Poem: After the Block Party

After the Block Party

A boat floats across the harbor
its light a single, mournful candle
as the sad growl of a motorcycle
fades  in the distance

Lovers walk away from me
Hands and eyes reach out
in the disembodied dark
dancing barefoot on bare floor
as intention and energy
bare their white teeth

You are dancing two feet away
But I am pulled and pushed
Into the Shiva circling of your arms
I am dancing past the boundary 
of my own skin 
tentative as the breath of surf

A sudden slap of wave,
and your eyes are on mine
beseeching, burning
pulling me out and in
the surf drawing its breath
the urgent growl of a motorcycle
thundering past

I love my loneliness
staring out at the ocean
with predatory eyes
that miss nothing

I am far away from the party-goers
dancing in the ambulance light

I am a searchlight pulsing over the horizon
Deeply seeking the other side
the mournful connection
--a single candle
--a light in the harbor
--a ghost, a mist, the scent of decay

This is the ocean
This is where I live
--a twist of driftwood an empty limb
--a white suggestion of birch tree
--a drowned forest primeval

The mournful candle of your eyes
glowing over the black water
slowly turning away

8/19/2012

Poem: Dancing with Middle-Aged Women In Clunky Shoes

I love dancing
with middle-aged women
in clunky shoes

with cropped hair and gaudy belts
festooning hips
with broken-in torsos, generous breasts

not afraid to take up space
arms akimbo
maenad bravado

who dare the men to join in
swim the estrogen-rich waters
with these sleek smiling sharks

not timid maidens in pinched jeans
watching us, wide-eyed
staring at their elegant footware

not the young bucks with stiff hips
and determinedly heterosexual beers
waving in the air

those are not the powerhouses
who dominate the dance floor-
sprung from empty nests
hungry for the spotlight

with crow's feet shameless
dancing around firey eyes

shaking what god gave 'em
putting us all to shame

Empathy, Energy, Attachment and Addiction

I have been pondering the role that empathy has in my sickness and my recovery, in disintegration and rejuvenation.

I was in Salem at a yoga studio and in the lobby there were these black-and-glossy business cards advertising an energy worker, a healer, an “empath..” A colorful glowing lotus formed on part of the card, the other showed a figure radiating a globe of light from the head and a cross-like beam of light over the heart. What is this? Is this an empath? Some kind of being of light offering healing and insight to the multitudes? Some kind of strip-mall yoga-studio Jesus?

Being an empath for me has never been pretty. Imagine your psyche is a toothbrush and the emotional residue and energy of everyone around you is the bathroom at Grand Central Station. It means you crave the energy around parties but the wrong kind of energy can drain you. This article was the closest I've come to telling the truth about growing up empathic.

I find myself dancing around this subject. Let others talk about Mirror neurons, the neurological approach to inter-connectedness. Still others will illustrate the impact that the human response to collective compassion has upon our personal spiritual awareness and our fate as a nation, as in the brilliant film “I AM”

Those approaches are fine for others, but I want to tease out these problems of energy, empathy, attachment and addiction through the best way I know how: telling a story. I am inspired by Anais Nin, the intrepid fore-runner of the blog with the diaries she published in her own lifetime. She said she was not as concerned with facts, figures, names and dates as with the “inner journey.” She would say it is ok to dance with your topic, to tease out its secrets, to make it reveal itself to you slowly simply by engaging it in easy conversation and gracious smiles.

So I want to tell you the story of a young girl. The Biblical meaning of her name meant “bitter sorrow, bitter tears” and it also was the Sanskrit word describing the illusion of all things Perhaps being named for sorrow and illusion makes a woman more than a woman, but some kind of avatar of desire. Something akin to La Belle Damme Sans Merci, the faery temptress created by John Keats and visualized by many Pre-Raphaelite artists.


There are many images of this favorite topic of Pre-Raphaelite artists, but this one emphasizes the arresting and entangling nature of her appearance of helplessness, her beseeching eyes, her clutching hands. Around him her hair entwines, a serpent vine, red of course. And this girl, this archetype, this empath, this vampire, was a red head, with moon-drenched skin and heavy crimson tresses, a stem-like waist and a bosom designed to tempt men of any age. She confessed to me she felt disconnected from her body, whose extreme curves not even Fredrick's of Hollywood could accommodate. She compared herself to a bicycle, a thing to be used for a purpose and put down. We have all met self-hating beauty queens. We have all, like the poet John Keats, stumbled upon faery temptreses in the woods.

But in this one moment all these things converged. She danced with fireflies in the July woods. She called herself a healer and pulled in energy from everyone around her to accomplish extraordinary things. When my husband had injured himself she decided she would heal him. Strangely, after she was done with this “healing”, I had a splitting headache. It did not take me long to identify what had happened. She depended too much on the kindness of strangers. She didn't expect what she pulled in to push back. I told her that there was a very fine line between an empath, a healer, and a psychic vampire. I gave her a hematite bracelet, the metal of earth, cold iron to ground the fey. It burns, she said. It's working, I said.

Like Anais Nin I understand that those you charm into your circle, those friends and lovers called seemingly out of nowhere, are the ones who most strongly mirror aspects of yourself, shadows you cringe from or secret sunlight you long for. I could see the shadow in her. I could see the danger inherent in the desire to save her from herself but it was as if somehow I knew that she had some lesson to teach me, perhaps much more than I could teach her. So there is this part of me, the fey temptress, the vampire muse, the dark side of the empath. I am very much aware that she exists but only as one aspect.

There are those who believe that extreme attunement to another's emotions and thoughts is codependency, brought on by a dysfunctional upbringing where emotional expression and self-hood were not encouraged. There are parallels between empathy in the sense of disconnection from self, overwhelmed by people, places and things. I've even explored the concepts of love and sex addiction, where one person becomes the “drug of choice” and attachment seems to alter the brain like a hallucinogen.

When I was younger, I was bullied in school. I took refuge in the vast collection of science fiction novels that were left in moldering grocery bags by my uncle in my grandparents' basement, I soon developed the idea that my emotional experience was different than the other children. As a teenager, I discovered “Star Trek”, and decided I would adopt (for the sake of my sanity) a Vulcan-like attitude of detachment towards other people. I would often declare the usual dramas of other adolescents as “illogical.” My own internal chaos was depicted in the stories I wrote and the characters I created, who got to experience all the emotion I was denied. Of course, I would argue with geek logic, the Vulcans, like Mr. Spock, suppressed all emotion. They were telepathic. Society with that much awareness of underlying emotion from others would be chaos.

Yet despite my attempt to detach, inevitable someone with bright, shining emotions would draw me in. The most brilliant “colors” were anger and pain. It is not that I was deliberately martyring myself, it was that I was helplessly winging my way towards the brightest fire in the stark night of emotional emptiness I had created to feel safe. I needed someone to be larger than life, to become inescapable and inevitable. Is it the perception of pain on that visceral level that makes empaths become healers, or else shut out the world? Is it the shutting down that causes the “acting out?” Can an unaware empath, caught in the ebb and flow of emotion, turn into a psychic vampire?

There is no manual for empaths, or how to survive growing up with this hypersensitivity in an often chaotic environment. We often have to learn by trial and error, like the children of repressed parents piece together their own sex education program through sections of romance novels and murmurs on the bus. I was at a party, feeling woosy, melted into the carpet, when someone took me outside and said, “You're an empath, aren't you?”

I nodded in confused agreement, not certain what that admission implied. He then proceeded to tell me how many people at that party were on various chemical substances, and that the entire room was an energetic swamp of of psychedelic ooze. Empaths are the cheapest of cheap dates, having the ability (or liability) of riding the coat-tails of someone else's high. It isn't always voluntary, as mind-altering drugs can trigger telepathic-like experiences where I could become energetically bonded to someone in an altered state and remain connected to them even after the drug had worn off. Sometimes when someone's aura is full of holes, it is not uncommon for an empath to fall in. These are the pitfalls of having such thin, malleable boundaries. That is why we are prone to addictions and obsessions as well as compulsion and creativity.

The best use of this ability, this gift or this curse, is through art. Like this video of Anais Nin, where she describes the women who were her heroes, women who did not demand their freedom, but created it. I envision a salon of healers and artists, witches and wanderers, dark and light dreamers. I envision a place where we can explore our edges and our roots, find fertile soil for our ideas. I envision where energy is shared, like food or love, like ideas and inspiration. If I am a vampire, let me be the voracious artist-muse that Anais Nin was. Let me blend the pain and pleasure, the masculine and feminine, the unconscious and the magician's tools of art. If I must constantly cycle energy in order to feel alive, then this is the way. This is the world I want to create for myself and my tribe.