Month: October 2019

Leaves, help me to wait like you do

/ Brian / 3 Comments

Let my hands work independently of my mind, until my mind and heart get on the same page. Let my hands work as they were made to work, while my mind looks for some way to keep the work from happening, to keep from being seen through in all its insubstantiality, all its trickery and thievery, its whole mindless charade.

Watch the parade of characters go by: some in regal vehicles, awaiting the fanfare they believe is their due; some hunched over, as if they could hide themselves in plain sight, overwhelmed by the crowd of people on either side of the road they walk down, feeling personally attacked by the laughter and merriment raining down from both flanks; some standing up tall, chest puffed out, as if to ward off attack by going on the offensive. And so many more, a veritable army of characters populating the mind, the battalions running on self-importance or self-denigration, on self-love or self-hatred, on self-righteousness or self-doubt. The parade is supposed to be a celebration of independence, but in this state, under these influences, it wouldn’t make much sense to celebrate Independence Day, would it?

In this state, under these influences, the only thing that makes much sense to me is closing my eyes, opening the door, and accepting the wind’s invitation to spin wordlessly through the air, to bear for a moment the absence of my mind, to let that beast lie, and become friends again with the world outside my skull and skin, become intimate with surfaces and learn from them how to rest in the silence out of which they surface.

Leaves on the oak trees that are even now turning color, help me to wait like you do, green in the sun all summer, for your unwilled transformation into the deep reds, bright yellows, and rich auburns of autumn. You do nothing, make no efforts to change yourself; you stay green until you are changed by nature of some power outside your control. I do not know why you change, and I do not know why it is so much harder for me, who sees you not simply as you are but as a symbol of what I could be, to change with the seasons, to express freely and openly the bright golden joys and deep red passions of a full and vital existence. This past summer, as you hung patiently on the trees, I lost touch even with my own longing for that full existence. I cowered from the endless ache at the heart of that longing. I stayed away from this silence, so as not to let that ache surface. I could weep now at my self-betrayal.

Let this silence break my will and break my heart open. Empty and purify me, make me a clean window. Let ear and tongue be open windows: the ear letting in the wind from outside; the tongue letting out the breath from within. Breathe in and breathe out. Shout from the rooftops the good news. Or lament from the basement the pain of your separation, your longing to stand on the roof and let the beauty of the sunset bring you to tears every evening. I want to live today, and not in the basement. But perhaps it is only there, only here—flattened, split and shattered—that I will find myself nailed to the ground of humility, and pray from here, from the depths of my being, that truest of pleas: help me.

I want these words to swim in living waters

/ Brian / 6 Comments

A dog yips and yaps from next door. Why? A human types and taps the keys. Why? Why are the leaves turning color before I am ready? Why don’t they follow my own timetable? I am not ready for the summer to end. I was not ready for it to begin.

One night soon, my small world of woods will go silent. The crickets will suddenly stop their songs, and so will the birds. Even the wind will absent itself for the night. A real chill will fill the air for the first time in months. I will want to go outside and run for ten or more miles, or crawl under the covers in my bed and stay there for ten or more hours. Anything I can do to escape the chill, to fight against the continual recognition of my lonely mortality.

To every feeling and every action there is a season, and I know I am stuck because in every season I hurt in the same ways and do the same things to try and alleviate my pain: this same chill that keeps me frozen in time, burning for eternity; this same tightness in my heart that starts the moment I wake each morning, and my futile attempts to distract myself from the raw awareness of my diminished capacity to love; this same gaping wound that keeps me scraping open again and again these ancient scabs. If only there were some clearly visible marker to show to the world, some irrefutable cause of my hurt, so no one would need to ask why I was in pain, because everyone could see it. It would be impossible to hide. Here is my wound, I’d say, untying the layered bandage so they could see, and look how deep it goes. Look, I’d say again after many years, look how my wound has refused to heal.

See how deep it still goes and understand why I can’t move on, for the wound has infected my whole body, the body that houses the soul. If the house is on fire, how can the one trapped inside ignore his burns? The whole body is sick, and no physician has yet been found who can heal it.

Physician, someone once said, heal thyself. There is a long line to enter the gates of the true physician, gates that swing inward rather than outward, and I do not have the patience to wait in line, so I turn away and head out. I will heal myself, I say. Why should I need to enter the gates that swing inward to see the true physician? Who is the true physician? What is Truth? I am innocent; I wash my hands of his blood. But something unclean has entered me, and I am like a blind and deaf tracker with no sense of smell, unable to follow its trail to catch it and make it clean. O Lord, create in me a clean heart…What God hath cleansed, let no man call unclean. Let no man lean over the abyss without a man behind him to catch him if he leans too far. Let no man hear the soft hush of the wind and run for his life in the opposite direction. To run for your life is to run away from Life, to deafen your ears to its clear, unwavering call. The call that says, ‘stop running, come back to me, return to yourself. There is nothing between us but your fear that there will always be something between us.’

There is nothing between my skin and the wind. Shirtless, I feel the late summer breeze moving through the light hairs on my arms, and the darker hairs on my stomach. It is still September as I write this. The wind is colder than it was yesterday; it will be colder tomorrow than it is today. There is nothing between my skin and the wind and the world except for my mind that tells me I am separate, out of contact; my mind that reminds me I am completely alone and should feel very bad about being so. But everyone is permitted to have a different experience every now and then, and this afternoon I do not pay too much attention to these thoughts. They are so familiar; the feelings they produce—hopelessness, emptiness, loneliness, sadness—feel so much like myself. But I am more than my predictable reactions to the thoughts that impress upon me how disconnected I have always been, how unimpressive I am now, and how unfulfilled I will continue to be until the day I die.

Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being somebody else. Somebody with an easy-going confidence, a carefree vitality, and a naturally expansive disposition, who goes out to meet his fellows and the world with warmth and goodwill.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert, Jung said. Such a person would be in the insane asylum. No argument here. I am a kind of architect of dysfunction, working overtime to construct my own insane asylum. A refuge for my fugue-like states, a sanctuary for my fill-in-the-blank neuroses. Please let me be here, at least until I understand why I can’t just let myself be, why I am always interfering with my soul’s natural course. Let me travel the perilous seas of my longing until I reach that golden shore where my solitude meets yours, and my feeling of being stranded at sea all my life is first understood and then transforms into an experience of landing, dropping the anchor, and resolving to stay awhile on the unfamiliar terrain of shored belonging.

My soul needs this asylum in order to be restored to sanity, but my ego, the pirate captain of this aimless ship, gets in its way. The latter wants protection, too. But what to the soul is a precious dwelling-place where it can regain contact with itself, to the ego is a brick wall behind which it can hide, keeping itself safe from contact with anyone or anything else that might call into question whether there is anything of substance here. Is there anything of substance here? Is there anything but a certain stance, and a need to express that stance, so as to defend its legitimacy?

It’s a legitimate question. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know why I have abandoned the blank page for so long. I am uncertain of how to come back to it, so I’m writing with my uncertainty, keeping it company with my pen. I don’t want to hold my fluid unknowing or my intuitive knowing or anything else within me, known or unknown, at a distance. I want to hold everything inside myself like I would hold the pen, if I were writing in a notebook and not typing on a computer. How would I hold it? I would hold the pen as if it were both sides of a railing on a narrow rickety bridge that spans across a canyon rim, my only support to keep from falling to my death in the river far below. I would hold the pen as if it were a wedge, to keep some secret door from closing completely, allow just enough space for my foot to open the door another crack when I am ready.

I want these words to dance with light feet, to juke quickly when I try to tackle them to the ground, to run away from me, teasing me as I try to catch them. Though I may be on the road to serious illusion, I want these words to keep their sense of humor. I don’t want to fill them with my own heaviness; they deserve a lighter touch. They have the right to live on their own merit, free of my confused interference. No referee is needed here. These letters play by their own rules. While I sink in stagnant waters, struggling to get my own way, to be my own sun, I want these words to swim in living waters, to float on their backs as the only sun on this planet smiles down on them.

I am on my own today

/ Brian / 5 Comments

I am up to my neck here. I am upstairs, and afraid to go back down. I have forgotten, or maybe never learned, how to descend gracefully. I am not Cinderella, lovely and pure, tip-toeing down the spiral stairs as if floating on the zephyr wind. I am one of her spiteful step-sisters, and I hate her beauty. I hate that she loves someone, and someone loves her back. Why does she get to be loved, while I rot here with my rotten twin and hideous mother? I was supposed to be the beautiful one. I was supposed to be the one touched by a magic hand, woken from my trance with a kiss, but I was living in the wrong fairy-tale.

I wanted to be white as snow. I wanted to go to ground and hibernate inside my soundproof den all through the long winter, watch the snow come down and wait to be transformed into the sleeping beauty who is kissed, and who lets herself be kissed, and so wakes up. But why would anyone enter this cave and wake me with a kiss? Who over there cares that I am not awake in here, but sleeping? Who would it concern if I slept my whole life through? If I cannot find the will to attend to my own unlived life, why should I expect some princess to abandon her kingdom, drop her own cares for a moment, and kiss my own away?

I am on my own today. It is not the way of the warrior but the way of the worrier, the way of the soul bound not for freedom and glory but inside the horror story of contraction and resistance.

As a boy I wept on my first day of first grade. In the home video my brother bounces down the stairs with a big grin on his open and curious face. He is a happy child, so young and so excited for his first day of kindergarten. He cannot wait to meet whatever Life has to store for him that day. It is impossible not to love him. He is Joy made flesh, Hope in the human form.

In the video I am curled on the couch, my face pressed into the pillow. My whole body is shaking, and I keep repeating, ‘I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!’ I am a distraught child, so young and already so frightened of whatever Life has in store for me that day. I am Sorrow made flesh, Anguish in the human form.

And this day, as I sit here now, it is the same, for the fearful patterns of that six-year-old have stuck with me all these years, have kept me stuck all these years, although my body has grown much bigger now, and twenty one years have apparently passed.