imtalkinghere

Teddy

February 22, 1932 - August 25, 2009

So many individual reflections on Senator Kennedy are, by their details, painting a clear, consistent story about the excellent man he was. Yes, excellent – no matter  what  flaws and errors may have existed as well. Such is life. Such is especially true of large life. And large is a small word for Ted Kennedy.

When I was in college, my sister lived in Cambridge in a third-floor walk-up on a hill near Harvard. While visiting, I had to make a run to the post office, one of those grand old edifices,  with steps up to the main doors, lots of stone and ornate metal work, a series of service windows against the back wall. It was busy day at the P.O.,  maybe 2 or 3 people in line for each window. As I was concluding my business at the window, the interior space suddenly shifted, almost as if the floor had tilted. I turned my head to see that everyone who had been in line was now exiting the building or had left their place in line to peer out the front doors. I looked quizzically to the clerk, who explained, simply, “Kennedy.” 

Sure enough, Senator Ted Kennedy and a small entourage of male aides were walking up Massachusetts Avenue and were now in front of this building. As I exited the main doors, I paused to observe the others rushing down the steps to shake his hand. People were coming from across the street, too.  Kennedy welcomed every hand.

Two thoughts hit me. First, “So that’s what a really expensive suit looks like. Worth every penny.” And then: “Oh.  Charisma.  But more.”

In that one moment I “got” the palpable force of energy that creates capital-C Charisma. It’s not just good looks, though Kennedy was in peak condition that day.  It’s not just charm, though he had that, too.  It is a force field of energy that is wholly its own thing and exceedingly rare. It had reached from the city sidewalk right into the building and sucked the people out onto the street. I stood transfixed at the top of the steps and took it in, memorizing what I was seeing. People, who just moments before had been standing sleepily in line at that wall of windows, were now smiling broadly from a mere handshake and some eye contact. Amid all of this activity swirling around him, Kennedy  even took the time to look up to where I was standing, make eye contact, smile broadly, and wave. I smiled back. And then he moved on.

I had felt tired as I trudged down to the P.O., - I didn’t want to make the run, my sister had pressed me into service - but now I was enlivened. I ran up the hill to my sister’s apartment and bounded up all  three flights of steps to announce, “Guess who I just saw!” The force of his presence was so enormous that it had energized me into this easy sprint home. And it stayed with me for hours afterward.

In the years since, I have met and worked with many famous people, so I’ve been around a lot of charisma – plenty of good looks and charm and sex appeal and personal buzz - but very few of them had the “more” that I witnessed in Senator Kennedy. Today, I would call it Soul Energy. Reading so many lovely and striking personal reflections of this “lion” today, I keep thinking how well he spent that precious resource.

“And you know, he was never defeatist, he never was petty -- never...petty. He was never small. And in the process of his doing, he made everybody he worked with bigger, both his adversaries as well as his allies. Don't you find it remarkable that one of the most partisan, liberal men in the last century, serving in the Senate, had so many of his (long pause) so many of his foes embrace him, because they know he made them bigger. He made them more graceful by the way in which he conducted himself.”             - Vice President Joe Biden

Certain patterns emerge. The almost unimaginable support and presence he lent to the surviving children of his brothers, while simultaneously seeing friends and colleagues through sickness and celebrations.  An incredible generosity, Far-reaching kindness. The rich laughter. He was humble. Friendly. Thoughtful.  An impeccable work ethic.  Sound judge of character. The voice, the voice, that essential voice. And “the Senate chamber, although crowded, will feel empty without him.” Well yes, that energy will be gone.  When you realize how many lives he touched and in what ways,  you recognize the extraordinary amount of soul energy it takes to reach so far and so deep and so high.

We all have notions that we want to believe. Today, I want to believe the one about how we are welcomed on the other side by our loved ones and ancestors. I really want to believe that Ted Kennedy crossed over to see so many Kennedy’s waiting there …with his three older brothers right in front, smiling those big grins and saying to their baby brother, “Well done, Teddy. Well done!”

As for those of us still here, we’ll have to decide what we want to weave in the energetic void he has left. Such a void is an invitation and can be a blessing, if we fill it artfully and well.

If…

Of Men and Women, Madness and...

......a bit of an Ode to August 16, things past, and soon-to-be past

The new season of Mad Men starts tonight. It's one of the very few shows I watch regularly. The Mad Men website invites us all to enter its stylish world with a little picture game, so I did my best at re-creating my most stylin'  "adult" moment of the early sixties.

My grandmother took me along to a beauty show where I was selected to "be a head" for the show's headliner, Mr. Kenneth... Mr Kenneth! He did Jackie's hair! All the other heads were grown-ups. But I had great hair.  So there I sat on the stage, my feet dangling from the chair as Mr. K performed his magic on me in front of an auditorium of hairdressers, as they were known then. Two most vivid memories: (1) Nana and her friend Delia sitting near the front. Nana just smiled beatifically with pride. Her usual.  Delia kept putting her fingers to her lips and dabbing oddly at the corners while bugging her eyes out at me. I thought she was trying to tell me there was food on my face. They'd given me a hot dog while I was under the dryer. Imagining a smear of mustard,  I kept running my hand over the general area of my mouth. But she kept making the signal - bun crumbs? actual meat? what could it be? -  so my hand passes got wider and more searching. Turned out Delia was trying to convey, "Smile!"... leading me to look like...?  Let me tell you, Delia would have been lousy at Charades. (2) The "do" was e-nor-mous. A giant, highly teased flip with very little relationship to my person. But a fabulosity worth taking home to show and tell. Did I mention Mr. Kenneth?!  Which meant I couldn't go swimming in the hotel pool after all because no swim cap has ever been invented for such an insistent presence of hair. An important life lesson for me: Any style which cramps your style ain't no style at all.

So here I am - back home showing off my crowning glory to Mom. The heels, the figure, the height that fits the hair are wrong, wrong, and wrong,  but the flip is actually right on the money.  And Mom  would, in fact, have had a smoking cigarette in her hand.

I added the pink glasses as a symbolic gesture to the fact that I saw the world differently then, which is a big part of the allure of Mad Men, to enter that not-so-distant world, so much a thing of the past and yet... and yet...

...still so much work to do on the feminine.

The Greek came home early from his studio yesterday looking weary or maybe just the kind of confused that can make a person appear that way.

“I keep thinking about something you said this morning.” Here he repeated it. “Did you mean that? Do you really feel that way?”

“Yes.”

(Okay, I may have said a little more than “yes.”)

Here’s the thing: What I said is something I have been saying frequently for fifteen years. Always from the depths of feeling.  And here he was “meeting it”, as if for the first time.

The author Luis Alberto Urrea tells a story about consulting with a distant cousin, a medicine woman, as part of his research for writing The Hummingbird’s Daughter, about their ancestress Teresita . He confessed to her his nagging doubt -  could he, a man, really capture this woman’s experience? His cousin’s response was a flashing rebuke: “You men! If you want to know about women, all you have to do is ask us. And then when we tell you, why… don’t… you…  listen?!!”

Jungian psychotherapist Robert Johnson writes, “How many hundreds of times have I instructed a man, ‘Go home and listen to your wife for half an hour and find out who she really is!’ A revelation awaits such a man.”

Here's an important thing: the Greek is a whole lot more conscious and respectful of all things feminine than most. This man loves women. He champions them. Yet even he...

I know the world of hostility to women. Intimately. In fact, today is the birthday of a woman-hating man I once loved. A five+ year misery, but a terrific teaching. I also taught at a Catholic college, for heavens sake! In short, I have steeped myself in this particularly broken part of our collective psyche.

I take it as a hopeful sign that it seems the larger part of fascination with Mad Men comes from the lives of its women characters... Please let it be that we are captivated by these women, not just out of historical curiosity, but because it resonates at some profound level with a much deeper shift we are making in relationship to our inner feminine.  Until we - men and women -  restore that relationship... loving, respecting, expressing, empowering...listening to (!) and giving dominion to... the interior feminine,  women's lives will continue to be the unpleasant symptom of an inner ailment.

And boy is that ever way past old!

 

God. Death. Ocean. Little ones. (And how my mind works)

A book I’m reading opens with this:

"Some years ago, I spent an afternoon caught up in a piece of sewing I was doing. The waste basket near my sewing machine was filled with scraps of fabric cut away from my project. This basket of discards was a fascination to my daughter Annika, who, at the time, was not yet four years old. She rooted through the scraps searching out the long bright strips, collected them to herself, and went off. When I took a moment to check on her, I tracked her whereabouts to the back garden where I found her sitting in the grass with a long pole. She was affixing the scraps on the top of the pole with great sticky wads of tape. 'I’m making a banner for a procession,' she said. 'I need a procession so that God will come down and dance with us.' With that she solemnly lifted her banner to flutter in the wind and slowly she began to dance."

Pause to reflect. Three-year-old…”procession”…”so that God will come down and dance with us.”

The author quickly points out that her daughter was not precocious, just natural – that young children, confronted with so many things much bigger than themselves have a natural inclination to create what is essentially sacred ritual space for containing and meeting these big energies.

Suddenly, I was standing waist deep in the memory of my great-grandfather’s garden – the rows of corn, strawberries, the arbor of purple grapes – and the scavenging black birds that bugged the heck out of Pappap. He used a slingshot to chase them away, and he was skilled enough to actually kill some. I understood that it was Pappap’s domain, he was in charge of it, but it just seemed to me that you had to respect what you killed, so I insisted on marking the bird's passing with a funeral. Under my high priestess direction, my next-door playmate Mary Myers and I would arrange a bed of grape leaves and dandelion posies in a cigar box, place the bird carefully inside, and cover the deceased with a hollyhock blossom shroud. Then – attired in beach towel capes -  we performed a rhythmic, humming procession from the back porch to the big red tree at the end of the yard, where we would bury the bird with love and serious formalities, sprinkling white snowball petals, honeysuckle, and water drops throughout. – I can’t remember how many birds we buried, but I do know that over at least two summers, we began to run out of digging space under that wide spread of tree. And I also recall that after the first year, we both looked forward to the honor of repeating these  responsibilities when the next summer arrived. This would all have been in summers before first grade, so I was probably four or five.

Where did I get my notions of a funeral? With a procession… and capes? I had never been to a funeral at that point. That wouldn’t come until I was nine.

The book includes another example of ritual as child’s play that we’ve all witnessed.  Small children, overcome by their first trip to the shore, will pull back from “what is too awesome” and begin to dig a hole in the sand…allowing the incoming tide to enter and make their own little mini-sea. They create a space to hold something too enormous to control – or maybe even confront – in its entirety. And then they dance with the ocean, building up walls of protection, having them washed away, then building again - giggling and enjoying this manageable version of the horrific power of enormous incoming waves. That is ritual in a nutshell.

What an exquisite thing if humans are born with an innate gift for negotiating enormity via self-created ritual. But why do so few people seem to maintain this gift? Where does it go? What strips it away? And what is the cost of losing it?

Musing on this, I was reminded of Paul Krugman’s recent column about the town hall “mobs” shouting down civil discourse on health reform. Allowing for ignorance, disinformation and some ratcheting up by right wing power players, Krugman adds, "For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?”

He posits that their underlying anger is “the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the 'birther' movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship… And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.”

I don’t disagree with Krugman’s assessment, and I have already written here about the extent to which people act out their personal demons in public forums, but it also strikes me that the loss of meaningful ritual in our culture may account for a significant portion of the wildly inflated emotions (He wants to euthanize old people! Our babies aren’t safe! I want my country back! Conspiracy! Conspiracy! Conspiracy!) and overblown behaviors.  After all, if you lack the means to “dance” with enormity, perhaps you “make enormous” (big, scary, uncontrollable) things that are not,  as a poor person’s toxic mimic of ritual enactment. It’s the difference between a reverent  ritual and a depraved one. A natural hunger for embodied understanding flipped on its crazy head. Shadow distortion  of the sacred.

By getting in the way of actual civic discourse which might bring clarity - by denying the humble openness in any decent ritual - the thing gets to stay unclear, out of control, the stuff of booga-booga.

The more I think about this, the more I think there’s something to it.

 

Musing

 Hmmmm. This is new, but it’s becoming apparent that my portal opens at the breakfast table – specifically, at the big round walnut table where the Greek and I drink his exceptional cappuccino while trading back and forth sections of the two morning papers. By portal I mean a momentary throughway to creative flow that is blessedly different from working at it…where stuff sort of bubbles up from silence. For whatever reason, reading the newspaper helps to trigger it, even though the ideas worth catching often have nothing to do with what I am reading. And the trick – a hard one – is to grab the moment just right, walk away from the paper, and turn it into a decent work session, because that portal - for me anyway -  can be a fleeting  opening.

Recently, I was reading a review of The Answer Man  - a devastating review: “everything slides around like a plateful of half-set jello, convincing you of nothing” and “never shows enough passion to be interestingly bad”… OW – and, without knowing the film, I knew what it would take to make its pieces dance.  Its individual elements almost spoke to me. No, that was a hedge to keep from sounding strange. Let me correct that: Its individual elements actually spoke to me.  – “Place me like this”… “Reveal that I…”  …”Put this over there” -- Really, it was just so striking. Almost enough to make me consider going back to being a script doctor. Only almost. Think I’ll just fix my own stuff for the duration - what with there being so much to fix and all.

That was on C9. Then, on C14, another striking moment, as I answered a decades old question.  As a college student,  I directed Calm Down, Mother, 42 pages of play by Megan Terry, in which a variety of characters are played by three actresses, who shift into new roles throughout different sections. Here’s the thing: I never got the costumes right. I really struggled. What do I put them in that will work for all these different parts and places? In the end, what I chose – loose pants & tops – didn’t work, but I didn’t know why and I couldn’t figure out what would be better. But there – on page C14 – in a picture from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival,  were dancers in a mix of dresses that would have been just exactly right. As I stared at them, I had a flood of long-lost memories of ways my unconscious mind had tried to let me know what was needed back then – but they were all symbolic messages, and I could never decipher them. Until that morning. When I “got” all the old messages all at once. Saw the perfect costumes. And understood the very specific why of what was wrong with what I settled for.

Even now – thirty years later - I feel bad for letting my actors down, and exhilarated by the clarity. 

Funny how time converges to make then alive now.

I'm thinking the portal doesn't live in a place where there's time. Or where much of anything could be called strange.