May I Have Your Attention Please? This is the Universe Speaking.

Ignoring its previous, more subtle nudges to "slow down," lately the Universe has called out the big dogs in an effort to get my attention.  To wit, I find myself with an injured foot that has left me limping (the second injury to the same foot in six months); the receipt last week of a whopping ticket for driving 23 miles over the speed limit on my way to Bristol, Virginia to visit my parents; the return of my ulcer; and to add insult to injury, the removal of a basal cell carcinoma from my neck a few days ago.  (Not sure how that last is connected to the previous three, but I thought I would throw it in for good measure.)  And then there are the continuing dramas on the work and daughter fronts, respectively.  An unexpected incident in Bristol, however, might have marked a turning point.

For at least a decade, I have been curious about a little store located on Old Abingdon Highway about a mile from my parents' home.  On this recent visit, I finally ventured into Gwen's Herb Shop, which I learned has been in business at that location for 21 years.  There I met Gwen and her daughter, both master herbalists.  The store itself was not the dark and dank health food store, circa 1978, that I expected, but a brightly lit, relatively sparse, and highly organized space stocking only the highest quality herbal and nutritional supplements.  No stranger to the world of herbal and nutritional supplements (I was an early and continuing aficionada and familiar of those aforementioned dark and dank health food co-ops and stores), I immediately plucked a few items off of the shelves, at which point Gwen, a pleasant looking woman about 10 years older than me, approached and asked if I needed assistance.  Although I initially brushed her off, there was something about her energy that made me slow down, actually look at her, and then admit that I was looking for products along the lines of ones I was using already with only partial success, for both sleep and digestive issues.  She asked me if she could do a brief "assessment" to see whether, in fact, I could benefit from the items I had already selected.  The assessment involved asking me some questions, and then engaging in some "exercises" involving my placing one hand on a certain part of my body and then Gwen applying gentle and unobtrusive force and/or pressure to my other hand, which I was to resist.  I should emphasize that she asked permission at all times to touch me and even then, her touch was respectful and unobtrusive.  After about 15 minutes of this exercise, she told me that my insomnia was not related to any underlying sleep disorder, but rather to stress and anxiety.  As a result, the supplements I was already taking (and was about to purchase again) were likely insufficient if not ineffective.   She also told me I had an ulcer, which I suspected had returned but was still in partial denial about.  I would have blown this off had she not pointed to the exact spot where it was diagnosed,about a year ago.  Now, that diagnosis involved numerous doctor and specialist examinations, a CT scan, a colonoscopy, and finally an endoscopy before the physicians involved could identify where the ulcer was located.  In 15 minutes Gwen nailed it.  I left with two bottles of herbal supplements (both, I might add, priced lower than what I had initially selected) which seem to be helping, even after only a week.

While this interesting visit to Gwen's was only the last in a series of incidents reminding me to take things in my life down a few notches, for some reason I left that little shop with a commitment to start managing more effectively the stress in my life.  Unfortunately, I cannot yet retire and I likely have a year or so to go before the mother-daughter complex releases me from its stranglehold, but one thing I can do is resume my meditation practice.  After about 18 months of near-daily practice, for some inexplicable reason, about six months ago I  stopped meditating.  Just stopped one day; there was no gradual sloughing off.  It had begun to seem like one more thing I "had" to fit into my day.  Moreover, I did not seem to be mastering it.  I still spent the vast majority of the 20 minutes I allotted to the practice thinking of how my knee hurt, what I was going to make for dinner, or how often and in what manner my boss had pushed me over edge at work that day.  As a type-A personality, I do not like to engage in activities that I cannot master.  This week, though, as I recommenced my practice, I decided to approach it differently.  That is, I would not expect myself to achieve, in the time allotted, a complete focus on my breath with its concomitant emptying of the mind.  Rather, I would approach it for what it really was:  practice.  Practice, that is, in gently leading my mind, as every 2-3 seconds it raced away from my breath to the ten million distractions that bounced off of the walls of my brain, back to the breath.  To repeat:  the new emphasis would be on the exercise of continually bringing my focus back to the breath, and not on remaining focused on the breath. The latter, I seem to only now be grasping, is an exercise in self-defeating futility, at least for a novice like me.  Having given myself permission not to be "good" at this meditation thing, I am hopeful that I might be able to plumb its depths more effectively.  We'll see. 

The Moon and Her Mother

Another Aesop fable:  The Moon and Her Mother.  I find myself obsessed with them all lately.   

The moon once begged her mother to make her a gown.  "How can I? replied she; "there's no fitting your figure.  At one time you're a new moon, and at another you're a full moon; and between whiles you're neither one nor the other."


This could not be a more fitting fable to read as I struggle through a period of time, dragging into week three here, where my daughter and I remain at loggerheads over seemingly idiotic issues.  I am experienced enough as a woman and a mother to see beneath the outer drama to what is really going down, but it doesn't make it any easier to endure or resolve.  My patience is worn thin even as my heart is aching to connect with this complex, precious young woman.  I am hopeful that with the dark moon tomorrow night, our turmoil will also recede so that we can emerge into a different, lighter place with the new moon on Saturday night. 

Chodesh tov, my beloved daughter. 

Of Moles and Mystics

This past week has been one of the worst in recent memory.  It brings to mind a story in Aesop's fables about a young mole who went to his mother and told her he could see.  Now, as most people know, sight is something traditionally lacking in moles.  This mole's mother decided to test him.  She placed in front of him a piece of frankincense, and asked him what it was.

"A stone," replied the little mole.

"Not only are you blind," his mother answered, "but you have lost your sense of smell as well."

As a symbol of my own psychic momentum, the little mole, both blind and without a sense of smell, would seem to aptly describe my inability of late to effectively navigate my world.  The following is a brief but not exhaustive list of the struggles that have managed to undo me this week:  yet another tiresome, inconvenient snowstorm; mounting frustrations at work; the seeming ephemerality of what I thought was a solid, life-long friendship; a stubbornly oppositional 17-year old daughter; a (hopefully) minor health issue; and most prominently, standing (figuratively and, as often as possible, literally) next to one of my oldest, dearest friends and watching in horror as her partner, an intelligent, kind, and gentle man of only 50, teeters over the abyss of advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer.  If the little mole is a symbol of my own inner potentiality, this week mine is decidedly retrograde. 

What did manage to ground me somewhat this week, if not lift my spirits very much, was a return to the rich, potent work of the Nobel Prize (Literature) winning writer Doris Lessing.  A chance remark about Lessing by a woman I met in Jamaica led me to order a rare book of interviews, Putting The Questions Differently:  Interviews with Doris Lessing (1964-1994), which in turn led me to an unread novel of hers already on my bookshelves, The Marriages of  Zones Three, Four, and Five.  I finished both in a few days time.  I am also currently listening to an Audible version of The Good Terrorist, so my Lessing immersion this week has been intense.  While I have read most of Lessing's prolific output--starting in my early 20's and ongoing--there are a few treasures that still await me, as these latest reads proved.   Lessing doesn't mince words and she doesn't suffer fools, so while reading her did not have a palliative effect, her brilliance and intellectuality at least distracted me from my own petty woes for a bit. 

What was intensely interesting to learn, especially from the Interviews and the Marriages novel, was the enormous influence Lessing's study of and immersion in Sufism had on her writing.  I know nothing about Sufis but the Interviews led me to another book, The Sufis, which I just started, by the Sufi Master Idries Shah, who Lessing studied with in the 1960's.  Which brings me full circle, because that book opens with a brief meditation on why Sufis consider the fabulist, Aesop, a Sufi Master in his own right.  I love Aesop, and recently heard the mole fable, narrated above, on a BBC podcast I follow (In Our Time).  So, while many of the dots of my life are not connecting this week, it is, somehow, compensatory and gratifying that my reading dots, at least, are. 

Ithaca or What Comes Next?

 

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would never have taken the road.

But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.

With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience

you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

 

 

This poem of the modern Greek poet Cavafy is one of my favorites; I printed it years ago and it remains posted on the bulletin board over my desk at the office.  The city of Ithaca is both the place of departure and the goal of that prototypical wanderer in all of us, Odysseus.  In the poem, Cavafy warns Odysseus to pray that his road be long, his adventures many and, perhaps most importantly, not to rush the return journey.  The stanza above is a further warning to Odysseus not to return with concretized expectations about what he will find when he finally pulls into the harbor of his homeland.  In short, the poem tells us that perhaps the goal of the journey was the journey itself.   

 

Likewise, as I scan the horizon of my impending retirement, and as I consider the recent retirement of one of my oldest friends (shout out to Sandra!), I find myself meditating on what the journey has been all about, what expectations I am clinging to regarding what retirement will look like when I finally land on its shores, and perhaps most importantly, what arrival at the actual destination of retirement will bring.  An extended dream vacation?  A late life crisis?  The time and energy for more meaningful endeavors?  Depression stemming from the recognition that the incoming tide might, on any given day, bring illness and even death, at a time when I envision only freedom? 

 

Let's face it:  for those of us who are looking at retiring near or at the age of 60 or thereafter, the journey of retirement is simultaneously the journey into our old age.  While I have devoted much time and psychic energy in the past couple of years or so to planning--psychologically, financially, and spiritually--for my retirement, I recognize that retirement signifies not the end of the journey, but the start of a new leg of the journey.  Yes, I will take time to celebrate having made it through Dante's dark woods of midlife, and I will certainly take the time to decompress and reorient my energies.  But then the work must resume.  For me, that will involve letting go of my identification with the successes of my career, letting go of my children (a tough one that), and devoting serious time to the odyssey of my own creativity. 

 

Most importantly, however, will be accepting the mystery inherent in the journey to come.  I am re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  In exploring mystery as it is involved in different ways of seeing, Dillard writes the following:  

 

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . .  "Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

 

Grappling with the mystery, for me, means continuing to take responsibility for myself and recognizing that whatever path I take, the one taken by others is not necessarily for me.  This, in turn, means truly grasping and living the reality that what I am ultimately seeking lies within, not outside of me.  As the Grail legend admonished, it is "a shameful thing to take the path others have trod." 

 

 



The Virtue of Vulnerability

After an incredibly productive morning working from home yesterday (the world, upon awakening, was a sheet of ice here in the D.C. region after 18 hours of sleet and freezing rain), I ventured out mid-day for a brisk walk in the strong sun, rapidly melting sidewalks, and relatively mild temperatures (low 40s).  Plugged into one of my favorite podcasts, On Being, I listened to the unedited interview with Brene Brown, broadcast a few weeks ago.  Brown is a research professor and writer, most recently focusing on the gifts inherent in vulnerability and imperfection.  As usual, I was feeling validated and slightly superior because of the prodigious, high quality work product I consistently churn out (in the morning's case, I had just finalized a lengthy, sensitive, and particularly thorny report with the potential to dilute a politically motivated imbroglio).  The Brown interview, then, really pulled me up short. Speaking about herself, first, Brown proceeded to characterize as self-righteousness the following attributes:  perfectionism, judgment, exhaustion as a status symbol, and productivity as self-worth.  Moreover, she pointed out that these attributes do not induce creativity.  What?  But I'm zen.  I practice yoga.  I meditate.  I create art.  I have had years of therapy.  And, more importantly, I am a competent person who makes things happen in the world.  But the more I listened, the more I realized I was guilty as charged.  Interesting stuff that rocked my world a bit yesterday. I am not particularly in the mood for it after such a dark and dreary winter, but I guess it's back down into the underworld for me, to process this new insight. 

 

 

The Questionnaire

To be more specific, what I am referring to here is something called the Proust Questionnaire.  I recalled this questionnaire earlier this week, after my 17-year old daughter sent me a self-styled personal questionnaire (apparently there is an iPhone App for this), which she challenged me to take, to test how well I knew her (more about that, perhaps, in a later post).  As for the Proust Questionnaire, it refers to an English-language questionnaire given to the then-teenage Proust in the 1880s, by a friend.  It is the Victorian version of today’s personality tests, such as the one my daughter designed.  I decided to take the test.  Here are the results:

 

What is your greatest fear?  Even at the age of 56, I would have to say that my greatest fear continues to center on something dire happening to either of my children.  While it is always a parent’s atavistic fear that serious illness or premature death will strike their offspring, I somehow thought that, once I steered them through childhood without disaster striking, the intensity of this particular fear might abate somewhat.  While the specific contours have changed slightly, it seems as firmly entrenched as ever.  As a somewhat spiritually conscious individual, I recognize and accept that sickness and death are inevitable for all of us.  I even reluctantly acknowledge the existence of that most grotesque violation of the laws of nature, namely that children do not always survive their parents.   Nonetheless, this particular fear remains lodged like a cold, hard stone in the nethermost pit of my stomach. 

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?  The omnipresent feeling that no one else can do something as well or efficiently as I can, so I might as well just do it myself.  This attitude has not served me well in life.  It has often left me resentful of and impatient with others.  It has also left me feeling overwhelmed a lot of the time, as I do work or complete tasks that others could, in fact, do well enough, if not exactly as I would do them.  And, I would wager, it has rendered me intolerable—whether as a colleague, parent, or partner—to others on more than one occasion!

What is your favorite journey?  The annual pilgrimage my husband and I make to Jamaica has become my favorite physical journey, while my vivid, nocturnal dream life continues to be my favorite metaphysical journey. 

On what occasion do you lie?  At this point in my life, I consider myself an intrinsically honest person except when it comes to social niceties.  I confess to committing, not infrequently, the venial sin of the social white lie.  That said, I try never to lie in my personal and professional relationships.  I have done so in the past, and the results were always disastrous.  This was a hard-won lesson. 

What do you dislike most about your appearance?  Ignoring for the moment the parade of horrors that ageing presents in the mirror most mornings, my skin has plagued me most of my life.  Even though the ravages of acne are long past, and the scars no longer visible, the psychological scars, I fear, are permanent.  Not even the specter of wrinkles and sagging skin can send me spinning into total despair the way the ten or more years, in my teens and early twenties, serious acne could and did.  Thank God for Accutane, that little of shop of horrors in its own right. 

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?  My friends and acquaintances who consider me unnecessarily (and not, I might add, amusingly) pedantic might have quite a long list, but I myself am aware that I often preface comments, stories, anecdotes, etc. with the phrase:  “It’s interesting . . . .”  I try to catch myself when I am about to say this, recognizing fully that what I am about to say might not really be all that interesting to the listener, but nine out of ten times it slips out before I can withhold it.  It’s more of a nervous tic than a self-serving description of what I am about to say. 

When and where were you happiest?  I can only hope my husband and children are not offended by this, but in all honesty I am most happy when I am alone, reading or studying something that I find enthralling, and am able, however temporarily, to absorb myself entirely with what is before me to the exclusion of all my quotidian or larger concerns and commitments.  As an example, I can recall in particular a period of time in the early 1980s when I lived in Richmond, VA and was engrossed in my first reading of Remembrance of Things Past.  I worked all day, went for a run after work, and then 2-3 nights a week had dinner alone, at the long-defunct Grace Place on Grace Street, where I read Proust for an hour.  An idyllic setting (either indoors or during nice weather, on the outdoor patio behind the restaurant), a fabulous vegetarian meal, and my complete absorption in the magnificent, majestic world of ROTP all amounted to a little slice of heaven. 

What talent would you most like to have?  I have always marveled at musical talent.  I never learned to play an instrument and there is something about the idea of musical composition that eludes me entirely.  I have enormous awe and respect for musicians.  While I do not feel incomplete without this talent, I have often speculated that musicians have access to a spiritual or psychic dimension that precludes entry to non-musicians. 

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?  Like Lot’s wife, I find myself looking back when I know good and well I should not.  This results in lots of “would haves, could haves, should haves.”  Likewise, I worry a lot about the future.  Despite my 30+ years practicing yoga, I find it a daily struggle to live in the present. 

What is your most treasured possession?  This is a tough one, but if I had to say, my paternal grandmother’s small, dangling, diamond earrings might top the list.  These are not at all valuable, but they are simple, elegant, and I never put them on without immediately feeling my Nanny’s presence around me.  Very cool. 

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?  Those instances when I am, or imagine I am, estranged from someone I love. 

Where would you like to live?  Good question, but one that remains open at the moment.  This is a work in progress, so I will abstain at this time.

What is your favorite occupation?  No surprise here, but that would be reading, hands down.  Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, anything really.  There simply are not enough hours in the day. 

What is your most marked characteristic? At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would have to say earnestness.  While I have, since childhood, been frequently accused of being “too serious” a person, I prefer to view myself as my beloved, late Uncle John did (or so he told me), as “intensely earnest.”  To a fault perhaps, but there it is. 

Who is your favorite hero(ine) of fiction?  Clarissa Dalloway.  I have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway three times, and she resonates with me more with each reading.  My 2014 re-reading was especially resonant because at 56, I was finally the same age as Clarissa is on the June day on which the novel takes place.  Woolf’s depiction of Clarissa is so brilliantly conceived, so thoroughly dimensioned, and so absolutely documented, that I can relate to all of Clarissa’s ambiguities, whether they relate to class, friendship, motherhood, marriage, or sexual orientation.  She incarnates womanhood in all of its strengths and weaknesses.