On Peace

It is Nov 1st, 2010.  We have had a short and late summer this year.  However, fall is officially here.  The leaves on the trees are turning shades of orange and yellow and are forming a bright carpet on the sides of the road day by day.  Soon enough the trees of St. Edward's Park will be bare and I'll be able to see the sunset over Lake Washington through their skeletons.  How different the view is season by season.

Often I walk my dog, Rango, on the trails,  headphones on, lost to the external world of people but tuned into the sight of nature and into my internal world,  wherever the music transports me.

Music is magical that way.  It brings forward memory, dreams from the night before and emotion you thought was dead and buried over events long past or events you never realized had significant emotion attached to them at all.  One day you find yourself listening to

"The cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you coming home dad
I don't know when
but we'll get together then,  son
You know we'll have a good time then,"

and tears are streaming down your face.  For the first time in forty years you realize that you are grieving the loss of a father you never knew not because he wasn't physically present but because he wasn't emotionally present.  As your fingers could touch his skin and feel his warmth,  or your ears could sense the resonance of his voice or the rattling of his snores, so too you wish it could be so easy to feel connected,  loved, and that you mattered to him.  These are the types of things I think about when I'm listening to music and walking my dog on the trails of St.  Edward's Park.

At the waters edge I remove my headphones.  The gentle waves lap against the shore.  The leaves rustle.  A bird chirps. Kenmore Air passes overhead and the clopping of a runner's foot passes behind me and fades into the trails from which I came.

I continue my trek up the hilly trail,  back to my vehicle, back to what awaits me. My focus shifts from the present to what's next.  Anxiety and dread return but I know that on the trail, beauty surrounds me and peace lies within me.  I need only return to experience it.

It would be three more years before I would realize that the experience of beauty and peace lies not out on the trail,  but is accessible always within.  How nice to find this bit of writing nearly three years to the day,  to see where I was and to be grateful for how far I've come.

On Breaking Bad

What is it about breaking bad which resonates with the heart of me?  Is it that it is a story which  makes me think more deeply about the nature of good and bad?  Is it that at its core it is about existential crisis, transformation and connection?  Is it that I identify with the main character, Walt, who having lived his life according to other’s rules and doing what is expected has lived a canned life and yearns to break free?  Yes, yes and yes.

Walt, in facing his death to lung cancer, is freed to do what he previously feared, live life on his own terms, according to his own values.  It freed him to embrace himself.  The journey begins when Walt leaves his job as a high school chemistry teacher and part time car wash attendant to become a methamphetamine cook, a profession which will allow him to leave behind the legacy of having been a good provider for his wife and children.  He “breaks bad”.  Three of the primary, but not only, complex relationships Walt has are with his wife, his DEA agent brother-in-law, Hank, and his assistant cook and former degenerate high school student, Jessie.  It is through these relationships that we witness Walt’s transformation and the blossoming of his authentic self.  

Through the course of the show, Walt changed from a man claiming to do what he did out of self-sacrifice for his family, into a man who acknowledged to his wife what few of us can - that his deeds were done to fulfill his own needs.  This makes Walt for me, not only sympathetic, but a hero.  In contrast, Hank’s shallowness of insight and affection left me ambivalent towards his demise.  It was Walt’s grief at Hank’s death which moved my sympathies more than the death itself.  

Walt had been a hero to his teenaged son when living a life of pretense.  This was shattered in the end and never mended.  However, Walt gained a son in Jessie, someone who saw, accepted and I believe loved Walt for who he was. We see in the final scene of the last episode that Jessie, who could never do anything right in the beginning, became for Walt a beloved son that he was proud of.  In the end, Walt achieved that which I desire - an authentic life fully lived.

On Feeding the Creative Soul

Not sure what I will write about.  All I know is that after being back to work a week, my soul misses waking up and spending the first few hours meditating, thinking, reading and writing.  Even now, on my second day off I feel the call of responsibility - bills, grocery shopping, ironing, vacuuming, brushing the clumps of hair calling to me off of my dog's back and hind quarters, filing, culling through closets and cabinets and drawers in preparation for moving next spring, setting up the external hard drive for backups, retrieving files from the now dysfunctional  laptop's backed up drive and installing them onto the desktop and how about getting reimbursed from the flexx spending account?  When was the last time I balanced my checkbook?  On and on and on.

Meanwhile, it is probably the last week of eighty and sunny.  How much more would I prefer to be hiking in the Olympics?  Let's not go there.  All of these responsibilities seem so much more agreeable when I have my thinking and writing time.  What must I do to feed this need in the midst of real life?  I haven't the answer yet.  What I do know, is that this is a need.

Hey, this Imagine Dragons CD  I downloaded last night is hitting the spot.  Just another day in the life.  In this, too, there is something to be learned.  It's just another wave under the paddleboard.  Sigh.  Though it's not the amount of time I'd like to have spent writing, the 17 minutes it took to write this is enough for now.  It is a rough draft of perhaps something that will become something more in time, in time.  I am grateful to be in a place where I can recognized a need and honor myself enough to carve out 20 minutes to feed it.

On myself

Whenever I am finding fault in another,  I must turn it back onto me.  If I find your behavior disrespectful towards me,  then I must reflect on how I disrespect myself in the relationship.  When I am tempted to nag my son about going to bed earlier so that he has less difficulty getting up for school in the morning,  I must look at myself.  Am I not guilty of the same offense?  How much more fruitful would my efforts be if they were exerted on my own behalf. Just for today,  let it begin with me.

On Excursions

Why must I go into the world,  together or alone, to BBQs, go sailing or watch passersbyes small or grown?

Perhaps a conversation starts,  or maybe I'll blend with the wall.  Neither of which matters,  it's all ingredient from whose mixture something evolves.

Sometimes hours pass,  sometimes a day or more, but I always get a feeling when the ingredients will become something more. 

Like the nauseated is to a commode,  I am drawn to paper and pen.  As a lady in labor must push,  so I must expel that which is within.

On paddleboarding

Yesterday was a beautiful end of summer day. I had waited around in the hope that my son would decide that he finally did want to go do something summerlike with me or even just go get a haircut. At 3:30 I could wait longer. I went paddleboarding.

Log boom Park sits at the northern tip of Lake Washington. The water there is fairly protected so it remains calm even with the passing speed boats and occasional jet ski. The conditions were great for paddleboarding and afforded me an opportunity to be with myself and observe my thinking.

I recently heard that the ego does not exist in the present. It only exists when we are reliving the past or worrying about the future. It came to my attention while paddleboarding that I was spending and awful lot of time thinking about the past, which means I was spending a lot of time identifying with ego. So I positioned my boat upwind of the landing and floated. I placed the life vest under my head and relaxed into the board with one goal - to be here now.

I closed my eyes and paid attention. What I noticed was a wave coming on the right side of my board and exiting on the left, coming on the right and exiting left, coming on the right, exiting left, while I floated effortlessly above.

Like the waves, situations, people, thoughts and feelings enter our lives and like the waves, so will they go. I am as powerless to prevent this as I am the coming and going of the next wave. What I can do, is try to place my board in a favorable position, then lay back and experience the now.

On Presence

What is it I strive to be if not honest and present in mind, body and emotion?  It is not that I must act on my thoughts and desires.  I must only acknowledge that they exist. So too, I needn’t share all of my inner experiences, these are intimate parts of me, intimate details that I want to be judicious in sharing.  After all,  what is the most precious gift I have to give, if not myself? So then, I ought take care with whom I share the gift of myself.  Vetting is a wise action when considering placing something valuable into another's care. 

How then, do I go about the process of vetting? How do I determine what is and is not appropriate to share and when?  Do I determine this based on your behavior, on what it communicates to me is appropriate?  Certainly not!  Yet this I have done as though I were a mere image of you! It is I who must determine, with the guidance of my higher power, what is and is not appropriate to share of myself.  I must not share for the mere purpose of holding your interest or out of fear that should I not, you will turn your attention elsewhere.  

I cannot rely on myself however to remain pure in action and intent.  I must rely on my higher power and awareness practice to hold my ego in check, to keep me from falling into my old beguiling ways, to replace these with new responses and to keep the end goal at the forefront of my mind no matter what my heart and body desire.   What are they but impetuous children, always wanting and craving, who no sooner obtain the desired object then become wanting for something more.  

Lastly, what of communication?  We for the sake of ease, fall into the trap of text messaging as what seems to be the main source of communication these days.  Are we not using this format as a shield, as a way to keep others at arms length, as a way to obscure what we really mean or feel?  Without the nuances of body language, tone and intensity of voice we do ourselves a disservice when we communicate in this forum.  I want to experience and be experienced in the fullness of presence, not just as text on a screen.  I want to bring to you my practice of presence.  Will you bring me yours?