NOVEMBER 3, 2006 (entry #1)

RELATIONAL INTIMACY AS A CRUCIBLE FOR AWAKENING

Every so often I find myself not just writing a book, but having to write a book. In this, I am both driven and loose; I may get to write with great intensity for chunks of time that fly by in seemingly no time at all, and I may shut out everything else as I do so, but at the same time I am really enjoying myself.

Even the rewriting, the tossing out of great-sounding but not so great-fitting phrases, all the reorganizing and reworking, is mostly just a pleasure to me. I love starting the process, letting the words fly and form and land in all kinds of unexpected ways, and I love redirecting and deepening the process, and I especially love pulling it together, until it sheds any further editing efforts, even though I know that a few months from now I could improve the whole damned thing.

My new book, begun just a few weeks ago, is about awakening through committed intimate relationship, with a special focus on mature monogamy. There’s plenty to say about mature monogamy, which will occupy more than a few upcoming blogs, but for now I’ll just say that it is a life-giving, passion-deepening, spiritually-opening choice, a choice we cannot truly make until we’ve become incapable of immature monogamy and unseducible by promiscuity’s and multiple-partnering’s advances. At this point, we are able to love so deeply and so fully in a one-on-one relationship that we can become profoundly attached, so that if our beloved were to suddenly die or betray us, our heart would be ripped wide open.

Consciously opening ourselves to such attachment means that we are not going to run away or dissociate from whatever pain our relationship might bring us. Here, we are not repressing our multiple-partnering or promiscuous urges, but have outgrown them, leaving ourselves no escape routes (like another lover or some other potent distraction) from our chosen relationship.

Mature monogamy is all about finding freedom through intimacy, especially the profound and singular intimacy that characterizes a truly bonded partnership. Our relationship with our beloved is then a sacred container which we are deeply committed to taking good care of and protecting. This means, among other things, not leaking energy elsewhere (especially erotically), not distracting ourselves from challenges and difficulties in the relationship, not indulging in reactivity and negativity, and not putting any limit on our love for our beloved.

Such deep focus, such devotion to our shared depth, such shared safety to get really vulnerable and really alive with each other, such shared emotional and existential and spiritual nakedness, is an ongoing choice made all the richer by cutting off all exits. Then she is not just a woman to him, but all women and Woman Incarnate, and he is to her not just a man, but all men, and Man Incarnate. This is not metaphysical mush, but a living reality, full-blooded and more often than not ecstatic.

Immature monogamy entraps; mature monogamy liberates.

Let’s leave it at that. There’ll be plenty more later...

NOVEMBER 6, 2006

TOWARD MATURE MONOGAMY

I am very excited about putting together my new book on intimate relationship. I feel as if it’s already written, and is just waiting to spill onto the page. As I start to write, and feel it taking shape, I can sense all the couples with whom I’ve worked in psychotherapeutic and spiritual contexts, all the relational tangle and wrangle and despair and breakthrough, all the shutting down and shrinking and opening and revelation, all the thinking and feeling and eloquently unique interactions, all of which I am grateful for, grateful to have been part of, grateful to have been trusted with.

And at the same time I can feel my own long and winding journey through the multileveled terrain of relationship -- so much learning and unlearning, so much journeying, as I slowly but surely opened myself to the art of finding freedom through intimacy.

I just did an Introduction for the book, part of which follows:

Intimate relationship is, to put it mildly, at a very interesting point in contemporary culture.

It has, in a small but increasing percentage of the population, evolved so quickly in the last forty or so years from its long-established ways, mutating into something very different, that its very nature and structuring, once so unquestioningly obvious, is now up for some serious questioning and reformulation.

Reformulation, revisioning, reinventing, restructuring -- how we look at intimate relationship is changing almost as fast as intimate relationship itself.

One result of this is that many of us don’t have a particularly clear view of intimate relationship. We look, but don’t very often take time to look inside our looking, getting so caught up in checking our rearview mirrors or getting nostalgic for the future that we don’t see that much of what’s right in front of us. Nonetheless, we have to admit that something is different about intimate relationship now. We look back just two or three generations, and it seems as if we’re looking back hundreds of years. Things are moving that fast.

For a very long time, intimate relationship, with few exceptions, has been viewed and lived as an alternative to spiritual life. There was the householder, and there was the spiritual seeker, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. This split was wide for men, and even wider for women. Intimate relationship was something you did -- or endured -- until there was cultural permission for something “deeper.”

Now there is not only a significant amount -- small by conventional standards, but still substantial enough to show up on the radar screens of cultural evolution -- of permission (cultural and otherwise) for something “deeper” during relationship, but also an increasing need for it. So intimate relationship has, at its leading edge, become less a prelude to spiritual opening, and more a crucible, a very potent crucible, for it.

This is great news. Grounding our spiritual dimensions in the stuff of everyday life, as amply supplied by intimate relationship and its daily dynamics, is much needed, especially with regard to the increasingly precarious positioning we as a species are occupying. Spirituality that is directly lived in the context of ordinary life is spirituality that can have a real impact on the quality of life -- staying experientially connected with our spirituality during the bumpier times of everyday life gives us a much needed perspective, greatly increasing the odds that we won’t sweat over what’s not worth sweating over. (Thus is daily life becoming contemporary culture’s ashram.) If we can access our spirituality -- and access it at a deeper level than that of belief -- during the inevitable trials and challenges of intimate relationship, we can probably access it just about anywhere.

Intimate relationship as a crucible for awakening from the entrapping dreams that we habitually animate and occupy -- sounds good, doesn’t it? But once our honeymoon with this is over, the labor begins. The path is not neatly laid out for us, in part because we, through our very relatedness with our intimate other, are cocreating that path as we go, feeling our way -- more often than not on our hands and knees -- toward what really matters. In this, we travel together not only through adventures high and low, but also, as we will see, take up residence in deeper stages of intimate relatedness.

These are exciting -- excitingly alive and excitingly unstable -- times for intimate relationship. The playing field for men and women has, in far more ways than not, been leveled, making possible encounters and openings not available when women were second-class citizens, cut off from their own voice and power. Now men and women can meet eye to eye, belly to belly, heart to heart, without the disempowering ethics of earlier times. A meeting of true partners no longer has to be a rarity.

However, a level playing field is not without its own perils, for it’s easy to let it become a flatland of overdone or force-fed equality. Once that women had more rights and a more inclusive cultural context in which to live and work, they began leaving men, in trickles at first, then in droves -- which brought more and more men to psychotherapy or at least to their knees -- and men then began to realize that they’d have to do more than flash some bucks or raise a fist to keep women with them. Many relationships became arenas of negotiation, wherein equality between the partners did not liberate, but rather only fed the status quo.

Neurotic egalitarianism seized the helm, declaring an equality that not only increased comfort, but also deadened relationship. The husband typically depicted on television sitcoms -- sexless, inept, and supremely unattractive -- reflected and reinforced the notion that for men marriage was, whatever its trappings, a trap. And so on. Intimate relationship went from barbaric to bland, infecting many with a nostalgia for the barbaric, because at least it had some juice, especially for the men. Affairs multiplied. Pornography infiltrated the mainstream, attracting refugees from the steppes of conventional marriage.

There had -- and very much needed -- to be a move away from the banal stagnation of such conventionality, but it went backward instead of forward, while often acting as if was indeed moving forward(as exemplified by multiple-partnering practices and their accompanying rationalizations). Monogamy itself started to take some heat, getting overassociated with the deadening of passion.

Nevertheless, there was amidst all the relational chaos something else emerging, something neither barbaric nor bland, something at once deeply passionate, caring, awakened, and rooted in integrity and love -- a stage of intimate relationship that could be called mature monogamy...

NOVEMBER 11, 2006

POWER STRUGGLES, JET LI, & RAMANA MAHARSHI

I was working just the other day with a couple caught up -- or netted -- in a dead-end argument, with both making very articulate cases for their position. Yet however novel their verbal fencing and its subtly emotional infusions, it was just more of the same old he said-she said power struggle. As I pointed this out and had them pay more attention to what they were up to below all the talk, their battle to establish who was right just got more veiled and sophisticated. The thrusts and parries were more spectral, but still had enough impact to keep the power struggle alive. A war for control.

But as feelings emerged more openly, and vulnerability and transparency took more central roles in their encounter, being right started to become less important than being connected and intimate. Feeling the other (an emotional resonance that includes feeling into, feeling for, and feeling as the other) became primary, and agreeing or disagreeing secondary.

Letting in the other -- cognitively, emotionally, viscerally, spiritually -- then signaled not a loss of power, but rather a freeing up of power, with both clearly sharing it. Humor and love returned, along with greater clarity about their mutual battle for power. The room felt quieter, softer, looser, no longer being filled with courtroom intentions and corresponding thoughts. Not that the war was over -- but it had lost some of its grip.

The point is not to stop fighting, but to fight without losing touch with our caring for the other. We can be fiery, fierce, confrontational, and still remain compassionate. It’s also important to remember that at some point just about all relationships grapple with, and frequently succumb, to power issues. In some relationships, there’s no apparent power struggle because one partner has allowed the other to run the show; this, of course, speaks not of resolution, but of resignation.

In the presence of awakened intimacy, conflict is just shit auditioning to be compost.

Most couples don’t fully resolve their power struggles, settling instead for a partial resolution, taking comfort in the common territory between them that’s no longer under dispute; what hasn’t been dealt with is then simply kept in a peripheral enough position so as to not threaten or disrupt the relationship. Still, it does exist, and does show up, if only in dreams (which are usually either not remembered or not shared, or are shared but not explored in enough depth). So easy it is to project our disowned power onto others...

So how do we resolve our power struggles with our partner? First of all, we need to see what we’re actually struggling over -- we can call it “power,” but what exactly is that? Autonomy? Non-interference with what we want? Agreement from significant others? Social strength? The taking of a stand? There are many ways of looking at power, but for now let’s say that power is the capacity to act effectively, to generate significant change, to impose one’s will on one’s environment, human and otherwise.

And for what do we need this power for which we are struggling? To stay on top? To not go under? To win? To be heard, felt, seen, appreciated, loved, known? Whatever we “need” power for exists in a relational context. “Power over” is power over another or others (or perhaps something in us that “we” feel separate from and therefore seem to be in relationship to); “power with” is power shared with another or others; and to be “empowered” is to experience power or an increase in power in the company of or through another or others. What this means is that power arises in a reciprocal manner, however imbalanced the dynamic and/or result is -- another or others are involved, however indirectly or fleetingly.

I just saw Jet Li’s new (and reputedly final) film, “Fearless.” From an early age, Li’s character (real-life Chinese martial arts legend Huo Yuanjia) is obsessed with defeating opponents, at whatever cost. This began with him being humiliated by another boy, who easily crushed him in a fight. No matter how great his victories, he is not satisfied; he is obsessed with having power over. When a rival martial arts master apparently wrongs him, Jet Li’s character seeks him out and does battle with him, not just to win, but to destroy him. The epitome of righteous vengeance. Only with the great tragedy that follows this is he knocked off course, and deposited in a new life, one of unadorned ordinariness and natural humility.

In his broken state, he gradually learns to flow with this, eventually becoming very at home with it. His inner war is over, so that when he eventually returns to combat -- for a very different purpose than before -- he is no longer seeking power over, but rather a resolution that dishonors no one. As much as I enjoy watching Mixed Martial Arts (UFC and PrideFC) fighters striving to overpower each other -- in the raw adrenaline rush of weaponless combat -- watching Jet Li’s character do battle after regaining his integrity and spiritual core stirred something much deeper in me, something about taking a stand that asks everything of us.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to want to overpower another under certain conditions -- as in a fiercely competitive yet still mutually respectful game of tennis -- nor that it’s wrong to exult in one’s achievements at such times, but that there’s a deeper game to be played, a game in which far more than our egoity is at stake.

I’m not talking here about idiot honor -- where we’re willing to trade our life or make enormous sacrifices for an ideal that we’ve never properly questioned or examined -- but about doing what honors our very being. There is renunciation in this -- not repression, but renunciation, a no that deepens our yes -- and there is also tremendous freedom, the kind of freedom that is found through limitation. Earlier in the film, Jet Li’s character is diminished by things not going his way; later, nothing can diminish him.

This kind of heroism -- call it being-centered heroism -- is timeless, and therefore always timely. When another embodies it, we are, to whatever degree, naturally touched, no matter how small, old, or frail that person may be. The image of Ramana Maharshi (from black-and-white footage shot in the 1940s) hobbling along on arthritic limbs, even as his whole being is smiling, comes to mind, moving me not because he is trying to be heroic, but because he is so obviously and so completely surrendered to the ultimate empowering act, namely the full awakening of others to their real nature.

Back to our couple: Their task and sacred labor is not to stop fighting, but to fight for each other and for the relationship, rather than against each other. Theirs is a humbling task that does not require them to hang their head or dilute their energy.

Power that is released from the labor of overpowering or controlling the other is power that can synergistically coexist with love, power that is but strength that does not lose focus or heart, power that is an ally, asking only that we use it as such.

NOVEMBER 13, 2006

ONLY BROKEN WAVES WILL EVER KNOW THE OCEAN

Yesterday evening Diane (my wife, deepest friend, and beloved) gave a concert in the cottage in our backyard. A year ago, the cottage was a rat-infested, run-down shed. Now it’s a sanctuary, thanks to massive renovations and some great interior design (which I, fortunately for the building, had little to do with). Early last April, we were married there.

As much as I love what’s inside the cottage (including a humongous 220 pound crystal that we spontaneously bought instead of expensive wedding rings), I also love what surrounds it: Big ceramic pots of plants, clematis vines, a jasmine-topped cedar hedge at one end and a crazily sprawling, too-far-gone-for-pruning plum tree at the other end, with a couple of massive Western Red cedars standing guard behind it. When stormwinds arrive, the cedars slow-dance, their uppermost tips seeming to impale the sky.

Last night it rained, as it had all day. Our guests made their way along a barely lit path through the dark to the cottage. My mother, 82 years old, was among them. We’d been concerned that if the rain started thundering down upon the roof, Diane’s voice would not not sufficiently carry, as she was not using a microphone. The cottage has unusually good acoustics (which we didn’t realize until the renovations were done and the new floor almost in), but this would have meant nothing if the raingods had really laid it down on us. We would have heard the sounds of rain more clearly; great under some conditions, but not here. But the rain didn’t intensify.

During the last three or four songs of Diane’s second set, we kept the door of the cottage open a foot or two to let some fresh air breeze in. By that time, the mood was deep and sweet, as we all were riding the waves of Diane’s wonderfully evocative voice. I’ve heard her sing many times, and I still get blown away by her singing and her presence while she’s singing. It’s not just that she has perfect pitch and a heartfelt, lovely voice, and that I think (quite objectively, of course!) that she’s an incredible, hyperbole-transcending woman, but that something really big comes through her when she gets into a song, something that knocks more than my socks off. I could go on here, but I need to get back to the rain, as I’m forgetting why I mentioned it earlier.

Okay, I remember: Diane’s second-to-last song was “Sacred Hymn” -- a combination spiritual confessional and love-song to the Real, ending with the twice-repeated line: “O may all things awaken me until there is only Thee.” There was a silence of maybe ten or fifteen seconds, and then she softly launched into the final song: “Last Sigh of a Vagabond Wave.” I’d written the original version long ago, but the version -- the revision -- that she sang was only a day old. As she delivered the first verse, I became aware of the rain outside; faint though it was, I could hear it through her singing. Adding to this was the natural elemental feel of the lyrics. I felt ecstatically immersed in Diane’s voice, the lyrics, and the rain. It was all happening at once, in a profound and effortlessly felt unity, without, however, any homogenizing of its constituent elements. How wonderful to hang out where Mystery is all that’s known...

One more thing about rain: I live in an area -- the Pacific Northwest -- that gets, to put it mildly, an abundance of rain. Many here find the rain depressing, especially when it goes on for days without a single ray of sunshine. Hence the enormous number of coffee shops -- is there a more common sight in Seattle or Vancouver? But I really like the rain, at least most of the time. It doesn’t depress me, but instead makes my indoor times more of a cocooning, a time to write and weight-train and meditate more than I might if it was a sunny day. I also enjoy running in it.

And the sound of rain when Diane and I are in bed late at night beneath our quilt? That sound, that intricate, only superficially staccato music, that freshly ancient and soothingly irregular chant, makes the quilt even cozier, and our room even more of a sanctuary. I think of a refrain I wrote for another song: “Look, look for me where joy and pain / disappear into sun and rain.” Sometimes what’s needed is to put the umbrellas down, and our heads up and back, letting the rain touch more than our skin...

I’ll leave you with “Last Sigh of a Vagabond Wave”....

My face is unveiled sky and timeless dream
Dewbrightened dawn and shadow-dappled stream
Gnarled coastline and jagged-blossomed storm
Ever bursting through the roof of what’s unborn

Gone, gone am I
Birthing me am I
Struggling deepsea drop am I

My body’s spun from gravity and boundless light
Dreaming of gypsy joys and knotted night
Soaring over cobblestone oceans of cloud
Ever sailing through the walls of what’s allowed

Gone, gone am I
Birthing me am I
Green fire of wild places am I

My life sings and bleeds in colors bare and bright
Riding waves of shattered moon through the night
Nothing is moving yet everything’s in motion
Only broken waves will ever know the ocean

Gone, gone am I
Birthing me am I
Last sigh of a vagabond wave am I

And this too am I
Where mystery is all that’s known
Where love is what’s being grown
Where silence tells the ultimate story
Where life blazes in all its pain and glory

Gone, gone am I
Birthing me am I
Last sigh of a vagabond wave am I
Where there’s so much I’m dying to see

NOVEMBER 18 2006

DROWNING, STATIC APNEA, & PAST LIVES

Someone once asked Ram Dass if reincarnation was real. “To the extent you are real, so is reincarnation,” he replied. I feel much the same way. I don’t take the possibility of it all that literally, and nor do I dismiss it as outright bunk. My sense is that what we call reincarnation is but the presenting surface of a depth beyond depth. Showing up in a series of past lives pales beside endlessly showing up as everything -- but that’s another story...

There’s plenty of flakiness and spiritualized egoity around the topic of reincarnation, and there’s also some compelling data that makes a plausible case for reincarnation. It’s not enough to say that it cannot happen because there’s no scientific basis for it -- just because something cannot be currently explained in scientifically acceptable terms doesn’t necessarily mean that it therefore does not exist -- and it’s also not enough to say that it happens just because we (and/or various esteemed persons) believe it to be so. Given all this, all we can do is keep an open mind regarding reincarnation.

Some other time I’ll dig more deeply into the anatomy of reincarnation, exploring just what it is, if anything, that reincarnates, etcetera, but for now I’m going to describe a visionary experience I had that could be construed as a past-life experience (or as a waking dream or hallucination), and then reflect on it a bit. So here it is, told in the present tense:

I see, facing away from me, a dark-skinned man, maybe in his late 20s, sitting in a small outrigger canoe, surrounded by sea. It’s early evening, the water is calm, and the nearest land mildly mountainous, silhouetted purple-black. He is holding a pole or spear in his right hand. Suddenly I realize that I am him, even as I simultaneously witness him.

For a moment, I wonder if he is going to drown, and then I see, as through his eyes, a scene superimposed over part of his sky: immense waves, dark blue and stormy white. I still feel calm, but know I must move closer to the storm scene; as I do so, it feels less like a painting now, and I can feel the intensity of the water. There’s a faint sense of a toothpick-like object in the middle of the waves -- I know it’s a boat, and am hesitant to go closer, but I do.

The boat is broken and half-sunk. There are vague images of bodies afloat in the wreckage -- and there is one that I have to go to, floating face-down (as in a static apnea contest, in which contestants float face down, holding their breath for as long as possible). I reach the body and have an urge to turn it over, but cannot; I have the feeling of running my hands through the thick long blond hair.

Now I can half-see his face -- young, Caucasian, sharp features, clean-shaven. I back up in time and see him slammed out of sleep by the sudden waves’ smashing entry -- he has no time to prepare. Soon, he is under water, full of shock and holding his breath for as long as he can. He drowns, and I feel a wave of deep sadness, knowing myself to be him and also to be more, thinking how young (22 or so) he is to die -- I know he is not ready, and wants to live, wants to adventure...

Now I am more him, as he is minus his body, adrift, mapless. I go back into his memories with and also as him, seeing “myself” in a mirror wearing a tight blue jacket with big gold buttons, getting all dressed up to go see my lover, before I go on my sailing adventure -- the time, it seems, is perhaps 300 or 400 years ago. For a short while, I walk down cobblestone paths, as if in a lucid dream. Suddenly I’m back in my bodiless state, aware of the presence of an extremely compelling luminosity. The young man that I am does not recognize the immense light all around him, but is magnetically drawn to it; other are nearby, semi-transparent and floating, all feeling like me, as I realize that the dark-skinned man in the outrigger canoe lived after the young blond man. The vision fades...

So many connections: For starters, the young man dies before he’s had the adventure he craves, and I also died -- also by drowning -- in an extremely significant dream at age 22 (when I was unhappily immersed in the second year of a doctoral program in biochemistry) that preceded my having the out-on-the-edge life that I really wanted (including, a short time later, travelling the world for two years, during which I had an abundance of adventures, including almost drowning twice). Here’s that dream:

Through a mist I look down and see a small boat bobbing on a glassy sea. I don’t sense my body; I seem to be a witnessing presence only. In the boat stands a man, apparently unaware that his boat is slowly sinking, almost brimming with water. He casts his fishing line, and feels a strong tug. I cry out to him, for I fear that he’s hooked some monstrous creature that will surely drag him down, unless he lets go of the line. He does not seem to hear me.

When his boat can hold no more water, he at last releases his line. As it flies from his hands, his boat sinks. He sinks, too, and at that very moment I know that I am he, that he is me. I am drowning, but am not afraid. Without any sense of panic, I gently glide up, up through the warm green water. Just before reaching the surface, I stop and exhale fully, then inhale.

With the water rushing into my lungs, I let myself drift down, down, down, my entire being streaming with a bliss-saturated joy and ease.

A few hours after having this dream, I left my graduate studies for good, turning almost immediately toward a far edgier and adventurous life. Dying into a deeper life. You could say that I took up where I had once left off.

The young man holds his breath as long as he can -- I have done so thousands of times, with great focus, since my teens. I never questioned why; I just did it, hanging on long past the point of initial panic. This has not been, as far as I can tell, the result of some early trauma. My son Kamryn was born blue (at a home birth), not breathing until I’d massaged him for a while; he was fine, but up until the age of 5 or so, he would when upset periodically hold his breath until he was blue, and then he’d inhale. This seemed to me to be a reliving of his first moments, but in my case, breath-holding has been much more deliberate.

I have held my breath for four full minutes a number of times while driving (on lightly-trafficked freeway!), and went past five minutes once, sitting with accelerating panic for the last minute and a half. As crazy as this might sound, I felt very much at home during the process. What was important was that I hold on for as long as possible. And there’s more: from the time I learned to swim (in the stunningly clear crystalline waters of the Sooke Potholes near Victoria, British Columbia), I have loved swimming underwater, more often than not staying below the surface for as long as possible.

The young man in my vision is dead, floating face down -- I fantasized for a while about floating face down in a national static apnea contest (during which contestants hold their breath for as long as possible while floating face down in a pool, closely monitored by knowledgeable others). I also have many times exhaled fully, and floated down, face down, to pool bottoms and just laid there for quite a quiet while, motionless and relaxing as the panic arrived, feeling a deep peace. Other times I have exhaled fully, and simply sat with empty lungs for up to two minutes.

Does this prove that I had a past life (or past lives) in which I drowned? Not necessarily.
Perhaps my reincarnation-suggesting vision was simply an imaginative offshoot of my lifelong breath-holding practices, augmented by the life-changing drowning dream I had at age 22 (which arguable symbolized my dying to an old way of being, so that I could enter a deeper life). And perhaps not.

A final note: Since I had the vision described above -- about 2 years ago -- I have done no serious breath-holding. My desire to do so has simply faded; now and then, I may hold my breath for a couple of minutes, but I’ve lost the desire to extend that.

NOVEMBER 20, 2006

WHEN RELATIONSHIP LEAVES THE SHALLOWS

Most weekends I’m leading groups or trainings. This past weekend was a couples intensive (Freedom Through Intimacy), which I especially enjoyed, because it allowed Diane and me to so fully combine our abilities in working with other couples. We have, through our relationship, a deep and abiding passion for awakened relational intimacy and the gifts it brings, and love being able to share what we have learned, and are learning, with other couples committed to deepening their relationship.

It takes courage to leave the safety of status quo intimacy and its anesthetizing powers. Each couple in our group had a difficult and very challenging edge to play, a zone of relational stuckness to face and somehow move through. This was more often than not quite painful, but it was a liberating pain, the pain of leaving a stagnant but nonetheless relatively reassuring familiarity for a wilder, far more life-giving, but not necessarily so reassuring territory. Like most of us, the couples in our group would have preferred to have shifted gears to a deeper, more awakened relationship without having to go through the initiatory stretching and suffering.

Most of the women were concerned that if they stopped muting or only partially presenting what they wanted from their men -- for example, being more present or being less mechanical -- that their men would then pull even further away, much like testicles retreating in icy water. And the men? Most were concerned about not being controlled, overpowered, or pulled along in directions that didn’t resonate with them. But for both the men and the women, so much energy was going into keeping the relation-ship afloat --whether through trying for change or for resisting it -- that the deadening seas upon which it traced its way were getting insufficient attention, as were most other relationships shipwrecked in the shallows.

Sperm can get very heady as they rush upstream in eggistential frenzy to the promised land of the ovum. But when they get close enough to sense that they are about to be swallowed by the object of their lust, their enthusiasm quickly wanes. Suddenly the great harbor of the Feminine becomes a threat, an about-to-happen swallowing, a perilous encircling. The little boy in an immature man may crave the all-surrounding mothering of the primordial Feminine, but the adolescent in him wants to run the other way, ideally after getting some degree of a sexual fix through cruising her surface.

By contrast, a mature man, a man who protects the little boy and mentors the adolescent without identifying with either, lets himself enter the Feminine so deeply that he lets its core merge with his, until there is but embodied Presence showing up as both him and her, in contexts simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. He does not fear the Feminine, but loves it, and loves it so fully, so powerfully and so tenderly, so wildly and so sweetly, that he goes into it with unguarded presence and full-blooded passion, emerging more himself, at once strongly individuated and intimate with the Absolute.

In the group, as passionate expression --including nonreactive rage -- was allowed full voice, full-bodied intensity, and fittingly creative licence, verbal sparring and courtroom dramatics became far less important. Instead of continuing to battle over who was right in a particular situation (and it’s amazing what trivia couples can fight over -- the trivia being the tip of a very large and dark iceberg), the whole drama of who was right became both an object of awareness and something worthy of compassion -- and, eventually, humor -- but not something to put behind the driver’s wheel. It was clear that in whatever argument was going on, both were right, but only partially right, and far from right about what was really going on.

Sometimes a ray of clarity would break through a couple’s thickly clouded impasse, and they’d smile for a moment, as if in acknowledgment of a deeper perspective, but very soon would pull themselves back into their struggle, like errants kites hauled back to earth. Still, the sheer passion that they were expressing, along with their commitment not to get into blaming, badmouthing, or shutting out the other, brought down the walls between them, sometimes fully, and sometimes partially -- but there was healing movement, there was renewed vitality, and there was an increased recognition of the value of the very difficulties -- that is, the Good News about the Bad News -- that brought them to question their relationship.

When we stop caring about who’s right
We find enough heart to see
What’s right about what’s wrong
Settling into the evernew familiarity
Of incarnation’s perpetually perishing show
More comfortable now with discomfort
Including the fear of being so close
That even the smallest cruelty of tone
Can stab, smack, cut to the bone

But do not our wounds large and small
When held with awakened care and feel
Plunge us naked into the ever Real?
So let’s include all of it in our embrace
Every pain and joy, every loss of face
Every bit of sun and rain, every loss and gain
So short this time to be together
Yet time enough to reenter the timeless
The day’s tasks call and pull and scheme
Fall floats by the window like an escaped dream
While we make shopping lists and forget to breathe
Losing what matters while we look for more
But now everything’s out on the dancefloor
Wallflowers suddenly in bloom
And there’s so much room here
Where love cradles fear

NOVEMBER 23, 2006

RABBIT-PROOF FENCE & RACISM

Just saw “Rabbit-Proof Fence” again, and was even more moved this time. Great cinematography and score, but what a story! The main actors (other than Kenneth Branagh) are not even actors, but Australian aboriginal children. The story, a true one, goes thus: Three young mixed-race girls, two sisters and a cousin, have been forcibly removed from their mothers in Western Australia in 193 1, and are in an internment camp 1500 miles away from their home, so that they can be -- after being not allowed to speak their language, have any exposure to aboriginal culture, or have any contact with their parents -- eventually brought into white culture, mostly as domestic workers. The Australian government apparently viewed what they were doing to aboriginal children as a good thing, even a noble undertaking, with much the same misguided zeal as Christian missionaries everywhere (and in the same dark spirit as the infamous Indian residential schools of Canada).

The film does not cast the Australians perpetrating this as villains. There is no sexual abuse, no down-in-the-gutter racism, no savage beatings. The bureaucrat in charge, crisply played by a buttoned-up Kenneth Branagh, really believes he is helping the aboriginal children, handling them with cold but professional care. His racism is all the more unsettling because of his “civilized” demeanor and emotional level-headedness. Those around him, with few exceptions, seem oblivious to what is actually happening. Their help, mostly well-scrubbed and briskly efficient, is far from helpful, reeking of the very barbarity of which they accuse the aboriginal culture they are helping to destroy.

So the three girls, Molly (whose daughter wrote the book upon which the film is based), her little sister Daisy, and her cousin Gracie, are in the internment camp, an unrelentingly depressing place spectacularly out of place in the West Australian wilds. Molly hates it and within a day escapes with the other two, deciding to walk the 1500 miles back home. The film already has me -- and I very willingly let certain films take me over -- but now, as the three children set out on their trek, I am totally immersed, walking each step with them. There are no discernible roads, no nicely laid out paths, no maps, and no guarantees of food. An aboriginal tracker, played by David Gulpilil (featured in “Walkabout” and “The Last Wave”), himself a sad figure, is sent after them.

What follows is an adventure made all the more remarkable by the fact that it actually happened. Watching the three children making their way on foot across the outback wildlands of Australia, doing everything they can to avoid capture, is deeply inspiring. At the very end of the film we see two old aboriginal women moving into camera view. One is the real-life Molly (now 84), the other Daisy (now 78). As they stand there, subtitles tell us what happened to them after, and long after, they’d left the internment camp. Reading this and seeing them, with so much written into the lines of their face and eyes, slammed me in the heart so hard that I dreamt I was them, in their childhood, through much of the night.

In my dreaming I also made the journey into setting things straight, without, however, dehumanizing those who had dehumanized “me.” This did not mean that I ceased to hold them accountable, nor that I bought into the idiot compassion notion that they had done the best they could. Feeling myself as the aboriginal children did not stop me from also feeling myself, albeit less fully, as the white Australians who looked at aborigines and saw only ignorance and inferiority.

If we do not recognize and have some degree of intimacy with that in us which is cold, cruel, and self-serving -- however “civilized” its demeanor -- we pose a danger not only to ourselves, but to others, no matter how nicely we generally behave. What really matters here is not the presence of this inner darkness, but rather what kind of relationship we choose to have with it.

It’s easy to denounce Kenneth Branagh’s character as racist, but not easy to see our own racism. Consider the enormous impact stand-up comedian Michael Richards (Kramer of “Seinfeld” fame) had a few days ago with his outrageously racist rant at a heckler, featuring a more-than-liberal dose of the “N” word. Richards really lost it, and his apology on Letterman didn’t help much; saying that one is not racist after such a rant is no different than beating someone to a pulp, and then saying that you are not violent. At the same time, though, it was easy to condemn Richards, without at all considering one’s own racist tendencies.

Racism is far more pervasive than we’d like to admit, and much of it is unconscious; you can check this out for yourself by taking the Implicit Association Test for race (https://implicit.harvard.edu). Having underlying racist tendencies does not necessarily make us a racist; it all depends on what we do with such tendencies. Condemning them just drives them deeper into us, until they are out of sight; being merely tolerant of them is of no more use. What works is to expose and illuminate our racist tendencies, getting so intimate with them that they can no longer do any damage.

“Rabbit-Proof Fence” takes us inside the oppressed. It is up to us to take ourselves inside the oppressor. So long as we deny ourselves this, we remain stuck in a fractured humanity, forgetting that we suppress suppresses us.

NOVEMBER 26, 2006

STATISTICS, INFORMATION-SUITS, & TRACK

Probably the only thing more boring than statistics is an essay about statistics, unless that essay is not really about statistics. Okay, so I’m trying to keep some inkling of interest, some dollop of curiosity, alive before I drop more deeply into my topic. Already I’m wading into arid abstraction, enduring dazzlingly dull flashbacks to my mathematical statistics class in 1969 (as part of an ill-advised undergrad degree in honors biochemistry) and, much more vividly, to the statistics course which I had to take as part of my doctoral program in Psychology in 1997.

That last course, which required roughly sixty pages of analysis on my part of various psychology studies employing an overload of statistical stuff -- numbers everywhere, in all kinds of arcane arrangements, implying various probabilities that no one outside of academic psychology would give a fuck about -- was by far the most tedious point of my doctoral program. Somehow I did so well at it that the professor teaching the course recommended that I get more into such things in my professional psychology future. I wasn’t flattered; I was just glad to get the damn course out of the way, knowing that I’d never again be doing stats analysis in my work. Thus far I haven’t, and don’t plan to.

My interest in the statistical analysis of data is at best minimal, and my trust in the experimenters’ resulting interpretations is riddled with doubt; I’ve seen too many studies that drew questionable conclusions from their data analyses, pretending to be objective while they in all likelihood were being skewed in accordance with inevitable researcher bias. After all, in the crunch isn’t research actually me-search?

Stats don’t deal with context, including the context of stats; stats fall flat when it comes to qualitative research; stats easily lie -- after all, facts are facts, but are not necessarily Truth. Factuality -- the actuality of facts -- leaves out too much to be Truth

Various tangents are now pulling at me, and they’re all attractive -- I’m tempted to get into a rant about information, especially the data overload that most of us accept as normal these days, as if being bombarded with information day after day is a good thing. Gregory Bateson somewhere said that information is a difference that makes a difference. Of course, what constitutes a difference differs from person to person. A one hundredth of a second difference in a 100 meter sprint probably means little to most people, but has been huge for me -- because of my longtime interest in the finer details of the sport.

I remember as a teenager knowing to the eighth of an inch the top 20 long jumps of, say, 1965, or the top ten 400 meter times of, say, 1968, to the hundredth of a second. I didn’t have to memorize these; as soon as I saw them (mostly in Track & Field News), they were embedded -- or enshrined -- in my memory banks, undisturbed by the rest of my miserably adolescent life.

And it wasn’t just track and field; I’d read baseball box scores on the sports page, and remember the details for a long time. This probably began because I didn’t see much TV in those days, other than the odd hockey game (no helmets then, nor any masks for goalies, a toothless breed of crazy bravery), and got most of my sports news from the local newspaper. If someone was on a homerun tear, I loved to open the paper to the sports page and see a number -- a number -- indicating that yet another homer had been slugged by that someone. The numbers couldn’t hurt me; they were black and white, solid and unchanging, providing me with much-needed stability. Numbers made me number, removing me, at least to some degree, from my suffering.

I was a lonely, existentially-tortured teen, despite having friends, and my affair with sports stats gave me some consistently predictable comfort. I brought this into my own workouts, keeping close track of my bench press and curling bests, along with my personal records in various running distances and throwing events.

It was almost as if this made up my identity -- this clearcut collection of numbers. Move them around fast enough, spin and circle and loop them over and over, and an image seemed to emerge that had my permission, however unwitting, to refer to itself as me. All wrapped up was I in the sensation of sensational data, keeping out the outside and simultaneously keeping the inside far enough inside so as not to disrupt me. In this nonpermeable informational membrane I did my time, until certain events of my early 20s and beyond brought me to my knees, so that I had to go behind, beneath, and beyond my information-suit, until all that was left was what really made a difference...

NOVEMBER 29, 2006

FOR LYRICS TO EMERGE

Just one more song.

That’s all Diane and I need for the CD she’ll be putting together in the recording studio in a week or so. The seven songs we already have all feel really good; she’s got the vocal down for each of them, and I can’t wait to hear them with instrumental tracks and harmonies. When I heard the first song (Sacred Hymn) --birthed, like the rest, from poems of mine, mostly written in the late 1980s -- I was blown open, like just about everyone else in the room that night a year and a half ago.

And that was just the start. We’d begin with a poem, bring in her melodic take and voice, and then rework the phrasing here and there -- what sounds great as poetry doesn’t always sound so great as song lyrics -- and she’d love it into a fitting shape, precise and deeply alive, her sounds not only enhancing the meaning of the words, but also evoking that to which they were pointing.

Good poetry is more visitation than recitation, and the same is usually even truer of good lyrics. When the music arrives, the magic deepens, so that message and medium become one evocative, multidimensional transmission. Good music is the poetry of sound.

So I looked through my poems to see if there was a suitable would-be song lurking in there somewhere. Finally I found one I’d written long ago, and decided to hammer it into something that Diane could sing. My first few versions, considerably altered from the original (with me reluctantly pruning away cherished but poorly fitting phrases) -- were okay with her, but just okay -- which was not so okay with my ego -- so I went back for more revision.

There were a few lines I really liked that I had to admit didn’t go so well with the rest of the poem; for a while, I tried to convince the rest of the poem to incorporate these lines, but it just didn’t work. So instead of nipping and tucking them, I erased them, and started afresh. By the time I was done, not much of the original poem had survived. Now it had more rhythm, more depth and color, and less abstraction -- thanks in large part to Diane’s keen songwriter’s ear and eye.

I enjoy this process so much -- even though I usually complain about it in its earlier stages -- that I’ve a strong feeling that an upcoming CD project we both really want to do (songs about relationship) will mostly be written this way, forged in the crucible of our intimacy.

Here’s the poem, ready to transmute into a song (and surrendered to more pruning if my beloved so desires):

O BREATHE US

The waves arrive one by one
Sparkling with remembered sun
Ancient songs seizing our tongue
The temple rising out of the blue
Broken pillars now solid and true
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

The waves sing of holy yearning
Stained with dawn’s red churning
Leaving us adrift in their turning
Until we release our golden chains
Bursting through the slumber and pain
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

It’s time to emerge from the old
It’s time to come in from the cold
Frozen pain hides what must be told
Until we are freed from our tomorrows
No longer married to old sorrows
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

And once again here we are
Gathered together from afar
Each of us a spark from a waking star
Our awakening heart is the clearing
For the Holy Deep we are nearing
O Breathe us deep, breathe us strong
O Breathe us full, breathe us home

Music tends to breathe more fully and more consciously than most poetry. Music also tends to be more in touch with its preconceptual roots (and transconceptual wings) than is most poetry. But bring music and poetry together, permitting them a lucidly succulent embrace, and what beauty can emerge, what richly textured epiphany, what deep invitation!