Archive for Not @ Sex (!)
Bittersweet Balloons
Two years ago, one of my dearest friends informed me that her great Uncle Jesse’s (names changed for privacy) 90th birthday was coming up. She said that at his 80th birthday party, he had told everyone that if he made it to his 90th, he wanted to have a “girl jump out of the cake” at his party. With his 90th birthday and corresponding party plans imminent, my friend told me her mother and Uncle Jesse’s wife (Aunt Grace) were wondering if they could hire me to surprise Uncle Jesse at his party with a (very tame) strip tease.
I said of course, and on the day of the party I wore a matching polka-dot push-up bra and boyshorts set and covered myself with blue balloons, which Uncle Jesse was provided with a thumbtack to pop while I danced. I had a delightful time performing that job and meeting Uncle Jesse and Aunt Grace, whom I enjoyed seeing occasionally over the next couple years as my friend got married and her family and I encountered each other at different wedding-related events.
Several weeks ago Uncle Jesse underwent surgery and experienced some subsequent complications. While he was recovering, I was told that Aunt Grace had brought him a picture of me taken the day of his 90th birthday party so he could show the nurses his “balloon girl,” whom he had apparently talked about. My friend said this was done “not in a silly way – it really cheered him up.”
Uncle Jesse died last week, just short of age 92. I will attend his memorial service on Saturday.
Sometimes, professional sexual entertainment is lighthearted, fun, sweet, moving. Sometimes it may hold an importance or make a difference in someone’s life many people aren’t or wouldn’t be aware of.
Today (March 3) is International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. This year has brought me, not that I need one, a bittersweet personal reminder that sex work encompasses and touches a wide variety of services, people, and experiences. As always, I offer love and support for sex workers and the recognition of their/our professional and human rights.
And I offer love to all who knew and loved Uncle Jesse, and wish him a beautiful journey.
Love,
Emerald
“If you could stand tall with me…so much more that we could know…move past this flesh and blood, see what’s inside of you…”
-Ed Kowalczyk “Stand”
Art of Heartness
I recently read a quote by Rod MacIver, painter and founder of nature and arts/creativity journal Heron Dance, on Heron Dance’s Facebook page:
“And it has given me something to think about, to write about: How we construct boundaries around our worlds to make sense of them, but those boundaries limit our experience of life. The role of art is (poetry, novels, music films), in part, to question the limits we place on ourselves; the role of art is to offer a glimpse of a different reality. It stands there beckoning to us, –there is greater potential in you and in life than you can see, than you are trying to see.”
Indeed. I have mentioned here before why it has seemed to me that the inarticulable, intangible, perhaps preverbal moving quality of art has felt so important to me. I suspect that sometimes the historically rigid, self-controlling, hypervigilant part of me does want a break, perhaps allows it in this seemingly “safe” area of being affected by art. Of course, perhaps unwitting to or forgotten by it, such hasn’t always seemed so “safe”—sometimes it has resulted in an outpouring of affect that the aforementioned part of me has not seemed to feel comfortable with; sometimes it has even felt overwhelming. Sometimes it has led to insights, shifts, openings that are healing and nourishing for the soul and not so job-security-increasing for those structures of ego in me that don’t know how to see beyond themselves.
What an amazing, beautiful gift of art.
I wrote that blog post opening a few weeks ago. I was going to write about re-reading novels, how I have experienced some differently upon the second or further readings at different times in my life. Sometime, I may still do that. It happens that now, though, I just finished reading a book for the first time, and it is what I want to write about instead. It, as well, fits impeccably with the quote above.
Which, along with what I wrote following it, rings very poignant right now.
I finished a novel (not in the erotica genre) last night that I started reading a couple weeks ago after feeling inexplicably drawn to and purchasing it at Barnes and Noble. I’m not going to identify it here, partly because some that I say about it is not particularly complimentary, but mostly because in discussing what I want to about it, I’m going to spoil the hell out of it.
There were many things I found beautiful about this novel. The setting, the history, the writing in general were such that I pictured the scenery and the overall novel very vividly; such vision has stayed with me after finishing it and often while I was away from it during the reading of it. Most of all, I loved the main protagonist besides the first-person female narrator—her love interest and later husband, Tom. I fell in love with Tom upon our first exposure to him, and that never changed.
Other things I found lacking in the work. Frequently, especially during the second half, I found myself feeling like there was no central conflict in the book—we were reading along with what was happening in their day-to-day lives, but I was not seeing the conflict that was described on the back of the book (to me it had seemed to be resolved fairly early on in the first half), and there didn’t seem to be another “point,” if you will, holding the story together. Occasionally I felt impatience with the narrator, seeing her as selfish or a bit oblivious in ways that didn’t seem particularly convincing. Neither the story nor the characters ever really “pulled me in”; though I enjoyed it, I did not really feel invested in the story. I felt like I “knew” almost none of the characters and did not feel like I particularly cared about them.
The exception was Tom—who, incidentally, I feel was superbly written. It was because of Tom and the relationship between him and the narrator that I kept reading the book. He was the only character that I cared about—looking back, really, I was swept away by him.
To illustrate what I’m describing, about 15 pages from the end of the book, I was reading what I suspect was intended to be an intense scene. I was not particularly finding it so. It may have even consciously occurred to me then that the only character I really cared about was Tom, and as long as he and the narrator were together, I felt a fairly detached disinterest in how they would handle the potential tragedy that was in front of them. Probably in part because he was the main character, but also because of how I had interpreted the tone and content of the book, I felt no suspicion that Tom was going anywhere, so I was feeling fairly nonchalant as I read, my love for Tom and their relationship forming a background of appreciation for a novel I was finding fairly lukewarm on other fronts.
Nine pages from the end of the book, Tom died.
It seemed to me then from a writing standpoint as though all those things I mentioned—character development of most of the characters, pulling into the story, strong central conflict—weren’t even needed because the end of the book was one of the main protagonist’s meeting an untimely death. The “climax” was at the very end, if you will. All that came before was made instantly more poignant by, its meaning as a work of art perhaps even largely derived from, his death at the end of the work. Likely exacerbated by how I experienced this circumstance in the book personally, I did not appreciate this.
Emotionally speaking, I was stunned to a degree that I found stunning in and of itself. I actually found myself in denial, sure he hadn’t actually died and was going to reappear any second (which would have worked under the circumstances). It was literally not until I read the last sentence of the book that I understood that in this story, Tom really did die. And funnily enough, as I was reading the last page I didn’t even know I was doing so yet, because it is followed by an “Author’s Note” that I had not glanced at yet and thought as I was reading the last page was still more of the book.
When I realized the book had ended, I experienced some anger (a furious hurling of the book to the floor with a What a stupid book I hate it! may have been involved) as I felt the flood of feeling related to this occurrence in the book rising to potential overwhelm in me. It struck me as almost ironic in that I had not felt very invested in the story and had certainly not anticipated that I would experience much of a significant degree of affect after finishing it. I had not in the slightest expected or seen coming what happened, had felt no wisp of a hint that Tom was going to be taken away, that the emotional wind was about to be knocked out of me, that I was about to feel the flood of pain and devastation that I did: sobbing for intermittent periods over the course of the day and night, experiencing difficultly sleeping, physically feeling pain and unease in the heart area of my chest, and feeling as though, despite his status as a fictional character, I was really almost grieving Tom a little bit.
I may not have been invested in the book…but I sure was invested in him.
Less than a week ago, I experienced a realization. It was not a deduction or an analysis (or the result of one) or an intellectual examination. It was a seeing, a spontaneous embodiment and insight through which I was made aware of something about myself.
The awareness was of the absence of heart. I experienced a sudden seeing of how absent connection with my heart had been in my experience over a period of the past several months. The immediacy of this insight was breathtaking, and I was stunned that I had not seen it, had not been aware of it for the several months that it had been taking place. Granted, since the phenomenon of disconnecting from and holding myself outside of my heart is an unconscious pattern in me developed at quite a young age, it has not been an uncommon thing for me to do in this lifetime. But it is something I have become more aware of and worked on quite a bit in recent years, so to see suddenly that I had been so oblivious to its occurrence, that open awareness of and connection with my heart had been almost entirely absent in this particular period of time, was astonishing as well as heartbreaking.
At the time I saw this, I stated out loud that I desperately did not want to operate without heart, to be disconnected from my heart and exclude it from my experience and awareness. I unquestionably wanted to reconnect with it. And I felt—and said—tearfully, right then, that I did not know how.
It has occurred to me in the 24 hours I’ve had to contemplate since I finished this novel that the relationship between the narrator and Tom seemed one of the most beautiful I’ve ever read about and felt privy to observe. Seeing such heart between two people (and especially in Tom, whose inner workings the reader did not get to directly see) may have felt like the observation of something new and incredible, that has not always been forthcoming in my own experience and that calls to something profound in me. Particularly at this moment in my existence, this may have occurred to a degree that I felt, really, awestruck by it and experienced from it both a yearning and a satisfaction not unlike that akin to drinking water in the face of urgent thirst. I can—and do—appreciate that I have realized I actually felt a shift reading about them, reading the relationship between them. More and more I have felt a gratitude about this. Though I hate with a passion that the book ended with Tom’s dying, I have felt the energetic shift in me in remembering the witnessing of the love between them. In ways, that being one of them, I did love this book.
Given how I saw this relationship and how it moved me, it makes sense to me that I would have found the abrupt and unexpected loss of one of the participants in it, and thus in a way the relationship, as stunning and excruciating as I did. It occurs to me that other readers may not experience or have experienced it that way did they not have the circumstances and current experience I have described in common with me. Even I may have experienced it differently at a different time.
As it was, I was overwhelmed—blindsided, I had no guard up against the devastation that was coming because I had no idea that it was coming. The rawness in my heart has felt scathing, initially almost unbearable as I felt the fury at this book’s ending and the soul-wrenching awareness that I could not undo the experience of reading it, of falling in love as I did with Tom and experiencing his disappearance from the form in which I came to do so. That it was a fictional work and he was a fictional character seemed to have little effect on the anguish to which I was privy when I realized the story was over and Tom was dead and I had no choice but to experience what I would as a result. Emotionally, I was laid out flat.
Days ago, I said that I wanted desperately to reconnect with my heart—but that I felt I did not know how to.
Here is my answer.
If I take seriously that I want to connect with and open to and integrate my heart, then the invitation to me is to see this for the opportunity that it is. To see the offering, as Rod put it, “that there is greater potential in you and in life than you can see, than you are trying to see.” There was no guarantee, or even a likelihood, that it was going to be comfortable. As wrenching as my response to this book may feel, this is the opportunity I asked for. This is what I said I wanted.
And I love it for that.
Poignant as it felt to me to read when I started this post, I am brought back to the assessment I offered at the beginning of it, that I wrote long before I finished reading the novel I have discussed here: What an amazing, beautiful gift of art.
In humble appreciation.
Love,
Emerald
“And if your glass heart should crack, and for a second you turn back, oh no, be strong…I know it aches and your heart it breaks…walk on…”
-U2 “Walk On”
The Normative and the Outlandish: Growth and Opportunity
For as long as I can remember, I have tended to procrastinate—frequently and characteristically. To be perfectly frank, sometimes the phenomenon has seemed to manifest less as procrastination and more as simple avoidance. By this I mean I procrastinated until it became avoidance: the deadline, opening, opportunity passed. And often I did so knowingly—though not necessarily because I wanted to.
It is something I have felt enormous frustration about even as I have watched myself do it over and over again. And perhaps even more frustrating is knowing exactly why I do it and the clear knowledge that I do not want that reason to be why I do (or don’t do) things.
The reason? Fear.
More aptly, in the form it has often taken in my experience, it could be labeled anxiety. The deep-seated, freezing fear of doing almost anything I may not perform irreproachably, especially if anyone else is going to witness or experience, directly or indirectly, the process or result of it. (Feel free to consider how much those criteria narrow things down.) The resulting anxiety I have been known to experience in varying degrees has sometimes been the motivator for the simple avoidance of doing it. Not necessarily indefinitely—but if I put something off “for right now,” and the anxiety I felt about doing it thus abates, a subconscious cycle is formed. The avoidance reinforces itself by resulting in a lessening of the anxiety each time, and the actual specter of facing that which I have avoided seems less and less appealing in the face of this quick-fix of decreased discomfort.
I have been avoiding a number of things lately (I may call it “procrastinating” sometimes, but I know what it is). Blogging, writing, and especially emailing (which triggers the immediacy of someone else singularly and directly witnessing something and thus the “perfection” required under such scrutiny) are a few of the things I dearly would like to be doing and have been known to feel particularly frustrated when I avoid. I know the reason I have been doing so lately is this feeling of underlying anxiety I have experienced upon consideration of embarking on them—barely conscious, just that tight, tense feeling in myself that makes movement seem about as forthcoming as in unloosened clay. (Ironically, this has often been compounded by the historically persistent internal voice ordering that I “should” be doing them.)
Very often, the things I have avoided thus have not been things I don’t want to do. On the contrary, sometimes I have felt like a little child looking out the window at my own life, my own actions, watching the other kids play outside and not understanding why I don’t get to go out and play too. I want to do these things. I do care about them. (Alas, sometimes it’s seemed the more I care, the more I have felt fear.) I move to do them, and the child part of me watches the fearful part of me, the one that has often been in charge of opening (or not opening) the door and letting me out to play, and I feel, like that child, as though I don’t have any control over it. Like I’m just watching. “Why can’t I go out and play?” the child might say. “You might not do it perfectly,” the large, shadowy, abstract figure answers with finality.
At my last appointment with her, I told my breathworker I didn’t want fear to run so much of my life. She said the only way for that to happen is for me to face the fear, to “lean into it.” Wanting to avoid fear, trying to “keep it at bay,” means engaging with it, and like Chinese finger traps, that just gives it energy and results in its holding more tightly.
That concept was not new to me. But I felt, and feel, like I don’t even know how to face or lean into this “fear,” because how absurd does it seem to feel nervous and fearful about something like emailing a friend or colleague (who would probably be astonished to know the degree of anxiety I have felt at the prospect of emailing him/her back)—to experience in the face of it an unconscious fright that I will somehow not say the exact “perfect” thing, and that anything less than perfection elicits a vague, terrifying punishment that results in the child within me curled into a ball of cowering, trembling, petrified fear?
It seems funny to me to realize how outlandish that sounds even as I also recognize it as perfectly normative in my experience. This, of course, is where and how the unconscious pattern arises and subverts the perception of the actual situation. It is not that I feel literal anxiety about responding to someone’s email (usually). It is not the actual lack of perfection that is the fear—it is the psychic structure in me that formed when I was a child that associates lack of perfection with the punishment it perceived as resulting from a lack of perfection, from ever making a wrong move whether it was known in advance that the move was wrong or not. Punishment that somehow seemed much larger than whatever the literal act of reprimand was at the time and felt as though it ravaged my very foundation.
I do appreciate—deeply—that I consciously recognize this, and it has taken some Work to do so. It does, however, still affect me, at least at the time of this writing. There has seemed to be a gap sometimes in awareness of such internal patterns and their dissolution. Still, I know awareness is where growth and healing begin.
In a way I smile at every story I’ve written and polished enough to submit for publication, because every instance of it represents a time I shoved whatever was blocking that internal door aside and opened it myself, joined the potential landscape of my life outside the window and became an active partner in it. Fuck what’s blocking the door—really, fuck the door itself.
I am an adult now. I am no longer the child I once was in a situation in which I felt perpetual terror about punishment and doing something wrong. I have the opportunity now to parent myself. I am allowed to speak to myself gently, to reassure the child in me that she is safe—and to keep her so from the harsher and more denigrating voice of psychic habit in me. If I’m not paying attention, that shadowy figure does the addressing instead and speaks to me harshly, rigidly, sometimes violently. It is still wanting to protect me from circumstances it saw me in as a child, when it felt it needed to teach me to act and feel a certain way so that I could avoid the external punishment it witnessed and felt so afraid of. It is not necessarily external circumstances now that may block my authentic experience and expression of myself as much as the internal patterns that formed in response to the perception(s) of such in my young development.
It is because of this, actually, that anxiety may sometimes indicate that something unconscious (including, perhaps, recognition of a projection or egoic pattern) is coming to the surface: the psyche feels anxious because whatever is surfacing is likely unconscious because the psyche found or finds it in some way traumatic. I recognize—and appreciate—that in this way this kind of discomfort can be part of the psycho-spiritual inner Work that I do. Anxiety may be an invitation or opportunity.
Fear. I feel it in my body right now. Lean into it. I feel like I don’t know how to do this, but maybe that in itself is an opportunity—do something I don’t know how to do. Risk doing it imperfectly. Allow the imperfection. Learn that it is okay.
In the meantime…if you contact me, and I take a while to get back to you, I apologize. I assure you it is not because I don’t want to.
Love,
Emerald
-matchbox twenty “Unwell”
Here and There
I am honored to be the guest blogger today at the magnificent Oh Get A Grip!. The topic for this week is Back to Square One; in my post, “Here,” I discuss my experiences around the MFA creative writing program I attended several years ago.
“Here” is up at Oh Get A Grip! now—big thanks to C. Sanchez-Garcia for inviting me to be the guest blogger this week!
Love,
Emerald
It was late summer 2002. I had packed up my apartment in the Washington, DC, area, where I had just acquired my master’s degree in the field of politics, and was preparing for the cross-country drive to Washington state. I had been accepted into a Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing there and would be starting in just a few weeks. I was thrilled. Finally, creative writing was going to be not only one of my utmost loves but a “legitimate” responsibility as well.
-from “Here” at Oh Get A Grip!
Love
Understandably, what has been referred to as bullying has seemed a prominent topic right now. I have seen a number of what I have found heartening responses and outreach in relation to the subject, one of which was today by Rick R. Reed. As I have reflected on what seems this bullying phenomenon I have experienced as prevalent in the media right now, some things have occurred to me.
Seeing children and adolescents act needlessly mean or cruel to each other feels like it rips my heart open. It has for as long as I can remember—even to some degree when I was one. During my pre-teen and early teenage years I felt a target of what has now been dubbed the “mean girls” phenomenon among my peers. I attended a very small school (there were about 21 students in my class), which looking back seems to me very relevant to the situation. I experienced the five girls who were my closest “friends” as arbitrarily and frequently ostracizing me, and given the tiny size of my peer group in the school and the relatively established groups of friends within it, when this happened I felt really all alone at times in the school atmosphere.
Even then, I didn’t like to see other kids being picked on because I felt like I knew how it felt. But I will say that at that age I still halfheartedly participated in it sometimes in a desperate attempt to “fit in” with those who at least as frequently scathingly isolated, verbally attacked, maliciously gossiped about, and appeared to take pleasure in ignoring me. It seemed a vicious cycle in a way, and while I say with all sincerity that kids bullying other kids breaks my heart, I must acknowledge too that that may seem easier for me to say and recognize as an adult than it was to act nobly when I was that age, because I remember sometimes (again, halfheartedly) participating in it too.
I did this because I felt desperately left out, unwanted, unloved, and like it seemed there was no place in the world I could go where I would experience the opposite and feel safe. I do remember sitting by myself one day on the playground and the thought occurring to me, “It won’t always be like this. I won’t always be at this school, with only this group of people. Someday I won’t be trapped in this environment. Someday it will be different. Something will be different.” I really do remember thinking that. I also remember thinking though that at the time, that seemed almost inconceivably far away, and I did not know what I was going to do in the meantime.
I, of course, did not have the additional confusion, possible fear, and seeming target for bullying of feeling any question or (generally, it seemed) external perceptions about the sexual orientation, gender identity, etc., in me. I am only saying that I remember feeling desperately ostracized and manipulated by my peers (mostly female) and utterly powerless to do anything at all to change it. Thus, sometimes, if for a fleeting moment it felt like I was being included, that I wasn’t suffering that horrific loneliness and searing humiliation of what seemed a complete rejection by the people my age with whom I went to school, I might do something I felt less than excited about in order to “hold on” to that feeling—like participate in picking on someone else that my group of “friends” was presently targeting.
The adolescent of a species, including human of course, is by definition not fully developed, but not completely helpless like the infant or child of the species either. It seems to me this could contribute to what makes this seem such a tumultuous time. Human adolescents generally observe some degree of autonomy but are not fully developed yet, and they may feel a sense of overwhelm in the face of the power they do have juxtaposed with that they don’t. I for one feel that they tend to take their cues from those of the species who are fully developed (which is not the same as evolved or aware—just physically fully developed as an adult).
Given what has seemed to me collective humanity’s prominent issues around sexuality (including gender) at this time, it does not seem surprising to me that this area/subject is one around which intense vitriol, ignorance, and aggression has been displayed by youth.
I have literally cried as I have read recent accounts of adolescents exhibiting horrific cruelty and ignorance toward one another. It feels like my heart breaks open—which I let it do, and do my very best to be with. But I look around at how adults treat each other, and even as my heart breaks more—I feel chillingly not surprised.
—If we want to make a lot of money via the media, we follow people who are famous and try to find things out about them that they have not shared with the public, and that we probably wouldn’t want the public finding out about us, and broadcast it indiscriminately. More of us then go on to state our perceptions about that, some of which may seem personally directed and/or even malicious. How frequently do we consider the feelings of the subjects of this kind of scrutiny and/or exploitation?
—If we want to hold political office in America, we leverage as many resources as we can against whomever is running “against” us and then attack that person/people either verbally or through forms of what seem frequently overt manipulation.
—When we don’t like the way another country/culture/society is doing something in the world (however justified we may find that disapproval to be), we go to war with them.
To me, all of these things look in some way like bullying—implicitly, overtly, collectively, and/or via manipulation.
I was at Dave & Buster’s the other night, and for the most part I had a delightful time. As I walked around, however, I saw numerous games that included all sorts of aggression and violence toward both people and animals. I do not feel any aspiration to fall back on a “blame video games for all violence and issues among children” stance. I do, however, simply wonder why we find violence so entertaining. Why are games designed to be fun and compelling replete with violence that sometimes includes literally killing people in them? What is it we find so compelling about violence? Is it a way to deal with underlying fear in us that for the most part is not even conscious but that may largely direct our behavior and experience? Some part of us knows/senses such fear is there (in some this may seem more conscious than others), and in seeking desperately to not let it come to consciousness, we act out in ways that seem “safe” but still touch that darker part of us that is unconsciously there?
I don’t know. What I do feel is that the above have often been engaged in by adults. Yes, the way(s) some adolescents in question in recent news stories have acted seems horrifying—but where might they be getting this kind of example?
We don’t know what the home lives of the kids who are initiating and/or participating in bullying look or looked like, how their parents interact/interacted with them, how they are and have been treated away from their peers. I feel very clear that I am in no way intending to excuse or underestimate the behavior they have displayed by saying that. What I am rather aspiring to is remembering that there are motivations for everyone’s behavior, even kids’, and very frequently it is unconscious. In children, this may especially be the case if they are treated unconsciously by adults, particularly their parents.
To return to the “breaking the cycle” framework I invoked in a recent post, this does not seem to me helped by seeking simply to punish or counter-ostracize kids who act in a bullying way. I understand feeling the urge to do that. I do. I experience the anguish, fury, painful and indescribable frustration in response to horrendous treatment of human beings by another/others. But it seems to me reactive punishment and aggression simply breed more of the same behavior, coming out somewhere else or in some other way. It is where the motivation for the behavior may have come from in the first place.
This is not simple stuff. It is not an easy answer or certainly an easy process to say, “Okay. I’ll just change all the habits in me and get rid of all my unconscious motivations and love everybody.” First, in my experience, none of that can be “done” by way of the mind that is able to conceive of them. The shift is beyond that kind of conception and certainly beyond “trying.” It seems to me, however, that it begins with openly (and lovingly) observing ourselves, and especially on this subject the kind of example we are setting—larger than just what we do in front of kids. How are we living our lives? How do we view people? How do we treat people? How do we view and treat ourselves?
In that light, all I have is an invitation, which I offer wholly to myself as well:
Take a deep breath. Do it all the time. Focus on the breath. Hold yourself (again I am saying this to me too) in love. Touch yourself lovingly (yeah, yeah—I don’t mean just that way—though I certainly don’t mean not that way either). Seriously. Place your hand on some part of your body with love. Do you feel it? Does it feel different? Unusual? If you feel like it, even give yourself a physical hug.
Return to these things, over and over again. They may help more than we have any idea.
Love,
Emerald
“We got teenagers walking around in a culture of darkness, living together alone…don’t you know that love’s the only house big enough for all the pain in the world?…”
-Martina McBride “Love’s the Only House”
Birthday Best to Danielle!
Happy birthday, Danielle!!!
Love,
Emerald
“I think I’ll take a moment to celebrate my age…in my next thirty years, I’m gonna have some fun…cry a little less, laugh a little more, find a world of happiness without the hate and fear…spend precious moments with the ones that I hold dear…”
-Tim McGraw “My Next Thirty Years”
Reverence and Black Cloths
I had another post ready to go today, but for now, this trumps it. As a lifelong Yankees fan and, even more so, a baseball fan, I offer reverence here in light of the deaths of Mr. George M. Steinbrenner III, longtime principal owner of the New York Yankees, this morning at age 80, and Mr. Bob Sheppard, announcer at Yankee Stadium for almost half a century, on Sunday at age 99.
Though I didn’t always appreciate the impression I had of Mr. Steinbrenner’s actions or behavior, I unquestionably feel deep reverence for the pain and loss the Yankees organization may be feeling with the loss of their legendary principal owner. As well I appreciate and revere the profound contributions both Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Steinbrenner made to a team and to a game I love so much. Most of all, I honor their lives, the form of love they took in this lifetime.
I happen to have just finished reading one of my very favorite novels, The Secret Life of Bees, yesterday for the third time. Though it was my third time reading it, it affected me just as profoundly as it did the first two. The following quote, which I had read just hours before learning of Mr. Steinbrenner’s death, came to me as I reflected on these losses to Yankees baseball and to the world.
As one of the main characters, August, drapes black fabric over her beehives to signify mourning, she says, “Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way to life.” (p. 206)
To Mr. Bob Sheppard and Mr. George Steinbrenner, beautiful journeys.
Love,
Emerald
Flow, Breath, and Triadic Offerings
A few months ago my breathworker invoked the notion of the proposed three fundamental aspects of life (according to Hindu tradition, I think) of Creation, Maintenance, and Destruction. Upon hearing it, I immediately felt a sense of my historical relationship to each.
Creation, I knew immediately, had often been hindered in me by the harshness of perfectionism. While having felt oriented to creating sometimes, I knew the scathing internal demand of never messing up or making a mistake or doing something not the “right” way had held me back sometimes from even starting, much less finishing, something creatively. This aspect of the three struck me as the “medium” historical orientation in me.
I have been terrible—terrible—at destruction. That itself was not new to my recognizance, but this triadic context was, so it was an interesting new way to view it. Letting go, on multiple levels and in numerous ways, has tended to feel somewhere from foreign to panic-inducing to me. The idea of consciously allowing something to be destroyed or to destroy it as a part of natural flow has often seemed so unimaginable to me it felt funny to even type that.
It was instantaneously obvious to me that the aspect to which I have felt most heavily oriented is maintenance. Once I have felt familiar with something, known how to do it, and thus something in me has felt satisfied that it may perform as close to perfectly as possible, or at least make relatively fewer mistakes, it has seemed to feel most comfortable.
A few weeks ago I had the incredible opportunity to attend a personal gathering with Adyashanti. I first heard of Adyashanti last summer when the facilitators of the ongoing Inner Work group of which am a part recommended his book The End of Your World. I read The End of Your World last September, at which time it took its place as the second most important book I feel I have experienced in my adult lifetime.
At the event, prior to Adya’s appearance, I was sitting and waiting in silence, as we had been requested to hold upon entering the meeting room. I didn’t feel consciously nervous about anything, but I noticed a tense feeling in my chest. I wondered what I felt tense about.
I kept breathing consciously, focusing only vaguely on the question, and suddenly an awareness flashed through me. It was immediate, lasting only a second, and it was not a suspicion, or a thought, or a figuring something out. It was a seeing—an instantaneous, embodied realization.
My lungs automatically tense upon exhale.
Automatically. Not when I feel a certain way. Not when I feel nervous. Not when I’m experiencing anxiety, or focused on something particular. Simply upon exhale. My lungs tense automatically in the very face of exhale.
And there it is. The most fundamental of letting go.
This feels like a very intimate realization about my body. While in a way it does not surprise me at all, seeing on what a core level this pattern has been ingrained and manifested in me was(/is) stunning. Somehow my lungs/body learned that the fundamental act of exhale, of release, was scary and threatening and that I needed to “protect” myself from it and tense against it. So much so that this physical pattern developed that has likely been in action for decades.
The metaphorical reflections and extrapolations I see of this in my life are innumerable, so much so that it almost seems it would be easier to look at times when this has not been evident. Recently my acupuncturist and I were talking about the element in traditional Five-Element Acupuncture that seems most prominent in me (the main corresponding organ of which happens to be the lungs), and she described this element’s tendency to “hoard,” to hold on to things—which in turn makes it difficult for new things to come in. There simply isn’t room. To recall the triadic aspect of “destruction,” this, as I understand it, would be its basic purpose: to clear out/destroy what no longer serves. To never destroy or release anything interrupts the flow of life and the Universe. Destruction allows room for creation, offering the opportunity for maintenance…and so on.
Ultimately, I feel enormous, deep gratitude for the exquisite opportunity to have seen something so profound and intimate about myself/my body. So much so that really it feels indescribable.
I am scheduled to appear at F-Stop: Expose the Naked I (the blog founded by Neve Black, Shanna Germain, and Donna George Storey) this coming Sunday. I know what I plan to write about (or at least what has come forth so far), and I have attributed the nervousness I have been feeling about it to the feeling of wanting to impart what I’m saying exactly right…to do it justice, perhaps? I have felt some resistance to working on it for the reasons described around “creation” above. And, of course, when it comes time to finish it, which does seem to me a form of letting go, I may see challenge in that as well. I suspect the unconscious in me has most often felt most comfortable at the “maintenance” stage of writing, this middle/”working on it” phase allowing some relaxation of the vicious standard of perfection—if there is no finished product, there is nothing that has to be “perfect.”
The “maintenance” stage is where my piece for F-Stop is right now. This (somewhat rambling, I suppose) exposition may be serving as a precursor to the openness and clarity writing it feels like it is going to take from me.
“Take a deep breath” has been a mantra of mine for some time. No matter what I am doing, it is where I begin and to where I return.
And so, breathing consciously, I go.
Love,
Emerald
“There’s no one else to make the moves that you can do…your every breath becomes another world…take a breath, take a deep breath now…”
-David Gilmour “Take a Breath”
