One thing I love about you journal readers is that I can vacate for a while without having to make any kind of big to-do about it. I appreciate that kind of latitude.
I’ve been working a lot, and struggling to keep up with the mad pace of work a lot , which for this year includes a lot of planning for both Scarleteen and the FWHC job and dealing with a lot of adjustments and shifts. I’m also adding a few things to my load for the year: I recently accepted a position on the editorial board for the American Journal of Sexuality Education, I’m soon starting a Teen Talking Circle through CONNECT, I’m doing a bunch of travel for work which I’m usually more apt to decline. I’m also keeping up with the column over at RH Reality Check, and have a couple new pieces for various things I’m working on in fits and starts.
When it comes to my more personal stuff, I’ve been writing for myself or writing for, talking with — to a point of very intense immersion – the people the most close to me and the people I want to be closer to. I’ve been spending plenty of time with my piano and even the dulcimers now and then (ah, to have my hands work like they used to: it’s a pity fingerpicking hurts like a bitch so much anymore), reading, meditating, taking long walks. I took a break from my camera for a bit there, and it’s time to pick it up again. Just being able to write a snippet of this, a snippet of that, and know it doesn’t have to turn into anything else or more is golden: I haven’t given myself that permission in a long while.
None of my time away or to myself is because anything is wrong: despite things being challenging in my life on several levels at the moment, nothing feels at all wrong. Quite the opposite. There’s just a lot of cross-roadsy stuff that’s been going on all over the place, and it’s been really nice to be very introspective about it — and private about it — and when I do share outwardly, to be making an extra effort to do so almost entirely intimately.
It’s not something I tend to be inclined to do much of the time: hermit that I can be in some ways, I also don’t tend to keep things very close to the chest. I usually write about them or express them very outwardly in some way. But every now and then, the time calls for it and it feels like just the right thing. And this has. Of course, this season always lends itself to that, it’s for that, really. The time of year is not inconsequential.
I have a very expansive heart right now: it’s been stretching its legs exponentially of late.
There have been a lot of opportunities for me to water and grow my compassion over the last few months, my ability to love well and wholly. I’ve felt it at work with the Scarleteen users and the FWHC clients, with my family, and even just out on the street as I walk the dog. It’s been a marvel, especially with things with Mark and Blue where as all three of us have stuff to work through, inconnectedly and separately, when either of them apologizes for bringing heavy bags, and I say it’s all okay, I mean it so sincerely. I also mean that it all feels okay: I’m feeling so freely able that sharing a tough load with either or both of them may have its moments, but can feel nearly effortless when it comes to the flow of my heart and what I want to offer. I feel bigger of late, more mighty, I feel like I have a clarity in how I’m seeing people, experiencing people, what I have to offer — and want to offer — others that’s more attuned than it has been in a while, one that makes getting really close much less daunting.
There are a few strings of phrase from some private writing a month and a half back which does a very good job of expressing some of this:
This is not often a sanctuary
for small, broken-winged birds,
a Muzak-humming rest home for invalids.
It is where the giant-footed few
who have the seemingly strange inclination
go to toast marshmallows and sing campfire songs in the midst of an apocalypse;
it feels a temple for legend, not leisure.
We seem to tend to err most
when we underestimate the nature of who we are,
what our unique alchemy is,
and try and fit magnitudes into the tiniest of boxes.
I have to confess that I can sometimes have — have certainly had in the past on far more than one occasion — the tendency to give people I am close to a whole, big lot, but also to withhold just an eentsie-enough that I am still withholding. I actually think it’s partly a writer thing: I seem to notice that many of we wordsmiths have this tendency. I’ve been a lot better about that lately, a lot more fearless with it. I’ve been letting people really know me, which perhaps sounds very strange coming from a total oversharer in so many ways, but to anyone in my life who has come very close to me, I assure you, those kinds of barriers of mine are well known. Opening things up and being in both of these relationships has been so just right for me, and I feel so, so nourished by all of this. Nourished in my own heart and head, nourished with what I give out interpersonally, in work, in everything. I have had a very strong feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be.
Pema Chodron said some things I really like which relate to some of what has been going on with me:
There is a Tibetan teaching that is often translated as, “Self-cherishing is the root of all suffering.” It can be hard for a Western person to hear the term “self-cherishing” without misunderstanding what is being said. I would guess that 85% of us Westerners would interpret it as telling us that we shouldn’t care for ourselves—that there is something anti-wakeful about respecting ourselves. But that isn’t what it really means. What it is talking about is fixating. “Self-cherishing” refers to how we try to protect ourselves by fixating; how we put up walls so that we won’t have to feel discomfort or lack of resolution. That notion of self-cherishing refers to the erroneous belief that there could be only comfort and no discomfort, or the belief that there could be only happiness and no sadness, or the belief that there could be just good and no bad.
But what the Buddhist teachings point out is that we could take a much bigger perspective, one that is beyond good and evil. Classifications of good and bad come from lack of maitri. We say that something is good if it makes us feel secure and it’s bad if it makes us feel insecure. That way we get into hating people who make us feel insecure and hating all kinds of religions or nationalities that make us feel insecure. And we like those who give us ground under our feet.
When we are so involved with trying to protect ourselves, we are unable to see the pain in another person’s face. “Self-cherishing” is ego fixating and grasping: it ties our hearts, our shoulders, our head, our stomach, into knots. We can’t open. Everything is in a knot. When we begin to open we can see others and we can be there for them. But to the degree that we haven’t worked with our own fear, we are going to shut down when others trigger our fear.
So to know yourself is to forget yourself. This is to say that when we make friends with ourselves we no longer have to be so self-involved. It’s a curious twist: making friends with ourselves is a way of not being so self-involved anymore. Then Dogen Zen-ji goes on to say, “To forget yourself is to become enlightened by all things.” When we are not so self-involved, we begin to realize that the world is speaking to us all of the time. Every plant, every tree, every animal, every person, every car, every airplane is speaking to us, teaching us, awakening us. It’s a wonderful world, but we often miss it.
Of course, in all of this as well is the fact that for a very personal writer, I often find myself lately in the position of being the keeper of more than one very private vulnerability or big confidence which is okay, but it means that the gristle of a lot of my life at the moment is behind a closed door. It also means I’m being trusted to hold all of it, which is so small gesture, and these are trusts I’m grateful for.
I’m off for the most whirlwind of trips to Chicago on Monday for both love and for work — my apologies to all the Chicago people I just can’t see and who can’t (or don’t want to) catch up with me for a short bit at the workshop (by the way, I think we still need some more women on the younger end). I get back Wednesday night, then head right into the clinic on Thursday morning, and if all goes well, on Friday, I have something to do with something that resembles rest.
