Category Archives: Uncategorized

In these times (a poem)

01 Thursday Dec 2016

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false_hope_by_astridle

In these times

I’m fifty-eight. You’d think I’d know by now
these lessons I keep having to relearn.
The latest, loudest fact: the earth sags low
beneath the weight of idiots who mourn

an age that never was. And am I one
of them? Again, my trademark insipidity:
that life is good—and people too–deep down.
I’m Anne Frank in the annex, always pre-

annihilated, trapped in reckless faith–
“in spite of everything”–that men are good.
(Her “everything,” like mine, included death
but not the grin beneath the hangman’s hood.)

I fear my hope more than I fear my dread.
I think like children think, forever caught
in fairy tale, in prayers my mother said,
in “progress,” in “my country,” in the thought

that savagery’s a glitch, a rare malfunction.
What will it take, I wonder, to dispel
my dull naivety? My own extinction?
Or is delusion requisite to hell?

for Mary (a sort of essay)

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

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This is for Mary–my gentle friend and sister to my soul.

Like a lot of us these days, you long to understand why our nation is so polarized now, at a time when, as you quite rightly say, “both ‘sides’ need to listen to each other!” I know you mean it when you ask me to “comment” on your worries. Still, I hesitate.

For one thing, I used up all my weekend brainpower making up the song list for yesterday’s radio show with Henry. I chose songs that depict what I might as well call “the male predicament”: songs about what it might mean to be a “strong man” in our society, and they included as many points of view as I could fit into a two-hour show–from Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” to Will Smith’s “Just the Two of Us” (a sweet rap about fatherhood). It was a lot of fun, and it also, come to think of it, served as yet another experiment in compassion, for both Henry and me. Thus, all weekend (and, what the hell, all my life) I’ve been groping with the very question implicit in your facebook post: how do we empathize with people who see the world from angles completely foreign (and all too often repugnant) to our own?

For the show, Henry and I each chose a song from our childhoods that exemplified for us, in those old days, the “ideal” man or woman. It turns out that, when I was a kid, my ideal man was epitomized by Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.” Henry’s childhood dream-date, meanwhile, lies captive within the lyrics of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” We played both those songs and then talked about our picks. My childhood’s ideal was a huge, physically omnipotent man–more “icon” than “human”–who remained a stranger to everyone who met him, who never spoke or expressed an emotion, whom other men worshiped but also feared, and who ended up sacrificing his unknowable life in order to save the lives of his crew. Henry’s ideal, meanwhile, was a woman of endless love and loyalty who never questioned her own dull premise: that the opposite sex is no more than a walking catalog of selfish and incomprehensible behavior that must always, always be found acceptable.

No wonder we grew up so screwy. Both songs are great, I think, and certainly both embrace such virtues as loyalty, strength, self-sacrifice, even love. Otherwise, though, look at the picture. Henry–I think he’ll concede this point–is not Big Bad John, nor would I ever want him to be. After all, thank heaven Big John died young, because, wow, just imagine how boring he’d be to grow old with. Meanwhile, I became a “stand by your man” sort of woman only once I fully realized that I’d finally found a man worth standing by–a man who, not coincidentally, stands by me too.

Henry and I have walked a long tough road to get to this place of (relative) equilibrium. And I mention it, I guess, because it’s the same sort of road we all have to walk, every day, all our lives. In our 30-year marriage (which, for years, we’ve dubbed “The Endless Conversation”), Henry and I have never allowed ourselves (much less each other) a place to plant our feet and say, “This is as far as I go.” No, like it or not, we just keep on moving–evolving, regressing, evolving again… In each of us, you see, there’s still that little kid self-haunted by gender rules that don’t really fit anybody, much less the peculiar likes of us. We’re each still self-taunted by absurd but bone-deep archetypes we were taught to want or to become, but which simply don’t make sense anymore, if they ever made sense at all. It’s a tightrope path–this trek toward mutual sanity–but we keep stumbling along it, if only because we’ve left ourselves, and in doing so have left each other, with no other choice.

Anyway, my point (and I do have one!) is that America is like a marriage. We have to keep talking and listening, empathizing with the other’s pain while never letting go of our own best values, and never ever feeling too afraid to challenge anything that seems to us intrinsically wrong and/or absurd. It’s almost certainly true that, as your post suggests, “both sides” of America (though there are really many more than just two sides, of course) need, metaphorically speaking, to meet with a marriage counselor and talk this whole thing out like reasonable adults. As to whether it’s simply too late for that, or whether it’s never ever too late–I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that our national therapist has her work cut out for her, because America’s disagreements this time are so huge and so personal that the gap between us seems unbridgeable.

Here’s a strange and more or less unprecedented fact of my lifetime: The rise of DJT (I still can’t say his name–that’s how deep this goes for me) seems actually to have made half the country physically ill. Everywhere I listen or read, I hear from people who feel like they’ve been “kicked in the teeth,” who live with a “knot” in their throat, or a “permanent migraine,” or a fear so primal it keeps them from remembering what hope, much less patriotism, used to feel like. As for me, the election’s impact was just as visceral. It plunged me (almost literally) back into a moment when I was six years old, playing in the yard, and Paul K., a kid from down the block, came over to where I stood (I was singing “Que Sera Sera” and braiding dandelions through my hair), and punched me–really hard–in the stomach. (His irrefutable explanation: “I always wanted to see what it felt like to punch somebody in the stomach.”)

This isn’t normal. That is, I don’t normally feel punched in the stomach when my candidate loses. Even eight years of George W. Bush (who was, to my mind, a dangerous idiot) never made me feel the way I feel now. And the fact that (at least) half the country feels similarly–that we’re suddenly bonded by a shared sense of deeply personal violation–has given me a mirror worth looking into as deeply as I can.

As I write to you, my mind keeps returning to a thought I’ve heard a lot lately–something along the lines of “If you’re not worried these days, you’re simply not paying attention.” And that thought leads me to memories of other American moments that deserved more attention than I could afford to pay at the times they happened. Basically, I was so busy fixing the holes Hannah made by ramming her head into walls, that I barely had time to notice holes in our economy, holes in the ozone layer, holes in our democracy itself. But for better and worse I’m less busy these days, so I can afford to spread my compassion a bit further than my own battered living room. It may be, in fact, that I actually have space in my heart now for all of America–not only for my family and the other tribes I belong to, and not only for that much larger group of Americans–people of color, Muslims, Latinos, Jews, the disabled, the poor, the LGBT community, other women (in short, the usual suspects) who will be hurt far more deeply than I will by this deeply anti-American moment.

But my heart makes room, too (for it’s been stretched out a lot over the years), for the people who’ve been shoved by economic and societal changes into a despair so deep and self-contemptuous that they can’t help but long for scapegoats (see the above list) and saviors (see who they’ve chosen; see who and what the man they’ve chosen is choosing). I’m talking here about an underclass of people so seldom acknowledged, so often ridiculed, so little valued that this election seemed to them, as I’ve come to read and understand, their last and only “chance to be heard” before they drown.

For such people, the American dream has turned nightmare, and I think I know a tiny bit about how that might feel. It’s true, they’ve made a terrible mistake–in brief: they’ve elected someone who will almost certainly make their hard lives even worse–but I’ve been where they are, and done what they’ve done. In times of my own despair, I’ve longed for both scapegoats (who, in my case, took the form of benighted doctors, quack therapists, a country that refuses to support its neediest citizens), and saviors (e.g., that cohort of fraudulent or well-intentioned “experts” who assured me they could “cure” or at the very least “help” my daughter).

I can interpret the voice of that underclass, I think, even when it emerges as a primal howl. I can feel the terror on “both sides” as we confront a future that’s left both feeling, as the catchword says, “disenfranchised.” We both, we all, feel so deeply betrayed by our country these days–that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? And now, or anyway soon, we need to work together–somehow–to actually build the America so eloquently and emptily promised to us by our founders, the “ideal” America we all pledged to believe in when we were kids.

In all honesty, the only group of voters I still can’t understand are the ones who voted for Trump and then, having quickly locked their car doors from the inside, drove safely home to gated communities, comfortable homes, successful careers, and a whole lot of money they’d just as soon, thank you very much, not pay taxes on. These are the only members of “the other side” I still need to hear from, in fact–but they’ve been keeping their thoughts to themselves, at least when I’m in the room. (Occasionally they break their silence to shout, “I’m not a racist!” but that’s as far as the conversation’s gone, so far.) Such smart but tiny-hearted people, it turns out, are also part of the family I hold in my heart, and have been holding, all along. Which is maybe why they scare me most of all.

So, anyway, that’s my comment, I guess.

Much, much love,
Nancy

Roar (a poem)

13 Sunday Nov 2016

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laurel hardy

Roar

The furnace roar enthralls me, and the silence
that comes before–and follows–also soothes.
By turns, by force, they beg my acquiescence
to all that’s merely “being,” merely “truth.”

But the wailing mob—how ought I feel? The din
of eight billion curses and sighs. The shriek
of the shrinking world, the whisper-whine
of conquered species, conquered earth. They speak

in hurricanes that moan, in floods that spew,
in droughts that sneer at our inanity.
Yet we can’t translate, though they force us to.
(Our purest faith: Divine Cacophony.)

They’re growling to themselves alone, we think—
or speaking, yes, but saying something else—
completely else, all forms of else! (We’ll sink
while never knowing that we’ve drowned ourselves.)

It’s not our fault. We’re deaf, or worse. We’re dead
to any but our tribe’s vernacular
(which even God calls gibberish). I said,
“The furnace din enthralls me.” I don’t care

to know its source and cost, it seems. I close
my eyes to trace what paths my dreams may take,
as Silence, like a patient prince who knows
his sovereign destiny, remains awake.

dog-sitting in Seattle (journal entries)

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

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castle secluded

September 11, 2016

The sounds alone would be enough. I’d know just by the beeps and rumbles, helicopter ratatat, the nearly constant sirens, and a train whistle that sounds just as anxious/urgent as the police car, so that you can’t help but think they both must be chasing the same mad killer.

But you’ve got the colors too. You’ve got Puget Sound—how to describe the complex geometry of water? The ripples, wakes, and wavelets, all those intersections, all those patterns, the shifting gray/blue/silver, and oh how the sunlight spotlights every tiny peak of wave—and all of it in constant flux. I could get easily lost here, in this gaze to my immediate left. I’m a “pattern thinker,” if that’s a thing. I see it all—there’s buildings too, and boats and planes—as shapes and angles and delightful juxtapositions. The space needle I could see if I got off this couch (I pause as another seaplane passes), but I can see its reflection anytime in the glass of the corner window. So many helicopters here! Some miles distant, silver beads decorate a latticework overpass—sun glinting off car windows. Motorboats and sailboats, tugboats tugging barges just like in the movies. The V shape of migrating geese. The V shape of a cabin cruiser’s wake. The collision courses averted long before you can even hope for a catastrophe. All the coming and going. I could watch this glittering sea forever, I could hypnotize myself.

I pause to hypnotize myself. It works.

***************************

Always some emergency. Soft then loud the sirens. They Doppler in then out. You never hear them stop, they only fade away. They’re always going somewhere else. They all are, everybody out there, the ferries and the sailboats, that sun-dotted line of rush hour cars. They’re always going somewhere else. I saw a motorboat make two figure eights—two figures eight?—and it was all the more beautiful for having nothing at all to do with me. Life dazzles when you watch it from the 24th floor. So many people, and everyone going somewhere, but—what luxury!–nobody headed up here.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Still, there’s no sanctuary. Enough pain all around to fill the oceans. Mary [my friend and traveling companion] and I, on the 24th floor, we know too much, feel too much, even at this altitude. We know they’re all down there, afraid. And even if these walls were made of lead, Mary would still hear the crying, because she keeps her cell phone on.

Today I won’t ask myself all those rude questions I’m always asking myself, like “Just who do you think you are, anyway?” and “Don’t you have work to do?” No. No interviews today, please. Today I’ll mind my own business instead. Eventually I hope to understand that I’ve never actually had any business to mind.

Just this sunlight.

(((((((((((((((((((((((((

September 12, 2016

I know I’m not obsessed with fame, because I keep forgetting to check to see if that agent’s written back. Surely I’d be checking every hour, the way Mary checks on John [her son, who’s having trouble] when he’s feeling dire. Neither am I obsessed with—let me think of all the things I seldom think about: power, looking pretty, other people’s opinions, money, being loved, my own death, my own self.

I am obsessed—let me aggregate my hauntings—with the pain of the world. Merely that. I carry it with me in my chest—it’s the heavy stone on which my heart is founded, the crag on which it’s built its aerie, the reef on which my ship is wrecked. (Etc.) The pain of the world. Here on the 24th floor I merely hear it ebb and flow outside, as if from far away. Within the apartment, I feel Mary’s suffering more fully than I would ever choose to feel my own. Mary and John, both of them—in my mind they’re dancing, holding tight to each other, in a hurricane. I can only witness. It’s as deep a hurt as I’ve seen in years, and I’m honored to be let into it a little. Too, I feel my own helplessness as a familiar stab—another everyday reminder that I’ll know peace when I finally learn the simple, impossible trick of surrender, and not a micro-moment before.

Then too—how tedious I am!–I ache for Harley, the tiny, arthritic, heart-diseased dog who lives here too. (“A beautiful soul I’m glad to have near me”—that’s how we each would describe the other, I like to think.) No need for words. With Mary, too, no need for words. We nestle today in separate havens, me in the living room, her in the bedroom. We like to be alone together. This is all the outside world I need, I realize—someone to be alone together with—and even that only occasionally.

(I pause to watch a motorboat zig across the sound, its wake at first an S, then a snake, and then gone.)

The usual question: is this anything? If it isn’t, what is? Not fame, not power, not anything on that dull list. This much, by now, is absurdly obvious. But what about the pain of the world? It’s my deepest obsession–my only one, maybe, on my least self-burdened days. The one I can’t give up. I feel it en masse—inhale it like a dampness in the air.

But this generalized ache is old habit by now, and bearable enough. By now it’s only the particular that kills me. My brothers and sisters, my daughters, my husband, my dogs, my friends. A crumpled homeless man I dare to glance at.

If everyone would just be happy already, I sometimes think, then maybe I could finally relax.

8888888888888

Or maybe I  keep myself obsessed with other people’s pain in order not to feel my own? Or maybe it’s just a substitute for ambition? What is my own pain, anyway? And what ought I be ambitious about? Sometimes I see how lazy my mind is, how it starts a question or a train of thought, but can’t seem to bother to finish it. I feel, so often, half-asleep. I stare out the window. I breathe in and out. Hours go by this way.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

September 14, 2016

I was going to post that in my blog—the part about the pain of the world and all, but when I set it there, and read it again, all I could see was my own silly narcissism. I wonder if I’ll ever get past it. Or am I supposed to embrace that too? How about I give it all up, and just watch for a while? How about I don’t try so hard to know what I’m doing, and just do it, whatever it is?

Sitting here again, watching the boats on Puget Sound. Listening to the sirens, typing not because I have anything to say, but because I like the clickety clack of the keys. It’s a fabulous sound—the tip-tap-tip of success. So I make a resolution: just type to type, just fill the page with words because why not. If I could dance I would dance even when I didn’t move at all. Even standing still in an elevator, I’d be dancing, in my bones. Just as now I am always singing inside, and always writing. It’s like how Mary practices her Mendelssohn concerto inside her mouth, tapping each note on her teeth with her tongue. Such essences can’t be detached and put away, they’re integral to the body’s every molecule. So why do I insist on separating all my parts as if they’re separable? Always looking to put things in their proper bins—my marriage, say, or my writing, or my thoughts one day versus my thoughts the next. Let the contradictions blend together, I say now. I’m as tired of thinking my thoughts as I am of trying to dodge them.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

10 Things Not to Say to an Autistic Person Video BBC III — Everyday Aspie

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

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I love this video for multiple reasons. It’s presented in manageable, easy-to-digest bites, it’s relevant, the participants are true autistics, and they share common challenges of those of us on the spectrum. Mostly, I appreciate how they are sharing that we are all unique. It’s nice to see fellow autistics; seeing them reinforces I’m not […]

via 10 Things Not to Say to an Autistic Person Video BBC III — Everyday Aspie

Thought-petals: What Autism Means To Me

23 Monday May 2016

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I love this.

Restless Hands

Autism means…

…Running down the hill, full tilt, holding hands, feet flying, gasping for breath, laughing for the sheer joy of it.

Autism means entire conversations held without words.

Autism means…

The constant and constantly changing puzzle-game of trying to understand one another, and the incredible moments of joy and excitement — the Aha! — when one person’s means of expression is grasped by the other person’s brain. It’s a brain-teaser with a truly valuable solution, a code we’re racing to break together.

(I love this about tutoring, too.)

Autism means shouting “yogurt!” from the rooftops. Because you have the right to express yourself even if no one else understands.

Autism means colors colors Colors COLORS!

And happy flapping hands.

Autism means needing a break from stimuli other people don’t even realize are there.

It means the blissfully peaceful look on your face when you come up from a dive…

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“Genesis According to George Segal” (a poem by Robert Pinsky)

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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george segal art

Above: “Street Crossing” (1992) by the American artist George Segal (1924-2000)

Robert Pinsky’s “Genesis According to George Segal”

The Spirit brooded on the water and made
The earth, and molded us out of earth. And then
The Spirit breathed Itself into our nostrils—

And rested. What was the Spirit waiting for?
An image of Its nature, a looking glass?
Glass also made of dust, of sand and fire.

Ordinary, enigmatic, we people waiting
In the terminal. A survivor at a wire fence,
Also waiting. Behind him, a tangle of bodies

Made out of plaster, which plasterers call mud.
The apprentice hurries with a hod of mud.
Particulate sand for glass. Milled flour for bread.

What are we waiting for? The hour glass
That measures all our time in trickling dust
Is also of dust and will return to dust—

So an old poem says. Men in a bread line
Out in the dusty street are silent, waiting
At the apportioning-place of daily bread.

At an old-fashioned radio’s wooden case
A man sits listening in a wooden chair.
A woman at a butcher block waits to cut.

What are we waiting for, in clouds of dust?
Or waiting for the past, particles of being
Settled and moist with life, then brittle again.

————————————————-

Extra cool thing: Robert Pinsky reads this poem aloud here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/genesis-according-george-segal?mbid=social_twitter

 

Truisms (needs revising)

10 Sunday Nov 2013

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First rule: The answer is always “both.” (And “neither”–because why not?)

We create our own patterns and coincidences. We assign meanings to what would otherwise be (or seem to be [it doesn’t matter which]) random events. And that instinct is essential and, if this is the right word, archetypal. And, if we want to, we can learn how to practice this instinct deliberately and inventively–because, for one thing, that’s where the art comes from: that primal instinct to create meaning from seeming randomness. I think of it as “The Pirate in the Bathroom Tile.” (“You mean the Mexican pirate?” Becky asked when I told her this. “Yes!” I said, so happy to be understood.)  You can also call it “The Face on Mars” or “Jesus on a Piece of Toast”, or whatever you like. The real word for the tendency is “pareidolia,” I think. You could look it up.

[9/30/14 note to self: Edit to fiddle with the idea that apophenia is a wonderful tool in the “harnessing of serendipity”–once I understand what, exactly, I mean by that.]

Practice. Create rituals out of simple things: washing dishes, taking a shower, building a fire, taming a dog, taming a person, allowing yourself to be tamed by everyone you meet, so that, to whatever degree we can, we can all feel loved and safe. Live deliberately–if only because it keeps you from bumping into the furniture.

Watch for mandalas–they’re everywhere, and they help seduce us toward eternity, which is, so far as I can tell so far, the placeless place we’re in already.

There are a million ways into zen, scattered throughout the flood of sensations that immerses us right here, right now. The trick is to recognize those ways for what they are, and then to follow, oh, even just one of them inward. Keep following, keep immersing yourself, keep witnessing more and judging less, and eventually you’ll reach a point where, at least for a moment or two at a time, you sort of disappear. And that’s really cool.

Nirvana is, I guess, an absence of self. But I’m starting to think you can also define it as the (placeless) place where you become all of your selves at once.

Self-imposed rule: I’m allowed to want something to the exact degree I’m willing to let it go.

It might come down just to this: do the wise thing. That’s it. Because we almost always know what the wise thing is. We just do the dumb thing anyway, and the whole time we’re doing it we know it’s dumb. Sometimes you can even hear us muttering to ourselves, “I can’t believe I’m doing this stupid, stupid thing again.” So there’s your answer, there’s your practice, there’s your secret: stop doing the dumb things you already know are dumb. Do the wise thing, if you can. And if you can’t, do only whichever dumb things you don’t yet know are dumb.

Shorter version: Insofar as you can, make only new mistakes.

Don’t be afraid of the future. Love it fiercely, love it blindly, the way you loved your babies before they were born. Because why not?

For all we know, we’re still in utero.

I am always–and maybe only?–at my best when I have no other choice. (Update 11/10/13: the trick, it seems to me lately, is to choose to have no choice…) (Update 2/27/14: And yet of course I have no choice–choice is only a rule of the game I’m playing. Choice invigorates the air inside this dream I’m in. It helps me forget the dream’s frustrating trope: that I’m running as fast as I can, but not getting anywhere.)

Our minds seem designed to judge the world through (what seems to me) the relatively primitive art of comparison. That is, we can “understand” things only by contrasting them to other things. We grasp at every thing, every event we witness, but can receive it only in relative terms: bigger, smaller, fewer, more, similar, different, better, worse. Maybe that’s one reason it’s so hard to break out of dualism, so hard to get to the truth that seems so crazy to us: that really there are no “opposites”–and, in fact, no “separate” things at all. …I think, I think, there may not even be things. How would our minds know, after all, without a purely frictionless “nothing” to compare our sticky “thingness” to?

Carry in your mind an encyclopedia of apt metaphors. We can only really talk to each other in fables, after all. We can only really understand each other by comparing something we’ve witnessed with something the other may have witnessed too. (11/10/13: that other, richer kind of understanding must come some other way–through silence, maybe, or the feel of one heartbeat upon another, or a whole tribe huddling each night around the same big campfire, each of us seeing  its flames, logs, embers, sparks, from our own unique angle, but all of us staring into the same mystery and feeling the same steady warmth.) (2/27/14: in the end, I think, there’s no way–not even silence–to tell the truth about everything/nothing. Even to become the truth doesn’t explain it. Even your desire to explain wrecks any chance of ever doing so. The truth is–maybe–that we already know the truth. We breathe it in and out and in every day, but usually without noticing.)

Until you’ve been hurt yourself, you can’t easily feel compassion for another’s pain. Luckily, our lives deal out opportunities for pain as often as they possibly can.

Any moment now, I’ll be dealt my next come-uppance. My next “fierce grace” (Ram Dass). My best–perhaps my only?–teachers are the ones who, time after time, remind me (with a sudden or slow tightening of the handy scarf that circumscribes my throat) of how fragile, how already going and already gone, are the things I cherish most. The only amazing thing here is the way I keep forgetting–the way every loss still takes me by surprise.

The road to Find-Out is scary. The trick of continuing may simply be this: not to be afraid of being afraid. (Props to Franklin Roosevelt for that one.)

Keep penetrating, keep connecting. Go forward. Practice. There’s no contest. There’s no right or wrong way. There’s no failure, no success.There’s not even an ending, at least not one we can readily know about.

Safety is vital. You can’t go anywhere or do anything or think straight or feel peace, unless you first feel safe. The physical world, of course, is both “safe” and “dangerous,” alternately or sometimes at once. But if you cultivate within yourself what can soon become an obvious awareness that, deep down, you’re capable of accepting whatever happens, then you can become safe from the inside out. (11/1013: and, if you can somehow allow yourself no choice but to lay your heart forever raw and open, I think then you may become capable of actually and indiscriminately loving life’s “whatevers”. At the very least, you can allow yourself enough perspective to find them fascinating, enough love to find them bearable, enough patience to wait out what hurts, enough grace to rejoice in what’s miraculous, and maybe even enough wisdom to feel all these different responses at the very same time–which I think must be the point where you yourself, as a self, begin to disappear.)

The trick, in short, is not minding.

Surrender. Plunge headlong into the abyss. Chances are you’ll be able to haul yourself out again when you need to (and you will need to). And even if not, the fall itself would be worth a lifetime of merely peeking, meekly peering, over the edge.

Odd but true: Somewhere down the road of all this, all you’ll really want to do is love everybody. It will be, eventually, the only compulsion you have left.

Never be ashamed of your own essential foolishness. What else can you be, after all? You wouldn’t be out here, stumbling along this road, if you were already home.

If we nurture the world, the world nurtures us back, whether it means to or not. The gifts you give the world give themselves back to you. Your very life becomes your reward for having lived it well. (11/10/13: a lot of times you will learn all this only a very long time after the period of your giving and your pain. Sometimes, I imagine, you never learn it. And an awful lot of the time, you have to look really hard to find a single hint of it. But it’s still there–the miracle, the reward, the equanimity and spaciousness; and once you see it, you’ll have to work very hard to “not-see” it next time, so you might as well just allow it to remain in your field of vision on a moment-to-moment basis.)

Sometimes it helps to remember that a lot of what happens to us is none of our business.

When in doubt, do less. Widdl, for short. I use that word–widdl–a lot. It doesn’t mean, “do nothing.” It means only what it says, “do less.” …And less. …And then a bit less. No worrisome need to disappear entirely–so far as I can tell. To become nothing–that self-defeating self-obsesssion–is a wonderful experience but a crazy goal. (To have a “goal” at all, no doubt, is crazy in itself.) But anyone can do less. And then less. So, simply:  widdl. {You can also “widdle,” in the sense of “urinate.” Both are very useful occupations, and, now that I think of it, are interesting metaphors of each other, maybe?}