imtalkinghere

Can you see health from your place?

Over at Lance Mannion's shop, he's musing on the many weirdnesses in the voting last night for the imperfect House health reform bill. Imperfect, indeed. Anyone who thought it could be otherwise is a magical thinker of the first order. The fact is our approach to health and medicine - two waaay different things, by the way; genuine health may be further from what most people call medicine than Russia is from Sarah Palin's porch - is a mess almost beyond measure. Some kind of government health reform is a necessary step; but without a shift in consciousness it's just an insufficient finger in the dike. Some examples:

Today's Sunday Times Magazine features Dr. Brent James and "The Theory of Evidence-Based Care", a completely rational approach to bringing down health care costs:

PROBLEM :  For any given diagnosis, a doctor can consider a number of ways to treat a patient. But how does a doctor know which treatment to use?

SOLUTION:  Committees of doctors and others track treatments and their outcomes by medical specialty, developing treatment protocols based on the data.

RESULT:  A doctor may choose to ignore the protocol. But patient care should improve as  doctors see evidence for the most successful treatments.

Yay-Rah for Dr. James. Thanks for helping, and it's not enough.

In part, because there is this block quote in the Times article:

"It is possible to rely too heavily on numbers and patterns when treating patients but the BIGGER RISK - the one we are now taking - is relying too heavily on intuition."

May I just step in here to mention that I would prefer to have a physician WITH intuition? Not just some intuition, but I want a doc with major, mind-boggling intuition! The problem is not so much that we are "relying too heavily on intuition", it is that we are relying on faulty intuitions, because our current medical education is designed to thump the intuition out of these people, when it should be actively nurturing just the opposite.

I'm remembering a conversation I once had with a family physician who had been practicing  for about ten years. He told me that he'd recently heard at a seminar that, while examining a patient,  it would be good to place his free hand on said patient in such a way as to establish  more human connection, and that he had found this to be true. To quote SNL, "REALLY?!" Here was a guy supposedly "called to healing" who couldn't figure this out on his own in ten years of practice... with kids, mothers... "REALLY??" - I asked him how he'd come to medicine. Answer: "Well, I could have gone into law or engineering or medicine and it just happened to go this way." In other words, income was the call. I'm okay with income being the call to to law or engineering. With medicine, I'd like a little something more. But I can tell you from having attended a top pre-med school, income is primarily the call. So when people fret that government health reform will lower doctor salaries and drive people away from medicine, I smile and say, "Bring it on. Alter the damn universe. Up the proportion of actual healers in the ranks. It can only improve the system in the long run."

* * *

If the physician attending me cannot be an intuitive genius, then I want him or her to at least have some deeper awareness of subtle energies. In Chopra's latest book, he tells the story of a patient with a pulled muscle that grew more and more painful.

"I knew from doing this kind of thing before that it was tendinitis... I was given the name of a really good acupuncturist and made an appointment... he stuck needles in a few places. not just in the afflicted muscle. When the treatment was over and I was about to leave, (he) surprised me by asking if I was depressed. My mother had died the year before, and I told him that I had been feeling down, though I didn't think I was still grieving. He told me that he had detected weak energy around me. That was how he recognized that I was depressed, and he suggested that I let him do a few things...he pressed a few points along my spine, very gently... The whole thing took no more than ten minutes, and he didn't charge me... As I was walking back to my car...I felt very good. I was buoyant, my footsteps lighter. Only then, when the gray cloud over me had lifted, did I realize I had been feeling down for quite a while. The next day I was still in a good mood, almost elated...The visit stands out for receiving a healing I never expected."

How many doctors today spend enough time with each patient to make or cure such discoveries, or for that matter know you as a human being?

Findings have estimated that on average, patients can expect to spend no more than 10 to 16 minutes with their doctor, depending on the negotiations that doctor has made with that patient's insurance company.

Sixteen minutes once or twice a year.... Now, there's a meaningful relationship. With pressures to move 'em through as quickly as possible, physicians need to become extraordinarily perceptive and sensitive. How many do you know like that? Name one required med school course that addresses this need.

* * *

Another example of "off" thinking: The Placebo Effect. As Dr. Andrew Weil points out every time he speaks at medical schools, the placebo effect is the most interesting thing in drug  studies, it's the place of power and potential: How exactly did those patients heal without drugs?  That's what we should be looking into - not to the exclusion of all else, but certainly we should be giving it more respect than it gets.

Meanwhile, we're all drowning in TV pharmaceutical ads... Ugh. Or should I say glug?

* * *

For some people, the decision to not buy health insurance is based on a desire to commit to prevention: "I can either spend $600/month on coverage, and have nothing left over for personal maintenance or I can use that $600 to buy better food and have regular acupuncture, massage, Ayurveda, etc. to keep my body in the best possible shape." Some people might call them irresponsible. Really? At least they are consciously applying themselves to health.  How many health plans make room for that? It will be interesting when those people have to - by law - put that  $600 into insurance. We should all hope that they - who know whereof they speak -  will start demanding a health care system that allows for a much more flexible and intuitive approach  to prevention. 

* * *

In short, yada-yada-yada - reform the system, change the system. Yes, do what you can and as soon as possible. But until we fundamentally transform the works through a shift in consciousness, the current beat will go on and on and...

Well, aren't I "special" ?

"I read an article recently in the New York Times Magazine about anxiety – it was a big cover article… about 'Is this the culture of anxiety, the age of anxiety?' It  was one of those articles where I had this light bulb go off in my head. This guy, Jerome  Kagan,  did this twenty year research study starting with babies all the way up until they were in their…early twenties because he was of the belief that anxiety is learned, that it is behavioral ...it’s a nurture versus nature thing. And then after 20 years of observing babies that … had, he called it, a 'high reactive nature' when they were born, went on to be anxious people. Now, if I can read from the article, 'Clinical anxiety disorder of which there are several forms – panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress, and a catch-all called generalized anxiety order, taken together,  make anxiety the most common mental illness in America,  affecting an estimated 40 million adults' and I’m looking at that list and I’m like, 'Those are all my hobbies! This is my day-to-day life!' I don’t know where the hell people have time to watch TV, to take in movies, to Tivo shit, to look at YouTube videos… I mean,  I am old school with my entertainment options. For me it’s dread, panic and revenge fantasies. That’s where my imagination goes, that’s how I find satisfaction. And now I find that I’m among forty million people that have this disorder. On some level it’s a relief to me, to know that when I’m going what the fuck, why the fuck, who the fuck, where the fuck – that that is a common experience that forty million people have."

    Mark Maron, WTF Podcast, 10.23.2009

I used to go to a massage therapist weekly. I would drag myself up the steps feeling like the most pathetic, barely functional bucket of stress and then, somewhere during the massage, she would comment, "Oh, that's really good. See how your muscles just let go there? I have so many clients who are just like steel there. Nothing ever lets go."

And I would mumble from my head hole, "Really? How do they manage to walk around?"

Or I would be talking to a friend over lunch and the friend would say, "But you're different, you forgive people. You just don't hang onto that stuff. Most people aren't like you."

And I would ask,"Really? How do they manage to walk around?"

This was not a joke question. It was sincere. How. Do. They. Walk. Around? - How is it possible to be in a worse state than I am and still remain upright and mobile?

"Oh. You're just especially sensitive. That's only like 15% - 20% of the population, you know. You feel everything more than other people."

If so, of course, I can't really know what it is like to feel things less, because I don't. Except it would explain a whole heck of a lot that has flabbergasted me over the years.

I've mentioned here before that my husband has a habit of responding to things I say by pointing at me and announcing loudly to the sky, "Not Normal!" He's not being mean. He's just trying to explain that I shouldn't count on a lot of understanding or agreement.

Or there was that first class reunion where I was standing in a circle of the "girls" I'd known in high school - they were all married now, some already had children, and living back in town - and one of them said to me, "Well, we always knew you weren't going to come back here and settle down with a husband and kids like us," and then they all nodded vigorously in  agreement, and I sort of left my body for a second or two. It was the all nodding that blew me out the top of my head. Really? You all knew that? How? I don't remember ever talking about this with you. What was I doing that made you think this?

A "boy" from my class announced that same night, "You always struck me as a mystic. There was always something metaphysical about you."

Really? What?!  I was not, after all, some freak. I didn't dress strangely. I was wearing Villager, for crying out loud.  I was not a trouble-maker, I wrote thank-you notes, I picked up litter.  I didn't do drugs or drink. If anything, I was more mature and responsible than most of my co-horts.

Sid Wise, one of my undergrad professors, wrote me a note one Christmas two decades after college saying, "I never could quite figure you out. You didn't fit any patterns I knew."

I could go on. You get the drift on this throughline of my life.

So imagine the extraordinary comfort, even joy, I found this past week in reading William Zinsser's Inventing The Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir and Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past, as one chapter after another put me in shared company that I recognized as my own.

It turns out that the disconnected chunks of writing I have in my files are exactly how other people write about their lives.

It turns out that guilt about writing personal stories is the most common stumbling block in the world. Everybody feels that way. Even better, there was this completely delicious sentence: "Guilt is a form of narcissism." Wheeeeeee! I love that. I can work with that.

It turns out that the things I worried about and fought hard to provide when I ran a speaker series are, according to Zinsser's extensive shared conversations with other folks on the circuit, exactly what speakers worry about and want provided - and too rarely get.  In other words, I was just naturally in sync with a certain tribe.

And so on with Zinsser, who reflects at one point on how many people have come up to him over the years and said, "You altered my life."

"It comes down to permission. I'm struck by how scarce the commodity is. I go around America giving people permission to be who they want to be, and I think: Why me? How did I get stuck with the job? Isn't that what our schools are supposed to be doing? ... When I mention 'permission' the word detonates like a bomb...America has more than enough people willing to go through life being someone else's precise fit. What we need are men and women who will break the mold of conventional thinking, who won't buy the phrase, 'We've always done it this way. This way is good enough.'"  (Writing About Your Life - pp. 215-216)

I think Zinsser's real power is somewhat different. He comes across as a remarkably authentic man, and he writes with a clarity that allows a resonance in his readers - through his words, but mainly out of his very being, which infuses those words -  whereby the readers  feel what is authentic in themselves, and it is that recognition that opens a doorway to their own internal "permission", which is the only one that counts. While it is useful to acknowledge one's differences, it is far more empowering and beautiful to feel how  one connects to tribe. There's always a tribe. Maybe highly select, but a tribe - and owning connection is freeing... clarifying - not to "be like the rest",  but just to feel the communal aspect of self, the bigger energy at work, and know that you are never all by yourself. 

To Mr. Trayer, With Love

Charlie Trayer was my seventh grade world history teacher. He had to have been nearing retirement at that point and his old-fashioned suits and wide printed ties were perfect fodder for jerk boy derision, which passed for clubby humor then.

But I loved Mr. Trayer. For one thing, he knew his stuff. For another, he let me be me in ways that astonish me in retrospect. When it came time to write term papers, he agreed to let me write and put on a play about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. It was quite an epic - with beheading special effects - requiring that everyone in the class play at least one role, so there Mr. Trayer sat, all alone in that big auditorium, on the day we presented it for him.

There was another generosity that I find remarkable to this day: he let me lie. Mr. Trayer let me stand up - we had to stand to speak in that class - and tell the most unbelievable whoppers without ever giving away even the slightest hint of judgment. Since this was world history class, these lies usually required me to place my family in exotic ports of call. I remember specifically the ski vacation in Switzerland. Yes, my family - barely middle class from small town Pennsylvania - went skiing in Switzerland. NOT. As any adult in our very small town would have known. Trust me, just the notion of Pete and Shirley and their brood of four in ski togs is so riotously absurd that I can barely suppress hysteria even now. But there I stood, expounding on that ski trip, rounding it out with details. And Mr. Trayer let me do it. God bless him.

I was reminded of this recently when Po Bronson was making all the public rounds promoting his book Nurture Shock. At each stop, reviewers would zero in on Bronson's case - supported  by current research - that lying is something all children experiment with and usually not worth much fretting. That research goes to a fairly limited kind of lying among six-year-olds - "I will tell Mommy I didn't do it because she doesn't want me to have done it."  "I will say I have a puppy because that will make me seem cool to my friends." - but there are many other kinds of lying...some of them quite artful, even beautiful, and all of them revealing in ways that simple truth can't match. These deserve courtesy.

Ayelet Waldman tells a wonderful story about her son in first grade. On Family Appreciation Day, the children took turns reading the stories they had written, decorated, and laminated about their parents. Ayelet and her husband went wide-eyed as their son took his turn...

    "I love Daddy because he taught me to play poker and sometimes he even lets me win.         And my mommy makes the best fried chicken. It's super crispy."

... and nothing he said - not... one... thing - was even close to true. Out of air, this version of what was special about his parents, which he was presenting to his parents. Was little Zeke sending some important message? Was he wishing that just once he could play a little poker while eating some decent chicken? Who knows? They chalked it up to his being the child of parents who write fiction and Waldman tacked the laminated lies prominently on the wall at home.

Or what about that story of the night I was born? It was in April "and there was a blizzard that night... your father hit the brakes at the hospital entrance but the driveway was so icy that the car skidded past it." My mother put up her hand. "Don't back up. I'll just get out here." - That's always been the story. I heard it so many times, it was like one of those golden book stories that got read and read and read until the pages fell apart. Then one day, I asked a good friend back home to dig up the newspaper weather report for that date. I was going to use it in a collage for a Mother's Day card. Turns out it was quite seasonal - even warm - that night. No snow, no ice.  Go figure.   My theory,  based on what preceded the ride to the hospital, is this: something in my mother froze that night. And discovering the story this way gives me a whole lot more feel for its essence than "and I don't know how to explain it but something in me just froze that night."

Then there was my ninth grade girlfriend who told us about the Chinese Laundry spies trying to get the secret code she had found in the package and the relentless danger and they have special weapons that can shoot people through walls so you're not safe anywhere and what she really needed was for her Dad to come up from DC to save her... and I knew something was terribly wrong, but what? So I told the guidance counselor I was worried about my friend and he called in her mother, who threw such a fit in the school hallway that I felt mortified and ashamed and sort of grew away from my friend until, as adults, we finally talked about the fact that her stepfather was sexually abusing her.  That "lie" was her version of expressing the thing that must not be spoken. I heard her, but not well enough.

When my little seventh-grade self stood to proclaim as true a family life with vacations and means and joyful shared adventure, I was - for those brief moments - inhabiting a remedy to what ailed me, and it was good. And who did it hurt? Another teacher might have called me out right then and there and shamed me in front of the class and then sat in church that Sunday feeling proud that she or he had "helped a child" that week. But it was Mr. Trayer who gave me what my soul needed: a moment of respite, the act of standing and claiming a different reality... in front of - just as with that other play - an appreciative audience of one.

In college, I bought a wide patterned tie at Goodwill - brown and green, ugly by some people's standards - which I wore as a belt with jeans for years, always with fondness for Charlie Trayer in mind.

Thank you, dear, dear Mr. Trayer,  for the courtesy.

Me No I Know ~ II

I've talked here about the value of Not Knowing, but I'll take every ally I can find. This lovely fellow strikes me as an excellent shepherd, guiding people with grace and profound humility toward living with sacred questions rather than facile "answers" and simplistic human  constructs. Holy discipline versus disempowering superstition. 

h/t to Andrew Sullivan. For letting me know Tom Honey is out there.

Unopened

She tried not to look at the un-cracked bottles on the dining room table, because the sight of them stirred in her a thing she could not yet name. They had discussed this approach to beefing up his immune system, he had approved the plan, said he appreciated her research into alternative means. But it had been over six weeks now and he had yet to even remove the shrink wrap from the caps.

This was too much like the Christmas gifts. An immigrant kid, he had never gotten toys for Christmas, so she paid special attention to anything he mentioned that resembled play. Roller blades… magic tricks… juggling balls… poker chips. She had made them all Christmas gifts. Not one had ever been used, even once. So she spent weeks needlepointing him a Christmas stocking, thinking she could fill it with small practical treasures each year – the tins of mints he liked, toothpicks, good matches, handkerchiefs, gadgets. But the second year he couldn’t find it and, after extensive searching, figured he must have accidentally thrown it away.

It was enough to suck joy out of Christmas, her favorite holiday. She lost confidence in ever selecting a living gift and, with that, her sense of how to  think or feel about making this holiday in their home.

This reminded her of the man she used to write with. He had a habit of crossing out her best scenes with a giant red marker – not a fine point Sharpie, the big kind you use for posters. It grew so obvious that people in the vicinity would pull her aside to whisper, “Are you aware that something strange is happening here? He kills your best stuff!” They were genuinely spooked by it; she had just chalked it up to Hollywood. Eventually, when he kept calling to suggest other things they write together, she put it plainly, “I can’t. If my best work is the first thing you eliminate… and I have learned that it is… well, I don’t know where to write from with you. I wouldn’t know where to reach for it.”

Some years later, a woman, a seer, had once squinted at her as if looking through her eyes to a thing far behind. “I see you preparing wonderful gifts. You put all these exquisite things together, wrap them beautifully in a box with a big gorgeous bow. And then it just sits there. People come up to it. They sniff it. They poke it. They kick it. Some might even pick at a corner of the wrapping. But nobody opens it!”

With that, the woman snapped out of her trance and her voice changed, “What do you do for a living anyway?! What in heaven’s name is going on there?”

The seer had indeed described the grief in the woman’s experience teaching part-time at a small liberal arts college. One spring day she finally gave up, decided it was the wrong place for her. The next morning a former student called. When she mentioned she would not be going back the next year, he let out a whoop, “It’s about time! I’ve always thought that you spent your time there making feasts for people who refuse to eat!”

Now she was realizing there was an actual pile of wrapped packages in the dark of one of her mother’s closets. They were the gifts – birthday, Father’s Day, Christmas… birthday, Father’s Day, Christmas… like that, for years now – she had sent – “in escrow” she called them – for the emotionally constipated brother who had grown cold, sometimes cruel. It’s all her father had been able to talk about in the last year or so of his life – how negative and unpleasant his youngest son had become, how unforgiving he was, “such a miserable pill, I don’t know how his wife takes it”… “Could you maybe talk to him?” he prodded.  Couldn’t she get through to him? After all, she was close to him. But she was no closer to him than anyone else, as it turned out, and she had just enough wisdom not to provide one more place for him to be emotionally inept or hurtful. So she gave him the distance his limitations required. Still, in the event that something happened to her, she wanted to leave behind some assurance that she had not stopped caring about him.

This collision of so many synchronicities, all centered around archetypal male energies and human beings she loved deeply  – why was she only catching this now? – seemed to strike a tone in her molecules. The too much of it set them spinning. How had this happened? So many unopened, unwelcomed, unloved, unused offerings.

Then it broke open: Could there be... had there been... some gift to her that she had refused to use? Some inner aspect? Some spiritual something? Was all of this a mirror of her own unwelcoming, unopening behavior? If yes, she must reach for it immediately, tear those wrappings, welcome it with all her heart, stick the bow in her hair, dance around, sing  thank you, thank you, thank you. And use it fully and well. This would be her medicine.

But how? What?

Gone Fishin'

How change happens

A Labor Day Special. 

That's labor, as in work, as in giving birth.

We're making some changes under this roof, ones that have been a long time coming and require us to alter our habits and ways of thinking. You wouldn't know this by observing our daily doings, which appear normal, but we can tell because of one very particular soul phenomenon: As soon as anyone sets real change in motion, the most mundane tasks can become overflowing vessels bearing tests and tear-soaked blessings.

Like last Thursday for instance. I had spent a good part of the previous ten days trying to do what I had imagined as a simple click-click task: uploading the website I had put together for the Greek. But oy, the glitches. The total lack of interface. The mysterious disconnections. The imagined two clicks exploded into replacing the operating system, additional software, plus hours of tech support madness with no less than five suppliers. 

Have I mentioned yet that  am a computer idiot? There was one point - this was after a week of doinking around - where a very helpful fellow - I think it was Bryant. Or was is David? Not Lisa. Or Tina.  Stephen?? - was having me type in code language. I was dutifully inputting exactly what he said: umbrella typhoon independence lute ... and after a while, as I was marveling that this computer code incorporated words like lute and typhoon, it turned out that he was giving me the words to indicate their first letters - u-t-i-l;  but me,  I'm just typing in the whole dang thing. Talk about clueless! 

Under the best of circumstances,  I have a hard time understanding what techs are talking about, but this was a situation where even the techs were stumped,  and too many l-o-n-g calls ended with their saying, "Gee, I am totally stumped. I really don't know how to make this work." The customer support calls had gone on for about five days by the time the sun rose on Thursday. Thursday was the worst. Twelve straight hours at the computer, where I forgot to drink water. Or eat. My stomach was in knots. Seven different long tech calls, and all hit the deadest of ends. If every tech says there's nothing left to be done, then I've got a web address I can't use, a design I can't upload,  I'm paying for a host I can't access, I've installed expensive software that isn't doing what it's supposed to do ...and ...and ...well, I was feeling more than a little bit nuts. More to the point, a tap root had penetrated my deepest, darkest feelings of uncontrollable personal failure - and I... Was... In... It, baby. 

Earlier in the week, I had told the Greek that we should treat the launching of his website as something to be celebrated and that surely all the problems would be resolved by the end of the week. As the sun was going down on Thursday - and I was at the absolute nadir of my frustration, despair,  plus body pain from sitting in a certain way too long, the Greek came bounding in the door cheerfully bearing a small flourless chocolate cake for our celebration.  Whereupon I burst into boo-hoo-hoo-hooooooo....   

"It's okay, it's okay," he comforted. "I'll just put it in the refer and we'll have it later."

Later, I'm thinking - yeah, much later, in some distant future when my hair is grey and the stale, probably moldy cake tastes more like the inside of the refrigerator than its cake self.  Nothing to celebrate here, people, nothing to celebrate here.

Meanwhile, the Greek was enduring his own test. A long-time friend had hired him to craft various metal pieces  - an archway, a tricky custom copper water fountain, and some other things. It was a challenging assignment that pushed the material to its limits. When the Greek made out his invoice, he only billed for half the hours on the fountain, giving his pal a bit of a break. Incredibly, even with this, the friend balked at the total and after two long weeks of dead silence, proposed paying less than half the amount on the bill. Worse - and I mean waaaaay worse - he commented, "I think you charged me your (insert rich man's name here) rate" - as if the Greek (a) has so little honor that he would hike his price for people with money, and (b) would then stick an old friend with the despicable higher rate.   Or was it that the friend does business this way and assumes everyone else does as well? In which case, ewwwwww. 

How could it be that for all these years this supposed friend had held so little respect for or recognition of the Greek's artful & highly skilled work, and - ouch - so little grasp of his integrity? This rang the bell of the Greek's deepest grief in life - the people he counts as close allies - brothers, even - who turn out to undervalue him. 

This is not something he imagines or projects on others. I've watched this pattern unfold five times now. And I say that wifely thing that makes men crazy, "There's a pattern here. Take it as a gift. Consider the possibility that if you valued yourself fully, you wouldn't attract these bad behaviors. Work with the deeper unconscious truth of it."

Likewise, I have a scrapbook in my psyche pasted with lovely projects that for reasons utterly bewildering never launched. And on that Thursday, all the bewildered techs in all the world had conspired to smack me in the face with those black pages. Luckily, I had kept just enough of my wits to treat this familiar  as "an opportunity for healing" (Bleeeeaaaaggghhhh!) - so I did a lot of deep breathing, told myself an alternate story, got a good night's sleep, and sat back down at the computer Friday morning.  The night before, every single tech had told me there was nothing more we could do. I called bright and early to let them know there surely was, we just hadn't found it yet...

By Friday afternoon, we had downloaded the bridge to success. Thirty minutes later, the Greek arrived home. He'd had a frank talk with his old friend. It had not been satisfying. It had even been sad. But my husband's face was glowing with energy and strength - he looked positively beautiful as he spoke. He was feeling his true worth. It was better than cake.

So that's how it goes. You say you want to make positive change. You set it in motion. You commit. And junk starts to bubble up. Stuff that says, "Well okay then, here's this... and remember this?" And all of it is a gift even though it comes bearing sadness and stupidity. Most of the time, we recoil at the hurt. But if you can just keep your wits about you...

I think about this a lot as I watch the sad and stupid people screaming against health reform* ... or just Glenn Beck being Glenn Beck. They - just like the personal demons that rise for an individual -  are the excruciating expressions of broken parts of our collective whole,  rising to reveal their natures... their "offness" at a time of change. If enough of us can stay conscious, recognize them for what they are, and work with deeper truths, we'll get where we need to go. 

So instead of despairing, know this: Any time you make change, the crazy (unhealthy) comes up for review.  It's just how change happens. 

* I'm not talking about the ones with intelligent, informed concerns. I welcome them. I'm talking about the hysterical, gun-toting types who suck up all the TV news time.

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 – sometimes 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 we were 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. Mary went to the Catholic church - an ongoing fascination in my childhood - so perhaps she came up with the cape parade. Whatever, it was advanced ritual for preschoolers.

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.