Author: Brian

Embrace this book, and begin it again

/ Brian / 11 Comments

I want to staunchly defend my right to life. Abort this mission of lifelong constriction with the guileless admission that my aliveness has been in remission, as if living were the disease.

Freedom is a motivating force, the source and the end of hope. I want to bend to its flexible iron, become pliable, liable to lift off the ground, finding flight and descent both viable options, adopting a position of delightful collision with silence, a momentous joining with the moment.

There is almost too much goodness to bear. Still, bear with it. Allow the latent to unfold. The gold is hidden under piles of sludge, mounds of dung, found and lost, lost and found again among the ashes of the stung self. Enter that sting with instruments of healing. Follow the bee that has stung you, bumble and stumble after her humming flight until she leads you to sweet honey. Be stunned by the inner sweetness you’ve shunned.

I’m hungry, alert, on the lookout for food. I want to stay hungry, not to lunge at every passing squirrel or deer, but to wait for the big game, the sleepy-eyed moose that could wake in an instant.

The Bible on my left, the Bhagavad Gita on my right, and my hands, poised, on the keys in between. I want to hold the West and the East within me, hold the tension of my divided being: both the one who prays for Life, in all its tragedy and its treasure, and the one who resists Life’s magnetic pull. There is help even for this one. There are many shelves from which a man can choose but no shelf large enough to fit the living and breathing Book of Beginnings. Open your arms, embrace this Book, and begin it again.

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.

By order of the warden

/ Brian / 1 Comment

By order of the warden, all jailors must marshal their inmates to march to the beat of a diffident drum, tamping down all impulses of the id and reporting all uncontrollable urges to the superintendent. Those prisoners who are eager to please their super-ego, please join us on the other side of the bars from dawn to dusk. We welcome you into the ranks of the semi-institutionalized, semi-employed.

After you have become members of our Outstanding Institute for Correctional Action, we will teach you to deaden your dread until it no longer surfaces from your dreams to wake you in the middle of the night. We can’t afford to have our half-imprisoned, half-imprisoning convicts screaming themselves awake; it will give our full-time prisoners too many nefarious ideas. We require our employees to sleep soundly. We need you to leave your cells in the morning and oversee the imprisonment of your fellow prisoners with an untroubled conscience, so you can return to your cells at night and sleep undisturbed. Waking up, whether you wake up screaming or laughing, will result in immediate retraction of your daytime privileges.

If you have not already done so, from this point forward you will dismiss from your mind all images of frozen seas, barren fields, and paralyzed fawns. The rule here is simple: make your inner life a parenthetical, let that little line stand between who you are now and who you were meant to be. Bound and bracket off your longing to let Life touch you, to contact what is real in you, and wake you up. Learn to perfect your defenses of isolation, projection, and straightforward resistance, remaining inside the buildings of our renowned complex and refusing like all good militaristic Americans to let the sun thaw the ice congealing around your warring hearts.

Every day that my hard-heartedness doesn’t bring me to tears is a day lost to the part of myself that counts its losses, divides everything into win/loss columns, solemnly swears it will be only good, never bad; that it will stand up tall, never look downcast; that it will be right, never wrong. I follow that part into the corrupt heart of duality. I let it lead me onto the lost highway, where all the hardheaded men bull their way to nowhere. I am full of my own bull. I am beaten at my own game, as if my only ambition is to become a cretin, a giant of egoic delusion. I am waiting for the day when someone says about me: ‘Now there’s a man with a good head on his shoulders.’

I always find it fitting to be walled in, head and shoulders below the rest. I am always wishing for the courage to go all-in. I always find myself returning to the fact that I am wishing my life away. Wishing Life, with its promise of Death, would just go away. Wishing I had a way to go back to that pre-serpent age when I had no knowledge of good and evil, and so made no distinction between life and death.

A Figurative Battlefield

/ Brian / 3 Comments

I can’t let Life inside if I can’t find Life inside. But I don’t see anything when I look inside except darkness and emptiness. Not even an empty tomb, which might suggest resurrection, but just an empty black hole that goes on forever, in which life neither begins nor ends, making resurrection irrelevant. I don’t hear anything inside that hole except a soul oppressed into silence. Can you hear silence, if you attend to the rest notes between the sounds? But what am I talking about. It is not right for me to speak of silence. My mind might literally be silent, but it is a figurative battlefield, and I can’t figure out who the good guys are. I don’t know which side I’m on, so I become a traitor to both, a kind of double crossing puppet, pulled by the strings of an actor whose part is to suffer the morbid effects of the primordial split; to never forget that sting while traveling over the same forsaken territory, unraveling into the wound that keeps me feeling orphaned by Life, keeps me from singing my true song, the song of the undivided and undefended heart, David’s song of praise and thankfulness. I cannot see the hills that praise Thee when I cannot raise myself from the pit, even if it is only to reach my hand up and ask for Your pity.

I cannot see the hills. I am standing motionless in a treeless open field encircled by thick woods occupied by gunmen from both armies. There are soldiers at the ready in all four directions. Because the gunshot blast could come from anywhere, nowhere is safe.

No wonder, then, that I feel the pressing need to build some kind of fortified structure, to defend my exposed, solitary, defenseless self against the incoming blows. But although the soldiers on both sides smell blood, and want nothing more than to destroy the faithless man who stands alone, having reneged on his loyalty to both of their ranks, it is as if, due to now practically extinct remnants of their inborn sense of honor, they cannot kill an unarmed man. But the moment I buckle under the weight of my leg-shaking fear and start to build a defensive structure to shield myself from attack, they feel I have given them implicit permission to let blast.

Motivated by the almost complete hopelessness of the situation, and my fear of imminent death, I might very well build a nearly impenetrable fortress, the only opening a narrow slit that lets me look out, but which I can quickly shut when I see an attacker bearing down. I’ve forgotten one important detail, however. The battle takes place solely in my own mind. Both armies are within me. While I imagine that I am defending against the battalions, insulating myself in my fortress, I am actually building my own prison and then opening the gate to let my enemies inside. When I was in the open field, imagining that I was leaving myself completely vulnerable to attack, there was nothing to fear. The woods surrounding me were as empty as the field in which I stood alone. The gunmen were a projection of my mind. Now, enclosing myself within the citadel, which is within my mind, imagining I am finally safe from attack, there is nothing but fear. The woods are still empty, but the field now holds a cell, in which the soldiers swarm.

A Frustrated and Fastened Existence

/ Brian / 4 Comments

My aphantasia or mind-blindness is frustrating. I want to go back, find an event in my past, and look at it closely and clearly to uncover and make sense of the specific way I reacted to that specific event, which conditioned me to continue reacting in that way to similar events. But I can’t do it. I can’t tangibly return to a past event in memory. There is nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to taste, nothing to smell, nothing to touch. I am stuck with the present, and all the gurus with their beatific smiles stressing that the present is all there is, all the spiritually evolved people encouraging me to access the power of Now, do nothing to get me unstuck, or help me let go of my resistance to and frustration with this stuckness, which is what is here now. I want to go back into the past to try and understand why I have no patience for the present or hope for the future. But I can’t even conjure up a past feeling.

Since the past is out of the question, let me question the events of this day to see whether I can discover anything of value. I wake up already in a dark mood, exhausted though I slept nine hours. I make some coffee. The coffee wakes me up slightly, but the energy gained from the stimulant is used, by some unproductive but frequent mechanism of the self, merely to stimulate and increase my frustration. It is the kind of frustration that seems not to have any immediate cause. Which only means that the cause lies outside my conscious awareness.

I feel the frustration in my stomach as a hard knot of tension, what you might feel before running a race, or in the middle of a core workout. But I haven’t done any physical activity today except walking upstairs to put on the water for coffee. I am simply tense. I feel like I do not want to be disturbed by anyone today, but I am already disturbed, and there is no one else here. I feel a domineering inner disturbance. It is as if a rope, frayed from overuse, is tied around my midsection, and it pulls me along. I go wherever the rope, the noose, wills me to go. It is frustrating to feel I am not in control of where I am going. I cannot take one true step. But when the frayed rope snaps, or I let go, what will happen to me? It is like being on a ledge high on a canyon rim, the drop-off sudden and steep. Holding on to the rope I live a frustrated, fastened, anything-but-free existence. But if I let go, the only prospect I can see is an immediate fall to my death on the jagged rocks below.

I want to move easily, like a man who knows where he is going. Or maybe he doesn’t know where he’s going, but in that case he doesn’t mind not knowing. His every step somehow communicates a natural and relaxed attention, both to his outer environs and to his inner state. He trusts that he will know where to place his feet as he goes along. Wherever he ends up, and whatever he encounters along the way, will enlarge his experience of life, deepen his gratitude for it, and this awareness of the manifold ways in which life is a gift will grow within this man unself-consciously, until his thankfulness becomes as much as part of him as his hands and feet. He does not need to believe that life is a gift; he feels it and knows it. Even the deaths of the people he loves, even the prospect of his own death, do not subtract from this unshakable felt knowledge. If anything, they add to it. Death becomes for him a reason for more abundant life. Every passing moment is even more precious than the last, because every moment that passes brings him closer to his last.

But for the man who is not free, the tense man, the man whose every action is a reaction to some inner disturbance, life no longer seems a gift, and each passing moment, rather than expanding his capacity for heartfelt gratitude, only racks up his tension and increases his heart-constricting dread. Part of him sees and resonates and wants to reach out to the free man, ask him how he has been transformed, while another part of him envies and hates the free man, for he only serves with his easy grace to remind the roped man of his bondage. Life for the self-oppressed man is a constant struggle, the bulk of which takes place invisibly, in the confused turmoil of his inner world. Simple and spontaneous connection with anyone or anything looks to him like a monumental task, wrapped tightly as he is beneath the thick cords, the layered bandages, that cover his forgotten, but not thereby healed, wounds.

To reach out seems futile, for how can anyone else understand the maze he is stuck in, and lead him out? Despite this feeling of distressed futility, he longs for someone to see his plight in its entirety, to understand his suffering so deeply that, in the process of being completely understood, he is also freed forever from the idea that he was ever anything but free. But until that fairytale person arrives, he contents himself to waste his hours failing to understand his discontent. Though he claims to know without a doubt that he also cannot free himself, he continues to strive to do just that. His strained effort only tightens the chains, and to be in chains, even if they are not precisely literal, is to be on fire with tension, to feel every nerve in one’s body fighting in vain to loosen the iron bonds.

Childhood Longings

/ Brian / 5 Comments

I remember—in my limited, image-less, non-specific way—being a young boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, feeling a strange kind of longing as I looked out at a homeless man on the streets of Washington D.C, from the backseat of my family’s pine-tree green Honda Odyssey. Let’s say we were driving over Key Bridge a few days before Christmas, on our drive back from the Kennedy Center, where the extended family on my mother’s side—cousins, aunts, grandparents, and later uncles—would get all dressed up in suits and dresses (for the grown-ups) or uncomfortable Christmas sweaters and slacks (for the kids) and watch a play every year. Usually the plays were entertaining, even for us kids with itchy feet, but my favorite part of the ordeal was usually the king-size package of Dots candy I would always get at intermission. Pure sugar, enough to keep me wide-eyed for the first ten minutes of post-intermission before I crashed. My same-aged cousin Jack preferred the peanut M & M’s. One year the nutty crunch of these M & M’s, and Jack’s involuntary nonverbal expressions of his unabashed delight in them, got under the pallid skin of a couple of hot-and-bothered well-to-do’s in the row behind us, who shhshed and hissed their displeasure.

After the show was over, it would be time to spend at least an hour trying to get the perfect family picture on the velvety red steps outside the theatre. No face could be partially hidden by another face, no one’s eyes could be blinking, and everyone had to be grinning widely with teeth bared. When all of this criteria had been met, there was another half hour to hour of prolonged goodbye’s to people we would, save some unforeseen tragedy, almost certainly see in the next two days.

Finally, we would drive home. By now it would be close to midnight. Late December, usually some kind of snow or slush on the roads, the Potomac River partially frozen. And on the bridge under the streetlights a homeless man huddled in a threadbare coat, unsheltered in the cold night, eight hours or more until the wan winter sun rose meekly above the horizon. And I, a young too-well-dressed boy in the green suburbia minivan, looking forward to my warm bed that night, and even more to the upcoming two weeks off from my usual shy schoolboy agonies, two weeks to play in the snow with my brother and sister and cousins, knowing the warm shower and heated house would be right there whenever I needed them, felt this strange longing. What could I, apparently wanting for nothing, possibly want?

It was me, John Fogerty; I was the fortunate son. My family was well-off, deprived of no material thing. My parents could and did send me to the best schools available, where the teachers were contractually bound to care for each and every student, and the environment was conducive not only to intellectual growth but to the growth of students as whole persons, mind and heart and body, spirit and soul. I came from a large, tight-knit extended family. The virtues of love, faith, and hope were instilled in me at a young age, and the people around me seemed to embody those virtues to varying degrees. And yet, looking out through the letters of my name spelled in messy cursive on the frosty window at the cold bent figure on the bridge, I felt from deep within my body’s slight form a stripped-naked and skinned poverty no material wealth could repair or warm winter coat conceal, and a formless but full-bodied longing for I knew not what.

I did not know about alcoholism and drug addiction, about unemployment and desperation and crime. I did not know about the physical suffering this man must have undergone on a daily basis, in all seasons. Constantly facing the heat in the D.C. summer, unable to find refuge in the air-conditioned indoors. Blinded by the driving snow in winter, his coat absurdly thin and worn, unable to protect him in the slightest. His hunger and thirst, fevers and pneumonias.

I did not know about the mental torture he must have faced, the inner voices that told him he was a failure, a bum, a good-for-nothing ghostly presence that would soon be gone, with no one to remember him in a eulogy with fine words, delivered to a mourning audience who would miss him for the rest of their lives, with no one to remember him or miss him at all.

I did not know about the emotional slings and arrows this man—forced like all men who are utterly alone to remember always how he would not be remembered—must have endured, both from being sole audience, sole victim of his internal executioners twenty-four hours a day, and from being subject to the external voices that sometimes intruded into and compounded this hell on earth, who insulted him in similar ways, who with cold, contemptuous voices told him to get a job, get a life, get off the sidewalk, leave. Who told him he was not welcome here. How easy it would be for that man, after being told hundreds of times that he was not welcome here, to extrapolate and conclude that he would not be welcome anywhere, that Life itself had long ago decided to imprison him forever outside the gates of belonging. How hard it would be for this man to hold out any hope of ever finding his home.

I did not know about the spiritual agonies this man must have suffered, the unfathomable loneliness, the bitter hatred toward Life and all the people that seemed to move along smoothly and easily through it, the envy of the fortunate sons safe in their beds and the successful CEOs ensconced in their mansions, the shame that had burrowed its way into the very fibers of his being, the terrible fear of death that alternated with a terrible desire for it, the pain of an unlived life, the daily traumas of a soul born for heaven yet trapped in hell.

No, I did not know about any of this suffering. I was ignorant, a child already with pain of my own, and did I look at this homeless man on the bridge and see a kind of liberation from my own seemingly causeless pain, rather than certain bondage in his pain which had thousands of causes and no bottom or end but death? But how exactly was I suffering? From what particulars did I desire freedom? What could I possibly desire freedom from, as an young boy with loving parents, a warm extended family, supportive teachers and coaches, a roof over my head, clothes for all weather, friends to play with, food to help my body grow stronger, books to allow my mind to dive into its natural curiosity, and all of the above to help me discover and live out of the depths of my heart? Wouldn’t my spirit flourish? Wouldn’t my soul be nourished and at ease?

Alas, all the external wealth and support in the world cannot bring the soul through the dark night and into the sunlight. Though the surface of my life left little to be desired, yet I was filled with and burdened by desires and longings, and seeing this homeless man somehow brought all of this to the surface. I was longing for the inner wealth, the steadfast support, the perfect freedom, that resided somewhere deep within me, with which I had lost contact at a young age, leaving me without confidence or hope for the future, out of contact not only with people and objects in the outer world but most especially with my own heart, feeling an inner impoverishment that resonated with the homeless man’s outer impoverishment, feeling as deprived emotionally as I was privileged materially, unlike the homeless man in the prosperity of my upbringing but like him in my feeling of being down and out.

Down and out. Pressed down and left out. Pressed down as if under glass, divided by a fragile mirror that allowed me to look up and out at Life above the glass, to look but never touch. A mirror that also reflected back to me my own self, and because of this two-way mirror I became absorbed by the disparities between what was beneath the glass and what was above it, focusing on all the real and imaginary deficiencies that kept me gasping for breath as if under ice, perceiving everything below the glass as frozen in a dull and grey and painfully insufficient and lifeless image, and everything above the glass as a fluid Reality that was full of color and warmth and movement and vitality and fullness, left to conclude with a depressing finality that I would be forever estranged from that Reality, that I would be left to wrestle in unwelcome though unconsciously chosen isolation with my own inadequate and self-sabotaging devices, which only multiplied and exaggerated my sense of lack.

One of these devices, these defenses against the felt knowledge of my estrangement, which if recognized fully might pierce through the glass with its direct and unsparing insight, and re-connect me with the Reality that severed the boundary between inner and outer, above and below—one of these defenses was withdrawal. I withdrew in one sense in order to re-connect with the feeling of being myself. It was almost as if I could not feel or be that self in the presence of others, though I could not articulate who that self was.

There was a kind of freedom in withdrawal. Being around other people I was reminded painfully of the glass pressing down on me and increasing my feeling of separateness. Once alone I could imagine (to the extent that I could with my blind mind), a world where I never abandoned my truth and could easily be myself, where I did not fear rejection, where I never blushed when a teacher called on me and I had to speak in the presence of the rest of the class, where I never had to answer how my day went because everyone already understood how it went. There would be no need to hide who I was or what I felt. Written on my face would be the joys of a contented being, a soul at ease with itself. To speak of this contentment would be unnecessary, redundant.

But, in a cruel but predictable twist, the withdrawal that seemed like freedom was its opposite. It was the default response to my unsettling sense that I never responded to the events of Life authentically, blocked as I was by embarrassment and shame, by fear of judgment, fear of my actual self being seen by others and then scorned by them and rejected (or worse, ignored), which fears I reacted to by once more escaping into the well-grooved pathway of withdrawal. The comfort and familiarity of this default response made it feel like home, but it was a home that was cold and dark and silent. No one was home because the only one who could have been there was gone, lost in imagining what truly being at home would feel like, and the perfection he imagined there only made his time here, outside this suspect sanctuary, all the more distressing, lonely, and bleak.

Blessed Be This Day

/ Brian / 2 Comments

Lord, help me encounter fully this clear sky, the warmth of this spring day, the silence. I am most myself when I praise the beauty outside myself, and in that song of praise, enter more deeply the beauty within myself. I am within the world, not like a prisoner in a bolted cell, but like a swift gazelle in an open field. Let each leap and bound be a prayer unbounded by words or rituals. Let each breath be deep and visceral, not pressed in like a vise grip and squeezed out like a gasp. Let the vase on the windowsill be hollow and translucent, so the light of the sun can shine through it. I want to taste the juice going down my throat. I want it on my tongue. I want the truth sung with the deceptive power of the receptive spirit. I want to hear it every moment, so I can bear witness to the flame that grows when I hold my shame with kindness, when I notice my blindness and shed another scale from my eyes.

The time is now. It’s enough to make a man weep. It’s enough to sweep away the cobwebs when you can, so the window is fit to see through. The rope of faith may be a narrow tightrope stretched across a canyon, but there is no soul too confined it cannot someday shine with the glory that is not mine, not yours. It’s not time that brings me into this moment. There is no time now, but too soon I know there will be again, and I will feel like I am breaking, stretched on a cross between past and future, walking that tightrope, unable to get to the center and enter my own soul, and live from there in peace. If I live in fear, there is no place, no person, and no thing that will ever satisfy me. I know this, but I do not know this in a deep and enduring way. So I’ve got to go again, so I can miss you again. I’ve got to kiss you for the first time, again and again. I want everything to feel like it has never happened before. And none of it has, or all of it has. All I will ever have is less than you could ever deserve, but make me yours anyways. My need to feel shored by you and sure of your affections, to feel reassured by your constant presence, is not the true need, but it sure is a compelling substitute.

Beloved, pierce this fiercely resistant bubble with your subtle touch. Even that is much more than I can bear. Help me bear it. Help me see you, rather than stare through you. I care more than I am capable of understanding, from the vantage point of this cold dark cave. I must cave in without excessive deflation. I must stand up without excessive inflation. This station is a point on the way.

Blessed be the day when my heart is not tied up in knots; when my mind, like this sky, is wide open with imageless vividness; and when my body feels fresh, as if I could run forever and not grow weary. Blessed be this day.

Training for and Running the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler

/ Brian / 5 Comments

It could not be a more beautiful spring morning. Not a cloud in the sky, high fifties, no wind. I sit outside and listen to a single bird, a distant car, a more distant but louder plane. I hear the voices of two men working. They are listening to ‘Desperado,’ by The Eagles. Desperado, Why don’t you come to your senses? I hear a hammer bang in a nail.

I am working alone, as I prefer to do, to hear my own voice. Finally spring is starting to sing, to ring forth its birdsong praises. Winter went on and on, left occasionally but always returned. Yesterday was cold and windy; today may just be a reprieve. All we have is a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition. All we have is our daily bread, this ever so slight breeze, this desire to listen to the world, to let it touch us, let it move us deeper into its embrace. Resist the impulse to narrow the focus. To long instead to be embraced by a particular other, to be surrounded by her particular scent. Long for this: to be embraced widely by the world at large, and to embrace it back, to live as if surrounded by Life, which of course I am. If I embrace the whole world, that embrace will include the one I most want to embrace, but if I embrace her alone as if bracing myself against my own aloneness, I brace myself also against the rest of the world, and tensed embrace does not soften, and isolation that involves two people is still isolation, and not union.

All winter I trained, through single digit mornings and wet snow and brutal wind. I kept lacing up the shoes, heading out the door, and getting on the road. Breathing in and out, running with a steady cadence, doing tempo runs and workouts, long runs and strides. Forty to fifty miles a week, sometimes more, mostly alone. Because I worked nights, I usually would wake up late and wouldn’t run first thing. I’d have coffee, try to wake up a little, read aloud a few psalms or poems. Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart. But I wouldn’t wait long. Eventually I’d drag my heavy legs out the door, walk up the hill, do a few warm up exercises, and start to jog. It became as routine an activity as eating or sleeping or breathing. Running is hard only when first beginning. It becomes easy and natural once fitness sets in.

But no training block can continue effortlessly forever. The day-in, day-out leg-pounding  will have consequences. When I was training for the Marine Corps marathon, I started to feel my Achilles flare up in early October, four weeks before the race, after I did a tune-up half-marathon followed two days later by a hard 5 x 2 mile workout. The sore Achilles followed me all the way up to the race, but strangely enough I did not feel it at all on race day. A similar thing occurred during this training block. At the end of February, I got sick with a bad cold and cough. Friends told me to dial back the running, to go easy or rest completely, give my body a chance to heal. But it is hard to stop exercising cold turkey, the same way it is difficult to stop any pleasurable and habitual activity just like that. Exercise relieves anxiety, boosts mood, helps with sleep, and clears mental debris and brain fog. The list of benefits goes on. It simply feels good to move the body.

So I didn’t stop. I took a couple of days off, but then I ran a tune up race on the tow path about a month before the Cherry Blossom, just as I had done before the marathon. It was a cold morning, in the thirties and raining. Although I did not give an all-out effort, as there was no reason to do so, I did run at a hard 6:02 mile pace, and soon afterwards the cough became a wheezing cough that made it difficult to breathe at times, but I continued to run. The wheezing kept up, both while I was running and not, and I finally went to see a doctor, who told me I had exercise-induced asthma and gave me an inhaler. For no real reason, the week after she gave me that diagnosis, I ran 69 miles, almost ten miles a day, the most I’d ever run in a week. Even though I did not do any workouts, running that much was not a wise move. The asthma worsened, and I took the next week off and felt some improvement. After the off week there were two more weeks before the race. I ran easy most days and did two workouts, both of which I was able to finish without having an asthma-related issue. But on Sunday one week before the race, I was going to do three or four miles at my goal pace of 6 minutes a mile, and before I had even done half a mile, I had an asthma attack.

So I did not know what to expect on race day. Luckily, I had no issues and ended up running the ten-mile race in under an hour, which had been my goal. My brother Collin and one of his college friends paced me for the final two miles. At mile 8, when they joined me, I was on pace for 60 minutes and 20 seconds if I ran two 6 minute miles. I needed to average 5:50 pace for the final two miles to get under an hour, and I averaged 5:39 with their help. I wondered afterwards if I could have run close to that pace for the whole race, but I’m glad I didn’t try to do that. Instead, I started out with a 6:16 mile, a pace I was fairly confident I could hold for ten miles. When I felt good running that pace, I dropped down to around 6 minute pace for the next seven miles, before taking it up a notch for those last two. All in all, I am happy with my time. I think I am capable of running that race faster, but considering the fact that asthma slowed me down in the month leading up to the race, I did as well as I could have hoped.

I do not train in order to run the race. I train because it gives a purpose to my day. No matter what happens the rest of the day, I can go to sleep knowing I accomplished something. Though I might feel aimless for the other twenty-three hours, as if there is no definite meaning or clear purpose to my life, for the hour that I run my purpose is to keep running, and even if I run around the same two mile loop four times, literally going around and around in a circle, I do not feel metaphorically that this is the case. I am not running around my life or away from it but moving myself along with it so I can see it with fresh eyes, from a new vantage point, so it does not run me by. The run is routine and may even feel monotonous, while at the same time it frees my heart and mind from the cages I’ve locked them in. I do not feel trapped inside my body when I feel my body from inside. Only when I am immobile, out of contact with the moving body and quiet mind, do I feel mind and body as separate from each other yet thrown together into the same prison. Moving softens and relaxes the heart, frees and opens the mind, strengthens the body while simultaneously allowing it to feel a sense of ease and flow.

The wind has picked up a little now. I hear the songs of two different birds. Though the wind is cool, the sun is warm. I take off my sweatshirt.

Today I hope to see someone I care about. I care about her more than I care about running. Running can become a substitute for relationship, an escape from both the desire and the fear of intimacy, instead of a wonderful and energizing way to become intimate with one’s own body. It can be solely a method to become stronger and fitter, instead of a way also to be with oneself at one’s current level of strength and fitness. If I run wishing to be different—stronger, fitter, better—I may never make contact with how and who I am now. If I run to avoid the uncertainties and difficulties of relationship, I also run to avoid the uncertainties and difficulties in myself. If I run to try and rid myself of sadness, I may temporarily succeed as the endorphins kick in and my mood picks up, but the avoidance, the desire to evade or out-run my present experience, will seep into every aspect of my life. To attempt to flee the flood is to be flooded again when I return. Like Jonah I must wake up and face the town of unfaithful strangers. The town is within the beast in my own gut, and all my muffled groaning will not make those strangers disappear. They exist so long as I alternately resist and give into the strange siren song of my self-estrangement.

Today I may not see the person I hope to see. I may believe, not in the God of my understanding, but in the tragic misunderstanding that mistakes seeing and being with her, even in part, for contact with the true heart that does not need to be made whole, for it is whole already. I may despair that I will ever see her truly, in the way she deserves to be seen, the way God sees her, but that instead I will see her subjectively, screened by the dark clouds of craving and clinging, pulling toward and pushing away. Today I may want to push Life away, to say its whims do not suit me, its thorns are too many, and its blossoms too few. I may choose to pursue not the truth of my experience but anything and everything that might offer temporary relief from my pain. I may not know how to give glory to God for twenty-three hours of the day. I may not even believe it is possible. I may feel empty and lost, at a lifelong crossroads in which I make the wrong turn forever. I may feel severed from love, may feel as if I will never successfully weather life’s storms, as if shipwreck is the only truth, and rescue the only impossibility.

But as afternoon turns into evening I know I will lace up my shoes and head out the door. And for one hour my life will have a very simple purpose: to go forward, to run. Lord knows I was not put on this earth to go back into the womb. Lord who knows me, lead me out the door. Help me trust my own two feet to take me around the path, up the hill, and back home.