shifting

I’ve been reading about transformational experiences this past week, about shifts in consciousness, the ones that come about during intense periods of suffering, or after years of meditating, or after the LSD kicks in. Mostly about the ones that occur during intense periods of suffering because that is more interesting to this particular author, how, to quote Rumi, the cure for the pain is in the pain. I had a few mental objections while reading, namely, if Teri from South London woke up to her true nature because her boyfriend broke up with her, how come I am still such an asshole after 2010? My attachments are just too tenacious? Did I not surrender appropriately, not face the situations directly enough?

I remember when I was a kid and tagging along on adventures with my Born Again neighbors, where there was an air of conversion around at all times. They couldn’t afford there to not be, since eternal fire is a high price to pay for a simple oversight, and these were mostly pretty nice folks. Let’s hand our life over, let’s barbecue these steaks up, and then hand it over. Let’s play Red Rover and then scan the group for anyone who may have been holding out on handing it over. “If anyone here has not accepted Jesus into your heart, you can do it right now.” The phone lines are open all night long. I, personally, readily accepted Jesus into my heart. I cast the spell; I’ve always been a fan of the instantaneous. And there was a word for this transformation: saved. After you said it, you were saved.

I admire the fact that even my child self thought this whole thing, however interesting and wacky, was really f–king crazy, which, you know, I was open to exploring as a ten-year-old.

So wondering now why all of my suffering and longing has not resulted in, I don’t know, me being SAVED – because, after all, I’d like to be – I’d like to not be driven by fear and envy and the need to scratch every itch; I’d like to be present, and not separate, and live from a place of love and compassion; I’d like sanity – and I am deeply hurt that these good intentions seem to go unnoticed, that it’s not enough, to vaguely long for those things.

I was reading in this book about attachment, and how problematic attachments are in terms of shifting, so to speak, and this author talks about how, with every attachment that we give up, we feel some power returned to us. And then he goes on to talk about attachments to accumulating things, objects, attachments to physical appearance, attachments to youth, and etc. There was one sentence that point blank suggested that one stop buying unnecessary things and I felt sick. The same with giving less power to one’s appearance. NO. NO. NO. (I didn’t say no, something else did, because I heard it say it, you know?)

I already still struggle with not drinking – it’s been over 10 months – and so often I still feel cheated, bored, angry that A) I decided to stop and broadcast that decision to the whole goddamn universe and more deeply, B) that I know, in my heart, that this was the right choice for me. I still struggle with that. And so what? Take everything? Take the slight high I get from consignment shops? The slight high I get when the guy at the coffee shop tells me how pretty I am (ONLY when I’m wearing makeup?) And I can’t even go into men because that part of my life makes me too sick to think about.

The very moment I knew I had to stop drinking – the very, very moment where I knew I was in trouble – not some humiliating moment, though there have been thousands – I was sitting on the back porch with a bottle of wine and my cigarettes all alone and I was pretty drunk and smoking one after the next and I thought to myself, “I don’t want anything more than this – this is the happiest I’ll ever be. Right here, with some alcohol and smokes.” And I was so disturbed by that, how true that statement was. All I wanted was to be drunk. Pleasantly numb

And then, you know, unpleasantly numb.

 

Susto, or soul loss.

You had seen a bit of my soul hanging from my mouth, and not knowing what it was, you licked your thumb and tried to gently rub it off. What is this stuff? you asked. We didn’t know then but we should have known. That was the first Year of Unbearable Loss, which comes when the hand of a clock you can’t see strikes a number you don’t know. They are the years in which one is most vulnerable to sore throats and dog ghosts and to ears so sensitive they can hear the whole of a painful past in one piercing note.

That would be the year my soul left my body all the time.

It would drift upwards, like a balloon, bobbing against the ceiling, getting caught in the fan. Once, you brought it down with a broom. You called it to you like a dog, patting your thighs, whistling, as it ricocheted from wall to wall, like Peter Pan and his shadow. Meanwhile, I hid in the closet, reading US Weekly with a flashlight, running my finger along the knots in the cedar. In the end, you usually had to sing my soul some Etta James, until it surrendered itself into your hands, quivering with pleasure and love. Got it, you’d call, knocking on the closet door. When I’d come out, my soul would be trapped underneath a laundry basket, feeling tricked, lied to. Meanwhile, I’d have collapsed into your arms, whispering, “Demi Moore has gotten so, so sad.”

Eventually, I didn’t want my soul back. Everyone gets tired of wanting things that don’t want you, you once said on a night when I wouldn’t let you touch me. Once, you had to break down that closet door, and you spoon-fed my soul to me like a baby. OPEN. UP. Another time, you covered my soul with some peanut butter and spread it on a few crackers. I hate the way it tastes, I said, as crumbs fell out of my mouth. I threw up my soul on more than one occasion, buckled over our toilet, in cold, fierce sweat. My soul made a splash as it hit the toilet and I almost flushed it away before you put your hand over mine and said DON’T. I hissed at you like a sick cat. You plunged your hand into the toilet bowl and I could recognize no act of love.

“SUSTO,” the doctor announced as he examined my tongue, “the worst I’ve ever seen.” He tugged at his beard as he considered me, slack jawed and slowly dying. “Where is the soul?” the doctor demanded. You handed it to him in a birdcage. You explained that you had found it walking down Route 1, pleading with the moon to come closer, begging to know why it insisted on being so far away. The doctor huffed and his mustache bristled. “Wasteful. Typical tomfoolery.” My soul tried to bite him through the bars, and he handed it off to the nurse to be sedated.

“Doctor, what can be done?” you, my beloved, asked.

“There are herbs, obviously” the doctor said as he lifted my arm and watched it drop lifelessly back to the table. “She would do well to be read some Greek myths nightly. Keep her away from heavily industrialized regions, that would help. But yes, ultimately, this woman and her soul are at war.”

He paused to light a cigar.

“The heart is inhospitable,” he explained. “ so we will staple the soul to the intestines, or some dumber organ. We will sing in our finest voices and we will most certainly light a bonfire. We will consult several of the living sages. Nurse! Google the stages of grief and tell me all of the symptoms of acceptance. We will convince the body to accept the soul back into itself, and we will educate the soul on the nature of human pain. We will read it poetry till it knows.”

We will sing it in our finest voices.

school.

I blurted out today in class that I was afraid of dying. She asked what we were afraid of and it came rolling off my tongue, right into space. Feeling like I failed to illustrate my point effectively, I then added: “I mean, I’m afraid of what it means not to have eyes.”

 

Relationships.

A True Poem
Lloyd Schwartz
 
I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone.
I could never show it to anyone.
Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me.
Sometimes it pleases me.
Usually it brings misery.
And this poem says exactly what I think.
What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover.
Exactly.
Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them.
Some of it might bring misery.
And I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them.
I don’t want to hurt anybody.
I want everyone to love me.
Still, I keep working on it.
Why?
Why do I keep working on it?
Nobody will ever see it.
Nobody will ever see it.
I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody.
I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt.

flying.

All of a sudden, my play is going to be made to come alive. All of a sudden, the stories I wrote will be on glossy paper. For strangers to watch and to read.

What a feeling. They are relatively tiny successes but they are also the culminating moment of never believing that anything that came from me deserved to live beyond my private fantasies. And I’m so wrong. My work wants more than that for itself. It wants an independent existence.

Oh my god. I’m a writer. Holy shit, I’m a goddamn playwright.

To anything, anyone: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

 

Monday.

The problem is not that we want to be happy, but that we are going about it in the wrong way. When we really see that we are going about it in the wrong way, we quit. And then life can unfold on its own. We cannot make it unfold. We can quit our rejection, our judgment, our intolerance, but we will quit these patterns only when we completely and totally see what they are doing — that they are hurting us.

A. H. Almaas

Yesterday I volunteered for something at school and in a sense, I didn’t do a great job. Just like last week, when I said something awkward in front of the medical director. Just like when I sent a text message and I saw immediately afterward how its meaning could be misconstrued. Just like looking in the mirror and thinking that my legs lack definite sex appeal. Just like hearing a hard comment from my father. Just like smoking a a cigarette when I know they make me feel lightheaded and ill. These little bits and pieces of life that are so uncomfortable; no diagnoses of serious illness, nothing deeply inappropriate, no scarlet letters, no falling out with a close friend. And yet these are the moments that make up 98% of my life, these moments where I keep stubbing the same toe.

On the way home yesterday, I assaulted myself in the way that I typically do – the word ‘weird’ is always quick to come up. Weird. ‘Fat’ is never far behind but I couldn’t tell you why, except that maybe the other girls I was working with were particularly thin. ‘Crazy’ – there’s a recent favorite, put to use so memorably this past year. And then some more developed thoughts, some full sentences. I couldn’t repeat them exactly; they come like howling voices through numerous tunnels, mixing together until only their felt meaning is left. Something like – What were you trying to do? Why did you think you could possibly do that? How dare you.

During this onslaught, I was shocked, even though this onslaught happens sometimes several times a week, sometimes every day if the moon is positioned just so. But it was such a raw, brutal attack and I saw that, like I could see it, instead of getting lost in the swirl of some vague umbrella concept such as ‘low self-esteem’ – and I could see also how frequently this is the stance I take against myself, how much I am at the mercy of this malicious VOICE. And I’m in relationship with it in the sense that I feel it is protecting me from myself, that if I punish myself adequately, I will behave. I will be charming, and loved, and accepted; I’ll have what I think I need.

It reminds me of those times, you know, when you’re play fighting with someone and a knee gets awkward or an elbow pushes into your side or your breathing gets shallow and you might say, “You’re hurting me” but it seems like nothing because maybe you’re still half-laughing, maybe the mood is still light. But then the panic sets in only slightly and then increasingly: You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me, YOU’RE HURTING ME. And that’s what it begins to feel like, an increased panic at the degree to which I am willing to hurt myself so that I can have what I think I need, what I am missing.

There’s just so much confusion about what’s needed, the idea that anything could ever have gone missing.

ordinary days.

I’m to write every day. To take the medicine of my own creation. It’s a nice idea. It’s not my idea.

I so gravitate toward abstractions and so, for the sake of variety, here’s a report of a physical day: I woke earlier than I would have liked too and spent an hour talking with a man who asked me to visualize my inner power or some such thing and the first person I thought of was my acupuncturist because she’s too lovely for words. And then for the rest of the conversation, I was distracted by the idea of telling my acupuncturist that I had to do this and that she was the first person to come to mind, and she would feel so good about that, and I would feel good for making her feel good, and then I chastised myself for not being in the present moment and drank the rest of my coffee in one gulp.

We discussed some of the limitations of Buddhism, which I always just thought was way too cool to have limitations, which is a limitation of mine.

Then Rob and I did what we always do on Friday mornings, eat crepes and watch television, like the Saturday morning cartoons. And by the time I am done with the crepe, there is strawberry cake in my lap and then some more coffee and it’s like the spiritual equivalent of a mild case of poison ivy, where you’re just absentminded and scratching and you’re not sure what feels good because all of it does. But then of course Rob offers me such honest and direct delight, our treasure of inside jokes and meanings.

And then I take Anna to the vet and she’s so scared in the carrier and I loved her more when she was so scared. And for a moment I felt just the smallest glimpse of the love that a person might have for a child and felt unbearably sad. I kept kissing her little skull while I held her on the table, that old fat cat of mine, age is making her a little ugly like it does to all of us. I think of the woman I was when I first brought that cat home and the woman that I am now and am amazed that she’s alive to see it, though I’m certain it makes no difference to her – graduate degrees, sobriety, a commitment to sanity that is real. Maybe it does. I’ll ask her.

And it was so expensive and hours passed where I thought a lot about money, and I hated that whole thing. During that time, I misplaced my keys and kept picking up the same pillows over and over, plowing through the general self loathing that sets in when you are a person whom often loses things –

I went to see a play with a friend and I like my friend and I like the play, and even though anxious thoughts made me lose whole chunks of the plot – my mind pulling me into itself so that my eyes see nothing, I am so busy constructing devastating outcomes to each of my current ventures – I still felt a warm satisfaction about having gone. Oscar Wilde. A chain of thoughts around that name, I wear them like flowers and twist them around my fingers. I liked the play.

We talked too about joy.