perhaps floating is the main thing
When we launched our canoes into the Little Niangua River, we had to paddle to scooch across the first pond below the bridge, but fairly soon the paddling quit.
Looking ahead we could see the water sloping downward. Like a flat table, tipped, like a slide sloped, the water angled down from us and around a bend.
The front of the canoe was now lower than the back, and we sped down the river quickly now, with little effort, silently and smoothly slipping along the surface.
It was a soft, slippery, smooth run down through the green trees along both banks. We quit paddling; we ran fast.
Then the river turned and in the corner we sped up even more. The smooth water ran rough here; the canoe suddenly scraped the bottom, aluminum grinding on pebbles, and then we wacked the paddles into the water hard to scoot on through the turn and avoid smacking into the bank.
Out onto another smooth pond we glided, and we there we returned to dipping our paddles gently into the water again to propel the canoes along.
Slop, slide, slop, slide — with a familiar and constant rhythm we made our way through forested turns, past old, dead logs, along grassy, green banks shaded over with drooping bows.
Paddle, float, paddle, float, paddle float – life has a pattern running through it, a smooth and rough, a smooth and rough, smooth and rough, float and paddle, float and paddle, float and paddle.
I am noticing something. I think that maybe many of us tend toward paddling too much.
We tend to push. We fixate on the rush. We power forward. We compete. We seemed to have an anxious, urgent need to get there.
But … I think that perhaps getting there is over-rated, especially when we don’t really know where “there” is.
Perhaps enjoying the paddle is the main thing, and floating, down the so very nicely prepared slopes, the main thing.
i wish you confidence
At that moment, the main thing I felt was fear, but I also knew I wanted to do it anyway. Something inside of me was pushing me, hard. ”Step up now,” a voice inside of me said fiercely to me, “and say it.”
I raised my hand, and then I spoke for maybe 17.4 quivering, stammering, but nicely contributing seconds. I was aware of each tenth of a second. When I got done, I was all shaky inside.
That night, after the group ended, someone told me that they liked what I had said. Nice. I hope so; it cost me.
It’s stressful when the impulse to be quiet is fighting with the impulse to speak. It’s stressful being immature, plus shy to the fourth power, especially if you also want to be heard so much that you are willing to be scared shaky and yet still try. Between the ages of 18 and 28 shaky was common for me. On my way to getting to know myself, I experienced a lot of rattled. Many of us do.
During our figuring-it–out years, the years between child and adult, between immature and mature, between amateur and professional, many of us suffer from a significant and debilitating lack of confidence.
I remember that in high school I was afraid of girls. I adored girls, but from afar. I had no confidence around them. They had grown into something too beautiful, and I was unused to that. When they were little, we could play games together. I had some grade school friends who were girls, but when they and their kind got all perfect, I didn’t know how to reply to their amazingness. It took me quite a while to recover from their awesomeness.
The transitional years are often defined by insecurity with the gender we are not. We are trying to figure out how to relate to other newly remodeled creatures, to know what’s acceptable, when we are with them, what crosses the line, the line that is invisibly drawn in some unknown place that we don’t know how to find. And we massively struggle with what to do with our infatuations, crushes and transient moments of pure and true ephemeral love.
In high school I loved Linda, a cheerleader, but I didn’t know how to tell her. I smiled at her across the room, and I enjoyed the electrical shock therapy I received from her, but I couldn’t walk up to her and have a normal conversation. In the college years I think I was for a brief moment adored by Valerie, a tall, leggy beauty, but I was never quite sure, and I think she didn’t quite know how to alert me to the possibility of us. The not being sure if they love you, it can torture you – playground to grave.
It was the same with academia. Early in my education, I knew I wanted to be a writer, to say stuff, in the classroom and to the rest of the leaders of the world, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me. After all, I had no manuscripts, and I had no adoring readers. I wrote a poem in grade school. I still have it. At the university, I wanted to step up and to enter the conversation, the centuries old discussion about the great ideas, but I didn’t because Shakespeare, Hegel, Plato and my literature and history professors were over-wowing me everyday.
Those of us who want to be included in the conversation, those of us who even want to go to the front of the room before we know what it feels like up there or what a leader is, we suffer. The want-a-be-contributors take it on their aspiring chins. Those of us who feel like we can be more but have never proven it — we eat it until we become the more within the less of the very us.
Hard — this was hard. There was no small amount of awkwardness and a truck load of social pain in my years of low confidence, and that pain lasted a good ten years, even, to some degree, ten more.
Why? Why do we suffer in the becoming years?
For one, it’s all the new stuff. New stuff makes newbies feel incompetent, and a bit of aloneness can pile in on us during those years. We keep graduating, into new levels, new roles, new kinds of relationships. We are incompetent transitioners because we are semi-incompetent in each new place, and also because sometimes we are too much alone when working out all the new stuff.
Between 18 and 28 or 35 or 43, or somewhere down the road, most everything turns into something new and perhaps a bit isolating for most all of us At 18, I moved out of my family home. It was new to go it on my own, to make dinner, to pay the bills, to not have a family to hang out with in the evening. I was lonely and couldn’t even admit that. There was no new safe place once my parents stopped parenting me. They wanted to stop, and I wanted them to stop, but that meant that I was navigating the new while newly alone.
Neo-solo isn’t confidence building.
I went off to college to study literature, philosophy, psychology, history and linguistics. There were suddenly new concepts, new world views, new ways of thinking which resulted in new excitement for learning and some new confusions. I found a new form of lostness, in ideas.
Plato’s Republic got me to questioning the Biblical world view that I grew up with. What was the ideal society made out of? I didn’t know, but now I knew there were options to the monolithic view I was handed as a child.
In my becoming years, I took new jobs. Every new job put me in the role of the fumbling beginner. I became a janitor. That didn’t turn out well. My boss fired me for not having a good attitude. I didn’t have a good attitude. A good attitude while vacuuming was new to me. I hadn’t always done my chores at home with a good attitude. I also worked building a freeway. I didn’t get fired from doing that. That job paid my first year’s college tuition, but it had some sucky working conditions, like moving every time we finished a new stretch of road.
Really, that’s what the transition years are all about, moving. We keep moving, while we build the highway that we will spend the rest of our lives driving on.
During the schooling years, I worked as a grocery store box boy, I shelved books in a library. Every job, every new social part to play brought its own social challenges. I became a part of a church; I met a bunch of cute girls; I survived them telling me that they liked me when I didn’t like them the way they liked me, That was awkward.
I found the right cute one that I liked, but she liked someone else. That was awkward, but after a bunch of drama I got past her awesomeness and saw her personhood, and we fell in love so hard that we got married.
Wow! My transition years didn’t flow; they bumped along, they pounded down the road, they careened into the ditch and they bounced back on to the highway, spun around and set me headed in the opposite direction. I brutally pounded and spun my way toward maturity.
Right when I got married, I began a career as a teacher, the front-of-the-room guy who I always kind of wanted to be. It threw me into a total nervous disarray. To stand in front of five classes everyday, to have a conversation with a whole room full of people, all day, it made my stomach hurt.
What can we do, to grow into our own skin, to become more confident, to grow into a professional status? I have some ideas, from my experiences.
I am no longer new or in the grip of the new as much as before. In fact, I am in a second career now, and my daughters themselves are in the transition zone. I have learned just a few things, and they make me want to help a little, because I know what it is like to move toward maturity, and move again while experiencing low self-confidence.
Here it is. Do this, my young friends, to get through it. I urge you to rush down the pipe, and kick down the door. Knock the steel door off its hinges and jump head-long into the sea of things that are in your hearts to do. Do this. Do the very things that make you feel incompetent. Try to be the thing you want and need to be even when you won’t immediately be successful at being it.
And if you can’t do that, if what you try is not your thing, if it is not within where you are going or really can go, then you will find that out by trying. If you do learn that something good is not your good something, then you must have the courage to drop it and move on to the next good thing.
I always wanted to be a musician. I practiced and practiced the guitar. It was not my thing, and I learned from playing the guitar, to put it down. I still play, for fun, on the side, very minor, so that I can major in the major things that I do much better than playing the guitar.
That’s the thing, finding what you it feels like you were meant to do. And then, if it is in your heart, and within your reaching grasp too, and it is going to be your thing, then you must rush it. You must raise your hand and speak to the group even while you are shaking inside with insecurity.
If it is in your DNA of aspiration and ability, then you must walk to the front of the room, and stand and play the part of the teacher or leader while all the time thinking that you are perhaps a total fake and that everyone watching knows it, but of course they really don’t, and of course you really aren’t. I know. I did it. Pretending to be something is the first step toward becoming it.
And about the girl-boy thing, there you must learn to be brave and to tell awesome girls and totally cool boys that you love them when you do, or to sometimes tell them not. You must sometimes tell them not when you can discern that they don’t and won’t reciprocate. Then you will protect yourselves from that completely unnerving experience of unrequited love. You must learn when and when not, and when “when” is the most important unknown factor in the when-and-when-not social equation.
It comes down ro this regarding the confidence factor and confidence-building-type-things.
Do what you need to do today and you will become more confident tomorrow. Experience is the fastest road to get to the that very cool place that we called confidence. Your personal insecurity is bested when you are willing to be insecure in order to become more secure.
And one warning. Doing nothing for too long may lead to being nothing for a long time.
If you are afraid to become what you want to become then I urge you to do the opposite of what your fear is telling you to do.
Go for it, because I wish you, my lovelies, my beautifully insecure and shaky road makers — more confidence.
Mind the Gap
In the National Gallery in London Pierre-August Renoir’s “The Skiff” lights up the room. I am falling in love with it a little more every minute, and I can’t understand why someone put it in a small corner.
It overwhelms the space it is in. The green grass jumping up out of the lake in the foreground, the sparkling blues blue water grabbing the sunshine out of the sky, the women in the white dresses calm in the middle of the burning orange skiff.
It is the orange that gets to me, the orange, very, very orange skiff, I can’t get over the orange skiff – all that warmth absolutely dominating the blue lake, leaking off the canvass and banishing the picture frame, the museum wall, the museum floor, and the whole of the room we sit in. I can’t see anything but orange. I am totally smitten by incandescent orange paint. I can’t stop ogling it.
The women in the painting are so calm. One is reading, the other is sitting and rowing so casually. They seem so un-startled, so undisturbed, much like the people around me in the museum, shockingly respectful and settled.
But I am not so calm! I don’t know what to do. Perhaps I should stay right here on this bench for a long time looking and pulsating. I will; I am deciding right now to eat here tonight, and then sleep here. Now I am deciding not to. It won’t work; this Renoir won’t stop glowing, like a fire, and it won’t go down, like the sun. If I stay, it will be too bright to get any rest at all.
I won’t stay, but I will stare. At the bottom edge of the skiff I can see that the orange is coming off of the wood, and it is getting in the blue water. Renoir let it can away from him. The orange paint is jumping around in the ripples of the water that are coming off of the boat. The orange paint is getting all over the blue paint, taking over the gap between the boat and the lake. I can’t stop smiling. I like it that the orange has taken this step, has crossed over, has created an interface, has made this transition.
We leave the National Gallery. We get on the tube to ride through London to our refuge in West Finchley, our suburban home away from home that is housing our stay. We stand in the isle of the train because there isn’t enough room to sit down. A bell rings. The electric doors whoosh closed, and off we whir into the tunnel, rushing madly beneath the streets of London. We come to another station, we slow, then stop. The train doors open, and a woman’s voice, very British, says, “Mind the gap between the train and the platform.” We get off.
We mind the gap.
We always do, or not, depending on how well we are doing.
I love the gap. I love the people in the gap. I love young people crossing the gap between their immaturity and their maturity. I love me, crossing the gap into the next stage of life.
The spaces that exist between are always the most interesting, where the boat meets the water, where the blue meets the orange, where the train meets the platform – interesting, disturbing, transitional, difficult, formative, painfully beautiful.
Take the gap between childhood and adulthood — wow and superwow! This transition shapes the rest of life. To get out of the boat, to step across gap, to bring one’s babyhood, ones adolescence, ones teenafication, one’s “becoming” into ones “I have become, “ to splash the colors from one place into another, this is at the core of the very core of every rippling and transforming identity.
What is this thing, this growing up? What are the paint strokes that get us across the gap? How do we paint the immature past into the mature present?
I’m not always sure, but here are a few of the brush stokes that may need to be mastered to paint across the gap:
We must overcome the fear that makes us not want move our brushes beyond what we have known before, or beyond what others like us have done.
We must come to relate to the people in the boat, wisely, and not sit when they are sitting if standing is what we really want to do, or we must just jump, out of the boat, and into the orange water if really that is the only thing to be done when we are so ready for change that sitting doesn’t work for us anymore.
We must learn, must we not, when not to judge but still to discern what is right and what is flat-out, dead wrong for us, even if not for everyone else.
We must try, and test and test again, our limits, when one more, or one is less, or one is one too many, or too few or just right, if you know what I mean.
We must grow in confidence, to splash paint, from the boat to the water and on to the sky.
And what else?
What else must we do to get across the gap?
Tell me, so at the very least it is out here, on the canvass, to deal with, to face, to enjoy, to revel in.
Voices
We need protection — from voices.
Two potentially harmful voices come to mind.
The first one is our own.
When I finished my first year of professional teaching, I said to myself, “I hate this! I feel like a failure. I want to quit.” My own voice didn’t offer good guidance. Fortunately my father, in a phone conversation about this, said to me, ”Now you know how your students feel. Many of them feel like failures. Now you know.”
That was a good voice, and I went on from there, following the leading of that voice to teach, until now, and I like it. When I finally do quit teaching, I think I’d like keep teaching, part-time — for fun!
My own voice was suspect. This is hardly rare. Most of us have experienced bad feedback, from ourselves, concerning ourselves.
Beware your own whining and sulking and quitting-talk.
The second kind of voice to avoid is the voice of the unwise family member or friend. Family members — they don’t always get us right. Over time they tend to stereotype us. ”Well she always has been a bit edgy, or sad or dominant or shy,” or whatever they come to label us. Others in the family, may concur, and the label may stick, when it shouldn’t.
Friends are often also unwise voices in our lives. In giving feedback, friends tend to simply project their own reactive, unresolved feelings onto our situations. We need to face this; most people aren’t great counselors. If they hate men, they hate our man. If they hate women, they hate our women. If they don’t resolve their own conflicts well, they won’t resolve ours well either.
What to do?
Pick mentors carefully.
Find people who have life experience, good and bad, people who have been able to resolve conflicts, who have learned something about healthy boundaries, who have had some long-lasting relationships, who have raised some kids (and the kids still love them), who have been successful in their careers but who have also gone through some career-hell and come out still feeling like life is some kind of heaven, who know something about God, something along the lines that God loves us and will never, ever stop loving us.
There are many voices. The world is full of talk. The deal is to learn which voices are safe and which ones aren’t, which voices to tune out, and which ones to listen to when we are losing our way a bit.
This is one of those things to figure out, to get right, to get a handle on, to give some time to.
The right voice, the right answer, the wise counsel – it’s beautiful!
It’s protection.
I’m Kicked Over in Love
I’m smack down, knock-you-out, beyond-the-stratosphere impressed.
I’m astonished beyond the extreme edge of sheer, blacked-out and totally demolishing astonishment.
I’m flat-out, heels over head, shot-into-space-to-the-edge-of-the-sun smitten.
There is no one anywhere, anytime or in any way like God!
There never has been nor ever will be anyone ever with such a flat-out, full-0n, incomparable graciousness. You and I and the rest of the universe will never meet anyone with such an over-the-top and completely loving intelligence.
God is beyond the ultimate expression of the beyond inside of the beyond of the very beyond.
God is crazy attractive. God has such a floor-you-and-pick-you-back-up charm, such a drop-dead-and-then-raise-you-from-the-dead beauty, such an ultra-extreme elegance beyond the silken edge of the finest elegance that I just cannot stop staring.
I saw this when I saw him best. It was at the moment that he approached me at my worst. I was kicked in, smashed up, beaten down and washed out. I was done. I was gone. I was finished.
And then God, the incredible God, scooped me up, held me close. God soothed and restored me, fueled and refreshed me and set me on my feet and gave me a gentle push back into the perfect opportunity he had prepared for me.
No one will take this away from me. Not my detractors, not my enemies and not the unseeing.
God, my God, rescued me, and I can’t get over it; I won’t get over it; and nothing in the future will get me over it.
God was, is and ever will be the first-place, top drawer, premium, upscale, top-of-the-line savior of the world.
God rescued me!
I love God!
The Past Will Set You Free
“I feel like I’ve wasted the last year,” she said, as she looked at me through the camera on her laptop.
“Perhaps not,” I said back.” She and I were miles apart, but it felt like we were close together. We had screen faces and screen smiles and screen delivered nuances of expression that helped us to speak freely.
“We learn from everything we go through,” I said. It sounded cliched. ”Now you know more about yourself and about the kind of relationship you want in the future. If you hadn’t gone through this then you wouldn’t understand yourself or other people as well as you do now.” That sounded better.
It was really not much me telling her that. My wife said something like that to me recently, and I was paraphrasing her, as I so often do. There is a significant advantage in being married to a smart women. Not long ago, I had bemoaned to my wife my regret over the emotionally difficult experience that I went through in switching jobs in 2008.
My wife had listened, and then responded. “It’s made you who you are.”
She got it right, as she usually does, and I liked it as I tried it on, for me, for my friends and everyone else.
“Hmm.” We may not like what we’ve been through and it may seem a loss, a waste, an unwanted detour, but that is not the only way to view our experience.
Every hard thing we go through has the potential to shape us, make us.
When someone has been hurtful to us, this might at first bury us, but then we might learn that we really don’t want to do something like that to anyone else. When someone has dominated us, we may learn something mean from this, how to dominate others, or we may learn a much better lesson — to not dominate others. When someone has not honored our emotions, we might learn that only some people are safely entrusted with our deepest emotions. When we have made a mistake, we may know not to make it again, maybe.
Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.
The past is a form of truth, so ”the past will set you free too,” if you can see the truth extruding out of it.
I am learning to make friends with my past. The past is my best friend. It has given me everything I now have. It has been my teacher. It has been my lover. The past has humbled me, and it has honored me. It has left me angry; it has also taken anger out of me. The past has shaped me into the me of the very me inside the core of the very me.
And lately, I am realizing that the past has turned me into the me that I am learning to treasure.
The Beginning of the End of Discrimination
Age.
Disability.
Ethnicity.
Gender.
Marital status.
National origin.
Race.
Religion.
Sexual orientation.
These are sometime the basis for unlawful, socially harmful discrimination.
I’ve been discriminated against. When I was a teacher, I remember one of my students looking me in the eye, glaring and saying, “You’re not capable of understanding.” Then I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of racism.
For me and for most of us, discrimination is something we think of other people doing. They are racists, bigots, fanatics, the unjust. But it is a symptom of the disease of unlawful or harmful discrimination not to see it in ourselves. With our “they” we poke out our own eyes.
To actually experience condescension in our own voices, say when speaking to a sixteen-year-old or an eighty-seven year old or a disabled person, is harder.
We may also experience it in our silence. I noticed at one point that I spoke less to my daughter’s friend who can’t speak, than to her other friends. Why? He can’t speak back, so I felt awkward. I decided to change. Why shouldn’t he receive my attention as much as any of her other friends. It’s been a nice change for me. I have my own “way” with him now. We laugh a lot, together.
I know a young woman who in her twenties looks ten years younger. When she asks for help while shopping for clothes, store clerks sometimes ask her where her mom is or direct her to the “younger department.” She knows what it’s like to experience age discrimination, and while one might easily defend the clerks as having no way of knowing, such situations bring to light how easily we slight others and don’t know it.
It’s subtle. I have felt a distancing going on in my mind as certain people have approached me. An observation of size or disability or age has sometimes shot a small dose of fear or repulsion into me. I hate having to admit this, but my first impressions have sometimes been based completely on superficial and automatic distinctions. And I don’t always catch on to the fact that I have done this.
Sometimes our racial or social distinctions seem to us to be wise notations of differences. We think of ourselves as understanding. We make a capability clarification or a role clarification; we see our discrimination as a necessity that reflects physical reality. “There are differences between men and women.” As such, our discrimination begin disguised as enlightenment.
I remember in my younger days thinking that I wouldn’t go to a church that was pastored by a woman. I based this on an interpretation of scripture. I based it on no experience. I had none. I based this on my own insecurity. I based this on what other men and women that I knew said they believed. Now I would gladly go to a church pastored by a woman, and now I can present a strong scriptural basis for this and now I am surrounded by other people who affirm this. It is so important to be able to change, to be able to shed former boxes of constricted and harmful thinking.
I have had to grow into the realization that different should not be disallowed. I have had to flight past social taboo and come out free to accept as women as equals and their contribution as enriching.
The truth is that we too often hide our “put downs” in religious mandates, governmental programs, institutional values and herd mentalities. “They can’t” or we “must not” or “God doesn’t want’” can be simply disguises for insecurity, fear and selfishness.
Discrimination often functions within social expectations and rules. It is better to hear than to sign. It is better to see than to be blind. It is better to be light-skinned than dark. It is better to be rich than poor. It is better to be educated than not.
What is needed is a definition of what it means to not discriminate.
To not discriminate is to experience someone different from you and to not see them as less than you.
To not discriminate is to hire a person who is in some way the opposite of you, and not compete with or intimidate that person. It is when an extroverted leader hires an introverted leader to enrich the emotional depth and quality of the organization.
To not discriminate is for a man to see a woman as his equal, fully empowered, taking her place in the family or the organization and being treated as in no way inferior or lesser or weaker or more emotional. It is for her not to be dominated and controlled or put in a limiting box.
To not discriminate is to treat the school smart daughter the same as the daughter who is in special education and to affirm them both, equally and to see that smart is not better it is just different and kind is not better either it is just a quality that some have more than others.
To not discriminate is to see a court case where the one charged is Hispanic and the one dead is black and to not see this as a brown versus black issue but a right or wrong issue that must be given a process that has as its goal the truth and justice and love.
The truth is that it is always a fight for the truth.
And the truth is that it is hard not to discriminate, that we all tend towards it, and that maturity and personal growth always involve movement toward loving other people more.
The beginning of the end of discrimination?
Think of it as something that you, not just “they” struggle with.
It’s Easter: It’s Nail Pulling Season
I slid the hammer under the nail in the cross and pulled. The claw slipped off the head of the nail and popped off.
The problem was that the last nail that I pulled was stuck in the claw and prevented the one I was trying to get from being hooked by the hammer claw.
I knocked the offending nail out of the claw and tried again. This time the nail popped out of the wood with a light rip and fell on the carpet. I thought about how much it would hurt if each of these nails had been pounded into my hands.
Pretty soon I had a pile of nails scattered on the floor and a clean cross with no nails in it.
Then I slid the big pieces of the cross over a supporting pole, and when the fifth piece clanked down on the fourth, there it was, a clean cross in an empty room, ready for Easter.
It’s a bit of work, getting nails out of crosses, and getting the stuff out that has been pounded into people too.
I got a really fun chance to talk to an amazing young women recently who has been pulling out nails.
At one point, after we’d gone back and forth a bit, she looked out at me from under her beautiful, dark makeup and smiled. Through her quick smile, her identity darted out into the room, then disappeared again behind her eye-liner.
“I don’t talk much,” she said.
I was pulling nails again.
I’ve thinking lately about how hard it is to extract feelings, especially the ones nailed into our psyche’s by other people’s bad choices, the feelings that feel like they were pounded into our flesh as we hung on a hard, wooden cross somebody else nailed us on.
Why does it take so much work to get a clean cross?
In the first place, it’s pretty hard to find someone who doesn’t pass the emotions we reveal to them through their own experiential grid. When they hear us, they hear themselves. Most people never, ever get beyond this. They don’t get us because they are always too busy getting themselves.
And if that didn’t make it hard enough, the total and almost complete inability of our kind to be objective, our understanding of someone else is always compounded by their confusion about who they are and all the misleading things they reveal about themselves.
When a person is extremely, horrifically angry, they most often present themselves with extreme composure covered by a lavish layer of deceptive, raging calm.
And when a person has a nail of abandonment pounded into their palms by an absentee parent, they most often lay very, very low in public.
And when they have the ring-shanked nail of family addiction pounded into their skulls, they usually walk around with a self-constructed shield of complete and absolute apparent normalcy.
When they have a spike of self-hatred in their own hearts, yet they eat dinner and take dessert with a smile too.
When a pike of confusion divides their opinions, they tend to make very strong statements of extreme conviction.
This is common. It breaks my heart, because this doesn’t work, at all, for anyone. Silence is not an effective strategy for living. An undisclosed life is not a good life. It’s a torment; it is a total emotional disaster, this remaining unknown to each other.
I’ve gotten to thinking about this.
After all, it’s Easter.
Think of it as nail pulling season.
Mud Puddle Theology
Last evening I spent a bit of time in a mud puddle in the middle of a dirt road. It was about six feet long, two feet wide, very muddy, with some green algae hanging around the edges. I peered in. One of the children on the other side of the pool scooped some dirty water out with a small, clear plastic container.
“Ah,” no exotic vernal pool species showed up, no fairy shrimp, only tadpoles about the size of short grain rice. Somebody else peering into the mud said cynically, “They probably won’t make it.” Life didn’t look promising here. There was no mesa mint blooming at the edge of the puddle, only some tiny brass buttons in the grass a few feet away.
So where were the shrimp? If they were around, then they were still in the hardpan below the water, in a cryptobiotic state. They have sensed – not enough water.
Cryptobiosis is the state of life entered by a oganism in response to adverse environmental conditions such as drying. In the cryptobiotic state, all metabolic procedures stop, preventing reproduction, development, and repair. An organism in a cryptobiotic state can essentially live indefinitely until environmental conditions return to being hospitable. When this occurs, the organism will return to its metabolic state of life as it was prior to the cryptobiosis.
Smart, those shrimp. They knew it hadn’t rained enough. They were hanging out cryptobiotically.
And the tadpoles, they had launched, optimistically, and they were frolicking in the vernal puddle, getting ready to become spadefoot toads. Rain is predicted for next weekend. It just might be enough to fill the puddle again, to give the tadpoles time.
I’m impressed. Tadpoles thrive in inhospitable places.
They had launched here, they had hatched with an expectation, with a kind of biological faith in their survival. And for the moment, they were powering their way up and down their muddy lake, gaining weight and strength.
I thought of us, the living, here in the puddle of our now. We too have launched. This is it. Our present puddle is our present place to paddle. We don’t have a choice to hang out cyrptobiotically and wait to become shrimp. This is our time.
Today we flip our fins through our own oddly chosen muddy creases in the earth and imagine ourselves someday getting out, onto land, and hopping off as spadefoots into the lovely brass buttons in the nearby grass.
What to do?
Flip.
Mud puddle theology: We are not shrimp in a cryptobiotic state.
Flip
Mud puddle theology: We did not make the puddle we paddle through.
Flip.
Muddle puddle theology: We do not know exactly when it will rain again and how much.
Flip.
Mud puddle theology: We have been given the power of movement.
Flip.
There is inside of us a kind of built-in hope for more rain.
Flip, hopefully.
Unbordering King Lear
When my mom got breast cancer, I unbordered.
She had a disfiguring surgery, and it marked a new era for her – me too. Only later did I come to understand her experience as an extremely difficult self-consciousness regarding her body, her clothing and her sense of female wholeness. But as a teenage boy, although I couldn’t understand her conflicted feelings, and she didn’t share them with me, as I sat with her by her bed we fused over pain. The suffering-her and the anxious-me met in a way we had not experienced since birth had separated us.
G.K. Chesterton has noted that “birth is as solemn a parting as death.” When we are born, we get our first lesson in not-being-someone-else. We experience our first unhooking, a primal, existential psyche detrailering. It’s a good thing.
When I was born I broke out of my mother, and the deep structure of my psyche must have shouted, ”I’m free!” But when she got cancer I returned to her, to an adult awareness of her, and I had the opportunity to enter the acutely poignant reality of her again. This happens. We have chances now and again to make such movements. Birthed into liberating independence, we can be wooed by difficulty back inside someone we love. When we go through pain, there is an opportunity to trailer back up. She had surgery; the cancer was removed, but something remained in me.
It’s odd how connecting with each other works out – and when. When I was in grade school my grandma on my mom’s side of the family came to live with us in our home near Warsaw, Missouri. It was a migration that would take her out of element in the Los Angles area and into mine. She was alone at that stage of her life, her husband having died, her children having all set up their own households. Landing in our house, she landed in a thoroughly mid-west, male world.
I remember two things about her stay with us: That she bought us our first TV, and that I clubbed her to the floor in the laundry room. She changed our world, and we rocked hers. The TV she gave us saved our family. We were transplanted Californians, lost and alone in rural Missouri, but we were saved through Gilligan and his island and Steve McGarrett and Dano and by the commercials where we learned what we really needed to thrive.
The TV was an efficacious means of salvation from the Baptist church we attended in Warsaw, but grandma’s clubbing was merely good fun. My brothers and I loved to whack each other, a punch on the arm, a toy gun war around the house, a generally good thumping with billy clubs. The clubs we made for ourselves by stuffing several socks inside one sock until we had nice long, hard slugging socks.
The day grandma went down, I was lying in wait for one of my brothers; grandma happened to slide open the pocket door that accessed the laundry room. I jumped out from behind the washer with the club already in motion; it landed smack on top of grandma’s little head, down she went. The apologies came next. Not too long after that, grandma moved back to California.
It wasn’t the only time my grandma had met family difficulty and had to move. My mom told me a while back that her mom was sexually abused as a child. It happened in this way; my grandma’s dad died when she was little, and her mom remarried, and her step-dad abused her.
“Really, mom?” I asked. “I never knew that! In our family — grandma was sexually abused? Wow!”
And after my mom told me this, and I knew it had happened, it crushed something in me, connecting me in some kind of bridging way to my grandma and giving me an option really, to think about and enter into a new conscious awareness of her.
My mom told me that afterwards my grandma was sent away to live with an aunt. I think of her now, our Nana, tiny like she was, when she was abused. I imagine her alone, confused and afraid afterwards, and I know she was, crying under her blankets in her dark bedroom – alone. And I wish I could have gone to her then, changed like I have changed now, changed by my own painful experiences into a more authentic self, into one who knows what to do with pain, and talked to her as if she were my little daughter — time and space swept aside for a moment – and me patting Nana on the back, this harmed little girl who was to become my mom’s mom and my very one-and-only Nana, and me putting my head beside hers like a real good dad would, in an appropriate unbordering of the self, and then breaking down with her, and saying to her with tears running out of my eyes and down my cheeks and onto her cheeks, ”What was done to you was so wrong. I’m so sorry it happened! Look at me, you didn’t do anything wrong! You didn’t do anything wrong! Something wrong was done to you. And it shouldn’t have been done, and I love you, and I am going to protect you now so that this bad thing never, ever happens to you again!”
Sticking to one’s own consciousness and harboring up within one’s own self is overrated. We cross over, at times, into someone else’s sacred space. In certain uninvited moments of life, we make this choice, when time and space allow, and as we can, and even when it doesn’t seem to be allowed, because who and what is allowed is what we choose.
And I wish I could have gone to her step-dad, and said what needed to be said to him too, in an emotionally controlled way, and then gone to other people who needed to look into this in some way that would set some boundaries up, and then I wish I could have taken my grandma away and found a loving place for her and said to her, “Now you are safe, and you are going to be okay, we are going to have someone talk to you about this and listen to you and help you be okay.”
My grandma eventually married a much older man than herself, whose first wife had died, and he was a very good man, and he had little girls that he protected and I think he gave her some of that, the place removed from harm for the wounded self to recover — and safety.
My grandma was abused when I was not yet a self, when I was still unborn, but now I am, and my consciousness of it connects me with my grandma, but not her to me because she’s gone now. The mental time-traveler’s option is to cross over the sacred border of the self and to trailer up with someone who isn’t even alive anymore, especially in a family. We do it all the time when we read biographies. In nooks and corners of our lives we can choose to live in broken-down sameness together for a short time.
This is my experience, and it is increasingly so as I age. Over time, I find my edges smearing, fuzzing and blurring. It’s been a slow but certain transformation.
When my daughter Rosalind was two we started on the flash cards. And we made Sesame Street a habit. She made good progress – “dog, cat, lion.” We played school. I loved teaching her. I read, read, read and read some more to her. I read “Little Chick,” over and over again. These were some really good times together. At this point in life, I was working as a high school literature and writing teacher, and my wife worked in a library. Our family loved a book shelf, a pile of books head high, a campus, a life of print, but then something happened to Rosalind, and we had to learn to not make that the standard by which we measured value.
One day, when Rosalind was one and one-half, she stopped breathing, turned blue, and started convulsing. It was a moment that I haven’t yet fully recovered from. You don’t get over such things; you just take shelter, and remain hyper-vigilant and take comfort where you can. The paramedics came to the house with a siren blasting, and we all rushed off to the hospital. The needle in Rosalind’s baby spine was a tough moment. You spend all your energy protecting your baby, and then you hold her so someone can hurt her. It doesn’t feel right.
The diagnoses came in turn and over the next few years. She has “febrile convulsions.” Then she has “epilepsy.” And eventually, we were told the kicker that we never thought we would hear. She has, “brain damage.” Finally, the label-verdict on how school would go was given by a neuro-psychologist after extensive testing: “She is retarded.” Bam, that label hurt, all of us, from grandma on down. And with the labels came the drugs, phenobarbitol, topamax, depakote – a sluggish life, lots of naps. I hated it, I still do, but I have learned to be okay with it, kind of, and not.
I know that as tightly as I’m woven by my opinions and experiences and choices into a unique and personal self, my psychic independence unravels at the unwanted threshold I passed over with my family.
One evening when Rosalind was in grade I went into her room. Her face was red and soaked with tears, and angry and hurt.
“What’s the matter?” I asked sitting on the edge of her bed and putting my hand to her head.
“Nothing,” she said angrily.
“No, something is wrong,” I said, “just tell me. I won’t be mad at you.”
“I’m stupid!” she blurted out. “I can’t read!”
I put my head down by hers. Her pain swept up out of her and into me. I started crying. We were like that for a moment, my sobs mixed up with hers. She hadn’t seen that so much. I a guy, touch, not given to excessive humidity, especially with others.
We were close like that for a moment, then Rosalind pushed my face back and looked into my eyes with profound puzzlement. She stared and asked, “Daddy, are you crying for me?” It was out. Our eyes were locked. Then she knew something she hadn’t known as well until then — she wasn’t alone.
I think again about my mom, my wife, my daughters my grandma, and I know and always have known, and will and always will come to times when my carefully stitched up edges unravel. It tends to be when I get close to the women in my life. I am autonomous, and yet with them, I am not, and now perhaps more so over time. I have leaky borders.
If I have to live alone someday, and I may, without wanting to, for instance if my wife dies before I do, I won’t like it, especially at night. I hate to sleep alone. And I hate to go through hard things alone.
Recently, I spent the morning with my wife. We painted our bedroom together, one wall a beautiful dark olive branch green. Painting together is not advisable early in a marriage, but after years together it can go well, evoking only a couple of testy moment for a mornings team work. One snarly incident occurred when I critiqued her work on the baseboard. She reminded me that she didn’t need or want my opinion.
At the end of the day, we sat together exhausted. I found myself shifting into my very familiar and personal I-am-with-her awareness. I unbordered, as I sometimes do, when I am very close to her, relaxing into her green tea perfume, the clean smell of her hair conditioner, the skin-on-skin tactility that feels so very safe and so extremely comforting.
I asked her only a short time back, in just such a bonded moment: “Am I you?” At the time, it seemed like the thing to say. It could have been meant romantically, but I was thinking about it epistemologically and she took it so.
“No,” she said firmly, and then threw down her own opinion on the ontological table. “Sometimes you edit my decisions too much and tell me what to do, and I don’t like it.” My wife went to Smart Mouth College.
She’s wrong, of course, as always, but right too. I am not her. I am an autonomous self, and yet I do cross over into her, and at times I can hardly tell myself from her or her from me. I like to think back over my life; it’s been a mix of coexistence and independence. I have known the ecstasy of escaping my mother, and I have known the ecstasy of merging with my wife.
These many years later, I can still see my mom sick with the cancer, lying in her dark bedroom as I hold her hand, and I can see my daughter crying alone in her room with me beside her, and see too my grandma sitting on a chair in a room that my grandpa is painting. My grandma is smiling at my grandpa, her house painter, the renewer of her own renewed spaces, her gift, her other self to shelter in. And, I can see my self too, sick with my last sickness perhaps, and my wife, my own adopted other self sitting on my bed and my beautiful daughter stroking my pale head.
How is it that a man might come to such places where he might untrailer from himself and hook on to another? It brings to mind, oddly enough, in the shifting range of reflection, Shakespeare’s King Lear raving in the storm. The old king, once perhaps loved just a little and perhaps able to give a little love, ends up on the on the heath with no love, all bordered and fenced within himself, screaming into the wind.
He had his chances, the old coot, with his three daughters, to cross over into them, but then in the process of his making his way through the transfer of power, they were lost to him, and crazy with pain he cries out, ”A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.”
And so I turn my no-eyed, other-seeing consciousness on the crazy king, the man of the moment who is not me and yet who is me, because we both know deep family pain, but I have lived and moved and had just a bit of my being in other persons. And I see Leer there alone in the rain, not yet ended, and I, his self-appointed fool, take him by the arm, this wacked out old king, and I lead him home with me, a piece of my own disturbed self, and I find a safe place for him within me, as if he were me.
I am capable of his foolishness, but I think I can help him, and so I take his arm, and I lead him to bed so that he might take a good, long therapeutic nap. And then I go and get his daughter Cordelia, so that he might wake to her, crossing over to him, and stroking his crazy old head sane again.
