Go Be Alice

"'Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice… ‘Good-bye, feet!’”

Good-bye, indeed.

(I don’t like the look of human feet. They make sense in keeping us upright and walking, I know; but they are just so odd.

Cat’s toes: sweet little jelly beans. Dog’s feet: handsome and rational. Horse hooves: Strong, thorough, capable. And then we have two blobs of flesh with five wigglies handing out at the end of them. They are definitely curiouser.)

It’s curiouser I’m interested in today. In meditation, I thought: move from a place of curiosity. The place we all inhabited when we were Alice. Not a solving curiosity; not a frantic curiosity; not the selfish curiosity that sees the Other and declares them Freak. Just Alice’s “curiouser and curiouser” attitude, watching to see how far away our poor Feet will go as we nibble the “Eat Me!” cake.

“Curiouser” takes us to a place of wonder, as it did Alice. “Curiouser” watches, and listens, and experiences, and isn’t afraid of what might happen next because something is bound to change. It lets us see new connections, try new things, and simply be part of whatever is happening as our lives unfold.

On weekends, I often give myself a day like that: when my husband asks what I will do that day, I say, “I am going to unfold.” They are always lovely days, because I give myself the gift of curiouser and do whatever happens to come next.

It’s hard to let ourselves unfold in life – or it was for me – because I was told to Have Dreams, Set Goals, and Achieve. It got me pretty far for a while; but then every goal seemed overwhelming, every dream seemed unattainable or silly, and achievement translated into making a living for the daily bread.

I’m on a new track now: unfold. Stay in the curiouser. See what happens; experience it. Of course, it comes back down to trust: whatever I get curiouser about, whatever rabbit hole I’m willing to go down, Something Interesting will happen.

Right This Minute

As I sit this morning, in meditation, a thought – an old thought – pops into my head: What’s wrong, just this minute? I see it, notice it, hear it said by that little voice that’s mine but not mine, in my head. And I think: why not turn that around? What’s right, just this minute?

It’ a lovely summer Wyoming morning. Cool. Birds chatter at the feeders. Our neighbors a half mile away raise sled dogs, and it’s breakfast time: 70 dogs yelp in happy – unalloyed happy – anticipation of the Great Chow. I’m about to ride with my best riding buddy; we are each taking both of our horses, ride one/lead one, just to get them out and exercised.

And tomorrow I leave for California, to a cousin’s husband’s memorial service. It’s been years since I’ve seen most of my family there. There are few of the “older” generation left; in fact, we, the cousins, are now the “older” generation. There are grandchildren, and great-grands. And we all still feel as if we are still growing up in the heat of Southern California.

But right this minute: tea, a cat on my lap; I can breathe well this morning, the asthma is managed; I’m beginning to think better as the tea manages my late-rising brain; I don’t have much work, but I’m fine with that: I’m still seeking what it is I want to do when I grow up, and seeking something different from the years of writing training programs to teach people how to sell stuff.

Stuff lost its thrill for me when my office burned down, a few years ago. Now I want to work, not to help people get more stuff, but to help people realize the stuff isn’t it. Stuff isn’t life. Life is much more than stuff.

It’s what is right, right this minute.

When Failure Can't

I’m beginning to look at my past “failures” in a whole new light, since I’m redefining goals in their entirety. I used to have “thing” goals – get produced, get into an art show – instead of “being” goals – experience something via art, connect with the deep part of the world. I still have some “thing” goals, like be able to pay my bills, but I’m even coming to believe that these aren’t all that important – one can always pay one’s bills, somehow. And if you can't -- well, something else will happen.

I learned that at 26 when I completely ran out of money. Rent was due, I had $6 in my checking account, no car, an old mattress on a board for a bed in my studio apartment in San Francisco, a few books, and a teddy bear from childhood. I huddled there all weekend, with my big Monday plan being: Cut up the teddy bear with scissors and walk out to see what would happen. Poor Nice Bear must have been shaking in his teddy bear shoes!

Monday morning at 8 am (I kid you not!) a prospective client called to say yes, they loved my proposal for the newsletter, yes they wanted to start immediately, and where did they send the check? I was saved by the world. Or rather, by the seeds I had planted.

I learned that when you run out of money, nothing happens. You don’t get spit out of the universe like a watermelon seed. You’re there, and you have no money. And somehow you get out of it if you don’t panic. The seeds you planted grow and fruit. They just grow on their own timeline.

I’m glad I didn’t cut up Nice Bear. He’s still around at 51 (his age), and I think of that moment every time I look at him. As well as all of the secrets he has in his teddy bear head from childhood.

* * * * *

So maybe even “thing” goals like “pay my bills” are the wrong place to start.

What would a “being” goal “failure” look like? Well, pretty much if one remains mindful, one can’t fail. A “being” goal failure is a gremlin, a false perception. It's beating yourself up mentally for not “being” something in this instant that you’re not. When really, all you can do is be where you are, experience what you are experiencing, and trust the process. Plant seeds.

It’s funny: changing this perception of goals has changed my perception of how I might contribute. I was in a "visioning" course this past December, and when I was asked, “What can you contribute?” I thought, well, nothing, I don’t contribute anything to anyone. (No gremlins there, eh?) Now, in thinking about “being” goals, I see that it all contributes, only you can never know how. If I am present, and “indulge” my creativity, and create something cool, and spread it around, that is the gift, whether the Thing is art, a business or personal tool, an idea, a comment. That's the seed.

* * * * *

I love studying complex systems, because they are so unpredictable. And because they represent real life: you never know where you contribution will go, how your seeds will sprout, because you aren’t privy to the impact.

For example, in 1985, I wrote a play about Nelson Mandela called "What Is To be Done?" My "thing" goal: get it on Broadway. It got locally produced; it didn't hit The Big Time (almost, but not quite; I made sure of that by having a nervous breakdown before it could be finished). My thought at the time? Failure. Not just the play, either; Me.

I lived with that failure, blaming myself, for 20 years, long after I stopped writing plays.

Fast forward to Google: it's true, I Google'd myself, and discovered that a copy of the play landed up in the African National Congress collection at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. How did it get there? Who has read it? What do they think now? What did it spark them to do? I have no idea, no answer to any of those questions.

* * * * *

A "being" goal means trusting that, if we are true to ourselves and the world, to kindness, joy and love, then our impact will be positive. We don't have to make it so. We just have to let the world know. We just have to plant a seed.

Arriving At Now

For the past 20 years, I've read and re-read "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki as part of my meditation practice.

Today, the following sentence leaped out at me and made sense:

"We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else."

Suddenly, even as I sat there, the expectation of future experience stopped intervening in the actual experience, and I sat at peace for some time. I'm floating in and out of it now, in the face of what my unfolding life today brings, but I can access it when I stop and realize it again:

There is no preparation for something else. This is it.

_______

Since December, I've been in a dark place, struggling to re-version my experience of living, struggling to figure out "what I want to do when I grow up," even as I approach my 58th birthday in a few weeks.

With a good therapist, with a good life coach, with a journaling community, and with a lot of work, I've finally learned a few things:

- Let go of controlling emotions. Let them be, look at them with curiosity, and see what you can learn from them. You are not your emotions.

- A goal to achieve a thing is different from a goal to achieve an experience, a state of mind. The former are stepping stones to achieving the latter -- and, at the same time, results of achieving the latter.

- All there is, is this. The rest is residue of the experience.

I feel ready to re-version now. No. That's not right. I am already re-versioned. There is no preparation for something else. From now on, it's about experiencing and exploring and creating -- and trusting the process and myself.

Stealth Re-Versioning

Yesterday, a reader's comment brought me back to this blog, after a hiatus of two years. Has much happened in the interim? Yes and no. I'm still struggling, after a fire destroyed my office in 2008, with what I want to do when I grow up. It took a deliriously deep turn this past December, when I blissfully started a class on visioning and strategic planning for my art business and found myself wondering: what DO I want? Since then, it's been a struggle, emotionally, as I find I've spent a lot of my life laying big plans, aiming for big goals, yet not really doing what fed my self-soul.

So this morning, after meditating, I thought it's time to come back and continue here. After all, I've discovered, re-versioning happens even when you don't have big goals and dreams driving you down the road. Maybe especially then.

*****

In meditating this morning, using a meditation for unpleasant or difficult emotions, I realized that I can often hold two different emotions in my body at once: both the loving-kindness peace, and whatever negative emotion – in this morning’s case, anxiety – separately. They manifest in different parts of my body. The loving kindness, when I can maintain it as the focus of my attention, helps calm the anxiety a bit, or at least lets me feel anxious without anxiety taking off and taking over. And I thought: if I’m not completely the anxiety, and I’m not completely the loving kindness, what am I? And I clearly experienced that I was not these bundles of emotions and thoughts, but something else.

That “other,” that self, is a mystery. It’s not my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my actions; and yet it is. I remember a question/koan I learned a long time ago: Who is it that watches my thoughts and emotions when I sit and meditate? Who is it having the thoughts and emotions?

In the Buddhist tradition, that one watching is the Whole, the One; the part of us that is connected to the whole. In fact, there is no “part of us,” there is no separation from the whole. We create and imagine that separation because we cannot, in out little minds, do otherwise and (in the way-back days) survive the beasts out to eat us. We had to differentiate: flower from food, pack animal from lion, self from other. Yet it is a type of fiction, an amazing and incomprehensible fiction, because it seems so real.

I’m reminded of when my depression kicks in and I am struggling with it: it always seems so real, and yet I have learned to not make big decisions during the episodes until I figure out what’s going on, because the next day – the next moment – it all vanishes like a ripple in a stream.

Which means the feelings of loving-kindness are also a fabrication, an attachment, the Buddhist teacher would say. What is eternal is what is beyond that attachment and all of the others. What is eternal is the mystery.

My affirmation for today: I am a person who expresses the wonder and joy of life – at the mystery – in as many moments as possible. I hope many others may do the same.

*****

I realize that, in light of what the people of Japan are experiencing now, that this meditation seems elitist and ephemeral compared to very grim realities. Yet I hope the same peace and joy for every person there, in the midst of earthquake/tsunami/radiation realities. As a teacher once said, pain is real, and inevitable; suffering is optional. May the people in and of Japan suffer as little as is humanly possible.