science believes, but it’s more likely that these chemicals and everything else in nature are the result of consciousness, need and intention on the part of the species itself acting in partnership with a pervasive creative intelligence in nature. The cat evolves claws not by mutation and selection but because she wants claws and knows what she’ll do with them.

   Where do women learn their unique skills?  Part of the answer might be in those phenomena where women are different from men. Somewhere back there, women and nature decided rugged births and periods are necessary. Nature creates nothing superfluous. Perhaps women understand why.  Men don’t.  It’s an immense mystery.  Great Mysteries aren’t meant to be solved, but rather to shape and mature you as you seek to fathom them.

   Every month, I’m awed and appalled at the energy of the period.  She goes into the crucible of nature and lives the pain of labor and birth. She seems to embody some fierce, irresistible goddess, a Kali, the creator and destroyer, wearing a necklace of little skulls. She weeps, despairs and decidedly lowers her center of gravity.  She’s grounded in the body and in ancient earth wisdom and from that becomes uncannily psychic, like the Pythia of Delphi, who prophesied while perched over a great hole in the earth.

   No man can even imagine what all this is like for women, but I think men are secretly awed and jealous at this ability to create life and at the monthly dues which admit women to a place men can’t go.  I think men have unconsciously tried to match the power of all this blood and milk and suffering and bonding with nature in their hacking, bleeding, glory and comradeship in the mud of war. Never mind that men’s bloody travails ended life while women’s began it.  And now that nukes and world markets and a global web of internet marriages have made war ridiculous, it’s a good time for men to come home and watch real power in action.

   Why do women suffer when they bring forth life?  Why do women suffer each month when they don’t bring forth life? Why do men cruise through life with none of this? The guy authors of the Old Testament had it figured out: God must like men better.  After all, God is a guy and we guys understand things.  God saddled woman with The Curse and sentenced her to Hard Labor (get it?) to pay for that apple business because she was willful and listened not to authority.  She leaned unto her own understanding and got chummy with the serpent, who symbolizes earth, instinct and nature and, God knows, we don’t need that stuff in a faith that comes from on high.

   But it’s likely that these desert village guys were scared out of their sandals by the blood and pain and births and periods and the urges of sex and it all pointed to women having powers even God didn’t seem to understand. 

   In the end, men are a wee bit blown away that women at all times carry with them an incubator and food supply for the next generation and that into these are woven an alluring array of fleshly swells and recesses and that as far back as men can remember, they’ve longed with their every cell to be welcomed into the bliss and Great Mystery of all this.

   And yet, to men oriented to the use of power over others, these can seem like power over men.  What can guys do?  They sardonically try to brush off the savage, screaming lioness gore of birth, the mess of poop, tears and milk of infancy and the she-daemon edge of the moonflow but deep down, men know they come from this and that the mystery of women is wiser, bigger and comes from a deeper place than theirs and that expressing fealty to this mystery is expressing a fealty to the survival of the earth.  ~






Pulling Them Back Into the Village

It’s Tuesday and suddenly I’m watching the Columbine High School thing unfold and they have to tear away practically all day from our heaviest yet bombing of Belgrade cause it wouldn’t seem somber and responsible to like leave just leave the coverage of our children in our school with our weapons and their neurons wired with years of our very own doom video games we rent them at our video store and their heads full of 45,000 hours of tv mayhem murder while we are at aerobics and making a mint at the best bull market in history and attending our women’s/men’s group and scoring our new beemer and here are the joint custody kids live in color enacting this new and highly crazy menacing kind of violence with black trench coats and gothic hairdos and the anchors are trying to articulate for us grownup Americans a new kind of shock we must feel, a new kind of surprised aghastness and how this could happen right here in the coolest best most prosperous most reasonable country on earth yeah right.

Now we will get going on our response so what will it be – metal detectors, surveillance cameras, renewal of the debate over gun control yeah right (an armed society is a polite society says the NRA – o mah gahd), soundbites of congressmen oh please who always and only think of campaign money addiction fix and we see thru you so deeply so don’t even bother and suddenly emerges a picture of why just maybe why so many young kids might just be getting their heads stuck way round the bend in that dark place where the one thing they feel when they look at the grownup world is that for starters it doesn’t make any sense at least not enough for them to pretend and work real hard to belong to it and pay the $50-75-100,000 entry fee kafkaesque college debt to play the game.  The one thing for starters they might feel is alone.  And maybe hopeless.

But everyone has to have personal power and meaning and direction so their lives go forward and if they cant plug into the big system matrix we have set up well then I guess they just create their own don’t they and I suddenly know this Littleton thing is the dark flipside of our society, the worst confront, the worst news, worse than all the wars and assassinations cause its right here inside us all right now and its not good.

And I’m laying there on the couch with the kids and the soundbite starts and I already know what it says and its this girl sobbing crazy terror how they shot kids on either side of her and I think, do I let them see this?  Should they enter this crazy place yet? And something says yes let them know.  They should know.  Maybe they will be the ones to change something.  And when its done and my guts are doing a slow roll, they look at me pained and say could that happen at my school?  It could happen anywhere, honey -- well, anywhere in this kind of -- what?  This kind of fluxing, fractured, headlong, hi-tech society with megastress at every level and no time and with multiple serial parental bondings and minimal villaging.  Which I hope please safe Ashland is doing more to overcome than anyplace I know.

But then fortunately the Trib sends me out on a story to actually talk to these kids at Ashland High and South Medford and the grownups who are with absolute warrior integrity compassion manning the battle lines and filling in where parents have faltered and there and I am on the ground up close and the kids are glib with brave terse cynical answers like teens do and sometimes very touching, thoughtful answers about these Natural Helpers who are trained from all the cliques and they find the isolated kids who are dropping back and turning inward hurt and later angry and they pull them back into the village and how I wish that had been there for me and my sisters back then, so things are changing and as things get worse they are also getting better. 

And I say thanks and had to turn away and choke back the tears and I want to stay here at high school and teach and help and counsel and go on field trips and I don’t ever want to be away from the kids, they are so so good and now I really get it about it takes a village and we’ve got to do something all of us somehow and I guess we are but its not enough and I think back on Eric and Dylan crazy round the bend in Littleton and there was a point when I know any one of us only a few years ago could have gone there and somehow found them at the precipice and said hey you come on inside, we’re all a little scared it’s all changing so fast but we all need a hand sometimes and let’s go out for pizza and tell jokes and start finding our way.   ~





Trust (and Love) that Blank Page

At this New Year’s Eve party, after the dancing and champagne, we’re sitting and someone says, let’s go round the circle and say (I knew right then the party was going into a big shift) what was the best and worst of last year.

   So much of the “best” was how friends and family showed up and cared during the hard times, they say -- and so much of the worst was how one wanted more from the partner, women even suggesting, no offense intended, that men would benefit by going to a “husband college” and learning what women really want.

   Ah, the gender gap.  Women, they said, want to be seen, heard, felt, touched, valued and romanced a lot more and guys are too busy being guys and focusing on work, projects, football, making money and using substances too much.  It seems a vast, insoluble issue but men and women are different and, as Dr. Laura says, your man is not your girlfriend!  So don’t expect him to be.

   Then, at Bloomsbury Books, here’s a book about men called “Not Too Bright and Damn Proud of It.”  It’s humor.  Isn’t it? 

   I’m lecturing at Ashland High’s SAEJ class on essay writing, encouraging the kids to list five or 10 things they saw, thought, did, learned, wondered at, felt feelings about in the last couple weeks, then face the blank page, which so many writers say they fear.

   I tell them, hey, that fear and that blank page is what you want. It means you have beginner’s mind, child-mind and what you write will be an unfolding, learning experience for you – so it will be interesting and a learning experience for readers.  The blank page is scary because it’s demanding one thing: be honest.  And think.

   I suggest they freely own and draw from self, friends, community and world, seeing them all as part of their world, so that, as we said in the Sixties, the personal is political, that is, there’s nothing “out there” beyond me, not personal to me.  It’s my world, all of it.

   We talk about their lists, how we’re closing our libraries because the feds cut off our historic O&C funding, which they could pay for with what’s being spent on the Iraq War any given day between breakfast and lunch – and then we’d just bombed some village in Somalia.

   They read their essays aloud, Whitney saying, “What do you do when you run out of answers and everything’s become a question? When nothing makes sense any more? What do you do? Stand up for what you believe in or fall to the corruption of others? Jump back in the war or be persecuted for not wanting to die in a war that shouldn’t have started to begin with?”

   Cody writes, “close the war and open the libraries.” Sacha says, “to have knowledge of doing what’s best for yourself would be so nice but we don’t have answers for everything…We grow up having everyone telling us what is right and what is wrong….but who made these rules and why?”

   Jeff writes about seeing Star Wars for the first time since he was a child and “now that I’m older and more mature, it’s easier to understand all the symbolism of the light sabers and The Force.” That’s it, Jeff, the door to an essay that must be written.

   What, indeed, is The Force?  It’s that voice in you that is connected to the wisdom and energies of planet, all people, all life.  That’s what the writer is trying to ride.

   Jeff misses when the old Carnegie library was our only library and the kids would gather round the old gold radiator and read all kinds of books, like The Berenstain Bears, Calvin and Hobbes and Dr. Suess, then the librarian would bring a jar of candy to give to whoever could guess the number of candies in it. 

   Was that The Force moving in that sweet ritual?  Are these words reaching to be born in writing?

   I tell them, hoping it will catch on with maybe just one person, to write every day in a journal, to master words and let their voices be heard, to submit what they write to local newspapers and magazines, who rarely publish writings of teens, these people who must soon inherit and make sense of an adult world that, in a master stroke of form over content, spends millions on grand, new libraries and a grade school here, while laying off teachers and putting books out of reach.

   I tell them that learning to write is the art and discipline of learning what you really think and what really matters to you and triggers you into awareness – what do I feel? What is this moving in my chest and gut?  Why does it matter?  What do I value?  Who is going to write about it and get it in print, if not me?  How do I face that voice that says, forget it, no one’s listening anyway?

   And if just one of them keeps writing and learning to really hear that voice inside, then that may be the voice that one day becomes the hundredth monkey that creates a world where things make sense and we buy books, not buildings – and not bombs.   ~





Roughly Slouching Toward Adulthood

He didn’t want to become a man – who does?  Gabe is only 14 and still having a totally sick (that means wonderful in middle school language) time being a funny, loud, witty, devilish kid.  He resisted it, argued against it, tried to blow it off. 

   But he did it, the whole 2-1/2 hour bar mitzvah.  He learned to speak Hebrew and read it at length from the Torah.  He looks out suspiciously, yet with a core of calm strength from the big hair that bushes around his eyes. 

   His dozens of pals, mostly strangers to this spiritual path, sit in the back, wearing yarmulkes, smiling and alternately bored, mystified and awed at this – a rite of passage out of childhood, something you know most have never seen, as they propel toward society’s rough passage rites of drinking, sex, getting a license and having parents implore safety around these potentially lethal, life-changing urges.

   Gabe carries the three millennia-old Torah around the congregation.  The hair stands up on your arms.  Everyone claps and sings as Rabbi David plays guitar, frequently reminding, hey, loosen up, this is not “religion,” which takes itself so seriously and brings us long faces. This is the antidote, he says, to the misery, grief, pain and isolation in the heart of each of us.  This is community, this is dancing, this is us, right now, in this love! 

   Then there’s that stunning moment when his dad, Steve, cuts the cord of karma (that word is actually used), saying your deeds no longer come back to me as your father.  What you do now falls on you alone. Wow, bang, if there’s a moment when Gabe becomes a man, that’s it.  He makes his own choices now and they’ll always be informed by that moment – and the love with which his dad handed him his manhood.

   At Gabe’s party that evening, four of us, all Gentiles and parents of boys the same age as Gabe, make a pact by stacking hands.  We will do this for our boys.  It’s a deep instinct, to engage and ritualize the passage to maturity – and we feel it rising in us as we sip our wine, watching the sun slant across the dry hills and the full July moon balloon up over the valley rim.

   Do they suddenly become adults?  Many people wish – like the neighbor who calls the cops on the “gang” of 13-year olds in the delicious throes of a crab-apple fight.  I talk to him – they may look like criminals, I say, with their hair in their face, their jeans half way down their shorts, their mouths full of profanity and their ears full of throbbing, in-your-face hiphop, but, ok, I call them over and ask them variously to say their names, tell what their parents do and recite their gpa’s. They’re all A-students or close.  I want the neighbor to see they have names, faces, brains, families, smiles – and I keep them all talking till, indeed, the smiles start coming out.

   Another thing, they’ve all lost a friend in the last few weeks – T., who died in a climbing fall. I don’t bring that up.  They all went to the memorial at her house, where her dad invited them to touch and read all the things in her room.  One of them found a list Tracy had done about her favorite people and places – he found his name and house listed there.  He had no idea, he said. 

   That’s the way it is sometimes.  You write a line across someone’s heart, with a smile or a little gift, maybe sharing your lunch.  There comes that moment in adolesence – it always comes – when you realize you have a soul and you see through things to their essence. So it is with Colin when he read that list and had to think about where she is now and that she’s almost certainly sharing this moment with him.

   So it is, too, with Hannah, 16, now reading Dan Millman’s 1980 consciousness classic, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. She likes to copy down song lyrics or lines from books, then forgets them, leaving them around the house. This one, from the kitchen floor, said, “I was consciousness, recognizing itself, I was pure light that physicists equate with all matter, and poets define as love.”

   There is so much going on in these kids – behind the mumbled, impatient, dismissive replies to our questions, which some parents tell me they take personally.  I say – I don’t think it’s personal.  And they don’t need to be grounded.  Slouching into maturity, they’re rough, but they know where they’re going.  They’re trying to hang onto their fire, their clarity, their very souls as they career into an adult world that seems to be largely missing these.  They’re worried about that.  Ask them. They would like to periodically ground us so we can have a long think about THAT.   ~





Keep Your Tubes Outta Me…
It’s a Good Day to Die.

 “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.”
                                                                                    --Laurie Anderson

This past winter, for the first time, I saw someone die.  It’s quite ridiculous it should have taken these many decades before I saw death.  Death happens often and we should see it often, understand it a lot better and have a whole bunch of rituals and songs for it.  Instead, my sisters and I and a few of our partners stood around an ICU bed, glancing back and forth from our mom’s face to the monitor which fed out its blipping lines about heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure and oxygen absorption.

   When someone would leave the room and come back, they looked first, not at dying Nan, but at the monitor.  At some point in the early evening, after Nan realized for the 15th or 20th day in a row that she wasn’t going to get her white wine before dinner, she began to let go and, over an hour, her lines began to flatten.  The lines, not our instinct, told us she was going to die.  That’s when we began to tell her how much we loved her and what a great mom she’d been and how she’d find Bill and her parents on the other side and we’d be fine without her (lie).  We began to sing her favorite old swing and jazz songs from the 30s and 40s.  I sang “It’s a Wonderful World” softly into her ear, especially the line, “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do; they’re really saying I LOVE YOU.”  On her lips, I put a drop of Canadian whisky, the kind in the purple bag that she and her dad and his dad loved.

   Then the lines dropped precipitously.  There were a few more breaths with long pauses between, then the breath with the endless pause after it.  I know I wasn’t imagining it – I could feel her happiness to be in the spirit world and the happiness of those waiting for her there.  It was a lot like being at the birth of my children, a mystery so silent and honest and beyond any rational assessment.  Where does the spirit go at this moment?  Where does the spirit come from when the children are born and they open their eyes and very soon, over several days, you realize they already have a personality, a way about them, a personal power and destiny – and they didn’t learn it here.  They came with it from – where? – from the same place Nan just went to.

   We held hands around her and I did a prayer asking that she be taken happily into paradise, which apparently, she was. I cut a lock of her hair with my Swiss Army knife and kissed her forehead. The sweat of death was on it.  I tasted it on my lips.  I pulled the monitors off her body.  I poured shots of Canadian and we all tossed them back and let them burn.  During lunch the next day at Goose Hollow, I had to go outside in the clammy March wind and smoke and cry in privacy of the driveway. A red tail hawk suddenly appeared, soaring here over downtown Portland.  It cut several graceful circles over my head.  It was her, somehow – her spirit.  How do they do this?  In so many cultures, birds take part in signs to humans.  In the wake of it all, death pushed lots of buttons.  One sister found something to fight with us about – the ashes, I think.  Another cruised on with extra positiveness.  Another became a patient herself, seeing the docs about palpitations and trouble breathing.  They told her she was depressed (I think it’s called grief, doc) and prescribed antidepressants. 

   I went home and danced in the dark with my beloved to all the old swing-jazz songs Nan loved and which I grew up with.  I wept for hours and felt numb in my guts for weeks.  A few weeks later, Nan came to me in a dream and was young and happy and talked angel talk, which I couldn’t understand, then she woke me up so I’d remember it.  I got the meaning of her words, though: she was ok.  Later, I caught a Star Trek episode in which the sad crew are trying to plan a funeral for someone.  They ask Worf if he has any ideas.  He says, well, I don’t think I have anything sad to contribute, because in my culture death is a time of celebration about passing into the hall of heroes, where life is much better.  Wow, I thought, that sounds true.  Why do we -- though most of us say heaven/paradise is better -- feel so pole-axed, so riven with shock, so full of regrets that more love didn’t happen, so aching with soul-stripping loss?

   The FedEx guy brought several boxes of photos and letters, most of them sent to Nan by me over the decades.  It’s bizarre.  I don’t know what to do with them – probably keep them in a box for my children to have when I go to the hall of heroes.  Going through them, I get a sense of a big life, Nan’s, flattened into a thin archaeological layer about a quarter inch thick. Now it will never change; it’s fixed.  And, really, for the first time, I get a sense of my life being two-thirds of the way down the same conveyor belt.  Yes, yes, the dead live on as the love they nurtured in the hearts of their kin and friends, but, say a century from now, they’ll just be a box of pictures of someone’s great-grandparent.

   Suddenly, one day I’m playing wall tennis in the brilliant spring sunshine and marveling at the purple vetch and mustard all over the hills and I have one of these moments where I say, “You’ve got to be kidding me!  It goes by so fast.  What’s it all about anyway?”  Everyone says we’re here most of all to love and be loved and most importantly to pass that love on to our children.  Yes, I know that.  I do that.  But seeing this death – my mom’s – far from loading me with the weight of grief, has lightened me.  I feel freed.  It’s killed off that Protestant Work Ethic-temperance-superego-inner parent voice thing and I suddenly decide life is what I say it is.  I’ve tried to do this all my life, but now, like the slashing of a great sword, these things are cut away and I’m free.

   Life seems burst out of its blossom.  I hear people gossip and I don’t care what they’re saying and have nothing to add.  I don’t care what people do or what’s in the news.  Well, some, but not a lot.  People warn me that my kids are entering those adolescent years and I should brace myself for their wild goings-on around sex, drugs, cars and rebellion.  I say, I don’t care, I know they will do those things, just as I did, but they will do them well.  They won’t hurt anybody.  Or themselves.  People warn me I should blow several hundred dollars a month on health insurance but I just refuse.  It feels evil.  I don’t care.  They signal that cancer or heart bypasses or strokes or some combination of the above are my inevitable fate and I should plan for them – invest in them! -- so I can, well, live through them and – what? – be a very old survivor and have more years to “love life.”

   But I don’t love life, I finally tell them.  It’s been good, yes, (especially the 1960s!) but if I haven’t done what was important to me by 65 or 70, then what’s the point in stretching it out into the 80s and 90s, where I might do some watercoloring, see the pyramids at Teotihuacan, but realistically spend most of it with a 500-channel zapper in my clawed hand.  I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to let the docs get their hand and monitors on me and have their little conferences in the hallway with the next of kin, talking about how they have good news and bad news.  The bad news was anything that might let death get nearer to this 82-year old person, Nan.  The good news was the next sonogram, xray, transfusion, radiation, bypass or shunt – each one of them costing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s not likely they’d be interested in doing these “procedures” if the patient didn’t have several good health insurance policies covering everything imaginable.

   With the passing shock and the acceptance of loss, I found myself in the anger phase, but not anger at death. I was angry with those who tried to stand in death’s way.  If she’d lived before all this medical wizardry, Nan would’ve died 15 years ago.  When I say this, others counter that it “gave” us those extra years of Nan.  Yes, yes, she got to see grandchildren she would never have seen and got to grow in her wisdom and caring.  But it also pulled everyone into this burgeoning cult – industry, even – of life extension.  What right have we to do this, to tease out lives a generation past their time?  I was angry because I never got to come to grips with the fact of her death when death was ready.  As the docs tricked death time after time, they seemed like they were preserving something we love – the life of a mother – but they were also trashing something natural and good: death itself.  I only got to accept her death as fact when they sat us down in the conference room and said, well, we’re out of tricks.  She will die today.  We’ve made her “comfortable” (whammied her on morphine).  Now we’re done; you can go ahead and accept it.  And that’s exactly what happened.  It was managed and comfortable, like the antidepressants they gave my sister to help distance her from grief – or like a Caesarean, which docs do to most mothers now, saving them from the vice of birth.  Just as the dying are saved, until the last hours, from the vice of death.

   But then, I don’t care.  When death is come round, to let us say our goodbyes on our feet, then take us over into the desert and leave us with some water and maybe a drum and a pad to lie on.  The turkey vultures will recycle us.  That makes me comfortable.  I hope the stars will be out and that it is a good day to die. ~





The Gift of an Apple

Love is an emergence of ancient delights dwelling in our bodies and our souls which, in order to live, must be negotiated and agreed to by our everyday, practical, common-sense personalities. 

   We have to be able, not just to love the other, but to like them, to cook pasta by their side, to be interested in the books on their shelves, to do errands with them and to feel the same about things like how to speak to children, what’s money for and how do you be alone.

   What finally persuaded the everyday self of me was that she took long hikes in the hills above Ashland every day, alone, even during the rainy time of year.  Her legs were muscled and tanned from years of it and her blue eyes showed the intimacy of looking long distances. 

   When she told me about this and when she took me with her and I saw her knowledge of the network of Siskiyou foothill trails, with names like Toothpick, White Rabbit and Twenty-Sixty, something in me relaxed and let the ancient delights have their sway.

   This was something I could trust.  When she was “going through a lot,” as we say now, this is what she did, she took it to nature and let the truth of the hills, the winds, gorges, clouds moving, the sun, the grass coming up and dying, the quiet of eternal forests, all this – she let it orient her at midlife and repattern and reparent her and she came out of it who she is, who she always wanted to be.

   When I hiked with her, she glided easily up the trails, wearing her old-fashioned, green canvas knapsack, her dog at her side, nodding at the occasional familiar face, seen here on other treks.  When I hiked with her we wouldn’t say much.  She seemed to carry this space with her, like a thought.  I would just let my body sense it and learn its contours and I would find myself thinking: I like her.

   She would lead me to these huge boulders tucked all over high above Ashland watershed and say, here, this is a real good place to sit.  She would pull out avocado and cheese sandwiches she’d made and she’d smile and name all the plants and point out all the best colors.  When she was here, she said, she felt a “presence” that pervaded everything and which knew and loved and welcomed her.

   She was almost shy in showing me her world.  It could speak for itself, couldn’t it?  I would glance over at her munching her figs, her aquiline face framed by the shock of blonde hair and I would know she is showing me who she is – and who she is is this world. 

   Once, on one of the big rocks, we sat looking out over the sun-mottled autumn valley and she handed me from her snack-pack a bright, red apple.  We both looked at the fruit poised between us and smiled at the humor of this Eve-offering.  We let the moment last, grinning like young, naïve lovers of 20, which is what we’d become and felt like and looked like to each other.

   This apple-moment really says it all, I was realizing, everything philosophers and sacred texts and romantic poets have ever tried to say – it’s all right here, it’s all been provided from most distant days.  An apple is offered, the veil parts, we are children again and the soul of our self and all things shines purely like a flame. 

   In his march through history, man has tried to take all this unto himself and design himself as source of it all and then, in a moment, a woman offers a man this fruit and in it and in her is all of nature, all truth, all delight, all nurturance, all generation and all the mystery of it all and the man takes the apple and says would you like to get a bottle of red wine for tonight and make pasta together and she says yes.   ~





A Place at the Feast

I wasn’t prepared for this. It seemed simple at first – a middle school project in which the kids widen out from their immediate circle of friends, tv, gameboys, scooters, studies, and write a book about their family, ancestors, neighbors, with a seating chart for a big family feast, a map of the neighborhood and a story of one of their people.

   I see what the teachers are doing, creating a sense of place, a stream of Story, a picture of the whole sweep of time and the tendrils of many hearts moving inexplicably toward and away from chosen valleys, passions, persons and in the process seeding all these with the inexplicable stuff of themselves.

   As part of this, Hannah wrote the story of my dad.  She had to ask me about him, as he died five years ago.  Birt C. Darling was one of the first historic preservationists, I told her, back in the 1950s.  He was a journalist and historian and he used his voice in the daily paper to try and save Barnes Mansion, this immense, amazing Gothic castle by the Grand River in Lansing.  He lost, of course, and they put a freeway straight through it.  I showed her the picture of it in the book he wrote, City in the Forest, the history of Lansing.

   I was trying to tell her what it felt like to fight for beautiful things in the face of mindless, modern progress, and this back in a time when people thought of old buildings as faintly disgusting and sad.  How did he feel, she asked me.  I’d never thought about that.  Well, I said, I guess it hurt his feelings.  A lot.

   A few weeks later, I read her computer-printed report. “It hurt this man badly,” she’d written.  Yes, it did, and it was kind of hurting me now.  If he’d been born a generation later, he would have organized a huge and successful email campaign and chained himself to its doors, but back in those days, you coped with your lot.

   The seating chart for the family Yule feast included all manner of cousins, grandfolks and blended families.  So interesting to see who sits where, who should be close to and far from whom.  My dad should be here.  He’d be 90 next month, and though he’s gone to the happy hunting ground, I think this is the first time I’ve really let it come inside me and hurt.

   I always wanted him to be someone else.  This is the part that didn’t get into the school report.  I wanted him to be warm and have feelings and bounce us kids on his knee.  I’d heard he did this when we were toddlers but, as we grew up and started school and having minds of our own, he’d gone back to his books.

   It’s so easy to get angry at the parents for who they were.  Or weren’t.  It’s a rite of teen passage and a ritual in group therapy.  But, all that doesn’t change them a bit.  They remain who they are.  And so do we. 

  He complained a lot.  He had no friends.  He never talked to anyone on the phone.  He hated the modern world. He never drove a car.  He lived in his head.  He sat in his corner every evening with his books and typewriter, putting away a six-pack and smoking his lungs out.  He was the one who caused everyone’s unhappiness, the “sick one,” the scapegoat of the family, as psychologist Virginia Satir would put it.

   And he was a genius, who for 50 years, made the alternate realities of history, aviation, archaeology and space travel understandable and entertaining for the readers of The State Journal.

   I saw him in Florida a few months before he died.  He was on a walker and he shuffled about his house getting me copies of magazines that were paying well for articles.  He wanted me to keep writing for them, because he was dying. And he wanted me to have the paintings he did of the Indians of Michigan.

   He loved the Indians.  He would walk for days in the vast swamps outside Lansing, learning the Indian camps from the old people who’d known them.  He wanted to be an Indian.  His nose looked like an Indian nose, he thought.  He searched his family tree for any trace of native blood sprung from the woodlands of Vermont, New York and Michigan.  He worked with the archaeologists of Michigan State University, digging up the history and stashing boxes of pottery shards, points and hide scrapers all over the house, including under my bed.  I think that’s finally where I absorbed his love of history, archaeology and writing.

   When he was dying, ten boxes of his papers arrived on UPS and I went through them, paper by paper.  Inside were manuscripts of four unpublished books, including a novel in which the protagonist was a writer-archaeologist, free of the fetters of working to support a family of five people who didn’t understand or love him.  When I’d finished the last box, the phone rang and he was dead.

   I got to tell him before he died that I understood him – and that I loved him.  I hugged him.  I knew I would never see him again.  I talked to the hospice people and they said they found him quite a dear and fascinating man. They said he mentioned one regret – that he wished he’d developed a spiritual life. 

   The kids and I were doing the Ouija board a few years ago and we asked to talk to him. The angels said he wasn’t there. Was he reincarnated?  Yes.  Is he a boy or girl?  A girl, they said.  The kids and I all looked up and smiled.  He could be one of the babies living now right around us! 

   And, yes, he needs to be a girl and put away the books and the lost civilizations and take a place at the feast.  Next to me.   ~






The Greening of a Generation

It promises to be a long, hot graduation ceremony on hard bleachers, the second one this week.  A part of me hates these.  They always make me cry.  I imagine (and hope) it will be routine this time and, in a reasonably composed manner, I’ll hug Hannah in her new white dress and hairdresser-fresh curls, then walk out into the June day and get back to work. 

   Then the kids – eighth graders – start giving talks about their most important thoughts and memories.  One girl says she was so scared when she moved here and started middle school but on the first day, all the kids playfully competed to take her out to lunch and help her feel part of things.  It changed her life.  It took away her fear and made her belong.  She quotes Bob Dylan’s Dream: “We thought we could sit forever in fun, but our chances really was a million to one.”  She’s trying to thank everyone for the love.  Dang, my eyes grow moist.

   A boy reads a poem about the walls between us all and how painful they are and how they should come down.  I don’t have any trouble remembering what he’s talking about – the cliques of popular kids, jocks, brains, hoods (we used to call them) and those way at the bottom, the withdrawn ones who no one really gets to know.  We have a much better idea who they are now – abused kids, children of alcoholics, trying and failing to come close to some idea of likable and “normal.” The boy is pleading for everyone to look over those walls and realize our commonness and that we all have isolation, no matter how cool we think we are.  And we all need love.

   I don’t have a handkerchief.  My chest does a little heave and a little gasp.  I’m surrounded by parents and feel quite the idiot.  These kids, they’re so completely innocent.  They overpower with the authority of truth.  They have – what?  What is that thing adults lose -- hope.  They have freaking hope.  And I’m sitting here watching an actual display of this sheer, fleeting, near-shamanic thing, in its pure and completely genuine form, a thing you couldn’t for a million dollars buy a seat to see on Broadway or in Disney tv movies (which actually are doing the best job of any to show real problems, real coping skills and real people working their way through the “stuff” of life to find real love).

   Then the little student quartet plays Pachelbel’s Canon, getting most of the notes right and getting all of the heart right.  And the hope.  I’m actually crying now and the tears and snot are running down my face and I’m wiping it with my sleeve and then they say they’re going to play John Lennon’s “Imagine” because it “really expresses our true feelings about the world we want to live in and hope to create as adults.”

   Imagine there’s no heaven – it’s easy if you try.  My god, they’re saying that after being educated in our tax-supported middle school for three years?  Cool.  Pissing off some conservative parents, I’m sure.  But I’m glad they’re thinking.  It’s more than glad.  It’s actual joy.  They see something out there in the world 20 and 40 years from now, something maybe we don’t see. If there’s no heaven, then what have we got?  This -- we’ve got this world right here with these kids and all this hope. 

  Imagine no possessions, they sing.  Oh my god!  Now, there’s a word for that – communism.  But suddenly I am imagining no possessions.  I’m seeing it how they’re singing it and, baby, I don’t see any problem.  Of course, they’ll never do that.  These kids will get those degrees and SUVs and mortgages and vacations on credit cards, won’t they?  And spend their lives working for and maintaining and storing and preening better and better stuff.  But, right now, they’re seeing though it all.  And I’m sitting here knowing it’s possible and it’s fantastical and it’s right.

   I want to just cry out from my place on the bleachers – Do It! Don’t lose that!  It’s what we, your parents tried to do in the sixties and pass on to you and (doubt – did we make any freaking difference?) yes, we did it, we did what you’re trying to do.  Then it rises like the sun in my mind: can I even begin to imagine my generation standing here at middle school graduation and saying any of this stuff?  We’d have been shamed and thrown out of school and vigorously rejected by peers as the weirdest of dorks, the uncoolest of hyper-dweebs.

   So then how come these kids get to say and sing these things and not be punished and ostracized?  Because, dummy, I tell myself, you and your generation changed the world.  It worked.  The sixties worked!  It didn’t so much make the world safe for pot, tie-dye and old Dylan records as it made us look at everything as if love mattered.  Peace and love, brother – it worked.  It’s here, right in front of me, singing now.  We planted a lot of unfamiliar seeds and didn’t know what kind of flowers would spring from them. 

   Scarcely tended by mainstream culture, they grew into a world of conflict resolution workshops, nuclear freezes, laws against hate crimes, mothers against drunk driving, day care at work, seat belts, adult children of alcoholics finding ways back to self-love, people talking routinely about their feelings and personal growth, creek cleanups, indoor clean air, no World War III and parents chronically hugging and saying I love you to their children.

   And, after she gets her diploma, that’s what I do to Hannah.  “Dad,” she says, looking around to see if anyone noticed, “please!”  That hasn’t changed.  We fought for and gave them a different world, but they’re still embarrassed (in public) by our love.  I hope they get over it.  Hey, I must have picked up some of that from them – hope!   ~






The Making of Home Where There Was None

Only the cheeky, snow-loving crocus may have edged out of the otherwise cold, seemingly dead soil and one of you will be in the garage or shed trying on the gardening gloves and feeling the heft and exciting tingle of the rake, maybe even the hoe. 

   One partner, usually the woman, will go out and drag the first few leaves from the bed and turn over the first soil, her coffee cup set beside her in the rows. It’s time, the man will think, seeing the loveliness of her form crouched over the inert brown and tan space.

   He goes out for a newspaper or latte and swings by the Grange for chat with pals and a tray of starts, to surprise her.  It’s starting, this ritual about sowing, tending, weeding, reaping that so mimics everything in life – work, child-rearing, the learning and cycles of every part of life and you don’t really need the vegetables, which, instead of doing all these hours of work, you could buy for maybe $40 tops. You do it for other reasons.

   Other parts of this ritual are juicier – the summer storms and harvest, the salads, but nothing touches this first scraping at the soil, the long silences of gathering out last year’s deadness, pruning up the roses, hedges and fruit trees, laying bare and smoothing out the soil.  You’re both absorbing the quiescence of the dirt and still sleeping branches but they speak of beginnings, openings, startings of journeys – the first steps perhaps of our life together, the finding of the land we love, the first grey of dawn, of possibility, of hope itself.

   “Another cup of coffee?” you might say, to break the stillness. “Yes, that would be great and, you know, I was thinking about a movie tonight, maybe a bottle of wine. Let’s go pick up some more starts this afternoon.  I think some flowers might look good along the fruit trees there.”
   There is time, the soil says, lots of time.  Go ahead and plant things, open little holes in the dirt and put the roots in and pat it down around them. 

   This naked act, this ritual of soil and water and dirt under the nails and now it’s tying you into those rhythms and cycles, as it has your mother and her mother, touching all those generations, lives, harvests, deaths, going back to when people for the first time piled one stone atop another and the women showed the men, hey, you know, we’ve been watching this and if you stick these seeds in the ground and stop all this nomadic hunting and gathering – we’re tired of all this wandering around, by the way -- we can just sit here and have a nice time and wait for everything to come up. 

   So, let’s put a fence around it.  It will keep the deer out and these goats in.  That can be your job.  How about you put down your spear and get busy.  Let’s give it a name.  We’ll call it home. ~





A Heart in Fallow

I’ve known G. for years now.  We come from the same spot in the Midwest (Michigan) and share all those values and conditioning – a proper underlayment about keeping your word, showing up on time, eating a good diet, strong on the use of irony, hard-working but not working too hard, able to carry things to excess when the right party calls for it, but in general, nothing to excess.

   Then there’s love – able to make the wrong choice and give to it, but able to repair oneself out of the wreckage.  Which he’s done.  Took him a couple years.  We’d talk for many hours at a time after the crash – not pretty, no solution to a broken heart, is there?  Except time, which heals all wounds and wounds all heels.  That’s another Midwest belief.  That’s why Midwesterners don’t much go for revenge and are light on the gossip and deft (and brief) on the sarcasm.  Love will come around again.  We know that.  We get that from the farming thing.  Everything in its season.

   There are a lot of us out here from the Midwest, by which we mean Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan and sometimes Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, the last three being too close to the South to feel completely Midwest.  Not Kansas or Missouri.  That’s the Plains.

   What are we doing out here on the West Coast?  Getting the hell away from the Midwest, of course.  Every Midwesterner knows that.  The insufferable winters, the vapid culture, where everyone thinks the same and has the same values.  That song – Stop Making Sense! – could be the Midwest anthem.  It’s more interesting out West, more open, more alive, more changing.  We can breathe and think here. 

   Plus, out here amid a floodtide of Californians, they like us.  We keep the tempo, clean up the messes after the parties, listen the longest, finally have something sensible to say at the end of a long, crazy discussion. What tv journalists and anchors did they use to reassure the nation during World War II and the Cold War? Midwesterners – Cronkite, Sevareid, Reasoner, Collingwood, Chancellor.

   We’ll never own up to this, but we like the energy, the childlike spunk, the daring of Californians, who never seem to reach 40 – not spiritually and emotionally anyway.  At the same time, we’ll never say the truth -- we just kind of tolerate them.  And when alone in pairs or small groups, we Midwesterners will ask each other if we’ve ever been romantically involved with one – and how crazy did it get, how did it end and how long was the healing?

   The answer tends to be that they lacked the grounding of us Midwesterners, rarely showed up on time, would keep their word if it made sense to them at the moment but in general seemed guided by an invisible friend or inner child and, if in doubt, they went with that. 

   It was a lot more interesting to love a Californian.  It was like going to the movies, which, in the short term, are more interesting than books.  But, as everyone says, the book’s better.  Midwesterners are like books.  Slower.  Not all pushed in your face.

   In the late sixties when I got to Oregon, I thought it an amazing find – all these mountains, deserts, valleys, cheap real estate.  I decided it could be an honorary Midwestern state.  After all, it was settled almost entirely by people from those seven Midwestern states (who, by the way, had plenty of land back there but, even then, had to get the hell out of the Midwest).

   Oregon back in the sixties was as grounded, sensible and boring as the Midwest, but one hell of a lot more beautiful – and it didn’t grind you under six months of freezing winter.  Since then, I’m sure you’ve noticed, Oregon has been Californicated bigtime – Ashland essentially being the northernmost Marin County suburb, and in the next decade this darling state, once so feminine in spirit, will double in traffic, home prices, sprawl and all the ghastly overkill we fled California about.

   Back to G.  He’s lived a lot of his life out there on the edge, but to put life back together after that heartbreak, what he DIDN’T do was go to seminars, get rolfed, massaged, rebirthed, drunk or much of anything.  He went home for a year or two.  He listened to music, hiked in the hills with his dog (who also feels Midwestern) and just handled the whole thing as would a farmer: hell, it won’t work, let it be for a season.  It knows what it’s doing.  Maybe plant it with alfalfa and a lot of snow and rain. 

   Only a few weeks ago, G. said there’s this woman, L., trying for months to set her sights on him, but it just don’t feel right and he ain’t gonna let it happen.  “We’ll be friends, that’s all.  She’s real smart and we talk good.”

   Hm, says I silently -- sounds like the ideal ground for love.  At a small gathering a week ago, there’s L.  She’s beautiful.  We’re drinking wine.  The discussion turns, as it often does with wine, to matters of the heart.  Gotta keep your independence, says G., your separate homes, gotta be free to distance someone else’s kids, gotta keep your power. 

   That’s the stuff I always say, if you catch me on even-numbered days. On the odd days (this was one), I say, all those conditions mean nothing and when love comes along, you know it and you go with it.  It will change you.  It will turn you inside out.  The odds are even it could mess you up worse than the last time.  But you don’t get to tell Love what you’ll put up with and how you’ll run the show.  If you try, and succeed, you’ll get another “relationship,” not love.

   I study the look in L’s eye.  There it is.  I can tell.  In a later email, I say to G., hey man, she loves you.  She might be The One.  I believe she is.  We may only get one One in a lifetime, you know.  If we’re lucky.  And that’s the one that may violate all your conditions but ends up being the one that opens the door to all the things your soul needs to learn – and love – in this life.

   A few days later, at a yard sale he says, you were right.  She’s The One.  I can’t believe this.  I’m so in love with her. Deep inside, an old farmer soul nods contentedly.  Thought the fallow would do the trick.  Looks like a good season coming on.   ~





Women – Dreams and Nightmares

Like all American men, I’m conditioned to froth at the mouth and lope after the teasy, cheesecakey lass with midriff and bulging bosomy delights ever thrust at me, images repeatedly imprinted in nearly every tv commercial and all the magazines in the checkout lines, which a generation ago offered Newsweek, Psychology Today, Atlantic.

  No more. We’ve become Cheesecake Nation, baldly treating each other as consumer commodities or, more honestly, drugs, to be used, exchanged, consumed, “make us feel things” and please recycle this container. I’ve been asked what dreamy and nightmarish feelings I might have about women?  These are the nightmarish feelings.  I’m no prude, but this doesn’t work. 

   On the other hand, what turns me on has little to do with dreamy feelings but rather something shown me in recent months, by three women – friends – who wanted to know me -- a sentiment soon returned.

   Born, bred and educated in Europe, T. sees me across the room at a party and points to the chair beside her.  I obey.  It’s “dreamy,” not because she has power over me, but because she has and knows her own power and plays no games with it.

   We’re at a convention party.   We talk about Teresa Heinz Kerry and how she starts out saying yes, I’m opinionated. I think.  I feel.  I read books.  I’m in touch with all the depths inside me.  Far from dumbing down for a conservative, post-Victorian, anti-intellectual society, I will speak up.

   T. bats no eyelashes at me (nor do I), but sits there espousing why we’re at war again – because men are only capable of such evil by being cut off from goddess-earth energy – and that must and will change and it will be very hard.

   I take a breath.  Oh, we’re telling the truth here and respecting each other to use our brains and get real.  I instantly realize this is what I’m starved for in this culture.  If ya wanna know what’s dreamy to me, that is. 

   Another woman, L., calls me for lattes, likes my writing, wants to interest me in a story on her work.  She teaches Tantra, the ancient Indian path of enlightenment and love via the practice of sexual ecstasy.  I assume I know about that.  I don’t. 

   Soon a friend, she educates me.  It’s about going into the well of the sacred in each of us and witnessing and experiencing it in the other.  You make love with that, the Divine in you.  Sex as expression of love. Love is expression of God.

   In those inner depths where Divine ecstasy lives – guess what else lives there, she explains?  The Shadow – all the fears, anger, hurt we’ve ever experienced and stuffed and when you love and go into these depths, you’re gonna (you have to) engage it and be honest and vulnerable to it and if you don’t, well, that’s why so much love flips over into blame and shutdown after the first lovely year.

   Tantra is about healing that.  She was an abused child, L. says.  Love was always blooming for her, then hitting the wall, with considerable embarrassment, pain, betrayal and anger.  Tantra healed that.  She sips her latte and smiles.  She’s very beautiful, but there is no tease in her smile.  It’s happiness.  Like, T., she’s letting me see who she is completely and it’s, well, divine.

   Then there’s R, who fell in love with a dear friend, long before he did with her.  She had kids.  He wanted “freedom.”  She wanted commitment.  He smelled trap.  A familiar story.  Finally, she gives up on her conditions.  So does he.  You don’t get to tell love how you want it served, do you? 

   Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds, wrote Shakespeare.  She holds on.  He would have walked.  She knows she loves him and finally, she lets love make the choices.  Love – “el amor brujo” (love, the sorcerer) – changes you or tosses you off the wagon.  It has to annihilate the ego (both of them) to work its magic.

   Male stereotypes notwithstanding, this is what men want.  We don’t want masculine roles.  We want love, truth and to preserve and grow a sense of one’s own personal power and identity.  Given a chance, we want that, not the cheesecake, in women, too.  If that’s dreamy, it’s a wide-awake dream…the best kind.   ~





Love Ho’s Cuddling in a Time of War

Pillows and quilts cover the floor.  Space music plays.  Tea is served (no alcohol).  Most of us know each other.  Clad in jammies, we lay down and, after an initial sharing about how nervous we are and how we’ve all felt we wanted to be closer to people, we begin the first known Cuddle Party in Southern Oregon. 

   In a time when, as a society, we’re being told to be afraid, very afraid, this hug-in is nice, very nice.  Hands roam, legs entwine, faces are caressed, sore shoulders are rubbed, necks and cheeks are nuzzled and kissed – but no kissing on the lips unless both agree.  No grinding either. 

   You might think there would be hushed erotic preoccupation, but instead people giggle a lot, crack jokes, confess fears, talk about their lives, how they’re struggling, succeeding, failing with parenting chores, bills, relationships, loneliness – life.  And how we want love.

   Engaging our nervousness, we fall into mock English accents, saying stuff like, “I say there Greg, start up the CD again, then come back over here and love us, old boy, wot?”  And, “Dash it, you are a lovely lass, aren’t you now, Laura?  Don’t we think she’s beautiful?”  She laughs and says how she loves cuddling because you get to really experience how people smell.

   These parties have become a fad in the trendy capitols of the nation, where they charge $30 a person.  This one is free.  It’s a spinoff of Burning Man, where Merrill, the creator of this party, served as a Love Ho’ – a group set up to hug and stroke people and tell them “I love you,” – this based on the phenomenon that our nation is under-hugged and rarely told we are loved. 

   That lack isolates us and leads to thoughts that the reason people don’t hug us and say I love you is because, well, there must be something wrong with us.  This, in turn, gets reciprocated by our thinking there’s something wrong with others aka judging, resenting, polarizing, which eventually gets translated globally into, well, pick up the newspaper and read it for yourself.

   We’re literally dying to be hugged.  So goes the philosophy of Love Ho’s.  If that sounds hippy-dippy and dumb, it’s a lot harder to argue with than why we’re killing people in Iraq and blowing $200b to do it.

   Afterward, a not infrequent cuddle party “hangover” is a sense of uneasiness and regret for having let yourself go, for having shed the boundaries ego has worked so hard to establish all your life.  The ego – (“Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain over there” –Oz) can reproach you with shame as it tries to reestablish its defense perimeter.

   Exploring this later with friends, I realize that, while you may feel isolation and shame the next day, at a deeper level it’s not about individual psychology at all.  There’s nothing that can be “worked through.”  The pain is much simpler.  It’s grief from loss of the tribe, something I believe we all suffer all of our lives and write off with such names as anomie, existential angst, the Lost Generation – even depression. 

   The persistent subconscious sorrow, which started 10 millennia ago, when we first piled one stone on top another to make our dwellings apart from the tribe, also encompasses unspoken pain from the loss of an inherent spirituality that sprang, like grass, from this natural ground of being, made sense to all of us and was readily accessible now, not later in heaven.

   However, in the midst of a cuddle puddle, you know there is no personal alienation, inadequacy – and certainly not shame -- but rather a sense that this is oddly familiar, even instinctive.  Everyone knows how to behave.  Everyone knows the decorum, without having to speak it.  Of course we will respect each other.  We can sense what the other person wants, needs, welcomes – or not.  It’s very much like what oneself wants, needs, welcomes.

   I have done this before, the soul whispers.  I know this.  It’s woven into what Jung called the collective unconscious, the genetic memory.  We are laying about happily talking, stroking, laughing, loving – ah, yes, of course, it was those couple million years in the caves of Europe, the jungles of Java, the savannah of East Africa and it’s what bonded the tribe and wove us together, so we would know every cache of berries and nuts as our berries and nuts, every child as our child, every cave as our cave and every person as our person, our self.

   It’s the great leveler, the great uniter, because it’s the great ego eraser.  In the cuddle pile, you don’t think – oh, I want to go over there and hug that one person, because he/she is hot or better, more desirable.  You find that to love the one you’re with is exactly what is natural and what you’re supposed to be doing.  Everyone has become equal.  Everyone has become “my tribe.”  It feels exactly as good to intimately hug two or three people as it does one.  You can practically hear the ego shriek as, like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy tossed water on her, she dissolves.

   Ann gives me a kiss, looks in my eyes and says I’m so glad you’re here.  Yes, I say.  I realize she would say that to any person here and that it would be true.  I’m not special as some kind of neat individual who has earned this love.  It just is.  We are born knowing we deserve it, but conditioned to believe must to earn it by a display of individual accomplishment, power, independence.

   I come home and watch West Side Story, the musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and a major piece of my youthful conditioning to romantic love.  I weep with unspeakable longing and joy, as always, when Maria and Tony open to this amazing miracle of love. 

   But, wait.  I stop the video.  What is this really saying?  It’s saying that, far from being plentiful and natural as the grass, love, this greatest gift in life – is rare and hard to find in the extreme.  And, it is soon trashed by a world teeming with mad, violent, isolated egos.  Maria (as Mary) tells Tony (as Christ), hey, it’s not about our love – you have to stop the gang violence and bring love to the world, the big tribe. Like Christ, Tony gets blown away trying to do that. 

   They didn’t know about cuddle parties.  We do.  Their sense of the rarity of love – and that it could only be found in that one, special, right person, who is meant just for you (and this springing out of the limitations of having just nuclear family parents, rather than a village to raise you), made them crazy. They were martyrs for love, literally dying for it.  We know better now.  ~





Story – and the Soul of the Tribe

Is there any job like being a journalist?  I don’t think so.  People often say hi and ‘good story’ then tell me or email me another story.  Or about someone who has a story.  All day long, interrupted only by hikes, driving kids around, making meals, I sit and listen to people’s stories. “It beats working,” I say, when people ask me about the “work.”  That might be the definition of finding your calling, your perfect work – that it’s not work.

   I often have no idea what to write about here, but just sit at the keyboard and say to some god of writing (Hermes?), go ahead, write it, let it flow.  And the finger-painted canvas, the mandala of the week’s stories begins to spin out the threads, all of them having the common color and fiber that these are all people who’ve told me their heart – maybe have focused on it, crystallized it more than at any time in the year or their entire lives, because, well, how often does someone sit in front of you and write down everything you say, to be told to everyone you know?

   It’s an archetypal work, one of the few left in our society that can be traced into the pre-civilized shadows of time. In Alex Haley’s “Roots,” the job title was griot – storyteller, perpetuator of the clan’s myths, adventures, those who acted out its tragedies, those heroes who carried its visions and values. It’s a job granted me genetically by a journalist father and grandfathers, who had me typing stories before I could write longhand. And before I could type (and before the copying machine), I would bring books home from the library and beg my father to type them for me.  And he did.  It was a ritual, a sacrifice he did to imprint me with the love, meaning and magic of words, stories.

   When I read obituaries, the world kind of stops.  Here is a person’s whole life in three or six inches of copy.  She came from Kansas, married Joe in Idaho, had kids, Jim and Carol, farmed, taught grade school, came to the Rogue Valley in the Depression, maybe to work the orchards and forests, loved to fish and camp.  The first thing I wonder is – did she get to tell her story?  Did anyone write it down?  Did they read it over her coffin, with the candles going and everyone – or at least the griot – committing it to memory, so that it would be told centuries from now (and called myth)?

   When my mother was 80, I begged her to write her story.  I’d already taped it, written all the geneaology, but I wanted it in her handwriting.  She resisted – not proper to talk about yourself so much.  Those were the values of the early 20th century.  But she started.  She got through her childhood and said, it’s just too hard to remember all those things.  Hard to recall, said I, or hard to…  She nodded, holding back tears.  Hard to feel it all again.  So much happened.  So many people, so much…  She touched her heart. 

   It was like that moment in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” when the dead girl gets to revisit life, her home, her parents, all the people, for one day and realizes it was not the big things that imprinted, moved, changed her, shaped her soul.  It was every little thing, the sound of the silver in the drawer, the casual fussing over the way she dressed, the way the front door slammed, the sound of the horse’s hooves delivering milk – it would tear your soul apart if you could really let it all come in for just one moment.

   I read what she wrote and realized she stopped just short of meeting my father – an ill-starred mismatch (“The Genius and the Goddess,” an Aldous Huxley title that captures it), she a 19-year old Canadian beauty, he older, a writer, mysterious, aloof, come on a Great Lakes ship to meet her at a resort hotel dance.  But at some point, they loved and had all the hopes of the world ahead of them.  Even if it were just for a year, each moment of that year contained the universe compressed in it. 

   I wanted to tell her, but wouldn’t, that this moment, if she could touch it and speak it, would contain the novel, the myth, the understanding that the world has always wanted to read – and out of it came these children and all they’ve said, done, thought, longed to be and know and do.  Her story died with her.  But I felt it and know it and have passed it on.  Five centuries from now, sitting in the university library, someone will read this on microfilm and mention it to her lover over wine.  A tear will be wiped away.  It will change the way they love.

   Story.  Underneath every story, the words, plot, characters, is the true story, the heart’s story.  That’s what the griot hears and that’s how, with drum, chant, face paint, waving arms, tears, prancing, barking, nostrils flaring, he’s able to open the heart of story – and somehow direct the soul of the tribe.   ~





Love in Your 80s: It Feels
Exactly the Same as in Your 20s

These old folks are getting married at this assisted living facility in the north Valley. They’re in their 80s and have known each other for only two weeks. They don’t think there’s much for me to write about, they tell me, but we start cracking jokes and relaxing and pretty soon it starts coming out, hey, you know within two weeks if you love someone. Hell, you know within two hours. 

   We’re gonna be here to take care of each other, the groom roars, by being there to pull the plug when it needs pulling.  This guy’s a stitch.  Don’t print that, he says, slapping his leg. The bride looks owlish at him, but you can see she’s been needing, not just a husband, but a guy with some fire, someone to bring light and surprise into her life – a life, she says, that she hadn’t seen any reason for living, since it was mostly solitaire and reading in her room, with no one to love.

   He says the same. He’d prayed that his loneliness be taken away and when this woman appeared in front of him, playing gin rummy, he knew – and he went with it.

   I talk with her friend at the facility. You know what it’s like, she says, to be real old?  It’s exactly the same as being 20.  You meet the right someone, your heart flutters, you want them to touch you, you want all the same things you ever wanted – and lots of people fall in love at these assisted living homes all the time. 

   I really am blown away.  It’s pretty hard to surprise me with something new but here it is.  Old people are the same as young people, but they look old and we want them to act old. 

   I call up a hospital looking for someone for a historical story, someone here in the first half of the 20th century.  The lady gives me a name.  Is he old, I ask.  “I don’t think he would appreciate that!” she says.  I ask, is old bad?  Why?

   In the same week, I learn three old friends here are dead, two by their own hand.  One of the latter was this quiet accountant who lived alone on Van Ness Ave.  There were no headlines or memorials for him.  I asked a neighbor, was he depressed?  Well, was the reply, I guess so!  No one missed him much.  It took two weeks to notice and find him.  He was in the driveway in his RV.

   This brings up the whole discussion – am I my brother’s keeper?  Is no man an island?  One friend says, no, it’s their choice and their karma and has nothing to do with us and it’s just crossing into the spirit world, not a big deal. 

   Most others say, yes, they’ve racked their souls, wondering if they could have done anything and yes, we should have a tribe in which no one can ever feel that isolated, hopeless and in pain and that, essentially, love is all we need and if you have it, you want to be here.

   I talk to these women about a conference they’re putting on, reframing menopause as a time of moving powerfully into the crone or wise woman phase, rather than just surviving “the change” with insomnia, depression, hot flashes and loss of sex drive.

   When it arrives, the loss of reproductivity is not a loss but a liberation from all the roles – mother, wife, homemaker, caretaker -- that, while fulfilling, also bound you to another time. Menopause is a burning away of what’s not relevant, says one, who went on a retreat for a year, to reinvent herself.

   She puts it bluntly – the younger decades were a time, though you loved mate and kids, of being obligated and of giving your power away – and now that’s over.  If you take the time for yourself, you become a “clear, pure vessel,” she says, and return with your mind sharper and your soul able to be in service, not to nuclear family but to self, humanity and the earth.

   The more stories I hear, the more it seems clear that each soul is a universe, containing all, which means we all contain each other and indeed, no man is an island. As for being our brother’s keepers, I think they meant “hold,” not keep.  We all hold the universe of each other, as in “to have and to hold” in archaic wedding vows. 

   When these warrior women go off on vigil to find their new selves, they do not so much abandon spouse and home as they move into a larger marriage with us all, having and holding all life – and I see them becoming the conscience of a planet in dire need of one. 

   I believe suicide, not drugs, divorce or the high school dropout rate, is the truest barometer of a society’s health and sanity.  Suicide is a flat “no” vote against it all.  If anything should be in the headlines, it’s that.  Yet many said don’t print that.  Why?  Could we have done anything to stop it?  No, say the many friends.  What they mean, I think, is that they, as individuals could not have stopped it and they’re right.  Whew.  They’re relieved. So am I. 

   But we all know, even in our dear, healthy, conscious, thriving Ashland, we have created a society where such suffering, isolation and terror can happen, and we don’t know about it and we don’t hear about it until the body is found. When a member of the village gives up all hope on it, that person and that village (both locally and globally) did it together. And it says we have to change.  We just don’t know how yet.   ~





It’s a Learning Experience:
Like a Long Skid on Black Ice at Night

If there is a moment between that time when a guy feels young, carefree and possessed of limitless possibilities and when he shakes hands with reality and learns a whole deep array of emotions – pain, rage, grief – that he didn’t know existed, that moment would likely be divorce, especially if there are kids involved.

   Divorce is like going into a skid on black ice at night with the whole family in the car. What you don’t need to think about is how unfair it is or how it’s someone else’s fault.  What you do want to think about, as hard as this might be, is – how can I steer this to the best possible outcome? And how can I/we survive and not end up here again?

   You’re going to have anger for her. Your thoughts will play blame statements over and over.  You will want to communicate these to her.  Good idea?  Nah.  If you could communicate, you wouldn’t be divorcing.  Take this baggage to a counselor and rant your heart out, beat a couch with a tennis racket – and get to the bottom of it, which in our nuclear family culture is usually abandonment/betrayal by the opposite sexed parent.

   With your ex, though, especially if you have children, there is a possibility for friendship and respect, and with so many weddings, graduations, grandchildren and endless money questions around kids ahead, you’ll need it. 

   The starting point is realizing that, despite your earlier convictions that she may have been a demon-banshee born to devour your entrails in the public square, your ex is actually a human being.

   This “warm, positive, unconditional regard,” as psychologists call it, is demonstrated by learning the rare and difficult skill of listening.  The first step is to realize you don’t listen.  To listen means to zip it, sit there and feel what it feels like to be her saying what she’s saying, without you thinking up your reaction to it, which, chances are is just about you being right.

   Why should you bother?  Well, it’s simple.  If you don’t understand her and walk a mile in her moccasins, you are going to go right out, get in that same car (but with a different woman), drive the same way and end up on that same black ice 

   And the uncanny thing about listening is that if you can really do it – and repeat back to her not just what she said, but what she means and wants and what it’s like to be her, then, guess what?  She will start voluntarily listening to you, even asking you what it feels like to be you -- and you’ll get to say all you’ve been wanting to say.

   Divorce is harsh on the ego. That’s most of the “grief” you’re feeling.  As a guy conditioned to be in control, it’s crushing, humiliating not to be. Guys are conditioned to find their worth in being desirable hunks. Divorce is the reverse of that. You once ego-fuelling independence seems hollow and painful now.  Call it what it is – loneliness.

   These may feel like you’re dying, but it’s just ego-death and the ironic thing is that it’s ultimately good for you.  You want to learn cooperation along with control.  You want to know intimacy, heart and honesty along with being hunky. You want to learn to speak your needs and fears along with looking strong and independent.

   The more you get out of blame and “own your stuff,” the better rebirth it will be.  Without extended wallowing, do sentence completion, starting with something like “I pretend I’m right by…”  Email it to her.  Don’t expect applause for owning your stuff.  You’re doing this for you.  Then forgive yourself for being human and doing these things. 

   It’s over.  It’s a death and, if you look about in nature, you’ll notice all death is followed by rebirth. This is yours.  Give yourself a year alone, two is better.  Why?  Because with time and patience, you’ll start finding that holy grail – love of self. When you bring that to love, well, like attracts like.  We were built for love -- but we learn it through pain.  Spring comes again.    ~





The Lover’s Fight: Mirror or Door?

Just had a big fight with my gf.  It’s not easy to write about these things, but it’s real --  partners have to fight.  And if you can’t fight and do it creatively and passionately, your relationship is toast.

   Fighting is scary.  Why?  Because you’re trekking off into the unknown country of the soul, yours and the beloved’s.  And to get there, you have to go through the jungle of the ego, which, basically, is a selfish, dishonest beast, one that must be tamed and yet, in the process of the fight, embraced, honored, even adored. 

   You’re going to learn a lot in the fight, that is, if you tell the truth.  You have to really love the other person (and yourself) to do that.  It’s hard work and can take a long time.  That’s because, in the first part of the fight, it’s not the two souls (the real people) who are fighting, but the two egos, the false selves, the defense systems.  These two beasts don’t fight fair, but they do have to fight.

   Like weather, a fight is often preceded by a stagnation and calm that signals a storm. Like electricity in the atmosphere, judgments build and are withheld.  Boredom may prevail, but static builds and snakes out in small, unkind comments about the other’s insensitivities.  Terms of endearment, if spoken at all, are insincere.  Why am I here, you begin to ask yourself.  What did I see in this person?  Paranoia, even hallucination sets in. 

   The other is wrong, oneself is right.  That means the egos are now engaged and the first lightning may silently illuminate the distant horizon.  Take a deep breath.  It’s about to begin.  What you’re about to say – and hear – will be irrational, but it makes perfect sense to the ego.

   Now it starts.  How could you do/say this/that?  You’re ridiculous, blind, selfish.  I can’t tolerate this anymore!  The ego flashes its lightning over the landscape of the home, family, relationship.  The sense of safety, control and shelter shrink.  Fear of loss, fear of never being heard add urgency. This person, who was a creature of sunshine and haven, is now fanged gorgon. 

   Ego scrambles for control by trying to fight with the mind. Schooled over a lifetime to view feelings as weak, hurtful to others, generally regrettable, even a sign of poor character, it tries to resolve things with equanimity and wisdom – or just a lot of excuses – and puts feelings on a mental treadmill, repeating the reasons one is right and how dense the other person is not to see it.

   The question hangs in the air – what if we can’t get through this?  What if I’m finding new dimensions to this person or relationship that I can’t live with?  A fight is a test of the system, an overhaul of the engine, a wiping of the hard drive, a draining of the swamp.  It IS all on the line.

   Why? Because egos are real. They’re made in childhood and are crammed with lustful, angry, spiteful, but honest emotions that were second nature to us as kids.  And you’ll notice that children freely and unapologetically use these emotions and, in a matter of minutes, are over it and back at play.

   Harsh epithets, mean judgments, sarcastic mockery, sneering, unfair characterizations of the beloved – these are the stuff of the ego, which was assembled long ago by the pure young mind, in order to defend itself against the wounds of playground bullies, sadistic teachers, tuned-out parents and a joyless adult society.

   A good tactic, in the throes of fighting, is to stop and ask, “How old are your right now?”  It’s amazing what pops out: 7, 13, 3.  You never say an adult age.  What does this do?  It performs a kind of magic, allowing you to see and forgive each other for not being the grownup.

   After the fight comes a phase of isolation, when the savaged ego tries to put itself back together, using adult logic to justify its essentially childlike energies – a briefly satisfying but hollow experience, full of resolutions about being smarter, stronger, less vulnerable.

   Then, one person will approach the other, usually for some innocuous reason – and a gentle touching of antennae will start to happen.  This is the crucial phase. 

   It reminds me of the philosophy of Dennis, a man who easily lives his passionate wild child with a compassionate, wise soul.  He signs his emails with: “The key to good relationships is 1) tell the truth 2) risk vulnerability 3) own your shit.”  That’s what closure of a fight is about.

   Many, maybe most couples don’t go here.  If both people don’t go here, the relationship takes on a formality, with each person in understandable, secure roles.  It can function well indefinitely, though it wants for feeling and communication.

   If only one partner wants to go here, the other partner will shame him/her and the relationship will not last.  If both partners want to go here, well, buckle up kids, we’ve got a ride, one that can grow and last a lifetime.

   In “making up” -- a darling term, implying creativity and upward movement – you’re not glossing over stuff and moving on.  It is a journey into the unknown, where you tell the truth, not about the beloved (you already did that in the blamefest), but about yourself.  It ain’t fun, but, baby, if you want real love, here’s the can opener. 

   Telling the truth, at level one, is when you stop withholding and reveal “the facts,” like how you really feel about the situation/partner/relationship.  Level two is your feelings and thoughts in the present, revealing one’s “constantly active, secret mind,” as Brand Blanton put in it Radical Honesty.

   Level three is owning your stuff, calling your games, saying what you’re most afraid the other will think of you. You confess all the work you put into your mask. You show off. You praise yourself instead of trying to get them to do it.

   As Blanton writes, “You have to acknowledge being a secret hero to yourself and confess the putrid vanity of all your usual phony self-denigration. You have to admit what a worm and a liar you are and go through the feelings that come up when you tell the truth about all of this. If you have never truly embarrassed yourself by what you had to say about yourself, you don’t know s--- from shinola about transformation. At this level, who you are becomes more a description centered in the here and now and less a story about your life.”

   At this level, you start getting an inkling about that cliché – the truth will make you free – and you realize it’s not the truth about God or society or your parents or Republicans or anything but you here now.  And you get it how the partner in a “fight” is really just a mirror on which you’ve been throwing your denied shadow.  This ain’t no stinkin’ fight.  This is a golden door to the lower world of your mind and everything in it that’s stopping you from being the god you were born to be.

   And then – final phase – you suddenly see this person in front of you for who she really is, free of your projections.  It’s like a new person.  She has an aura.  She’s fresh like a teen.  Anything can happen.  And energy, geez, divine, creative, sensual, spilling over, laughter, happy in my skin.  Love makes all things new again.  Am I being more loving?  No.  Just more real.  I did the hard work, shoveling out the crap in the Stygian stable.  When you’re real, love just happens. 

   Remember wooden Pinocchio, his marionette strings being pulled, his nose made long by lying, in the dark belly of the whale, lost?  In a love-fight, we are that.  I was that. And now, as Pinocchio shouted, I am a real boy!   ~





Shinin’ Times at the Ronnyvoo!

It started at potluck gatherings, the guys pulling into a clatch out on the deck and talking.  Just the guys.  The women would dance with each other.  The men wouldn’t dance much, if at all.  They would come together for the food, but then, well, the men seemed to need this time together.  

     After years of this very occasional hanging out, an email went around and four of us decided to set a date for such a time, to do it special, just us, outside, with a fire going.  There was no agenda and none wished for.  We talk about our work, cash flow, the weird real estate market and of course the boys. We all have sons the same age, about 16-17 now, friends with each other and we’ve watched them all grow up.  Now, the kids’ passions are cars, girls and being away from us parents.  They always used to be playing in the background of our potlucks – no more. 

     At the first bonfire in Steve’s back 40, it’s starry and cold enough to make us gather close around the flames and after the usual topics (these are sensitive, liberal guys and there’s precious little chat about cars, tv or football), we move on to “the situation,” aka the mess the world’s in, chiefly the economy, global warming, the water supply, the end of cheap oil, the war, the Bush claque, the military industrial complex, creeping Fascism, the booming industries of China and the many scenarios for the fate of the world -- in our lifetimes. 

     Guys like to do this.  Much more than the women, it seems.  It’s definitely a guy thing, almost a guy ritual and it probably goes back into the earliest years of civilization.  There’s not much we can do about the world, but the talk is grounding, bonding and we try to scare each other with worst case scenarios and comfort each other with jokes about it. 

     “Just don’t give us (the group) a name,” says Ely.

     “No costumes and masks, either!” says I.

     The next time, on the deck of my backyard, fire roaring in the chimnea, we’ve got it down and, with no prompting, the guys have brought expensive Scotch. Russ breaks the seal and we pass it around for smelling.  Nice!  Ely fires up the ciggies, strangely delicious even to the nonsmoker – and we explicate on the rich and various tastes of the Scotch, which quickly and effectively bursts its uncanny warmth through the lungs, heart and brisket. 

     I point out Comet Holmes, which (a sign?) (of course it it, but a sign of what?) has suddenly exploded to 400,000 times its normal brightness in the northeast, in Perseus, and we have a sweeping view of it and the whole heavens, essential for a…what is this?  I recognize the feel of this gathering from somewhere.

     Ah, it’s a Rendezvous!  In researching the Mountain Men and their early contact with the indigenes of the West, here are these annual “ronnyvoos” in the Rockies at the end of each beaver trapping season, 1825 to 1840 – shinin’ times they was! -- and the purpose was to trade foofurraw (trinkets) with the Indians (often for wives), wrestle, race horses and throw knives, guzzle arwerdenty (corruption of Spanish for firewater), palaver (swap improbable tales) and smoke fresh baccy, also called Ole Viginny.

     And here, in the 21st century, in a West they wouldn’t recognize, we four guys mine our tales of the 1960s and 70s, hitchhiking (safe and fun, if you can imagine it now) back and forth across the country, bedding legions of maids in good cheer, with little thought of these strange concepts called relationships and marriage, sampling every manner of consciousness raising and, believe me, there’s something to the old saying, “If you can remember it, you weren’t there.”

     Then come the tales of future history, the tangled web, yet to be lived out, but created by our heedless reproduction, living high on the planet’s goodies – and now passing to our children a world where the dollar is chump change, the nation not exactly the beloved sentinel of democracy and the kids will probably end up working for corporations out of India and China.

     Coming our way, I opine, is what I like to call it an evolutionary bottleneck, something nature does to us and to all species at some point(s) in their progress through the eons. It changes the rules for adaptation and success as a species.  It says “adapt to this!”  Let’s see who can survive this!  In the past six big extinctions, it’s almost always been meteors or volcanoes that brought nuclear winters (years of clouds) and culled out everyone who couldn’t react, get smart in new ways and live.

     But this time (pass the awerdenty, boss), it’s us doing it – and we have to survive the bottleneck created by…us.  We nod.  Steve fires up another hand-rolled, organic ciggie, passing it along to his fellow coon (that meant “man,” in Mountain Man palaver, a term of respect and comradeship).  Yup, she’s a-gonna be starvin’ times, we all agree.  It’s gonna hit the fan bigtime and we give if five, 10 years, outside. 

     Should we git ready, sez I?  Silence.  Nah, to hell with it.  There’s some justice in nature changing the rules.  Let ‘em change.  We deserve it.  Let’s roll the dice, like we always done.  Anyway, we got to live in them boomer times, weren’t none better – shinin’ times they was!   ~





A Long Slog Through the Gender Jungle

One autumn night in Ashland, half a dozen people rent the Community Center and hold a forum where anyone can take the mic and talk about that old question: What Do Women Want?  And What Do Men Want? 

   I purposely don’t take notes -  I just want to recall this as a finger painting of emotions, longings, anger, tears, hope, blame, even one young lady jumping up and down with frantic joy, exuding that we have to get in touch with the nature spirits and doing a cartwheel at the end.  Not to make fun of her; I got it.  That was as good an answer as any.  Been there.  I think.

   So, with no agenda or limits -- just a caution about being responsible and sticking with the personal “I” (not sociological abstractions), we speak our piece to 50 people, saying that Ashland is a unique place in the world, full of the ferment between the genders and we’re fortunate to be here, even if way too many of us have been through way too much love over too many decades and are still trying to find it and define it. 

   It starts with a survey in which we hear that both women and men think a woman’s satisfaction in the sack is more important -- yet women think men think their (men’s) satisfaction is more important.  Does that not define the battle of the sexes?  So, a guy gets up and announces, hey, just wanna clue you women that the truth about men is we can hang out and work with it as long as anyone wants and ours only takes a minute, so enough with demonizing guys in bed.

   That’s right, damn tootin, the males mutter and harrumph, with big smiles and bravado.  Now the word is out.  We’re tired of being picked on for stereotypes that ain’t true!  We value the feminine bigtime -- and are ready to do what it takes.

  In the survey, both men and women said they want the same things from each other - honesty, imtimacy, strength, great sex. So much for the gender gap.

   Then comes What Women Want - sensitive and sweet or a manly leader?  Or all of the above?  One woman says life is like a dance and it works when the man leads and is confident and knows where he is going.  The women hoot a lusty, fond agreement, noting that, while the Marlboro Man is stupid, men have gotten “too into their feminine side.” 

   Within living memory, of course, all we heard was men were too into their guy side and needed to learn the femme skills of listening, taking time for pleasure, changing diapers, cooking and speaking his true feelings, if he has any.

   But enough of all these cliches about what women want.  What do men want?  Besides sex, that is.  That’s the stereotype men have to live with and it inspires a dialog as to whether the other gender also wants it.  Turns out they do.  But, for men to activate that, it takes the full range of potentials, from positive, confident leader to sweet, sensitive listener and back again. 

   A lot of men do that.  So the men say.  And they’re right.  Seen it, done it.  And men have gotten so they don’t care if women notice it or not.  The women complain, “Where are the men; men have gotten too soft!”  Men complain, where are the women who can show some frill, sweetness, vulnerability and old-fashioned sexiness?

   Then there’s the dark message of how women don’t feel safe out on the street or bike path, even in Ashland and another woman stands up and counters: you get back what you put out, so take responsibility.

   In the days after, there’s a lot of conversation about the forum. At Noble Coffee, I have an amazing talk with Joy, a couples coach I’d said hi to for years but never talked to.  She was at the forum.  She says, hey, things are changing. Men have been learning their feminine and women have been learning their masculine sides for decades and guess what?  It worked.  We’ve got it down now.  Women run police departments and the State Department and men don’t have to be on top -- and have changed 6 trillion diapers.  Now, she says, we’re all coming back to the center and can relax and like and see each other. 

   It’s happening slowly and there are big gaps, but it’s happening.  From single women I hear they want True Love and a good relationship.  That didn’t used to be too cool to say.  Men too.  It’s been a long slog thru the gender jungle.  We’ve learned also, not just to live traditional roles of the other gender but to love ourselves and put that first, not submerging it in marriage.  Who we are as individuals is vital and can’t be sacrificed; it doesn’t help marriage to do that. 

   How to be free and strong, though in partnership with another person?  That seems a major new question.  Women have made more gains in that area and are doing a lot more “inner work,” rails one woman at the forum, adding that she’s been looking for a man who does inner work and clears out all the old, dysfunctional programs, but she isn’t finding it.  She’s right: consciousness-raising workshops are always about 80 percent female.  Why?  Get busy, men, or get left behind by the rising tide of powerful women who are going to be running the world in another decade. 

   Good, I say.  Although they speak of men who are scared of them now that they have money and power, their focus, as they take more power, is likely going to be more on the life-sustaining work of society around education, environment and health care -- not just profit and GDP. 

   I study a lot of prehistory and have learned that, before urban life, we all belonged to the group, the whole -- and everything we did was dedicated to the good, not just of me, but the entire web of life, from tribe to planet, so there was no idea of gender, except that both men and women are beautiful parts of the same circle. 

   If the earth is to survive, it was suggested by more than one person, we will return to that balance and love of each other.   ~





The End