A Life of Non-Sense, Update

It's my five year anosmiversary.
Anosmia: lack of sense of smell.
A half decade ago, my nose up and left me, after a lifetime of exemplary service.  Until then I'd been a smellaholic, a supersmeller.  Smell connected me to place, to person, to memory more than any of my other senses.   And then it was gone, practically overnight.

For 6 months, I smelled nothing, and the world turned colorless and dull.  And a bit dangerous.  I burned myself giving a surprise hug to someone smoking a cigarette.  A season before that I would have smelled that stogie a block away.  I nearly asphyxiated my family a few dozen times when the stove pilot light didn't ignite. I licked bleach from a spray bottle bottle because I was sure it was water, not realizing I was wrong until my tongue blistered.  I burned numerous meals and ruined others because I had always cooked by smell and taste. Like the pie I made with unripened gooseberries, or the tumeric cookies (I thought it was cinnamon in the dim fall light).  I

For six months, food was a chore and a bore.  Everything tasted like variations on paper:  crisp paper,

dry paper, wet paper, soft paper.  The first food I enjoyed even slightly was a gift from Tony,my brother-inlaw.  Knowing that at least textures gave me some sensation, and that I had some very rudimentary taste (we don't lose our taste buds, so salty/sweet/bitter/spicy/unami are still there, just underwhelmed by the loss of flavor/odor), he made me a salad of chewy wheat berries, sweet dried cherries, crunchy nuts, and dressed with lime and hot peppers.  I was in heaven.

Then, six months into a world of nothing olfactory, I smelled a smell.  Bacon!  I was thrilled.  Except we are vegetarian, and there was no bacon.  And there was, apparently, no bacon smell.  I had my first smell hallucination.  I'd read about that, but it was entirely different to experience.  It gave me a a new respect for hallucinations, which I'd assumed would be more like dreams-- weirdly different from our usual sensed reality.  In my experience, they were no different that regular experiences.  I wasn't IMAGINING I was smelling bacon, as in remembering or thinking about the smell-- I smelled it.  A few weeks later I smelled incense.  I believed people when they said there was no smell there, but I was thrilled, after a half a year of absolutely no smells at all.  A new phase.

There isn't any way to describe the sudden loss of smell such that those who haven't experienced it will truly grasp.  Smell links us profoundly to the world.  For those born without it, it's a hardship that's minor and sometimes major, but it's the way of the (their) world.  For those who had it, it's as if you are instantly plunged into an alternate, very flat universe.  Memories fade.  Sexuality changes.  The gustitorial glue of the world disintegrates.

A few weeks after the bacon incident, I went to my sister's for a party.  I had come to loathe food centered events, and by gosh nearly all events are.  I was jealous and bitter about people raving about the fantastic smells and flavors when all I was getting was the paper.  I had a glass of wine, just to be social.  In the past wine had been a kaleidoscope of complexities.  After I lost my sense of smell, it was weird tasting water.  That night it was foul tasting water.  Everyone was going on about how good it was, but mine didn't taste good at all.  It tasted rotten.  I thought it must have gone very bad.  A few days later, I began to prepare a peanut butter sandwich, but after opening the jar became so nauseated I had to leave the room.

For the next several months, I could smell quite a few things.  Unfortunately, they all smelled the same:  rotten meat soaked in chemicals and covered with treacle.  This was a new phase:  cacosmia.  Literally:  shit smell.  It was awful.  I couldn't go in a restaurant or grocery store.  Walking in a public place was a horror: perfumes, gas fumes, coffee and cigarettes sent me retching.  One vivid day:  I walked through a duty free shop to get from point A to B in an international airport.  I ended up in the toilet, trying not to vomit, sobbing.

There were the worst offenders:  car fumes, smoke, and chemicals of nearly any kind including cosmetics or detergents.  Peanut butter, butter, celery sent me running.  I stayed inside.  I declined invites to eat out or at others' homes.  I avoided getting up in the morning to stay clear of my sweetheart's ritual coffee brewing.

Oddly, I still couldn't smell most anything.  Not bleach, not gas or ammonia or outhouses or body odor or farts or catboxes. I still can't.  People say :  Oh aren't you lucky.  I disagree. I tell them about an anosmic acquaintance who traveled abroad to get help regaining his sense of smell, and how he cried the first time he was again able to smell his own shit.

Meanwhile, my father died, and I cried because I could not smell him as I said goodbye. I remembered smelling my mom's robe for years after she died, and what a comfort that smell was to me.  I cried because the flannel shirt I took from my father's closet would never bring me that familiar comfort.

I cried quite a lot.  Like all grief, I cried at the firsts:  the first Thanksgiving when I could not taste the food, the first Christmas I couldn't smell the tree or the nutmeg in the eggnog.  I cried when I saw an old friend and buried my head in her neck and there was nothing familiar there.  I cried about the pies I ruined and the breads I burned.  And I cried because few people would acknowledge that I was grieving something very, very important, which meant I was alone in it.

I worried a lot too.  I worried I stunk and wouldn't know it.  I worried that when I walked at night or worked late I wouldn't smell a predator lurking nearby.  I worried everything I cooked tasted as bad or dull to my family as it did to me.

During the period of intense dysnomia (olfactory distortions), I ate apples and almonds for breakfast lunch and dinner-- when I remembered to eat. They met my criteria: they didn't project that foul zombie sock scent, and they were crunchy.   I lost 36 pounds because unless others reminded me or there was a clear external cue, I forgot about food. 

This lasted for many months, interspersed with random periods of back to no smell at all. By that time, true anosmia was a welcome relief from distorted smells. 

And then, like it does, life crept into a new normalcy. Partly this was time,and partly effort.  It's socially difficult to have such a restricted diet, so I did exposure therapy to add new foods.  I would choose a food that wasn't too offensive, like a carrot.  I would remind myself that it would not taste like I expected and that was ok.  I would remind myself, over and over, that it wasn't poison and was in fact a healthy and innocent food.  And then I would eat it, over and over, until I could tolerate it.  Then I would add a new food.  Soon I was able to eat most things.  Celery, cukes and coffee were still off the list but at least I wasn't a freak at Thanksgiving with my apple and bag of almonds.

I discovered that if I concentrated on those simple tastes of sweet, salty, sour and bitter I could learn to --almost-- enjoy food.  

And I discovered that those foods that were REALLY high in sugar and salt and spicy and bitter were, at least comparatively, wonderful.  So much so that in the last five years I have regained that 36 pounds.  Maybe a few more, because I also notice that I don't have an off switch.  If there is food in front of me, I eat it.  Faster than I used to because it doesn't taste as good.  And I am always chasing the high of it tasting good.  I'm working on that one this month, simply because I am too lazy and cheap to buy a new wardrobe, and I only have so many floppy dresses and stretchy pants.  I'm going to go back to taste training camp, using mindfulness to eat slowly and really try to notice what I can get from food.  How it feels in the mouth, how it looks, it's texture and how the sweet or salty changes on different parts of the tongue.  I'll find my anosmic cookbook and follow it for a while.  And I'll start portioning again, especially at restaurants, because I know it doesn't matter (except in a negative way to my waistline) how much I eat: I won't reach that bliss point of flavor savor.

There are a few practical changes I've made:  gas detectors, timers to check food (I used to know based on what smell was coming out of the oven).  LOADS of cayenne and hot sauce on foods to remind me I am eating something.  The return of antiperspirant and extra laundry, since I can't do a reliable sniff test.  In my therapy practice, I've had to hone other sense skills to tell if a client is ill or drunk or otherwise stinky, and I'm improving.

I don't get as depressed when people wax on rhapsodically about delightful smells.  Usually I actually enjoy hearing about them.  Spring gets me, for a few weeks at least-- I miss it.  I miss the smell of rain, too, and of children's heads.  But mostly I'm used to it now.

Which, after all that, may seem like a weak way of saying it gets better.  But it does.

I have some smell back now-- maybe 10-20 percent.  The smell training kit my daughter made me has me pretty solid on vanilla, cinnamon, coffee (ugh), a few other things. I can make out smoke, and occasionally skunk on a highway (so far more of a feel in my chest and throat than a smell).  I ask for confirmation on my guess and they are getting closer.  I can sometimes smell something like perfume, distorted, on a client or a passerby,or food cooking.  It's not what it was but it works, mostly.  I haven't given up on future improvement.  But I am learning to accept what is.

Here's a takeaway. We are amazing.  We learn to adjust, to compensate, even to correct at times.
Takeaway two: don't belittle a situation you cannot understand.  Treat loss as loss and don't tell people "it could be worse." In the case of anosmia, we know that, and we don't need shame on top of our grief.  Try to accommodate when it is early in.  Don't test us by shoving something stinky in our face, and restrain yourself a little about what we are missing.  After a while, we won't need the latter.  Except, maybe, in Spring.  Spring is hard.

Love and the dream of the scent of rising bread and a fresh rain,
Jana 

Using Others' Eyes to See

Ansel, about 14

Today's quotes: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”  --William Shedd

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”  --Anais Nin

This week marked the sixth year since Ansel Reed (poet, reader, social rights activist, hiker) left his too short life on this planet.  He'd only gotten 20 years in.  Born with a rare immune deficiency, he'd had more medical interventions than most octogenarians see in a lifetime.  He packed a lot of adventure into his days.  Sadly, there were many he just didn't have time to get to before his liver failed while he waited for a donor.

I think of Ansel at least once or twice a week.  When I hear poetry recited, I remember the time, not long before he left us, that I visited him in New York as he waited for that liver we all promised was coming.  He'd be feeling cold, or poorly, and would ask me to rub his back.  While I did he would sing to me-- hymns, usually; or recite wonderful odes--Keats, Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare.  He had an amazing memory.  He knew his time was short and By God He Was Going To Pay Good Attention.  His eye for detail was astounding, and he had stories to tell. 

When I told him I was coming for a visit and asked what he needed, he said : "Kelp.  Seaweed.   I want to bathe in it and pretend I am in the ocean."  Thanks to a very kind co-op worker I was out the door and on that plane smelling just a bit fishy.  He also requested and received Japanese rice crackers, and he wanted baking soda, coffee filters and a blender, for various Grande Schemes he was craftsying up.   He spent a hundred days at a NY apartment, fighting off bugs when there were livers ready, and trying to be hopeful when he was healthy but there were no livers to be found.  Sadly those two worlds would not collide, and after a time, he called it a day. He seemed much more at peace with it than we were.

I still vacillate between my own peace in knowing he found his, and fury he isn't here to keep stirring up the creativity pot.  What can be done?  We have to accept that he's really gone from this physical life on this place.  We don't have to like it.  But that don't change the facts, Ma'am.

So what to do?  I look for him in others, sometimes-- if I see a particularly high spirited sweet joke-cracking 6 year old, or hear of someone undertaking a physical challenge when they already have one (mountain climbing blind, skiing with Parkinson's, that sort of thing).  Ansel never seemed to let his health stop him, whether he was running a marathon or fighting for social justice.   When I see that spirit in others, his own spirit is very present to me. 

And I use his eyes to view the world.  I see something beautiful and think, "Ansel would have liked that."  Knowing him changed me some, and changed what I see in the world.  He gave me a bit of his vision.

That's one way others live in us.  They give us new eyes and perspectives.  And we honor their short visits when we notice what they might have noticed.  It's not enough, but it's a lot.

Jana

Wild Bill Takes Off

he knew how to laugh

It's been a week since my last post, Trouble Wants Community.  The day I wrote it, I talked to someone with whom I'd had little contact over the past dozen years.  He'd lost his parents last year, and I told him about my father moving here in the Spring.  He told me to treasure every minute with him, and I said, "If you knew my dad, you'd tell me to take a Valium every hour."  I was teasing, mostly.  Relationships with parents can be complicated, right?  But later that evening I had a great visit with my dad, and then came home and wrote that blog, and it felt good.

Here is part of the note I sent my friend the next evening:

R, you're an unwitting angel, and it was grace that you contacted me when you did.  

       I begrudgingly called my dad last night.  I was tired and wasn't going to, but I remembered what you'd said about your parents, and I did.  And when he ended the call "mentioning" that he had only the night's dose of a medication he needed, and that he was supposed to take it morning and night, I went rather begrudgingly to pharm, bitching that he could've let me know last week, and spent $50 that I knew I wouldn't let him pay back.  But I stopped at Trader Joe's and got him some OJ and licorice scotty dogs because he loves them, and went to his house, and we had a good visit.  He told me a couple of stories from his youth, and then he looked tired, and I asked if he was ready for me to get out of there, and he was.  I told him I loved him and gave him a very tender kiss.

           Today during my 11 oclock session my client's cell rang.  She was sheepish and asked if I minded if she checked; she was waiting for an important call . To give her a little privacy I turned toward my desk just in time to see my phone light up (it's silenced during sessions, of course).  It was the independent senior center where my father lives.  I picked up and they said my dad had collapsed and ambulances were on the way.  

...

Not long later, with family soothing his brow and holding his hand, he peacefully took his last breath.

---

I thank you so much for your urging to enjoy those minutes.

-----------------

Born during the depression in the small town of Pawnee Rock, KS, Bill was the youngest child and only son of Anna and Louis Svoboda.   His father was a jack of all trades, doing whatever work he could to support his family.  Bill arrived during a difficult time.  The Czech immigrant community and most of the midsection of the nation were hit hard by overfarming, drought and poor economy.  When the Dust Bowl swept through Kansas, Bill contracted osteomyletis and “the dust pneumonia” at age 2.  He spent much of his young life in hospitals, enduring more than 40 operations by age 18.  They were horrific-- ether was used, "and I used be so scared when they came at me with that mask; I thought I would suffocate--  Sodium Pentathol was the best thing ever invented." Last Tuesday he told stories about those times, and that “I would have been a genius if I hadn't been in a coma for months" as a kid.  I said, "You mean a SUPERgenius".  

here comes trouble

Bill lost most of the use of a hand during this time, as well as all of his teeth by age 18 following a car wreck and related to the osteo.  But he remained Wild Billy.  He learned to drive at age 7 and would go on whiskey runs with his grandfather during the prohibition.  He was spoiled and beloved by his sisters. 

Despite his physical hardships, Bill was a strong man, and loved labor, biking, tennis and being outdoors.  At 24 he met and married a nursing student from Memphis TN he’d  met through his sister.  He was smitten  by the “glamorous big city girl”, though he found out later she was also from a rural family.  They settled in Topeka, KS  and raised their four daughters.  Bill really, really wanted a son, but once he realized that was not to be, he made sure his daughters were strong and independent, and he advocated for equal opportunities. 

bill and ruth's sitting rooom

Bill and Ruth both went on to obtain Master’s degrees, the first in their families.  Bill worked in the 70s to arrange and then enforce access for persons with physical handicaps to public spaces.  He also worked for the blind, helping them adjust and find employment.  Together with my mother, he restored a beautiful Victorian house he and Ruth had purchased in complete disrepair for a few thousand dollars in the mid 1960s.  He added a kitchen with hand made cabinets, new foundation, remodeled the dug out basement into a family room, and built a workshop and garage. Bill brewed beer in the basement and crafted in his workshop.  He hauled huge limestone posts from the old family farm in rural Kansas to make stairs up to the home from the street, and Ruth turned the gardens into showplaces.  They loved finding antiques at garage sales and auctions, and furnished the house with their finds.  It became a gathering place for assortments of collected kids, with frequent Friday night potlucks and big Thanksgiving gatherings.  They always had an open door policy, and several youth lived with the family for short or extended times, becoming honorary daughters.

Here's a piece one of them wrote about him (thank you, Juliana, for this gift):

There so much about Bill that I remember. He was really there, I mean there there, In a way most Dads couldn't be. He was a gritty Tom Waits kinda character who made us laugh all the time, mostly with corny jokes, but funny just the same. While most the adults were smoking, he did it like it was part of his outfit, you hardly noticed the cig, because it was there just like the T-shirt was. There was no affectation or elegance about it. He was one of those people who could lean over, cigarette in mouth and, say, tie your shoe and when he was done he hadn't gagged on the smoke or gotten it in his eyes like everyone else would have. He was facile, as he was with everything else. He fixed everything, he fixed up their house, he fixed the car, he fixed the camper that Jana and I "camped" in in the back yard. He sang silly songs like " A Boy Named Sue" He made up a poem about me. "My name is not Lisa, my name is Julie, my hair is unruly..." He drove us everywhere and never complained. He seemed to enjoy getting that extra time with his girls. He made me feel like one of his girls. When we moved on to college, he showed up to help with moving and broken apartment parts, and sometimes he hung around and talked. He had a dog named Gouda. 
And he was also there for me when I was grieving and so young. He knew just what to do. He was soft in the right places too. There is little hollow place in my heart for him today. Rest in peace Bill.

Here are a few random thoughts about my dad:

memorial shrine at the wake

He liked to smell nice.   He loved his drink and tobacco, and M&Ms and peanut butter crackers.  He was a competitive card, domino, tennis, pool and ping-pong player.  He read voraciously--- everything from  detective novels to political biographies to the entire “Great Books” series.  It wasn’t unusual for him to read more than a book in a day in his younger years.  He loved the poets, from Shelley (he named his youngest after him) to Yeats to ee Cummings. He loved classical music, history, nature, fishing, and Simon and Garfunkel, and public radio.  He stopped hunting because he was too tender-hearted.  He was a squirrel whisperer-- they ate out of his hands.  

He made the worlds’ best cocoa fudge and popcorn;  and his beef jerky had a national reputation.

He was no saint.  He had trouble expressing vulnerability and related emotions.  He could do happy and goofy, but it was never easy for his to talk about the tender stuff, or his own vulnerability, so sometimes what came out was angry or curmudgeon.  Those were his protectors.  He’d been through a lot, and that was what worked for him.  But we knew him despite himself, and we knew his poet’s heart, and the sweet boy in him, and all the rest as much as he could let leak through.  He told terrible jokes, made terrible puns, and had no trouble at all proudly mispronouncing words and watching us cringe at them.  

He loved his family, and told us often.  He was proud of his girls, all of them.

I know this is a long one. I miss him bad.  A week ago, he was telling me stories.

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."  --Kahlil Gibran

Don't forget to treasure those moments.  

The reality of suffering

"It is what it is", we hear. and even as we struggle to resist the inevitability of suffering, reality insists itself upon us.  A devil's bargain:   feel little, of either joy or sorrow; or  feel so unbearably much of both the best life can offer and more pain than we believe we can bear.  We die young, or we live long enough to see others leave us.

There is no fairness, no sensible story I can make of some of what happens in this world. In a critical care waiting room, strangers become intimate through the worst of life circumstances.  A young woman's family gathers praying for miracles after a skiing accident; a small town high school football star tries to live up to his tough image as his 48 year father recovers from emergency brain surgery.  A 19 year old boy dies from injuries sustained in a car accident despite the full house church members praying fervently he be spared.

Tragedy is not all life offers, but it is part and parcel.  We are called to be big containers.  We bear more than we believe we can, and sometimes all we can do is breathe in, breathe out, and love.  If nothing else, we can love-- scared, small as we feel.  We offer what we can-- our ear, our car, our dollars, our arms.  We can accept that we are part of this big family, do our best to be kind and stay conscious, and keep walking toward that place of love.

finding mercy in the moment

This has been one of the hardest weeks in my circle I can remember.  Tragedies predictible and unimaginable have shaken those I love.  I have felt shattered and heartsick.

This morning I had an appointment to give blood.  I wanted to cancel it.  I felt literally tapped out.  I thought about Ansel, who needed so many transfusions and went through so much so that he could pack a life into 20 years.  I went.

I came home exhausted from a week of little sleep, with an evening full of things that needed done before bed.  Then I took one last walk to the grocery store.  I could have skipped it, but wanted the time with my friend and neighbor, also hit hard by the week's events.  We talked and planned and mourned together.

The night was beautiful.  The stars so bright, the sky so clear, the air smelling of pines.  The crickets sang in the brush.  And then, right in the middle of this small town, two owls called back and forth, back and forth.  The beauty of it lifted my heart, against my will.

It's not that things are ok.  It's that ok and not ok, beautiful and terrible, exist side by side.  That's life.  That's what makes life bearable.  That and a community of people, willing to listen and love each other even when-- especially when-- the terrible seems in charge.

"Christ, this life of mud and miracles-- it's the prettiest little burden, isn't it..."  --Richard Buckner

May we all sleep well tonight, and know we are loved.
Jana

Grief 101: Guidelines for Witnesses

In memory of Mark, Sept 1965-Sept 2010,  Ansel, Sept 1985-March 2006, and Dave, Aug 1952- July 2002


Rule Number One:  There are no rules.

Everyone grieves differently.  It's an American desire to put a time-line or a formula on grief; to tie it up in a neat little package and put it to bed.  There are some relatively predictable phenomena, as Elizabeth Kubler Ross outlined in her stages of grief writings.  But even these are individualized-- people will bounce back and forth between stages, revisit them at different developmental stages, skip some completely.  Grief is as individual as we are.

That leaves us with guidelines, not rules.  Here are some:

How do you support the grieving? 
However they wish.
Some people need space.  Some need you there.  Sometimes they don't even know what they need.  Just show up, and follow their cues.  Best thing, when possible, is anticipate needs and take care of them, within reason.  Bring food, offer rides and rooms to visitors, leave lists of people family can call to take care of last minute necessities such as errand runs and chores.
Listen without judgment.
People react to the shock of grief in many ways, sometimes many ways within minutes-- laughing, being quiet, crying, reminiscing, being angry at being left. All are "appropriate" in the moment.  Don't push them to talk but don't be afraid of acknowledging what is happening and what they are feeling.  Don't push your agenda on what you think they should be feeling or talking about.
Remember that grief lasts a long time.  The grieving person is usually surrounded by others in the first few days.  It's later when they may really need your help. Acknowledge important events such as anniversaries.  Know that the first year is the first anniversary of everything since the loss-- the first particular season, the first holiday, the first birthday alone.  Let them know they are loved and their loved ones remembered.

A few don'ts:  Don't make them talk if they don't want, or try to force them to accept things they aren't yet ready to think about.  They will talk in their time.  Denial is nature's way of protecting our tender hearts while we are taking in realities that are very difficult.  Give denial room to work.
Don't tell them this is God's will or it was just this person's time unless they are already putting forth their belief in that.  If that comforts you, fine.  It may not be a comfort to them, and may feel like an invalidation of their own natural anger or right to sadness.
If you don't know what to say, just let them know you are there and you love them.
Don't berate yourself for being scared of doing it wrong, facing them in their grief, not knowing what to say.  All this is very common.
Similarly, be mindful that what you say to or do for them is for them, not for you.  What comforts you may not be what they need.
If possible, don't avoid them because it discomforts you.  That's your stuff, and this is a time to put it away to help others who really need you.

In short:  let them know you love them and are there.

Quotes of the day:
To live in hearts we leave behind 
Is not to die.

~Thomas Campbell, "Hallowed Ground"

Oh heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.   --Kahlil Gibran


A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.  --Stewart Alsop

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. --Willa Cather

Poems of the day:

If Death is Kind 

Perhaps if death is kind, and there can be returning, 
We will come back to earth some fragrant night, 
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea, 
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.

--Sara Teasdale 

Gone and Dust

When we have done our

"job",

and left

what will remain of us?

Certainly a statistic,

 and a number,

or maybe if you're lucky

a memory inside a head

or two.

He used a tool

and dug in deep

trying

trying

to leave a mark

that would last longer than

he would.

   --Anselin Reed

Video of the day:  Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer

A Sermon on Uncertainty

AIN’T NO MAN RIGHTEOUS-- SITTING IN THE SHADOW OF NOT-KNOWING

Jana Svoboda/ Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis/ Aug 21, 2005

Opening words: Poem

If There is the Seed of Something in You

if there is a seed of something in you, and
all you can think is house on a hill,
house on a hill; built by the river and
thank god for the hill-- maybe you
live too close to both safety and danger
to either enlarge or relax. if the
seed needs water, do you resent your choices,
the well you never bothered drilling,
the bucket you let rust? you
look down at the swollen river;
even the river's pregnant, you think,
bursting its confines-- and you, more
like the seed, dry and hard and contained,
but within you some untapped largesse,
something wanting to be wet, and to break open.
from the hill, the river looks dangerous.
you forget that water is just what you need.

                 JLS, May, 2005

In Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, spiritual writer and professional neurotic Anne Lamotte begins: “These are desert days… I feel we began witnessing the end of the world in super-slow-mo...and some days it takes everything I can muster not to lose my hope, my faith, and myself.” I relate closely to her fear, and the paralysis that wants to follow it. She takes her fear to a theologian friend and asks, what can I do? He tells her—“left foot, right foot, breathe”. Because sometimes that is all we can do—sit with our uncertainty, and connect—through our breath—with something deeper and more divine. In the desert, Anne writes, we “know” what we should do. Stay out of the sun. Seek shelter, and safety. The desire to go back, to retreat into nostalgia—the pain for home-- is a natural reaction to dangerous and uncertain times. But courage, as the saying goes, is not being without fear—it is doing what needs to be done despite the fear. 

At a workshop with Jungian psychoanalyst and writer James Hollis, he asked us to rank our values.  What did we see as the most important tasks of our lives? I've done this many times.  But then he asked something else: to estimate how much conscious intent we put towards the items at the top of our list. A middle-aged man remarked: “The top of my list is love and growth. But I realize I spend most of my days just trying to avoid discomfort.”

I believe this is true for many of us. And for some, religion becomes a way of doing that. A hope for easy answers, for formulas: if I do this, that will happen. It is both a hope for the illusion of control and predictability, and a retreat from facing in ourselves and the world that which we cannot know. Rabbi Kushner referred to it as “God as Santa Claus”—we follow the rules, we get the goodies. 

James Hollis talks about these competing agendas living with in us: the drive for growth and actualization, and that for regression-- the wish for “the confident hubris of youth”, and for the familiar and the comfortable. When the desire to go home, to go unconscious prevails, “we will choose not to choose, to rest easy in the saddle, remain amid the familiar and the comfortable, even when it is stultifying and soul-denying… Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of the unknown, the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals.” But he admonishes us: “To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation.”

Hollis continues: “The recovery of personal authority is a daily task imposed upon all of us by the soul. It means to find what is true for oneself and live it in the world. If it is not lived... we abide in what Sartre calls “bad faith, the theologian calls sin the therapist calls neurosis. Respectful of the rights and perspectives of others, personal authority is neither narcissistic nor imperialistic. It is a humble acknowledgment of what wishes to come through us.”  It is also the maturity of realizing we don’t have all the answers. We don’t even have all the questions. “...from this encounter with our limitations the wisdom of humility comes: to know that we do not even know what we do not know.”

And yes—dealing with this will make you anxious. Coming forward always does. Kierkegaard said: move away from what makes you depressed, and toward what makes you anxious. The former is to regress. The latter—scary as it is to leap into unfamiliar territory—is growth.

In Plan B, Lamotte says: “In my experience, there is a lot to be said for desperation. Not exactly a bright side, but something expressed in the word formed by one of the the acronyms for the names of God—gifts of desperation. The main gifts is give up the conviction that you are right, and that God thinks so too, and hates the people who are driving you crazy. And this forces you to listen deeper, with your heart.” This is where we come up with wisdom, instead of information. 

If we are students, and we really want to learn something, it’s best not to steal and memorize the answers-- BBACACC. That’s not knowledge. It’s certainty—but it’s not wisdom. Unitarians have accepted that task as a foundation of our principals: the individual search for truth and meaning. But it’s not unique to us.

Buddhists teach it:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found in written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But when after observation and analysis, you find anything that agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” (from the Kalama Sutra)

And Daoists:

“A tree that is unbending is easily broken. The hard and strong will fall. The soft and yielding will overcome.” -- Tao te ching, 76.

And Confucians:

“To learn and never think—that’s delusion”. Analects 2.15 

The Koran states:

"Do not accept any information unless you verify it for yourself.  I have given you hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them."  Koran 17.36.

Christians, at least in the early church, agreed:

"Test everything. Hold fast to what is good".  I Thessalonians 5.21

But when times get scary, we regress. Like children, we look for external authority. Benedictine Sister Joan Chissiter writes: “We suckle ourselves on clear or comfortable answers because we fear to ask the questions that make the real difference to the quality and content of our souls. The spiritual life begins when we discover that we can only become spiritual adults when we go beyond the answers, beyond the fear of uncertainty, to that great encompassing mystery of life that is God.” Uncertain times are nearly always accompanied by a rise in fundamentalism, and I see it happening now. We divide into us and them, good and bad. This tendency to split, present since birth, becomes urgent. 

Writer and Buddhist Nun Pema Chodrin quotes one of her spiritual teachers, who said, “"The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.” Pema’s favorite mantra is “"Om, grow up!" It takes great courage to meet life on life's terms and accept responsibility for our actions. "To stay with that shakiness -- to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge-- that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-- that is the spiritual path." It’s also about the very Adult goal of accepting reality and letting go of attempts to control it. Anne Lamotte puts that into her spiritual practice with her morning prayer of “Whatever”, and her evening prayer of “Oh Well.”

Thomas Moore said: “You cannot do good by thinking of yourself as good. You have to sink into the complexities and go down far enough into life that you realize that it is not even good to be good. To do what others may judge as bad may be the best you can do.” (Here I am thinking Rosa Parks). “Certainly you have to admit to your moral ignorance in many matters. Can any one be certain in every design they are doing the right thing?...

Religion often avoids the dark by hiding behind platitudes and false assurances. Avoidance and defense are not the true purpose of religion. It shouldn’t whisk you away from daily challenges but offer an intelligent way of dealing with all the complexity involved.” 

Another Jungian thinker uses the story Jekyll and Hyde to illustrate. Jack Sanford writes: “Striving for a pure goodness results in a pose or self-deception about goodness, a persona. Dr Jekyll had a very big persona and believed in it completely, but wasn’t really good and became compulsive about expressing Hyde. He went to religion, not to find God, but as protection against his own Hyde. Religion often attracts persons struggling to exorcise the shadow rather than understand and make peace with it but what we cannot see in ourselves, we cannot forgive in others.” When otherness takes over, evil takes root.

Jung said “I would rather be whole than good.” Before we ate the apple, we were a thoughtless people. We were a GOOD people, but not by choice. We were thoughtless.

Christianity has seen evil as something that destroys the soul-- but originally the tradition recognized we carried both, and the Bible said —“For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not do, that I do.” Knowing we are capable of evil and no different helps us to choose. It also helps us to understand that “Ain’t No Man Righteous”, as Bob Dylan says. And if that’s true, we are all in this together. Being without self-deception, and seeing our own capacity for evil, we then can responsibly manage it rather than act it our or project it into the world. When we don't accept our contradictions, we act them out. When we turn away from our true natures-- even those we are uncomfortable with-- we are asking others to act them out for us.

Part of the work is in learning to sit with our discomfort without reaction. To just be with it. if we are lonely, to be lonely. If we are angry, to see our anger. Not to feel we have to manage it, do something with it, or even change it. When we are sad and someone starts to tell us all we have to be happy about, we feel compelled to defend our sadness, and explain why they are wrong. The shadow must have that same instinct of self-preservation. Perhaps the battle is in befriending it. Not feeding it, but not turning away from it either. Just sitting with it. Like Jesus sitting with the sinners. 

Given the burden and gift of thinking and choice, we may want to regress to certainty. We are pattern-seekers. We want to know. But often knowing, or thinking we know, prevents us from seeing what is truly there. There is a Buddhist sutra that says: Protect me from the disaster of my own thinking. Realizing we don’t have all the answers may prevent us from uninformed decisions, or worse yet, stuckness in our thinking. We need to allow ourselves the bravery of loosening our grip on what we believe to be true to find even deeper questions. Maybe, in sitting with the mystery we’ll find what for us is true. 

Closing Words: Rilke, from letters to a young poet.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your
heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like
locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given
to you because you could not live them. It is a question
of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it,
find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Resolution of the Day: GRIEVE

Today we said goodbye to our sweet Labrador, Jetta.  She's been an uncomplicated, devoted companion and a bonding part of my family's history for 15 years.  A couple of weeks ago she started wandering out under the sheltering cypress.  A few days ago she began refusing her food.  It took us a week or two longer than it took her to accept that she was ready to go.
   I work to hold gratitude for all our time together in the same heart as my sadness for the loss.  As much as I wish we could have avoided the pain of this day, it is a bargain for all gained from her.

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Three benefits of crying:

--Releases stress (both psychologically and physiologically)
--Communicates distress and our need for comfort
--Communicates connection and compassion for others in grief
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My Cup

They tell me I am going to die.
Why don't I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.   --Robert Friend


Song of the day: You Can Close Your Eyes (James Taylor song covered by William Fitzsimmons)
It's a repeat, although I originally planned to use it on this post.  We had a reprieve, and I didn't need it yet.  Thanks for the extra time, Jetta...rest now.

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."  --Kahlil Gibran

Living with Dying

"I don't have time for epics"-- Anselin Reed, 1986-2006

In early November,  it is traditional to honor those whose who have died with celebration and rememberance.  In my faith community, we celebrate All Soul's Day with an alter decorated with pictures and token reminders of lost loved ones, and music and thoughtful readings to help us reflect on their gifts to our lives.

It's rare, in America, to be allowed public time for grieving and memorial of those who have died.  Even our national holiday has been minimized to a day off and a weekend of sales.  Americans have a peculiar need for closure, and a strange idea that grief work has a time limit.  I have found that grief comes in waves.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work on the stages of loss was never meant to indicate an ABC orderly procession that ends neatly.   

It's two weeks today since my father died, quickly, of a heart attack.  It's not that surprising I frequently forget that he's dead and think of something I'll tell him when I visit.   Denial of this sort doesn't mean we aren't in touch with reality.  Denial is a gift, allowing time for us to adjust to big changes. Other moments I wish I had more of it, when I am gripped with the sadness of having no living parent, and the end of access to some of my history.  You live long enough, you are going to say a lot of goodbyes.

Krista Tippet said recently:  "Mortality is not at all special, but it is something we manage to avoid an awareness of, especially in Western culture."  We like to think there is all the time in the world to mend those fences, hear those stories, figure out what we need or believe.   But as the old saw goes:  "One hundred years from now, all new people."  

We can't and shouldn't live in fear about the very basic fact of life that is its certain outcome.  What we can do is spend a little time thinking of the little time we are here, and what we want to do with it.  We squander so much.  And I am not talking about leisure activities, which are a necessary replenishment (there was an alarming article in CNN tonight about how Americans forfeited 34.3 BILLION dollars worth of vacation time this year).  No, I'm talking about the amount of time we spend worrying about ridiculous things, such as whether our thighs are too fat, or what to wear in the morning, or whether we are Right and someone else is The Bad Guy.  I don't think it's a bad idea to think about our own inevitable death, and how we want to live in the interim.  I'm doing that this week.  I've not come to any profound conclusions, except I want to spend less time avoiding stuff  (I am a master procrastinator) and more time living the life I say I want.  I haven't got very far into practice yet.  I hope to spend some time figuring this out.  And I want to remember that I can't count on how much time I have.  I want to use it well.