Moods

It's sleepy time around here. I couldn't sleep, woke up inthe middle of the night, stayed awake reading and wondering what was in store for me, having premonitions that i would be hated, rejected, scorned, and disrespected - which has already happened before, so it shouldn't really hold any unique grip on me. But i suppose all of us have the desire to feel loved and accepted for who we truly are. As someone who was heavily censored as a little kid, truthtelling has been a tricky path.

Anyway, sleep deprivation brings on serious Moods. When these moods come upon me, i usually have the greatest access to old patterns that have held me back, so i share these with you, hoping they will illustrate the shadier aspects of the path, easing the way for others.

A few years ago, I had to make some radical course corrections in my lifestyle, because everything in my living was neatly arranged to keep me alienated from spirit. For whatever reason, I am acutely aware of the signals that float around in the ethers; and i never felt safe to speak to the inner depths that were at work in me, much less use them to help others.

The course correction has not been a smooth one; it was hard to find my voice and learn to use it with any deftness. After years of relative silence, i found that as soon as i opened my mouth, there were intense consequences. Some people came towards me, others were driven away. What I noticed, though, was that i repeatedly placed myself in an environment that was hostile to that light, so i was sabotaged. Can i offer a concrete example?

Example #1: Have you ever tried to speak to your partner about ideas or feelings that were really important to you, only to have them change the subject? I noticed that when i tried to talk about my own world of ideas - the portal to the possible - other topics such as professional sports or garage needs took immediate precedence. It took years for me to understand that i was being silenced. After about a thousand of these experiences, a quiet despair settled in. Maybe my mind worked against me, but i figured, who would be interested in what i had to say if my spouse wasn't? Wiser friends knew better; but i just felt like wow, what does it mean to be intimate if your partner doesn't know you? I mean, he knew my tennis game, and my cooking skills; but he didn't know what i was capable of, and i suspect he didn't want to. What guy wants his loving wife to ease up spoiling him and go out to be all that she can be? Or at the very least, maybe she would be something HE wanted, not what SHE wanted.

Example #2: After being hired by a major New York financial institution to address the soft side issues associated with wealth, I gave a presentation at a symposium there, about worth as the vessel through which wealth could be responsibly managed. After it was over, a lady came up to me and said she liked it so much that she wanted to move her assets to - that place - immediately, and would i help her. As soon as the event was over, the person who hired me deluged me with a pile of administrative tasks, anything that would keep me out of my strength. This person declared that all of these responsibilities lay inside my job description. Really, it was just a power play. The point was to take me out of my strong suit because the power of my message was a threat to others' "glow." As I was warned, nothing threatens so much as success.

Sometimes, claiming your power means identifying subtle ways in which we ourselves, or others, place us far enough outside the zone of our own strength to render us powerless. The perceptions of futility and the illusion of permanently difficult conditions are two ways to stay bound. Today, a moody day, reminds me of that suffering, and that education.

art, proportion, and psychology

I was trained in stress and health, not in clinical psychology. The whole idea was that there are some special techniques that reduce stress, in human systems, such that physical health is also improved. I was only trained to teach, not to actually help anyone. I helped people all the time when i wasn't trying to; but when i tried, i just locked up.

What i just didn't appreciate at the time is that less stress really isn't the mecca anyway. Less unnecessary stress is more like it. Some algorithm of stress vs. meaning. For whatever reason, after 9-11 and a few other cataclysmic picnics, i found that deep breathing wasn't enough - although for sure, it beats NOT deep breathing.

Is it just me, or what? Why didn't anyone tell me about art? In six years of real and committed study, not one article mentioned art as a stress reliever. Why not? Now, I'm a bit of a zealot, like any good convert.

Try putting a glaze on your kitchen wall. Or tear out a few hundred bits of colored paper and glue them onto - well, something else. Or - most subversive - break some plates and put the pieces, along with anything else you want, onto a plywood board until you have something else. Sing, a lot, and imagine, and paint, and draw. Notice things. When I began to draw, i noticed things that seven years of science wouldn't begin to touch. Shades, shadow, contour, depth, beauty. My favorite experience to date has been to post, then take down, from my idea wall dozens of upsetting photos from the NY Times, just to remind me of the plight of the world. In their place, i stuck up one pretty piece that i did at an afternoon course in sacred architecture. Ah, much better.

old america, new america

i have a love-hate relationship with the state of massachusetts. I hate the winter, the lack of softness, and the depression. I love the staunch, rebellious and self-righteous roots of massachusetts. I feel at home when i read about the authors of our declaration and the white guys dressed as Indians who threw a deeply subversive tea party. I could do that.

I was raised in the South, where tea parties were just that. It took awhile for me to know just how much i wanted to change the rules of engagement. Sometimes, though, it's just a little chilly up here, and I miss the daily kindnesses that are part of the air below the Mason-Dixon line. These rifts and differences cause me to drift back and forth, between old home in the expanses of Texas, where anything is possible; and the friction of the northeast, where people are watching, commenting, weaving new lines of thought in the warp and woof of our social fabric.

Today, i'm love-hating in North Adams, home of the fanciful MASS MoCA. We're going to see this awesome show by Anne-Sofie Sitel, "The Museum of the Queen of Mud." For any woman who feels a bit alienated from the main stream, and who feels she has endured a bit more emotional load than is bearable, this would be a treat. This performance artist, dressed in mud, interacts with people in the "real world" in profound and heartwrenching ways. She seems saner, in her mud coating, than do her questioners. More than anything, the exhibit causes me to feel a bit more at home as an observer, an outsider, in my own culture. She - the Queen of Mud - is coated in a special substance that will "protect her from extremes of warm and cold" so that she can travel into space and meet her destiny. Sounds wild, but not as wild as bringing democracy to Iraq through the use of armed forces from outside. America. Gotta love it.

But anyway, my partner is next to me, reading "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," the latest and greatest tome by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lincoln's capacity for appreciation must have created so much hope at a time when so little was apparent on the surface of things. Try this on:

"On Saturday morning, Lincoln and his guests visited Petersburg (which had just been abandoned by Lee). At a certain spot, the marquis recalled, 'he gave riders to stop the carriage.' On his previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a 'very tall and beautiful' oak tree that he wanted to examine more closely. 'He admired the strength of its trunk, the vigorous development of branches,' which reminded him of 'the great oaks' in the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed 'an old country graveyard' where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, 'Mary, you are younger than i. you will survive me. When i am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.' On the train ride back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle 'basking in the warm sunshine on the wayside.' He asked that the train be stopped so that the turtle could be brought into the car. 'The movements of the ungainly little animal seemed to delight him,' Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared 'a happy laugh' all the way back to the wharf." (p. 722)

I didn't start out to talk about Lincoln, really, but this capacity for appreciation has grabbed me, so why not tell it through one of my heroes? It's been my experience that in the darkest and most pressing times, life unflinchingly offers us solace, or at least a muse, so that we have the continued spark to move on.

Today's bright note centers on the art of Haram Kamrooz, a young Iranian artist also on show at MassMOCA, who makes his studio home in New York (natch). His glossy oils and ecstatic palette remind me of some latter-day Peter Max, only with a greater sense of restraint and Persian flourish. This lucid show is a cocktail of joyous spirit and refined artistry. And all of this from the sumptuous, wireless-enabled bedroom of the Porches. I'm in a cozy den, writing into a battery-operated laptop, with access to the deft gestures of Lincoln and the artistic daring of our latest and greatest, all while the fire warms my toes. It's a new world we life in, for sure.