Impassionata

While I had an amazing time at ComicCon, I’m not sure I’d return there anytime soon. I’m still ruminating over the experience – I think it depends on whether or not next year, I’m fangirlish enough over some media phenomenon (like Castle this year) to go.

On first sighting the hordes of geeks, I thought, “My people!” And to a certain extent, they are, one of my first tribes. At the same time, I became aware of the ways that I’m disjointed too, that funny sense of both being with and apart from. I no longer recognize a lot of the costumes wandering around (I’m not as in touch with pop culture and was never into comics), and the recognition isn’t reciprocal. Other than dear friends from my college days, there isn’t the sense of being recognized. (Shing joked with me that I was dressed far too chic to be a geek my favorite pair of jeans and a bright yellow chiffon top, with a hat and shawl. All my tech was hidden in my leather handbag – I came equipped with my iPad, iPhone, wireless port, full sized keyboard, camera, etc.) I’m not as immersed as the girl at 15 who didn’t sleep because there was so much to do and see. (The people I spent time with were wonderful – SO good to have a slumber party with Shing, and hang out with Justin and Lauri and Holly!!! Such wonderful conversations!)

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation with these two Australian guys in the Castle line in front of me. That was a neat element – meeting people with a shared passion from across the world, who shaped this segment of their lives to come to ComicCon. I also appreciate passion – the kind of passion that gets me and several other thousand people to line up for an experience that is quite a joyful one. Shared fandom is unique – indescribable. It’s its own form of spirituality, I think, its own form of questing and being part of that which is larger than oneself. And one thing I’ll say about cons – it’s generally an environment without that much fear of looking stupid, which creates this beautifully permissive environment.

I enjoyed it with a certain nostalgia – of what I used to do. A certain part of me loved getting up ass early to stand in line and worry that 7am wasn’t nearly early enough (the panel I wanted to get into started at 1030am). I was also overwhelmed by the sheer crowds, and I don’t think I’m built for that anymore the way I was when I was younger. It was tiring, and I needed respite. Nevertheless, I hope I don’t ever lose the thrill of seeing masses of geeks. It’s just not a primary identity for me anymore, and there’s a bittersweetness to that – and even as I say that, it’s transmuting because it’s not lost. I’ll never not be one.

I think one of the biggest, humbling, wonderful moments was just getting to GO. To realize anew (and it’s always a little awakening) that my life is both shaped by me and also not at all – that a life filled with abundance is also that of great gratitude for the gifts from others. It was such a wonderful experience to have the friends align to make it possible for me to go so very easily that at the moment of my commitment, things fell into place. It sort of reinforces my view of the universe, this experience of my own agency. It evokes other times when I’ve done that and I also think it keeps my sense of possibility alive and awake, this sense of “why not?” Like…Friday of a sold out convention in another city – totally possible!

I think what makes me anxious about having kids sometimes is not being able to do that – to not chase what I long for.

It’ll be interesting to be at the Integral Theory Conference next weekend, which I’m looking forward to eagerly. The first time I went there, I felt this great melding of minds and spirits, came away with remarkable friends and re-met a horde of other folk that I just adored. There will be people there from my Alchemist community, my Zen community, my academic communities, Integral Chicks and Lotus Loungers, and I’ll learn and grow and get excited. It’s a different kind of community/tribe of my people, and my curiosity is awake about my home there.

This is also amidst getting into heavy wedding planning, which is a deliberate gathering of my tribe, my peeps – “our peeps” – mine’s and Toben’s, which will have a different flavoring all together!

I’m going to ComicCon for Sunday! I feel like Norma Desmond returning to Sunset Blvd – “I don’t know why I’m frightened…I know my way around here…” I’m so exuberant, it’s disgusting. I’m possibly squealing more about ComicCon than my wedding gown (though admittedly, I squealed over that).

So I’m grinning as I acknowledge part of why I’m so excited. Watching the movie Galaxy Quest in a dark theatre, I remember my friend Greg ribbing me and pointing at the screen and the image of the geeks at a con, and saying, “Hey Gayle, those are your people!”

And they are. I remember my first geek convention – I must’ve been 14 or 15, horribly shy, painfully awkward, gawky. My favorite TV show was Star Trek and I once got mocked for standing at attention in my little corner of the baseball field during PE. I practiced Spock’s “live long and prosper”. (I sucked at baseball, and not just cause I was daydreaming.)

I think that it was in geek circles I started coming into my own – partly through playing LARPs (live action role playing games) and getting to try on different characters, partly because it’s a community that actually respects girls with brains. As an adolescent, it was the first place I fit in and I’ll never forget that.

I’ve built more communities, gotten more adept at various social graces, but there’s something about geeks that still feels like my tribe, my peeps, and going to a con has an element of coming home no matter what the specific genre. I love the visionary aspects of science fiction and fantasy – the dreaming of new worlds that don’t exist, the broad visions, the amazing art.

And it’s one place I get to just be a fangirl and squee. Noises come out of me that most friends have never heard. I would almost put Twilight fans to shame in sheer sound effects, except I draw the line at sparkly, psychopath vampire stalkers and the braindead Bella. (There’s a reason Edward can’t read her mind. There’s not one there. And WHY if you could read minds, would you repeat high school over and over again? HIGH SCHOOL? See above about being a teenage girl…)

I have such great convention memories. I met George Takkei of Star Trek at a con and he gave me the most fabulous London restaurant recommendation. I remember running through hotels in fabulous costumes. (Sadly, I will not be trotting out my Princess Leia bikini.) Cons are where I hung out with some of my oldest friends – Quintin, Greg, Mike, and Dan.

I feel like Cinderella going to the ball by getting a shot at a single day at ComicCon, even though I already missed the Joss Whedon panel. And it’s come together so magically! An easily re-routed plane ticket here (my client is in LA), the offer of a place to stay from my friend Shing, my friend Marc’s Sunday event ticket, a ride back from San Diego to LA on Monday night with my college friends Lauri and Justin who live in Pasadena, which is where my Monday client meetings are. I’m practically dancing with glee.

So here I come, hordes of shower-challenged Imperial Storm Troopers! I can’t wait to dive back into the land of fascinating (and frequently bad) haircuts, amazing (and sometimes dumbfounding) costumes, strange conversations and languages (I once tried to learn Vulcan), fantasical stories and worlds where the value is imagination and play.

The invitations are done! Now all I need to do is address them and stamp them and send them on their way. I’m delighted and could not have done it without the work of Judy, Jennifer, my cousin Tiffany, and my friends Alexis (and her kitten Eve), Kim Elisha, and of course, Toben. There were moments I thought I was nuts for contemplating hand-making each of them, but they’ve turned out just beautifully.

My friend Erica did the art for the invitations (the leaves and the bird) for the printed text, and we both worked on the layout. (Erica is awesome. So glad to have her touch on all the wedding art!) I bought the Amalfi cotton-rag paper from a glorious little paper shop in Florence, Italy that Toben and I found when we were wandering around there last year. The shop was down a narrow, cobbled street not far from the heart of Florence near the river Arno, and was itself a narrow little place, all tall bookshelves accessible with a rolling ladder, rich with the scent of paper. It held a bewildering variety of Florentine marbled paper and leather bound journals, with a sweet proprietor.

The skeleton leaves are bo leaves ordered from Thailand. It’s the same leaf engraved on my engagement ring, and symbolic as the bo-tree is the one that Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment beneath.

The papyrus paper is actually from Egypt that I carted rolled around in tubes and hand-carried on the plane home from when I was there in December of last year. It was actually quite amusing – these papyrus shops sell papyrus with hieroglyphics painted onto them, and scenes from ancient reliefs, and all I wanted was plain papyrus paper which was momentarily difficult to explain to the proprietor. I still remember them dealing with me somewhat dubiously, though they were more than happy to take my money. There is a slightly unfortunate side-effect about carrying them home and tubes and not airing them since returning from Egypt. I bought dark papyrus vs. light papyrus, and the way one darkens papyrus is to leave them in water and “age” them, sort of fermenting them and then pressing them for a couple months. I must admit they smell funny and not necessarily in a pleasant way. There was some debate as to whether or not perfume would make this better or worse.

And I just loved the hand-dyed silk ribbon that wraps it all together – Toben and I spent more time than I care to admit debating the ribbon for the invitations. I created and printed the wedding weekend schedule, directions, and map on brown grocery bag card stock, which I just love for the texture.

As an FYI, the date depicted as 09.18.02010 is NOT a typo. I list the year as 02010 to reflect the deca-millennial, to set a framework of tens of thousands of years rather than the short-term thinking that is currently so dominant a mind-set in this society. It’s a nod to The Long Now, a non-profit whose work and thinking I support as a futurist.

The wording of requesting your “unique selves” is a nod to some of the spiritual teaching on the Unique Self that is part of my lineage from the integral spirituality world. While the Zen tradition acknowledges the Non-Dual, and I honor the aspects of the human existence that we all share (that we love, we feel, we fear), there is also the fact that there is is no one else with your perspective, born when you were in the life circumstance and family situation, with your education, your life experiences, the books you’ve read, the movies you’ve been influenced by, the teachers and life lessons you’ve encounter – and so you are, in a very specific sense and a very universal sense, completely unique and it is that uniqueness that I chose to honor with that wording. As a note, unique self is differentiated from ego uniqueness.

The invitations have been a labor of love. The Italian paper had to be individually fed one page at a time into the printer, and that was mostly due to Judy’s patience. Toben worked on the cutting of papyrus into thin strips, Kim Elisha worked on the folding and ribboning, and Tiffany cut the corners onto all the directions and she and my sister did a lot of the assembly. With the many loving, helping hands, it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

The wedding favors were also completed by Toben and Alexis, who tied the final bit of cloth cover to finish the look of them. Cutting out 200 circles out of muslin is a pain in the behind.

I am so very grateful for the friends and family who are so instrumental to making this wedding happen!

It’s my lunch break and I’m sipping cold grapefruit juice.  It’s been a morning of nostalgia. I had a great meeting with a new colleague over coffee in a courtyard and learned more of her – that she grew up in Cairo and Alexandria, in a different world before her family fell on harder times and immigrated to the US.  People have such fascinating stories wherever they are.

It made me nostalgic. Made me think of walking along the Mediterranean seashore at dusk with dear friends.

I think when I travel, there’s something about it that is both its own structure, especially in regards to work travel. But there’s also something liberating – it takes me out of a daily context, and there’s a strain to not having any routine and no real stability, and a freedom of it too – and I like the latter part.

I’m somehow closer to the shades of me that existed in these spaces better, just like when I’m at home, I’m closer to the shades of me that exist when I’m home, and while they’re all me, some places are easier to access through some spaces and shades of me than other places. The writer in me, for instance, is easier to access when I travel – or when I’m pissed.

Ever have the sense of passing through yourself? Like the me that shopped on a city street in New York is so echoed in the footfall of myself browsing in little courtyards in Pasadena. (I picked up a beautiful little steampunk pendant, made from an 1830s watch piece, and the creator of it happened to be in the store – http://goldbugpasadena.com/.)

The other thing I can really feel in myself a longing for, probably due to travel, is grounding and it’s interesting to me to see what arose – I wanted to go to Salt Lake. I wanted to be at Kanzeon, before it’s light in the middle of winter at the Zen center there, seated on a cushion in robes.  The other beautiful point of wonder is that I carry that – because my body has known and lived that, it still feels like there’s a part of me there, sitting.

One of the things I noticed in looking at old journal entries is that there’s very little of my writing blog posts before I got married before, and even during the marriage – and then a lot when I got divorced, and I feel like there’s some correlation between that and my voice. So – I need to start writing again. It’s felt a little sucky to not write, and I find it really interesting that the way my need to write has popped up in a fictional sense (sadly, one with no real-life applicability even if it’s a silly creative outlet and stress release).

On the update side, it’s been an interesting and occasionally rocky transition back to full time working and commuting to Burbank. Combined with having three straight weekends of parental time and very little downtime, it’s felt pretty crazy. Mind you – I actually like having my parents around. They’re fabulous, and we’ve had a lot to celebrate lately with Jenny’s graduation. It’s the “no down time” aspect that really got me. The weekend before Memorial Day, there was my sister’s graduation and graduation dinner on Friday night, my sister’s graduation tea party on Saturday, a dinner and party Saturday night, and a BBQ on Sunday.  I was so happy for having a weekend of interacting with awesome people, but fried by Monday

Last week, I was already completely peopled out by the time I got home at 11pm on Thursday night after flying to Burbank and home twice last week and facilitating an offsite, and was full into introverted mode. Then Toben met me at home – and that was interesting because on one hand, I did miss him. On the other hand, I really just wanted alone time and to actually just burrow in my bed in godugly pajamas with a mindless book and not have to interact with anyone human.

Friday night, we watched the most god-awful movie I’ve seen in years. Don’t watch “Prince of Persia”. I had mild nostalgia from the video game, but the movie was plain bad. An hour and a half into it, I tried to get Toben to leave, but for some reason, he and Adam are willing to condemn themselves to bad moviedom. This pretty much sent me over an edge because not only am I time crunched and at capacity, but now my life is dribbling away like the stupid sands of time before my eyes watching a bad movie. As it is, I have a pretty low tolerance for things that are a complete waste of time. I’ll tolerate something if it relaxes me, educates me, provides a form of good escapism, is outside my comfort zone, is interesting, etc.  Life is just too short otherwise.  The movie was bad at the point I wanted to leave it, and then miraculously continued to get worse long after I was ready to go. At one point during a supposedly touching romantic scene, I just started laughing hysterically and put my sweater over my head. You add to boot that I’m already deadly sleep deprived and we’ve got a three hour drive to Madera and a full day of jam-making with an estimated departure time of 7am the next morning, and by the time the following morning rolled around, I’d hit raving bitch.  I also have fairly extreme reactions to being stuck places that I perceive I can’t get out of.  I really should have just left the theatre and gotten a cab home. The only upside was sharing the misery with Kim Elisha, and not being the only one laughing hysterically.

Then over Memorial Day weekend, we made 200+ jars of jam and that was tiring, and my mother and Toben’s mom are eerily alike in specific ways. Watching them try to get each other to not go through too much trouble or try to rest was really quite hysterical. At least, Jenny and I were really amused.

Fortunately, a weekend of getting things done, being fed well by Judy’s fabulous cooking Saturday and then my mom’s fabulous cooking on Sunday evening helped some, but I’m still tired, stretched thin, and people’d out.

I had a full schedule before I started working full time, between non-profit commitments and just other interest areas, and none of those commitments have gone away – they’re just more half-assed than I’d want them to be. On the upside, I’m getting to work with two of my favorite people in the whole universe, and I really like my clients and the work is interesting, though really hectic as we start to find our ground beneath us.

Overall, I’m a happy girl. I just need more sleep, a better balance of alone time/people time.

One of the fabulous things this week is that I finished a year of Women in Management – though I’ll miss my girls over the summer. I usually end with a ritual of exchanging gratitude, and I got notecards from all my girls that really touched me. It reminded me of why and how much I love people in all the variety and forms. My six WIM students this year are unique, bright, beautiful, exceptional women.

I’m also getting positive feedback in some beautiful forms to some fluffy writing, so despite my inner self-critic informing me that it’s a waste of time, it’s really not because I’m getting enjoyment out of it and getting creative in a way that I miss.

Hence, the need to return to writing, to the sense-making of my life.

I was also inspired to look up my notes on gossip from the Sex, Spirit, and Shadow retreat I was at with Marc Gafni, Sofia Diaz, and Diane Musho Hamilton. Marc said something I’ve never forgotten about the nature of gossip. Nearly every spiritual tradition has a prohibition on it, and for the duration of the workshop, Marc asked us to help hold the container of the workshop together and to refrain from gossip. In his explanation, I finally understood really why.

I’m going to paraphrase from memory what Marc said -we gossip because we inherently feel like outsiders. So what we do is we draw a false circle around ourselves and another, that we put other people on the outside of, so we get to the false hit like we’re on the inside.  If we could set that aside, and  know, and trust, that we are already on the inside of the inside, inside the inner sanctum – then we don’t need to go around with the gossiping.

And to quote him, “So carefully watch and you will see that a millisecond before you are moved to casual slander you touched a moment of emptiness in yourself. Something in the mention of a person’s name or in the topic of conversation subtly, almost invisibly, challenged your self-worth, adequacy or dignity. Imperceptibly, your system moves to fill the emptiness with a quick hit of fullness … gossip.”

Gossip is inherently a distancing move, between someone and the person you’re gossiping about first of all, and an falsely inclusive move towards the person one is gossiping with. My own internal check as to whether I’m gossiping or talking about other people (and I have an unholy love of both – you should see my aunts…), is the level of care of which I am inquiring or making comments about someone else. Can I feel my own sense of care when I am making an inquiry, a comment (even a critical one), of the person not present, and am I acting in their interest or out of my own envy?  Or both?

Watching those milliseconds before being moved to casual slander is so hard – and painful – which can be a real guide. This would be true of my experience – the more watchful I am – the more I’m aware that it comes out of something bothered in me. And I do it anyway, which is painful…and I fail at not gossiping, and there is a wound there, but it passes – and I dust myself off and continue to blunder way through life with painful awareness. Have I mentioned before how painful awareness can be? (My shadow sides are not my favorite things to look at it but unchecked, shadow-Gayle trips me up in the darnedest of ways.)

Which brings me to another point – there’s a reality that awareness in this human existence can be a bit crippling at times. It’s easy to get judgmental of self and others, and sometimes ignorance is bliss and fun is fun. Shouldn’t one be able to let down one’s hair and just have fun? Sure. And I think this is where the practice of maitri, unconditional loving kindness to oneself, is so key – and where real humor is downright necessary because we bumbling human beings will muck up and the world, this existence, is so very, very deeply funny!! Where else do you have human beings seeking everything they already are?!

This post is not about never gossiping again (that’s like a post about being perfect – which is just unreal and not particularly human), this post is about awareness – and the more aware I am, the more painful it is, but the more I get to have choice about what it is I actually do and how I life and create the life I want – and love better the people I have in my life.

Also  – there are distinctions too – sometimes people just talk about other people, like “Hey, did you hear X got a new job?” Sometimes people are trying to work things out in their heads – I do this a lot. “X did this, and I can’t tell how I feel about it, or I don’t like it and here’s why.” There’s a healthy level of working out and attempting to understand our reactions to other people in the world around us. Talking about other people, mentioning other people’s names, discussing your reactions to them, can all be involved in but not equate to gossip and slander.

In talking about the things one wants to change, it is also helpful to remind both myself and any readers, with great compassion towards self and other, that any journey goes like this:

Autobiography in Five Chapters

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost . . . I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it’s a habit
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I walk around it

I walk down another street.

from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

A friend posted this on his blog today, citing research – “Our emotional tone or mood is defined by the number of positive versus negative moments experienced during the course of a day.” To those of us who study human interaction, it’s a no-brainer but it got me thinking about why I don’t enjoy being around snarky people.

In a conversation with someone, I learned that while on the one hand, I probably should get better at tolerating snark and pay more attention to people’s intentions, there’s a degree to which I also consider interpersonal snark incredibly unhealthy (as opposed to actually wit – or humor used as incisive commentary on issues).

As my awareness of this has grown, so has what I consider to be a great skill in friendship and relationships in general. Namely, I think actively cultivating a positive environment for the people around you is part of the whole practice of what it means to be a good friend (amongst many, many other things), partly also based on the reasearch of John Gottman on successful relationships.  It’s something to think about – the ability to be a good friend is a SKILL set that one can work on, and like all other skills, there’s a journey from incompetence to greater degrees of competence.  I also think that the simultaneous skill you have to grow is the skill around having difficult conversations – the yin side to the yang of radical acceptance.  The best friends I have not only radically accept and love me, but they also help me grow – and they do that partly by telling me the things I do that don’t work for them, and give me feedback and input in ways I can hear.

Gottman’s research on good relationships show that there’s a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions and that really healthy ones have something like 23:1 ratio – because when things go poorly, there’s a reservoir, like a bank account, to draw on.  Even a 1:1 ratio doesn’t work so well because we take in negative more harshly than we do positive. (I’m drawing these numbers from my head – it’s been a few months since I last looked at Gottman.)

I also think it’s worth thinking about that men whose best friends cheat are 70% more likely to cheat themselves – which leads to the research that who you have around you DOES influence who you are and how you show up in the world. There are then two choices you have at the individual level – what kind of friend you are choosing to be and who you choose to surround yourself by.

I like to be around people who help me evoke my best self – and who see me, for all of who I am, at my best and my most challenged places. I’ve discovered that when I’m around people who behave in ways I don’t admire – I am more likely to behave in ways I don’t admire. Clearly there’s some inner work that needs to be done there, and step one would be exercising my abilities of choice – to not do same actions, and secondly, to make different choices about who I spend my time with.

I feel unsafe being around people who shred other people to make themselves feel better because of the extraordinarily high likelihood that they’re doing that behind my back to me. One of the things in learning about human trafficking is that johns believe that money exchanged nullifies the harm done. It doesn’t, but I was caught by the languaging because people think intentions nullifies the harm done. I would argue that intention at best mitigates it, like a harmful action done from a loving place is a different circumstance than a harmful action done out of spite, but nonetheless, mitigation is different than eradication.

I steamrollered my little sister on a decision recently. I meant well. But it doesn’t excuse my neglect of her feelings. Should I be judged on action or intention? Both – but not one to the exclusion of the other – and really, what I was ashamed of was my action, not my intention.

I would also comment that we live in a pretty armored society so it’s easy to dismiss the “small” stuff – but I would also say that people are by and large unaware of the accumulation of harm and only by starting to pay attention to the small interactions does awareness grow.

The best part of this, by the way, is that being with friend who I can relax with and also stretch me is that it’s just darned fun and becomes this completely awesome feedback positive spiral rather than a negative one. And when the negative stuff comes up, as it will, there is an increased ability to deal with it and an increased capacity to handle it – so it goes back to being  a no-brainer win!  The choice of self-work isn’t the choice to just make me happier – it grows my capacity to be a better friend too – another win! (As someone from ISE quoted someone else famous, you don’t do self work to save the world – you do it to save the world from you!)  And the last point – all of this takes constant practice of being in relationship – whether with Toben, family, friends, my mother, my clients, my colleagues, etc. so I’m never perfect at any of these – but it’s one of the core things I think are worth striving for because, to quote Mary Oliver, at the end of my life, I don’t want to end having simply visited this world.

Change shows up in remarkable, smallish, but really significant ways sometimes.

Toben is driving us home from pre-Christmas shopping, and this old guy in a Mercedes swerves into our lane, nearly hitting us and totally cutting us off.

Anyone who’s ever been in a car with Toben knows full well what a typical reaction is.

Post-Hoffman-retreat Toben is mellow and, despite honking at the guy, says in response to my look of astonished shock at his lack of swearing or otherwise typical reaction, “I still think he’s a terrible driver but my getting upset is not going to change that.” And then he says, “My heartrate is still up, but that’s mainly ’cause I want to protect my sweetie.”

At the weekend facilitator WIM (Stanford’s Women in Management) retreat a few weeks ago, our teacher read us this:

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

-          Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”

I included it in a recent letter I wrote to Toben, because it captures for me some of the reason to be in relationship in the first place. For some posterity context, I’ve been in Egypt and he’s been at a retreat, so I write this in the remarkable absence of his presence – remarkable for how keenly I’ve felt it and the opportunity it’s given me to feel that.

For me, partnership is not really to assuage loneliness – though it serves some of that purpose – because loneliness exists sometimes most keenly in a dyad or a crowd. The delusion of loneliness is such an inherent part of our existence that love sometimes temporarily banishes a sense of it, but sometimes also throws it into stark relief. (I use the word “delusion”, not because the experience of loneliness isn’t real and doesn’t have its own very profound truths in it – but because the poet Jennifer Welwood said it so well that “willing to experience aloneness, I discover connection everywhere”, and the discovery isn’t an intellectual one of finding it with specific other human beings but the literality of our innate connection to everything. Full text of her poem included below.) I think those who seek partnership to escape their own aloneness, which really all of us do, discover all the whacked ways that it doesn’t. I could write a whole essay on the relationships that arise from this, but that’s a different blog post.

I think it’s frankly easier to be single. There are fewer other preferences or considerations to take into account. Being in a relationship means that there is someone in every day  interaction with who will hold up a mirror to best and worst parts of me, whether I’m willing to see it or not. Even in his absence, since I’ve not seen Toben for almost 3 weeks and am missing him terribly, I get to experience the tumult of emotions that give me data about myself, how I see the world, how I see him. I see the places where I find myself not as secure as I’d like or can externally project, and I see the places where his presence really enhances my life, and I see some of the parts of myself that are ungiven. Whether or not he’s physically around, I’m still in a relationship with him – admittedly as much with the image I have of him in my head in his absence in the realm of thought.

To descend another level, into the felt sense, I also am in relationship with the essence of who he is. My fingers just stopped on the keyboard for awhile. There aren’t really words for that.

Refining the truths we tell each other indeed…

I’ve just come to my own ending. I thought I had a point to this blog post. I have an internal sense of closure on my writing, while my critical writer has failed to see the point articulated – probably ’cause it’s not in the words. Oh, well.

Here’s the Jennifer Wellwood poem. I like it because it reminds me of something I said at dinner a couple of nights ago to friends, that my life became so much more full once I stopped pursuing happiness. Happiness flees in the direct pursuit of it, and it has been the welcoming of suffering, and even loneliness that have shaped me. The latter is a tug of war – I’d like to welcome all the experiences, but it’s an ongoing and necessary and painful practice. :p

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed…