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Anchors Away

January 2nd, 2010

The beginning of the year is an artificial construct that tends to make us question what we’ve been doing with our lives and/or flagellate ourselves about what we’ve left undone. I haven’t made a list of resolutions, but I’ve spent some time thinking about why I’m not living as bold a life as I’d wish. I could promise myself to go on a cruise, take belly dancing lessons or date a younger man in order to shake up my life, but I think that would be skin deep. I’m more interested in the barnacle-encrusted anchors that I’ve pulled against for decades: I’m too shy to [fill in the blank]; I’m just not talented enough; I’m no good at relationships so I’m not going to try; I could never [fill in the blank]. I want to remember that my family is a strong anchor, that my job is a welcome anchor, that my house is a safe anchorage, but I also want to try and haul those other anchors up and let the wind fill my sails now and then. I don’t think it can happen overnight, and maybe I will always be too shy to [fill in the blank], but I do think it’s possible to lessen the drag enough to find an unexplored harbor or an unexpected sea lane of desire. I’m a big believer in kaizen, but believing and doing are two different things. Sometimes it feels like I would need to check into a monastery of the mind in order to have time to rehab my soul. It’s always: I’ll meditate/cogitate/contemplate as soon as I meet this deadline, drop off my dry cleaning, clean out the refrigerator. I’ll meditate tomorrow, I swear. Am I the only spiritual dilettante out there?

Posted in Change, Enlightenment | 6 Comments »

When You Wish to be a Star

December 6th, 2009

I went to a party last night and told several people that I was seeing Precious today. All agreed that it was amazing, but warned me not to expect a happy ending. But, oh my god, there was the kind of happy ending that is always happening in our lives if we can just see it. The friend I saw it with said it was the growth of a soul — and that’s huge, momentous, earth shaking. But we are so used to Hollywood happy endings–the pot of gold, the glass slipper, the inheritance, the bad guys locked up — that it’s sometimes impossible to recognize the little happy endings and beginnings that are occurring all around and inside of us. I’m guilty of it myself. I want a shooting star to be a sign that I’m on the right track. I want a full-on spotlight on myself and my achievements and when that doesn’t happen, I’m dissatisfied and angry with who I am. I want to be what I’m not, which I always assume is better than what I am. Why can’t I do more, be more, make more? If only I’d had a better education, loving parents, constant encouragement — I’d be famous by now, wouldn’t I? I want to love what I do instead of doing things in order to be loved. My ego needs to feed on a spotlight, but I think my soul needs anonymity in order to grow.

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Rain, Rain, Come Again

November 15th, 2009

Our weather recently has been a combination of fierce showers, drifting smoky clouds, a promise of peach sunsets and glimpses of Tiffany-box blue sky in between — all in the space of a day. Living in a place that doesn’t have dramatic seasonal changes, I love this kind of meteorological drama. Wild weather shakes me out of my predictable routine, my comfortable rut. I like dashing through downpours, carrying my orange umbrella or wearing my silver raincoat that makes me look like a Space Woman. It reminds me of being a kid and playing outside in the rain, of not having completed that alienation between self and nature that takes makes us as grownups impatient with traffic jams during snowstorms, power outages caused by lightning, the inconvenience of getting our hair wet. Watching the rain clean the streets and sidewalks, gush out of gutters, drip from the eaves, bless the bamboo trees in my backyard makes me feel like I’ve had an old-fashioned baptism of immersion. One that washes away the accumulated grime and grit of dailiness and adultiness, that makes me feel like a green girl again.

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I love the big maps in airports and shopping centers that have a star with a caption reading YOU ARE HERE. There are so few times in my life when I am absolutely sure I’m where I should be, but when I stand in front of one of those signs, I can stop holding my breath, working my worry, fighting existential confusion. Because someone has given me a solid message I can hang onto for a change. Not a sappy affirmation, a mantra I’ll forget or an ego stroke from the Universe. For a brief moment, I am grounded. Like the pilots who overshot their destination due to “a loss of situational awareness” (otherwise known as fucking up), I am often adrift in space and time. I go the grocery and forget what I came to buy. I carry on a phone conversation while my mind is still on the novel I’m reading about 18th century time travelers. I wander into the kitchen and wonder what I went there to get, and when I can’t remember, I settle for ice cream. There are so few times when I am solidly HERE: listening deeply to the person talking to me; not listening to TV while I’m working on the computer; enjoying the required time-out of a red light. Instead I am usually sending my anxiety ahead to the office while I’m still in the process of driving there or hopping from one experience to another in a split screen world. Like everyone I know, I’ve spent a lot of time being lost in my own life, but there are moments when I wish I could pull up a mental map and realize I AM HERE and it’s wonderful.

Posted in Enlightenment | 4 Comments »

New Improved Me!

October 19th, 2009

Can you keep a secret? I just had a facelift! I took some self-portraits with my new Canon Powershot SX10, and the result looked like a mug shot taken of Phil Spector on a really bad crazy psycho-killer day. My neck and jaw wrinkles are quickly morphing into crevices, attesting to my disregard of sunscreen and moisturizer back when I was young and immortal and sure I’d never start looking like my mother. Hahaha, silly me. So I simply blurred those neck wrinkles with the Enhance tool in iPhoto. Instead of 66, I think I easily look 63 now. And it entailed no side effects of blood, swelling, bruising or possible death that surgery might include. I’m so shallow that I always feel pissed when I look at all the bloggers who post wonderful pix of their gorgeous selves. (Are they secretly Enhancing, too?!) But I want to look at myself full on and not wish I were a younger, hipper, thinner version of myself who lives in Brooklyn. I want to Enhance my oddities instead of smoothing them out, Enhance the attention I pay to every passing day, Enhance my ability to love, Enhance my commitment to taking a spiritual journey on this planet. If only there were a Mac tool for all that.

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Shaking Up My Chrakras

October 10th, 2009

I’ve been sporadically reading A Sacred Primer, a book about sacred time and prayer, because I don’t really have enough of either in my life. I have lots of amulets and charms and relics, beautiful statues of Buddha and Kuan Yin and various boddhisattvas that I love, but I lack spiritual discipline. Not that I will go back to spending Sunday mornings in church I no longer believe in, but I know I’m missing some component that would give me courage or calm or depth. In my case, I don’t think that will come from thinking happy thoughts or reading Eat, Pray, Love or getting an email a day from Daily Om. All of that might help put me in a receptive state of mind, but too often it seems a substitute, allowing me to skate along the surface of a deeper spiritual pool. Getting my feet wet but never going under. I know what I need–daily meditation, silence and a willingness to be sad or scared or lost. But I avoid the hard work. Am I the only person who has a lazy third eye? What helps you cultivate a meaningful soul-full practice without it becoming the spiritual equivalent of counting points in Weight Watchers?

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Hello, Sunday

September 13th, 2009

“Someday, any day, now, if we are faithful to attend, something will reach out to us, a figure in a painting, sunlight on a door, a place in a dream, and it will woo us toward change, offering us, as well, the energy to make the change. These are transforming and energizing symbols, graceful fugitives coming to us from the Center of Everything!”

(from ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE, Marv & Nancy Hiles)

I stumbled across Sacred Life Sunday on a couple of blogs, but I’m too lazy/disorganized to join the list. I’m trying, though, to dedicate Sundays to being a pause, a stop-time before Monday time commences, and to make a conscious attempt to carve a spot of sacred space out of the day, even if it’s just reading something that makes a sound like church bells in my mind, like the passage above.

Posted in Enlightenment, Namaste | No Comments »

True Believers

September 1st, 2009

I used to love watching my grandmother take down her long hair and prepare for bed by putting it into a braid. And then she knelt by the bed and said her prayers. I think my grandfather, a sceptical reprobate, knelt along with her, but I mostly remember my grandmother’s devotions. She was a staunch Methodist who taught Sunday School and rarely missed a service. My grandfather would get dressed in a clean white shirt and put on his hat and drive us to church, but he stayed outside with some of the other men during the service, talking, spitting, jutting their jaws. I wish I had my grandmother’s faith, but even I never got truly inoculated. During puberty, I loved getting saved, or the idea of being saved, but I could never maintain that state of grace for long. Last night, I was reading poetry before bed, and I realized that it has become part of my ritual of faith, just as the Bible was for my grandmother. Poetry is what I go to for reassurance and transcendence and comfort, but my grandmother had Jesus and the promise of a better life after death, and I suspect that provided more absolute security than Milosz, Kabir or Mary Oliver does for me. With poetry, I usually get more question marks and exclamation marks than full-stop periods, and sometimes I envy my grandmother for having a certainty of an everlasting afterlife. But when I read a piece like Some Kiss We Want by Rumi or Postscript by Seamus Heaney I feel a shiver of eternity, a slight glimpse of a larger mystery, and it’s enough.

Posted in Enlightenment | 4 Comments »

The Spirit of the Place

February 13th, 2009

My guardian Buddha has lost his nose as the result of being knocked over by winds or maybe the neighbor’s cat. I like him better this way–as if his spirit had been tested and tried. As if he had ended up in this raggedy, weedy garden bed and was making the best of it. As if he’d been around the block and had a hundred stories he could tell about what he’d seen. This is no pretty boy Buddha but one that has withstood a few freezing nights and too many unbearable southern August noons. A Buddha for someone who has been broke but not broken, someone’s who’s often lonely but not giving up on love, someone who has a hundred stories about what she’s seen.

Posted in Enlightenment, Namaste, love | 4 Comments »

Eyes of the Soul

January 15th, 2009

The gate to my backyard used to have this round opening cut in it before I had to replace the whole fence and the contractor decided it was a mistake to be rectified. When I looked through to other side, it was like a magical viewfinder, framing a slice of my prosaic property in a brand new way. I wish I could remember to use that framing device more often during the course of a day. The “eye” was there when I bought the house, and I loved it because it reminded me of a Chinese moongate, which was conceived as the opening to a spiritual garden. My backyard is far from spiritual unless my fight against fire ants and sandspurs is a metaphor for my ongoing battle with my worst character flaws. But when I first moved into my house, I began planting bamboo, a plant that symbolizes strength and resilience–qualities I long to have. From small plants, they have quickly grown into luxurious trees. My dream is eventually to have a living wall of bamboo around the perimeter of my property, swaying and rustling in the wind, casting shadows of poetry under the full moon. One small spiritual step at a time.

Posted in Enlightenment, Senses | 3 Comments »