Dystopian Prophets and the Exegesis of the Elephant

"Hard times require furious dancing"
-Alice Walker
 
Where does art go?
 
It goes to the pain
 
This is something I am feeling quite acutely right now
 
Where does art go?
 
it goes to the story
 
But it is not my story to tell. 
 
I am merely witness to the burning of the world
 
I have been tempered by the fire in my own head
 
I have been mediated and medicated by the meditative monastic repetition of my job at a local bank where we are a microcosm of community.  We are so many races.
 
I saw a black coworker crying at her desk. I had just been online reading about the latest killing of an innocent black person. 
 
I don't know her very well but I know she's proud, and fierce, a dancer an athlete, an out lesbian with funny stories about her daughter and her girlfriend.
 
I went to the vigil downtown for Orlando. I sat at a table at our local Pride passing out pamphlets for those seeking shelter from domestic violence.
 
I wanted to invite her to go with me. But I couldn't step over the Elephant in the Room. I still feel like a freak and a geek, among so many people younger than me.  I still cringe a little when I mispronounce their names. So I mourned with others in my city of freaks and merchants and artists carried rainbow flags, candles, prayed and praised the value of tolerance.
 
I came into work early. I saw her shoulders slumped, heard unmistakable crying. I thought of the images on my newsfeed last night, of all my white friends apologizing for their good days and July vacations. I asked are you ok? She said I'm fine.
 
I still felt that heavy plodding sensation in my gut.  The Elephant was stepping on me, crushing me. That intuition and intimation that comes with the territory of being an empath. That implicit guilt that comes of being a white person in the world that black people live in today.
 
I sent her an IM ... it sucks what is happening in the world I just want you to know I care
 
I know that doesn't take away the pain. 
 
It's like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. I have no illusion.  But I sent it like I sent reiki to the homeless man I saw sleeping in the common in the pavilion. 
 
There is a place where we go in art that is like a hidden drone camera into the soul stealing your humanity to capture a uniquely humane moment. It's our species most ancient and invasive technology.
 
The place that says not now, only weeks after Orlando....
 
The place that says I don't know you but you are fierce and I see you. Bleeding from a thousand small cuts a thousand micro-aggressions and gaslight invalidations because unlike me and most of my geeky witchy white privileged friends who innocently say "oh we're not racist" but benefit from this system you don't get to graduate from high school and leave the bullies behind.
 
The PTSD, the constant trauma, the energetic, physical and mental exhaustion of knowing the weight of hate is not something time can erase. The bullies are still there and they have guns, and laws, and the might of society behind them.
 
My husband and I are watching "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K Dick.  It's a dystopian science fiction about an alternate history, an existential speculation of "what if." What if the Germans and Japanese won World War II and the United States was divided between the Nazi's and the Pacific Empire?  A young woman in San Francisco has her world shattered one night when her sister is killed delivering a mysterious film depicting an alternate ending.... Suddenly she is fleeing for her life and everyone is after her. As we watch her world crumble we ask ourselves the questions who would we be in that America. Would we be resistance? Would we be cowards? Would we keep our heads down, go along to get along? The truth is we just don't know. The truth is that by the grace of circumstance, we've mostly been spared that knowledge.
 
I am reading the "Exegesis" of Philip K Dick, the visionary science fiction writer who envisioned such dire futures and also had a mysterious psychological and metaphysical awakening he spend thousands of hours and pages upon pages chronicling. His journals are rabbit holes of scientific and metaphysical exposition similar to the Red Book of Carl Jung only using the language of science fiction and fact rather than nascent spiritual and psychological terminology of the subconscious that Jung pioneered by writing himself sane, excavating his own dreams of blood and horror just before the world was plunged into World War. 
 
Philip K Dick talks about future memory, about transmissions from mysterious beings, aliens, the Holy Spirit, Logos, the fire-in-the-head that kept him up all night recording his divine disordered downloads the madness genius watcher and observer and clairvoyant writer that he was.
 
Why was this series released now, in 2015? Are we skittering on the edge of fascism, of police state, of a class driven by fear and compliance, where the protesters are protested and the immediate media erased and re-written? Is this the right time for this message?
 
We've had robots used to quell riots why the hell have we not invented "phasers on stun"? Nonlethal stopping power we have this miracle nightmare technology why can't it serve humanity and not make us better killers?
 
I'm waking up to the reality that for those who don't come from white, suburban backgrounds, this dystopian future is already here. The jackboots are on the ground. But the good news is that most of the fighting back in my reality is digital. Armchair activists are flooding bloody images of the unjustly killed onto our Facebook walls, psychically staining our baby pictures and cat videos because the homeless bodies of poor nonwhite America littering the city park is not enough to make us put down our lattes and take notice. We are far too conditioned to keep our head down and keep walking. Just ask my friend Jason who after Occupy organized homeless people into squats only to see friends frozen to death in a Maine winter when the cops came to protect property already abandoned. The jackboots are on the ground for the criminally under-housed.
 
I am part of the problem. I am one of the "sensitives". One of them who would have been rounded up into a death camp, permanently institutionalized possibly burned at the stake in another age. One of those creepily aware clairvoyant writers diagnosed with psychosis at sixteen because I was self-aware enough to refuse to write my auto-biography with names and dates and boring details about my life but instead submitted an audio-tape analysis of my own novels and how each character was an aspect of my personality or those of people who were closest to me. I didn't know my creative departure would send me a one-way ticket to the school psychologist and I would be pathologized for the rest of my life with an alphabet soup of diagnoses.

My salvation is my own chronicle, my own Anais-esque diaries of exegesis and apology, my own neurotic rabbit holes of mythological, magickal erotic, transformational and romantic obsession.  By the grace of reiki, a phenomenally supportive husband, wonderful communities, my spiritual tribemates online and in real time,  and my entry into a double-income household homeowner minority I am doing well enough not to be medicated any more. I live in a lovely neighborhood and walk to work every day. I am not left alone long enough to chew off my own leg in the trap of obsessive self-analysis, like perhaps those genius neurotics were. But I have been watching and observing. Taking notes.

 I was sold a bill of goods.  I was driven to the edge of madness by the insanity of corporate America and escaped the medical straight-jacket when I quit my old job, but I was told that the price of this was I had to keep my head down, on the narrow track keep my blinders on, not let passion, disruption or rage take the reins of my fragile psyche. Told not to watch the news or pay attention to what might ignite the already faulty wiring of the fire in my head.  I understand as many of us do that there is an energetic and emotional power to the magic mirror of media. I understand that we are emotionally overcharged, even those of us who don't believe in anything beyond the limits of the physical body, would scoff at the concept of a universal mind or cosmic consciousness.
 
Yet in this country another time young people saw kids killed in Vietnam on television in their living rooms and it mobilized them to carry signs and face down the police and stop a war. They said"The revolution will be televised"

"First you See Video. Then you Eat Video. Then you Be Video"

 I wish I could remember what dystopian pulp short story that was from, back in the days before the hum of the modem launched the noosphere, when I was just girl with a hungry head reading Iassac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.
 
It used to be just a few freaks and geeks were exploring the trans-corporeal frontiers of cyberspace.
 
Now we are all living in our own reality show.  We are turned off by the commercialism of mainstream   TV that was the lifeline of our predecessors but tuned in to an endless incestuous soap opera of consensual reality. 
 
We see black people bleeding
We see our friend’s newborn babies
We hear one person's cry for help, one person's whining about the IT department, and one person revealing deep secrets to strangers that they can't tell their family.
We change our names to tell the truth.
We say what we feel and inadvertently hurt people we love who don't want to know this side of us. 
We see people using the power of the mass media to speak the truth to power.  We have lost the illusion of an impartial press so we are pressing "SEND" or "SHARE" and pushing the electronic emotional current through the stratosphere of our collective consciousness.
 
These are the equivalent of the sign-carriers.  Because getting up close to power gets you arrested, but unlike the 60's getting arrested these days may get you dead. Especially if you are poor and non-white.
 
And I have to say I'm sorry when I thought that I could thrust some peacenik flower in the gun barrel you face every day some affectation of affirmation as the panacea to all ills simply because it helped me get through my day. I have to say I was buying into an addiction a distraction that says if I don't see it is not happening and if I see it, it will hurt me and my job is to stay sane and keep buying things keep the clockwork turning generating the matrix of the ELEPHANT that is the WALL that we keep building around ourselves.
 
The infamous WALL. Laughing at the bloated cartoon of the racist.  Just as offensive as a lawn jockey that was commonplace only a hundred years ago and now obscene.
 
That wall is the elephant looming up that thing that keeps us trapped in ego in fear that makes us dive down into rabbit holes of religion and video and consume positive fantasy to erase the bloody reality that someone has left on our electronic doorstep and offended our vision of MANIFESTING the perfect self-delusion of all inclusive world peace. That wall is the crushing shame in the gut when we think of all the things we have, the shadow side of gratitude the empty pit that says.... for my portion, who gets less of a place at the table? That makes me deflect my own shame at not doing not being not caring enough and say put down your Don Quixote armor old man just breathe, just twist your body into bliss take a walk take a drink take a break from your constant vigilance.
 
But the art. the art that is real always goes to the pain. Of "life as it is" while imaging "life as it should be."
 
So I apologize to my artist activist friends when I have said you have to think of yourself, you have to put down your sword and stop tilting these windmills these giants these Elephants that you have been working so desperately to reveal to your room. That have been crushing the black writers in the energetic neighborhood you live in, bloodying the stories you swim in, the words and the worlds you consume. For years now.
 
We were wrong and we were right me and my crazy new age tribe.  We are energetically creating the matrix but we are all waking up and to be awake is a privilege and a terrible burden, it means we don't get to change the channel to eliminate "negativity"
 
We must learn to co-exist with the elephant to not let it crush us to live with this gift and curse every day to listen keep listening to listen to ourselves listening to each other listening to poets listening to prophets, listening live witnesses while reading our inner oracles written in our breathing bodies and souls.
 
I woke up this morning after a late night of terror reflection and the distortion and magnificence of art. I had to prepare myself for the business of the day. I looked at myself in the mirror.
 
I saw what was really there, the stranger that was my body to the fire in my head. Start where you are, that's what the Buddhists say, like Pema Chondron. For god's sake breathe. I saw the lines in my tired, worn, sad face. And I heard a voice.
  
My higher self? The voice said yes.... it is all there... but you knew this truth all of your holy books all of your prophets the light rises and the shadow with it.
 
We do not get a free pass.  Magick always has a price and that price is life and that price is living with this exquisite awareness of ecstasy and terror dancing with that fire.
 
Understanding that we are only beginning to know the truths of our emotional bodies, that people in warfare reduced to base survival and traumatized do horrible things.  That patriotism and duty are thin bandages we wrap across atrocity to keep ourselves sane. Everyone in a battle has some kind of lasting scars, just as those who have grown up in unjust regimes. Why don't they train all cops in trauma therapy and mindfulness, so they can bring those skills of humanity into the very real battleground they face every day.  Why don't they honor the warrior not by worshiping the weapon but honoring the human toll it takes to step into the reality of the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice.
 
We are just waking up as a species just understanding the complex ballet of body mind and soul we have enough humanity and enough technology to search for the seat of consciousness to break beyond ourselves to truly see the other as a mirror of ourselves.
 
In the story the quest is to find the film that makes a better future.  To break the back of fascism with the triumph of the right history,
 
We can start by really listening to our own prophets. Philip K. Dick and George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein and, yes, even H.P. Lovecraft.  Really reading and viewing our own beloved genre not for the space opera CGI and heroic psychodrama but for the keen observation of human nature and society that these geniuses revealed by using the powerful sociological critique and revelation that fiction has always provided.
 
We do not have to choose between Eloi or Morlock.  We cannot be all love and light and we do not need to demonize each other because we are the other. We are the alien angels and monsters hovering overhead. We are geeks the chosen people of the new revelation of the endless open source god game of consensual creation.
 
I have seen some remarkable things among my friends. Souls who can be self-aware and compassionate. People who came from privilege who escaped bad marriages and job dissatisfaction with yoga, addicts who found mindfulness through recovery. We have been relentless romantic seekers who fall in love with everything we have been to the inner rooms of our souls and begun the spiral out into the world. We are dancing furiously against the fear and against the urge of addiction raging with ecstasy and feeling the burn of compassion for this life fire in which we all burn. We know there is no escape from our own story except to re-write it and we are no longer in love with defending our love-ability. We relish the breakdown of our inner prisons, whether we have been to the ashram or the asylum We know that the crazy is not to be found there but that being aware in this complicated world if you do not have your tribe if you do not own your soul and question your ego will bring it down.
 
I see them shouting for justice I see them shining with connection white faces and dark faces but this is no Obama campaign this is no United Colors of Capitalism this is no kumbaya moment this is the collective furious dance of the dialectic that we are all and none of the above infinitely connected to source and terrified of our own voices in a dark room. We are the Source of light. We are the empty darkness.
 
Encompassing so much, we don't have to silence the screaming of the world for our own peace, choke the poetry of justice for our own serenity.  
 
Art goes to the pain, Art born from the union of the Universe and the human, but art translates, transforms, transmutes the poison it is the ultimate wall breaker it is the elephant illustrator the emperor has no clothes the emperor is dreaming the butterfly. It masters the matrix and decodes reality.
 
We are what we eat and we need a balanced diet of reality and fantasy, of prophets and iconoclasts, of god and the devil, of chocolate and kale and capitalism and socialism they say mongrel breeds are healthier and that the future skin will be some lovely shade of gold if we don't burn it all away in the conflagration of our illusions.
 
So start right now.  Take down the wall confront the ugly American within the shadow of the egalitarian citizen of a Star Trek idealism.
 
That's the only way to stop the juggernaut. not to wish it away but to look it straight in the face that is yours and mine and here and now.
 
The Elephant is in the room.  But it doesn't have to be the wall to house our fragile reality
It doesn't have to stop our soul from rising with the gravity of guilt.
 
And it gets smaller when it gets a chance to be admitted into existence. We get bigger and we get stronger and more human for our coexisting with the pain that is the root of our human search for wholeness and soul.
 
As within, so without. It's the way we are wired to grow.

 

Burn your Bible and write your own

Hey you

I want to talk to you about our relationship.

I know it's been a long time since we've had a conversation but you know how life runs away from us sometimes.

It's been almost three years since I've dared ply my voice anywhere other than the Book of Faces. The empty Book that replaced you and our decade dance of epistolary romance where a poetic voice was born where a voice was intubated and choked a poem stopped your heart and eventually your voice but your word remained imprisoned on a page forever. And here I am living in a mad world that's gone madder on April Fool's day contemplating the fate of artists, dreamers, lovers and thinkers in a Sufi dance of dissolving ecstasy. I'm reading Anais Nin and Carl Jung and working on a hotline for domestic violence. I'm an emotional firefighter sitting around the station playing cards but ready to spring into action should I get a call. I'm dancing this dialectic between writer and healer, between witness and activist.

Do you really want to know where I've been? I promise you we will catch up later. I've fallen in love gotten married have a mortgage another zip code and another diagnosis. Did you know another thing we have in common? Did you know blogs are a new form of therapy for the bipolar?

But I have to begin in media res. I have to start where I am to make it ring true.

Outside the wind blows silky electric and I think this is one of those e.e. cummings Springs with the power to make you cry. Spring is a weird threshold of longing and nostalgia, where we fall in love all over with everyone we have ever loved. It's a chemical thing they say the same hormone that is in chocolate and in nursing mothers the hunger for touch, soft and ragged that leads you to tell me you were running in a dream. At first I didn't understand, having been born with the privilege to have limbs not made of rubber. You told me you had muscular dystrophy, but I had not yet watched you walked with the spidery grace of crutches bracing yourself against the world. It was that early-onset infirmity that made you describe yourself as a "young fogey" the turn of phrase on a chat room for Pantheism that made me want to get you know you better to entice you to spend more of your words on me. I already saw myself in you from my earliest days I was known as an old soul

Words are cheap they say, "futile devices" but words have always been my weakness. I fell in love with you without your face without the knowledge and imposition of your body in space. How eagerly did I receive your words electronic missives that are disappearing from my inbox what is the statute of limitations on ghosts in the machine? But oh how your words rippled and suggested and seduced from an infinite distance more than miles. I long for a vanished world of yellowing love letters in a box technology is a false immortality but still the sensitive omniscient web ripples on the day of your birthday do they have birthdays in the spirit world? The algorithms are still singing even if the mermaids have stopped.

I am trying to talk to the Jungian Alchemists who are in search of a new symbol about the Bernie Sanders bird, about Egyptian gods and internet memes and shamanic symbols weaving into American Politics, and maybe they wouldn't understand and that is why I am writing to you now, master mythmaker of these modern times. You and I began this conversation years ago, spelunkers diving into each other's Platonic caves, cartographers of each other's interior cities, articulate as Anais Nin and Henry Miller but graced with the ability to instantly interweave stories, to friend each other's friends and fall in love with each other's lovers, longings, stories and secrets, graced by the internet and by our own spectacular peculiarities of mind our own ravenous need for meaning and voracious appetite for myth.

They say that spring mix chemical is produced not only through intimate touch but by women talking to each other. That there is something in our brains that makes us bond when we tell our story, even to strangers.

Is that what makes us write, poetry, novels, blogs? At first writing was reserved for only the most holy occasions. The technology was held secret, in the hands of scribes and priests and oracles. Poets chewed the fat of slain bulls and wrapped themselves in their bloody hides and waited for the gift of the awen, the fire-in-the-head sent to them from the gods. Poetry, to the Celts, was a serious business, and the poet who was part shaman part war correspondent and part travelling entertainer and news provider was that quicksilver trickster whose value in society, measured by the number of colors allowed in his cloak, was lesser only than the king.

In the magic mirror online we are all storytellers, all with the power to bring the thunder from far away, to launch a thousand ships, to touch the lives of those we have never met or never even imagined. We are all the masters of our own mirror kingdoms, we are all echo chambers. We take this technological promiscuity for granted, these incestuous tentacles that sweep deeper than our own memories, enabling us to watch our ex's children grow up in increments and see our friends grow older and wiser and stranger and even the vast remarkable beings our own mothers are finding themselves to be.

A long time ago you and I seemed so uniquely transgressive. Now the story has grown old almost before it has had a chance to be told.

The words you wrote in their original format are vanishing. So I have to rely on my imperfect memory. It was good enough for poets, writers, novelists, who never insisted upon facts and figures and documents. It's kinder if the names are forgotten or blurred or if poetic license saves us from libel. Who owns the rights to a dead writer's letters? What is left for history? Poor Sylvia how the feminists fight over your bones.

I want to begin at the beginning but I have to start somewhere. I want to talk about our relationship. I want to talk about connection, about evolution, about creation and co-creation and the weird synchronicity between art and fate, between mythology and madness, the witches' brew of synchronicity the epileptic synapses snapping and crackling in a tropical wasp candy, sharp and sweet and stinging like the thorns of God in a Hafiz wind. Is it the wind that is whipping up your long-lost ghost that is making me forget myself and want to tell your story. Because it's become my story too. Because I'm the last one alive to tell the tale.

I don't want to dig in your remains. Bad enough that I scrambled so desperately to save all your words. Every conversation, every breadcrumb trail of dialogue every dream you shared in instant message conversations. Even the ones that I didn't understand, the ones that interrupted me when I wanted to talk about my latest crisis, even the ones that offended me.

I won't remember it perfectly. This is not a true crimes story not on April Fool's Day on a New Moon in Aries when the world shudders at the ranting sociopathic Jokers ramping up angry alcoholic Dads and joyously tilts at windmills with a socialist Don Quixote hanging with the hippie college students who have finally found their digital Woodstock. Archetypes run rampant in the street and we are all building our own ashram or launching our own jihad every day with the click of a like button.

I don't remember if it was something you told me or something I read. If the words were shared intimately or vicariously with the world. Our relationship had a running commentary. But you said you burned your Bible. Only a believer would have the temerity to actually carry it out. You had to be free of your parent's indoctrination. You started with burning your own Bible and then you began making your own Jesus. Devouring and discarding heroes from comic books and television. A geek's innocence and curiosity with a philosopher's discerning eye.

Your last Jesus was Doctor Who. Your last picture online. Your legacy. Burn your own Bible and start with the story. Make your own meaning, your own myth. But don't stop there. Keep sharing it. Expanding it. Open source religion. The ultimate eclecticism. It's ultimate goal to laugh at the Devil and make God take himself less seriously while the Goddess dances, changing partners at will, with the seasons, with the ebb and flow of life and death, the High Priestess with the Scroll of Wisdom on her lap, between the black and white pillars.

The bird that landed on Bernie Sander's podium is just a bird. But in this wild myth-making wonderland of armchair activists and hashtag bards means the story can go anywhere. The sparrow is a Native American symbol of the common man. Go ahead. Get it wrong. Myths don't quibble with ornithologists. We need a little more truth and a little less fact checking.

Yes, you. If I was a quaint Victorian I would say "dear reader". If I was clever with html I would give you links to lead you down new rabbit holes and references.

But intimacy is a dying art form. We are stretched too thin these spider-web lovers connecting over infinite distances but the thread never breaks, not even in the other world.

When will we wake up to our own monstrosity, our own miracle?

It's time to shake up the Shakti soda can time to invite the awen in the fire in the head that by the grace of gods will not become Sylvia's oven only the immolation of ego in the mythic rapture of story.

So turn the page if you are curious. I know I am. More Later.

Blessed Be

Big Bad News, Big Life Questions

Common to codependents is a nagging sense of emptiness when relationships end, and a lingering inability to make decisions for one's own life without an impending crisis. Though hyper-reliable when the chips are down, we tend to falter when left to our own devices. Recently I have been grappling with this reality in a very visceral way. I make bargains with myself at work: if you make it through one more hour, all the way til 5:30pm, you are allowed to have your meltdown when you get home. Between crying in front of the television with a giant bowl of nostalgic popcorn and reading dog-earred romance novels, I have successfully put off writing my next blog post, which was going to be about a persistent pattern triangles in my life (more to come). That train of thought was largely derailed by the recent Boston Marathon tragedy.

I am not the only one jolted into looking at the bigger picture. As the media sings its September 11th song of tit-for-tat and eye-for-an-eye, I wonder like so many compassionate spiritual seekers what can I do about a culture of violence and the perpetuation of nonsense. I came upon this haunting quote, from a newsletter for a local yoga and chant festival that usually features beatific women in white singing. Its message of connecting with the chaos rather than pushing it away really touched me. All the smaller questions about codependency and recovery seemed rather self-centered in the face of all this uproar.

What can I do about this? Not just the tragedy in the news, but that feeling that my life is an old movie reel about to disintegrate as the grasping and illusions drop away and I struggle with a deep crisis of meaning . I am coming once again upon the 6-or-7 year itch. Almost six years working for the same company. In the bad-but-consistent days in the 90's and pre-bailout 2000's, I could count on getting laid off before the end of five years–shuffled off by an ungrateful corporation with a few weeks severance package and a brief stint with their career counselor.

In the past, the career counselor would suggest some pie-in-the-sky drastic change and I would promptly ignore them, chosing instead to frantically race around simultaneously sending out resumes and obsessing about the future of my relationship. Avoiding these questions, I relocated to the North Shore to be with my partner and traded one soul-less corporate master for another simply based on its location at the exact mid-point between my temporary digs in Londonderry, NH and my eventual destination of Rockport, MA.

I am still at that company, putting up with the hour-long commute in order to make a Boston salary without facing Boston traffic. I am hardly well-off but too comfortable to seriously consider quitting my job and going back to school. Yet find myself asking myself the questions I started asking, and consequently panicked over, when I was sixteen, twenty, and thirty-two years old. Some judge in my head insists I should know by now, but I am still floundering. What is my life path? What is my unique gift to the world? Now that I am in my forties, with no desire for the family track in my future, how do I navigate the years that (barring some disaster) stretch out ahead of me? How do I make meaning on my own terms, how do I contribute to the next generation?

In the old paradigm it was relatively easy to roll with the punches, but now the punches are coming from the inside as something long dormant wakes up kicking. Any experience of ending—a divorce or breakup, a layoff, a geographical shift—has long been a source of anxiety and imbalance. Despite difficulties at work last year due to my bout with mental illness, I got a fair and honest performance review and even a modest raise. I was waiting for the axe to fall, and when it didn't, that ragged, skin-crawling sensation that my desires had grown too fast and too big for my current circumstances began to set in. I wonder again about the big picture-- my job, my career choices, my plans in the world. I've grieved a major relationship, I've faced a serious mental health diagnosis. I've deliberately spent all of my ill-got gains from my retirement funds—earned from the corrupt banks and insurance companies I worked for in the 90's -on personal growth workshops and now I am deep in a roiling froth of mounting debt and unanswered questions. As an empath, I can feel the burning of the world. Perhaps not in the global sense—I've always been profoundly allergic to politics--still it manifests in the desire to reach out to strangers, or at least respond when they reach out to me. This may in fact be an evolution out of codependency—helping others with the hidden need to prove my own value—into helping others from a self-directed and compassionate place.

When I attended a “mini” HAI workshop this weekend, I got the chance to be a beacon of strength for a struggling, expanding soul new to the workshop experience. Despite my shaky sense of self, I confidently and clearly shared my “experience, strength and hope,” as we say in the Twelve Step fellowships. I listened without judgment, without offering direct advice, simply expressing what I had learned in my growth explorations, and what was working for me in my life. Agitated by hunger, having rushed off to the workshop with only coffee and a handful of trail mix in my belly, I felt oddly grounded in that sense of purpose. I invited this individual out for greasy Greek food in a nearby Mom-and-Pop deli, and I spent the next hour and a half after the two-hour workshop listening to his story.

There is something powerful in reinforcing my commitment to my own path by describing the changes that I have wrought with the assistance of the strong, empowering communities I have been lucky to discover. Could this, I thought, with a burgeoning heaviness in my gut that might have been more than just filo dough and feta cheese, be my True Path? As if in answer I sent my first-ever post to the Emotions Anonymous email loop and the group moderator immediately asked my permission to use it in the monthly newsletter. Could that be the Universe validating this direction-- that someone besides me could benefit from my words? I have been tortured and tormented by my words and my thoughts for so long, freezing and releasing them in poetry and fiction, that I never thought that anything I said could help someone.

Yet I find that when I think of the big picture, how I would want to spend my time if I did not have to worry about financial fears, it would be in a path of “helping people.” In this violently evolving world I no longer want to waste myself in something that doesn't feed me spiritually or make the world a better place. I have no idea how to begin, except with those people in my immediate circles and those met by circumstance or synchronicity. When I fantasize about my ideal career I know I would like to become some kind of facilitator, using my words not for poetry or stories, but as agent of change by acting as witness to powerful expressions of growth, allowing others to find their own self-guided trail and compassionate path.

It seems fitting that I saw this sign at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.



For the past three-and-a-half years I have been on a self-guided trail. Now I am in the center of the labyrinth, moving out of myself and back into the world. As the quotation on the plaque sent to me by one of my dearest friends for Christmas last year says: “She wasn't where she had been, she wasn't where she was going, but she was on her way.” I may not know the exact direction or even really have a map, but it helps to give myself permission to think about those career questions that annoyed and frustrated me years ago, the ones that begin, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with your life?” I know that the frustration and irritation is part of the process of letting go of my self-defeating attitudes and behaviors and embracing the uncertainly and possibility of the future.




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Relationships and Recovery

I have said before that the underlying theme of this blog is relationships—how to navigate the needs of others and explore the various shades of intimacy without being overwhelmed. This includes the journey of recovering from codependency.

There is strange power in anniversaries. It's been ten years since that fateful April Fool's Day when I left my first husband. Is that why I felt a vague sense of agitation, a cosmic restlessness, a difficulty focusing, a shaking sense of something missed, something missing? Was it the holiday malaise, even though Easter has never been a particularly nostalgic holiday. Pictures of cupcakes sent over cellphone from my sister. Memories of storybook artists shared with those who were inspired. Creepy vintage costumes at brunch--ravaged rabbit with matted fur and one dim right eye. It does not surprise me that I was derailed from my intention to work on this post this weekend, even though I deliberately stayed home when friends asked me to go out. I did spend some time by the ocean, walking over the varicolored stones of Cressy Beach. I wanted to find a heart-shaped stone for a friend, and for the first time in a long time I couldn't find the right stone. I did find a beautiful heart, a great green monster about ten pounds, but it was way too big to take home.

Is codependent just another word for a heart that is too big?

In my struggle to define myself, I have run into this word again and again. I have been told by some friends that I am not codependent-- I'm too fiercely independent, too active with personal growth work, for that. Yet years after the end of my marriage to an alcoholic, I became engaged to another codependent, and I began a long slow slide backslide. Before I moved away to be with my boyfriend on the North Shore, I found in Worcester a thriving CODA (Codependent's Anonymous) group. In the Worcester group I had found a wonderful community of tight-knit folk committed to recovery and who had created powerful bonds not confined to meetings. Our group had a standing date at a nearby Friendly's right after the meeting. Though I lost touch with them after my ocean-ward migration, I always remembered that time as a positive growing experience. Recently, I tried another CODA group in Newburyport, but I was chastised for my attempts to bond by sharing my own reactions to the stories and shares. I was told that was “crosstalk”-- which literally means providing unwanted advice or solutions to problems—though my reactions were not verbal at all—nods, meaningful laughter, affirmation of shared experience. I felt deprived by that group leader of the right to have my own experience, which is is very much a part of the lack of self-definition that is codependency. So I left the buttoned-up group with their frozen feelings and numb expressions, and found a more lively fellowship in Emotions Anonymous


I do find it difficult to talk about relationships with these recovery groups, either the positive or the negative aspects. Especially since I abandoned my one attempt at conscious monogamy and came out as polyamorous. Ironically, the more I explore this aspect of myself, the more I realize that I have always had multiple relationships, even when I only had one boyfriend. In fact, were it not for my intimate network of friends, my support system of Shakti sisters—women poets and writers, co-creators and positive conspirators-- my relationship of seven years would never have come into full blossom. Apparently, it takes a village to create a romance, or at least to allow me to brave the initial waves of terror that come with getting close. After that experience, I've come to realize that what it takes to create a healthy romantic relationship is a commitment to each other's mutual growth, even when that growth is difficult and painful. It means an agreement to make time for each other, put each other first, and share meaningful time together (not just vege out in front of the televison). It means accepting responsibility for our own emotional reactions, not projecting them on our partners. It means communication and keeping the lines open. The polyamorists seem to have dealing with jealousy figured out, but there are so many other potential relationship pitfalls, even between two reasonably stable people who are not addicted to any substances.

I am finding that the more personalities you combine the more the potential for exponential growth, and the more the potential for overwhelm and disconnection from self-hood. So now my question is not how to save one floundering relationship, as was my focus for many years, but how to balance the many loves in my life with my own journey as an artist and a healer, a magick worker and a person in recovery from codependency and emotional struggles? How do I take on all this spiritual work and keeping my head together and attending to the minute details of practical living? How do I piece together the many separate shining fragments in the mosaic of my relationships—each beautiful and fascinating in itself—into a coherent constellation of tribe? And how do I find both tribe-time and “me” time?

I suppose the simple answer is creating and maintaining boundaries. As crazy as it can make me, perhaps I need to spend a weekend with my phone turned off, logged off Facebook, without novels, Netflix, television or other distractions, trying to practice mindfulness and sit with silence.

One aspect of that silence could be filled with meditation. When people ask me if I meditate, I tell them about walking on the rocks at Cressy Beach. So many shifting shapes and bright colors. I am taken in by the “rip-rap” of things, the sense of a vast presence, bigger than every one and every thing that describes and defines me. When I first began The Artist's Way, I saw the rocks on that beach as individual planets, perfect works of art, and I felt the deep belief that nothing I could create could be so fine and singular in purpose. I was rejuvenated, awakened and awed-- my rigid perfectionism was for a moment no longer in my way. Art is true co-creation with God, or so boasted Julia Cameron. And in that moment, those moments, I was willing to agree with her grandiose vision. I was willing to let go and let God/Goddess, I was willing to give myself up to the flow.

And that is what recovery is all about.

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.