On Vacation

I’m up in Vermont–enjoying paddling on still waters–alone as the sun rises, reading books, drinking coffee and waiting for my grandson to wake up so I can play with him.

Below is an image of my hand and the morning sky reflected in the water over the edge of my kayak — almost still–hand, water and sky reflect each other.

I’ll be back to writing daily later this week. For  now, just rest, play and family time.

Being Awake (but not in the good way)

I’m awake in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep.

Ezra Bayda once wrote that he counts his exhales backwards to zero from fifty and that this activates his sympathetic nervous system which then takes over from his worried and anxious mind. I’ve been trying this sporadically for several weeks at night and I want to report that sometimes it works. Sometimes I’m asleep before I get to zero. Sometimes I can feel a shift in my brain where the energy moves from activated and anxious to stable and at ease. It’s quite nice. Sometimes.

But not last night.

I woke up at two a.m. to the sound of fireworks. For five minutes the successive explosions echoed through my silent neighborhood. I wondered about the young guys (my assumption) that were setting them off. Was their intention to disturb the easy sleep of the old folks? Did they set a few off then run to another location to avoid the police who might be coming? Were the police coming? (In that moment, I pictured the police as two reasonable guys in a car who would accost the perpetrators and restore quiet to my night—not, I’m aware as I write this, as a enforcers of a system of inequality based on skin color and economic class.)

I thought I would easily go back to sleep. It had been a long day and we were already packed to leave on vacation the next morning. But after a while, I turned over and realized I was awake. I tried to stay cool and curious. I’ve been sleeping through the night these days and thought this would be over soon. But it wasn’t.

For the next hour or two, I lay in a state of semi-consciousness. I did the counting backwards on the exhalation thing—I must have stopped and started three or four times. The instruction is, if you get lost to begin where you left off you don’t have to start again at fifty, you just begin where you left off. I would gather my intention and begin counting downward only to find myself some unspecified time later thinking darkly about some pressing issue of my life and relationships.

Realizing I had wandered away into a realm of anxious thinking, I tried another strategy I just read from a Buddhist teacher. He said, when you realize you have wandered away from a gentle focus on the breath to pause and calm your mind and relax the tightness in your head. I thought these were wonderful instructions when I read them and I almost wrote them down. But last night, my intention to calm my mind and relax the tightness in my head produced minimal to no change in my experience.

The things I think about during these occasional nightly rumination sessions are familiar. I am compelled to think about specific unresolved issues (content varies with the night). I strategize endless conversations to get to the heart of things and set things at rest. It’s hard work. My mind circles over and over the same territory. A lot has to do with locating blame. Something is wrong and it’s either my fault or someone else’s fault. I am the self appointed sheriff and my job is to find the bad actors and set things right.

I know, in these sleepless thinking sessions, that thinking is not the way out, but I can’t help myself. I am mildly curious about how long I will be awake. I try to ‘look around’ and learn what I can here in the underworld. I’m not very successful. I find some comfort in Norman Fischer’s phrase ‘Sometimes, this is how people feel.’ This at least locates my solitary burden squarely in the family of human beings.

I also try to trust that these places of obsessive thinking are my body’s way of working things out. I am chewing the cud of my life—trying to digest the roughage into useable bits of nutrition. I imagine how patiently cows spend a lazy afternoon chewing and chewing the grass they ate in the morning. Not one of them complains about the repetitive activity. They’re happy to stand there chewing—perhaps adding in the occasional pissing and farting for variation.

But me, I have to work to be patient—to realize that this is my only life—here in the dark and uncomfortable night. I look at the clock occasionally. I notice that this place is not continuous. I feel awake, but I suspect I am drifting in and out of awareness, even as I keep prospective track of ‘how long I was awake in the middle of the night.’

I open my eyes and it’s quarter after five—late for me. I have no idea how or when I got to sleep. It feels like I was just thinking about the many problems of my life. And I wonder, do I manufacture these problems to keep myself entertained while my brain just happens to be switched into worry mode? Or are these endless issues the roughage that sometimes need multiple chewing sessions?

Universal Movement

1.
Is everything growing
legs or is it just me?
These days when
I set something
down like my pen
or my watch
or my keys, some
universal force
of dispersion or
attraction seems
to lure it somewhere
else and I’m left
searching for every
thing on my own.

2.
Like a game of
hide-and-seek
the things of my
life wander away.

I try not to take
it personally as
I’m sure they delight
in their liberation.
I imagine their
wonderful adventures
unburdened by reason
and responsibility. They
must behave without
regard to their
parochial purposes—
freely dancing their
secret unclothed dances
and ominously chanting
their wondrous
incantations with
no witnesses to
remind them of
propriety and necessary function.

I’m happy for their
independent escapades
but sometimes I worry
and wander to where
I saw them last.
I look carefully and call
out softly. When they still
don’t come sometimes I
have to take a deep breath
and pause so as not
to get upset. (That just
encourages their
bad behavior.)

Eventually, most things
come back. I don’t ask
too many questions or
make a big fuss when
they sheepishly reappear.
I’m happy to see them
and have them with me
again. Their increasingly
frequent excursions remind
me of the days to come
when our mutual
wandering will increase
toward full entropy.

I suppose in that
wondrous darkness we
will all dance endlessly
together without containment,
but for now I’m happy
with our limited partnership—
temporary though it may be.

Studying What Has Happened

Mayor Jorge Elorza [Providence, Rhode Island] signed an executive order Wednesday to begin examining the feasibility of establishing a reparations program in Providence for residents of African heritage and Indigenous people.

City leaders have no estimate on how much a reparations program would cost or how it would work, but Elorza said studying the issue will be the “first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.”

“As a country and a community, we owe a debt to our communities of African and Indigenous heritage, and, on the local level, we are using this opportunity to correct a wrong,” Elorza said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

I was delighted to read this in the Boston Globe on Tuesday morning. Like so many others, I have been at a loss for what concrete steps can help us move from where we are as a country to where we long to be. The depth of our collective problem is daunting. Centuries of brutality and inhumanity directed against Blacks and Native Americans.

Of course, anywhere we look in history we see humanity’s capacity for brutality. Peoples of all skin colors and origins colonize and enslave each other. To outsiders, the ‘others’ may look exactly the same, but from the narrative of supremacy, we are the chosen people and they are the ones who are preventing us from having what is rightfully ours.

Perhaps the thing that is most astonishing about human beings is how morally justified we can feel we are doing the most horrific things to each other. How we can compartmentalize our lives so completely that we can make a value of being kind and hospitable to some small subset of people while we enslave and degrade others without a second thought.

The complex interwoven world implicates us all in this web of subjugation and oppression. The growing and morally unjustifiable income gap in our country means that children here in America grow up with food uncertainty – not knowing when or how they will get their next meal. Health care is already rationed according to the color of your skin and your capacity to pay for services and insurance.

Of course, humans have always done this to each other. Some are rich and some are poor. I don’t have a problem with inequality, but I do have a problem with a society that claims to be based on freedom and equality where the basics of shelter, medical care, food and dignity are not given to everyone.

I’m fully behind the movements to reform policing in our country—not just a few new rules to bar especially heinous police behavior, but a rethinking of the function of police and how they are held accountable to the communities they serve. And this bold move that Providence, Rhode Island and other cities across the country have announced toward conversations of truth and reparations seems to be another step in the direction of hope.

Whatever reparations might look like – from policies that favor the people who have for so many generations been actively oppressed to payments of cash to allow people to buy houses or begin businesses – to begin to talk and listen is most important.

As Mayor Elorza says: [this will be the] first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.” The first step must be to talk about, to hear, to listen, to see some of what has happened. Until we, collectively, begin this painful conversation where we speak and listen to the truth of peoples’ experiences, we cannot move forward.

Personal Practice – Search out some stories you have not heard–particularly stories of Black Americans. It could be an op-ed in your local paper or from friends or in books or films. The point of listening is not just to feel guilty and powerless—though this may likely happen. The point is to listen, hear and acknowledge. There may be steps you and I need to take, but the first step is to open our hearts to stories we have not yet heard.

Relationships, Problems and Turtles

A couples therapist once told me that there are three kinds of problems in relationships: the problems the two of you solve without even thinking about, the ones you have to work at for a while before they resolve, and the problems you never solve. These insoluble problems, he added, are the ‘bridges to intimacy’.

I remember being quite relieved when I first heard this. This model of three levels creates lots of room for the messy realities of living with another human being. I think I unconsciously believed that at some point, my partner and I would really get to the bottom of it. If we worked hard enough and were authentic and compassionate enough, everything would be clear and easy.

But the reality is much more complex and it turns out: ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’ This phrase is the punch line to an old joke about the man who confidently claims the world is supported by a giant turtle. A friend asks him, ‘What’s underneath that turtle?’ He replies: ‘There is another turtle.’ The friend persists and asks again ‘What’s underneath that turtle?’ Undaunted, the man says: ‘There is another turtle.’ Once more the friend repeats the same question. Finally, in exasperation, the man said ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’

I love the humor and truth of this story. It points to the fact that our minds simply cannot grasp the concept of limitlessness. The conscious mind is a brilliant innovation of the universe, but has some congenital limitations. The mind’s main function seems to be recognizing and giving names to patterns. The mind is a kind of ‘thing’ maker. Out of the vast web of mutuality and interbeing, it names discreet parts and wonders about the connections between these seemingly separate things.

Looking more closely, we can see that the physicists and the Buddhist appear to be more correct than our everyday minds. Everything is constantly moving and changing. Even things that appear solid are 1) composed of innumerable atoms and electrons and quarks and things that aren’t don’t even appear to have any substance—probabilities floating in vast space and are 2) in the process of rising up and falling away. Trees, houses, mountains, stars and galaxies are all processes that are endlessly coming into being and disappear. Left to its own devices, the house you slept in last night will slowly fall back into the earth. At this very moment, it is ever so slowly falling down.

Walking through the woods, you may sometimes come across a depression that might have remains of a wall or a fireplace—where human beings like you and me once lived and loved and did their best to understand themselves and the world around them. Without their constant attention, their house disappeared just like them—generously giving way for the next arising of organized energy. Beetles and molds and bacteria of wondrous variety transformed the solid walls and stable foundation into usable bits for the trees and other life forms now growing where the kitchen table used to be.

But these minds we all have are incredibly useful and fun. They have created systems, stories and objects of great beauty and complexity. They allow us to meet the many challenges of our limited existence – to grow food and find shelter, to protect our fragile bodies from the heat and cold, from the saber toothed tigers and from the cars that rush by us on the busy street.

The congenital problem with minds, however, is that they think that what they are perceiving is the world itself. As philosopher David Bohm once said ‘The mind creates the world, then says: I didn’t do it.’ The mind naturally sees discrete objects and must become very still and subtle to perceive the interpenetrating nature of reality that is only temporarily embodied in these seemingly separate objects.

The mind wants clarity and resolution. We often prefer a simple solution to the complex truth. In relationships (going back for at least a moment to where I began), we want things to be settled, clear and easy. If there’s a problem, we think that is a problem. But the reality of every relationship I have ever been in or come in contact with is that the problems are endless—the problems that arise are the relationship itself.

Of course we do the best we can. We act with kindness. We acknowledge and apologize when we have acted poorly. We enjoy the moments of intimacy when all our ideas of problems and solutions drop away and our hearts open to the sacred presence of another human. Perhaps the maturing in relationship is simply the growing realization that the dance of life includes everything—it’s turtles all the way down.

Personal Practice – As you move through your life today, see if you can remember that every thing you see is in the process of change—everything is transient. The floor you walk on, the toothbrush and the faucet and the sink—it is all here only for a short while. And with all the people you come in contact with, remember that they too are in the middle of appearing and disappearing—they too are only here for a brief time. Notice how this awareness of transience changes your experience.