Toward Election Day – November 3rd

I notice that I have not been writing about the coming election or COVID-19 or racial injustice recently or the environmental crisis. This is only partly intentional. I remain convinced that this coming election is hugely important for the future of our country. In order to move toward meaningful action on the pandemic, institutional racism and environmental destruction, we must elect a new President and flip the Senate on November 4^th.

The plurality of Americans seem to feel this way as Biden is ahead in almost all of the polls. This is not cause to relax whatever efforts we have been making to support Biden and Democratic candidates in general. Many of us still vividly remember our shock and pain when Clinton, who most polls predicted would win the election, was defeated by Trump four years ago. We must do what we can to lend our voice, our time and our money to support Biden and Democratic Senatorial candidates.

Please make a plan to vote. My wife has already voted by mail. I have decided to vote (carefully) in person to be part of the votes that are registered right away. Trump has been utterly transparent in acknowledging that he will do everything in his power to stay in office, regardless of the outcome of the election. I have seen no evidence that he actually has the capacity to admit defeat about anything, let alone being voted out of the White House.

Trump will do his best (worst) to confuse, obfuscate and throw things into chaos after the election. A landslide victory for Biden that is evident the night of the election is the best defense against Trump’s coming machinations. But due to the record number of mail in ballots, much will be unknown even on November 5^th. The nightmare scenarios of Trump trying to steal the election are terrifying and utterly unprecedented in my memory of our Democracy. His incessant cries to ‘lock up’ his political opponents and calling for ‘something to happen’ to Adam Schiff for his role in the impeachment proceedings are right from the strong man dictator/mafia boss playbook.

While American politics at the national level have always involved people (mostly men) with huge egos and an outrageous need for power, there have always been limits—checks and balances to hold the institutions of democracy together through the predations of the worst impulses of human green, anger and ignorance. This is where I fault the Republican Senators (and House members) who have ignored Trump’s lying and law-breaking and have refused to speak up and take principled stands against this President’s predations.

Though as I write this I think again about my black and brown brothers and sisters. To say that our democracy has been working well is to ignore the treatment of people of color and the indigenous peoples of this country. Our precious democracy did not grant them the personhood and the respect to be included in the bubble of representation, respect and support that I want to associate with democratic principles.

But there have been strides forward and as much as Trump has activated and inflamed the festering grievances of some white people who feel their assumed supremacy threatened, he has also activated women and men of all colors toward a level of activism and change that are also unparalleled in my lifetime.

As much as I want Trump out of the White House, these terrible years of his Presidency have been the context for the arising of the ‘Me Too’ movement and Black Lives Matter. Women have entered politics and been elected to office in unprecedented numbers at the local, state and national level. And a generation of young people have led the country in demanding recognition of and an end to police violence against blacks and to institutional racism.

Things are not all bad. The seeds of change have been planted. Our job is to make our voices heard and be part of the larger move to create a civil society that supports and protects the rights and opportunities of all, not just a select few.

Political commentator Robert Hubbell recommends a long view of our current situation.   I conclude my thoughts today with an extended quote from his October 16 newsletter:

Whatever happens—win or lose—the earth will continue to spin, and the sun will rise on November 4, 2020. While we may not gain clarity on the day after the election, life will go on. I suggest that everyone make plans now for the day after, for the week after, and for the year after the election. Keep those plans. We must expand our field of vision and extend our time horizon beyond November 3^rd, both because that is necessary to defeat Trumpism and because the struggle against Trumpism must not consume our lives. We are engaged in a generational fight, but we must also attend to the important work of raising future generations to carry on after us. November 3^rd will be a momentous day in a decades-long fight. But it will be only one momentous day among many. Plan your life for the long-term. Live your life in hope and expectation, not fear and despair.

Advice to Self: Don’t Give Advice (even to yourself)

Whenever I can, I try not to give advice. Rarely is my opinion about someone else’s life necessary, accurate or helpful. Even when people directly ask for advice, they don’t really want it. They may want to be listened to. They may want help in thinking about options. But nobody really wants or needs me to tell them what to do—and that includes me.

I am often filled with well-meaning advice for myself. I am sure I should be more of this and less of that. I should be more organized. I should walk every day at 11:00. I should set blocks of time in my calendar to make sure I’m progressing on my new book. These are all good ideas, but I have learned that my advice is always opinionated and partial. Life is much more interesting than simply trying to get myself to do what I think I should be doing.

I am continually amazed at the mysterious suffering and wisdom that pervade our lives. There is simply no solution to life and yet freedom and possibility abound. Good ideas and clever interventions are just good ideas and clever interventions—they don’t touch the deeper currents that catch us up so completely in the ebb and flow of actual experience. Things are not what they seem to be—or rather things are not just what they seem to be.

The other day a friend said she was appreciating that life is much more impressionistic than she had realized. I thought this was a lovely way to describe this quality of life I am pointing toward. When you look closely at an impressionistic painting, the water lilies that are clearly evident from a distance turn out to be just splotches of paint as you get closer. These delightful daubs of green are thick and viscous. They delightfully dance on the white weave of the canvas that holds them in place. Back away and the lilies reappear—floating serenely on Monet’s imaginary pond—that was definitely not imaginary for him.

Life is like this. Fear, anger, sadness and confusion are not what they present themselves to be. They are not monolithic, true and never-ending. Nor are insight, clarity and connection the final resting place. They are all true and important. But nothing is as solid as it seems. Everything is vivid and provisional. We should cry when we are sad and laugh when we are happy. But it can be comforting to remember that the seeming solidity of the moment is a trick of the eyes.

This is all preamble to my confession that I gave advice to a friend yesterday. I couldn’t help it and I tried, even as I was advising, to be as provisional as possible. I advised him to leave the protected confines of his house and spend more time outdoors. I told him to wander in the woods and look up and the sky—to allow himself to receive the vast light of the universe into his heart. I was so inspired by this advice that I told him that I suspected it was just as much advice for myself as for him.

I had some time yesterday afternoon and I could have gone into the woods as I had so wisely recommended, but I didn’t. I just took a book of Wendell Berry poems out onto the side deck for a better view of the flaming maple tree across the street. I sat there flipping to the familiar poems on the dog-eared pages. I looked up again and again trying to receive the message of the brightly colored tree.

No revelation or burst of insight or sudden clarity appeared. But it was lovely to sit for a little in the warm overcast of the afternoon in the midst of this beautiful falling world.

Released Once Again

I’m happy to report that I have been released from the dark realms that held me so tightly yesterday. Isn’t that the way it goes? No guarantee on how long or how short the hard times (or the good times) last, but for sure everything changes and everything ends. I easily fall into thinking that if I work hard enough and am skillful and compassionate enough, I can make the good things last and the bad things go away when I want them to go away. For some stretches of time, this may appear to be so, but when I step back just a little I see the great rhythms of life are fundamental. Everything comes and goes. Everything that rises falls. Life leads to and includes death.

Yesterday I used the image of the darkness and difficulty we encounter being like a cocoon that holds us. Cocooned without reason / I am slowly digested / by the darkness / that embraces us all. Indeed we are all in the dark about what that comes after this life or what comes after this death. Theories and beliefs abound, but what comes next—even what comes in the next moment—is unknown. Sometimes this is more obvious than others.

In writing the poem No Choice, I pondered for some time whether the darkness embraces us or presses in on us. These two phrases came to mind and I felt I had to choose one, but I was quite ambivalent. To be embraced by the darkness is much more hopeful than being pressed in on by the darkness. It was more comforting to go with the embrace rather than the more ominous pressure, but I think the darkness I was speaking of includes both aspects.

This morning, on the internet, I found this resonant description of what is going on in the cocoon:

Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar is transforming into a new creature. … The fluid breaks down the old caterpillar body into cells called imaginal cells. Imaginal cells are undifferentiated cells, which means they can become any type of cell. Many of these imaginal cells are used to form the new body.

I don’t suppose the caterpillar likes the whole breaking down thing one bit. But the idea of imaginal cells—cells of possibility that come only after being broken down–feels deeply right to me.

Despite my best efforts, I find myself in dark places again and again. Years of meditation and coaching don’t seem to protect me from the natural rhythms of life. I suppose this is a blessing, but it is one of those hard blessings that I have to take a deep breath before I’m willing to say I’m grateful for. But I have increasingly learned to trust the landscape and the process of darkness. There is a death that is required—and not just the death when the heart stops beating.

Moving through our lives, we lose so much. We have to let go of our children as they grow up and move on with their lives. We have to let go of who we used to be, what we used to be able to do, of friends and colleagues gone from our lives. Some endings are so slow we hardly notice them and some happen with such speed and power that we feel ripped apart.

In Zen we talk about the possibility of participating in loss – about joining in with the very process that is breaking us down. It still is sometimes wildly painful, but when we say ‘yes’ to what is going on, there can be some ease in the middle of the dying itself.

The Christians talk about resurrection. I don’t know what happens when our hearts stop beating, but I do believe that we all die and are reborn again and again in this lifetime. When we allow ourselves to die to who we were, to die to our opinion or whatever we were clinging to, then we are reborn as a new version of ourselves. In the dying and the breaking down we are humbled—brought to the earth. Our conceited illusions of power and control are dissolved and we are able to proceed on with some slight bit more of wisdom and compassion for ourselves and for our fellow human beings.

No Choice

Coherence dissipates
and resolve flees headlong
in front of the forces
of night. Overmatched
once again I resign
myself to the underworld to
impatiently await the end
of my infinite sentence.
Held prisoner and perfectly
cocooned without reason,
I am slowly digested
by the darkness
that embraces us all.

On Not Working Hard

This morning I wake up with a headache. Allergies?   Lingering cold symptoms? It’s hard to say. I’m not feeling inspired. I start writing about the fall colors which are now peaking and then switched to the story of my first COVID test (negative) but both feel contrived and boring. So I figure I’ll take the risk of hanging out here in the doldrums and see if there is anything to notice right where I am.

It’s a challenge to avoid working hard. My new definition of working hard is doing what you do because that’s what you do. Working hard is losing touch with the purpose but going on with the activity. ‘I write every morning so I must write every morning because that is what I do.’ If I follow this logic, I end up becoming a well-intentioned copy of myself. I go through the motions and follow the pattern but the joy is lost. When I lose my connection to intention, it’s all hard work. I can still put words on a page, but it’s not fun or alive in the writing nor, I imagine, in the reading.

One of the things I learned in the improvisational dance company I was with so many years ago is that you can tell the difference, both from the inside and the outside, when performers are genuinely in the moment. In our time rehearsing, teaching and performing, we explored the possibilities and the challenges of presenting the creative process itself as the performance. From the inside of a dance, the work was to be aware of what was arising within yourself, within the other dancers and within the space as a whole. We practiced not planning in advance—which is much harder to do than it sounds. When the mind comes in to ‘help out’ in a self-conscious way, the dance becomes artificial, predictable and boring. The best dances were surprising to both the dancers and to the audience.

This improvisational presence is the discipline I am most interested in—in writing and gardening as well as in meditation and in life. I want to practice and live in intimate responsiveness to what is arising in the moment. True beauty is a kind of courageous authenticity—a willingness to follow some inner necessity—not a carefully curated arrangement of appropriate materials. This is what most interests me in my daily writing. Of course I want to offer whatever wisdom and experience I have, but I want to do it in such a way that I get to learn too. I don’t want to blab on about what I knew yesterday, I want to find and share what is arising new in this moment.

As I write, I’m conscious of meaning and shape and the craft of it all even as I hold fast to not knowing where the thing itself is leading me. I go back over what I have written several times, both in the process of writing and after I finish to adjust and refine. I am trying to use my self-consciousness without being ruled by my self-consciousness. A high-wire balancing act. I am curating my presentation self in service of presenting some authentic self. I’m always choosing and editing—revealing some parts of myself while hiding others. But my intention is to use all these kinds of awareness to more clearly present some moment of aliveness that is beyond my conscious control.

When I know where I’m going, or even when I think I have to go somewhere, it’s not much fun. It’s hard work. And I am increasingly determined to avoid hard work. Life is too short and too precious to just go through the motions. I don’t mind working hard when there is some inner necessity. When the thing itself is alive, it’s all adventure. I’ll happily dig holes, pile rocks, or sit in the chair with my laptop morning after morning—as long as I have the sense of following and offering something more than myself.

Like a dog sniffing and sniffing, I wait for and follow the arousal of that invisible scent. Sometimes I dash off into the dark woods and get totally lost. Other times this impossibly sweet and subtle fragrance leads me leisurely forward. Other times, there’s barely a trace. Still I wait and trust as best I can.