Word of the Week - 88

Word of the Week: SELF-HELP

Let's say that we are in life as we may be in dreams, multiple characters in our own story.  Victim and rescuer, speaker and listener, question and answer.  This may sound like old business to many of you but it seems a fresh notion to me, brought on by my listening again to Beth Orton sing "Sisters of Mercy."  That may be us, "Sisters of Mercy," binding up our wounds. 

As I participate in a meditation course on beliefs, the process carves open pockets of emptiness, even if just for a moment or two, space in which no debris has collected, places of possibility.  Since I often feel what passes for real life is a bill of goods in which we are constantly being urged to reinvest, it is not such a leap for me to consider that much of what we've been told is essentially untrue, that it has always been untrue.  Consider this:  what if we are not the lesser beings we always felt ourselves to be. 

So I walk around the edges of the song, the entire notion of mercy and deliverance, and wonder is it wholly interior work.  If this is the true and natural order, our acting as self-healers,  no wonder so many of us have grown quite elderly and weary waiting for rescue to come from external sources.  As I say, this may be a familiar idea for you.  I stopped looking at so-called self-help books decades ago, deciding it might be less exhausting to blunder along in a state of disrepair than to try and mend, according to one specific set of instructions or another, all that I believed was broken.  In my long-ago experience with self-help, I never had the sense of it being a process which one undertook for the long haul, the gradual merging of this into that organically.  The books or PBS presentations always seemed to half-promise remarkable and rapid transformation, desirable as we judged our present manifestation to be so unpalatable, so wrong. 

For this same reason I don't read books in which women especially embark on a journey - physical/spiritual - of rather short duration after which they become, quite simply, THE light.  Such journeys, the expense of them alone, and such starry outcomes are not within ordinary grasp.  Few humans transcend in this fashion.  We are not less if we illuminate a smaller patch.  Again I return to an acknowledgement of process, of time and effort.  That progress as we measure it may not be swift does not make it any less remarkable.   At 70 years and counting, I will likely never believe there is a destination we reach in this lifetime.

We lay our own hands upon our hearts and souls.   In our heads we repeat mantras that pull us closer to center.  A quiet mind is the best friend I can hope for.   As it seems to be the most workable choice, is it not okay to remain part caterpillar, part butterfly, 100% work in progress?  It is the only solution I can imagine that moves us forward without discarding the best-loved and loyal parts of us, a bit threadbare though some may be, that have brought us this far. 

Making friends

Sundance: I wasn’t cheating.

Macon: You can die. For that matter, you both can die.

Sundance: If he invites us to stay, then we’ll go.

Butch: We gotta leave anyway.

Sundance: He’s got to invite us to stick around.

Butch: I’m over the hill, but it can happen to you.

Sundance: That’s just what I want to hear.

Butch: Every day you get older, now that’s a law.

Butch approaches Macon.

Butch: What would you think about maybe asking us to stick around?

Macon: What?

Butch: You don’t have to mean it or anything, just ask us to stick around, I promise you–

Macon shoves Butch aside. Butch turns to Sundance.

Butch: I can’t help you, Sundance.

Macon freezes. Sundance stands up.

Macon: I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. If I draw on you, you’ll kill me.

Sundance: There’s that possibility.

Butch: No, you’d be killing yourself. Why don’t you just invite us to stick around? You can do it. And easy. C’mon.

Macon: Why dontcha stick around?

Butch: Thanks, but we gotta get going.

– Sundance (Robert Redford), Butch (Paul Newman), Macon (Donnelly Rhodes), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), written by William Goldman

(with thanks to Scott Myers)

Recently and repeatedly I've encountered messages advising me to be on more agreeable terms with what vexes (torments) me.  In my daily emailed Note from the Universe, the question was, "Want to move a mountain?  Befriend it."  Yesterday the suggestion was longer.  

"If you can fall in love with just one thing about him, her, them, it, or you, Marylinn, just once a day, and speak it aloud, you'll be surprised at how quickly this will transform your entire life.

I love that look on your face when the coin drops -
    The Universe"

****(Okay, I have to report that I cannot get the fonts to change and match nor can I have this text in a stand-out color and no amount of love is going to make me happy about it, but there it is.)****

Over the past three days, I have tuned in to podcasts that share the application of such principles.  It reminded me of the scene from Butch Cassidy and how, maybe, we can make something leave by asking it to stick around.

To speak love, acceptance and welcome over aches, pains, tremors, unsure footing, life-long depression, fear, anxiety and every other presumed defect of body or character is unknown country.  I am not familiar with the customs here.  What I assume, though, is trying something so radically different cannot possibly make any of it worse.  To feel that I am no longer swimming against my own tide or that of the wider world would be so peaceful.  My arms are tired.  I find - I have found - it difficult to believe that our brief time here does not include larger portions of contentment, quiet mind, joy.  Having seen myself - and I know I am not alone in this, many of us have this in common - as a nearly-impossible fixer-upper into whom most of my energy needs to be poured to keep the roof from caving in or a portal to hell opening in the living room floor, has half-consumed and wearied me for years.  More than two decades.

The series of programs this week, about which I received notices that I chose to ignore, featured Panache Desai whose own descriptions of his history and work tell the story better than I can.   That the series was free made me less wary and that it was suggested by a friend whom I know to be much more fluent in this sort of transformation, who knows, too, what I seek, told me just to go ahead.

I am not sharing this because I have experienced the shift from an old, estranged self to the whole, radiant, authentic being the teachings assure is possible.  Instead I am sharing this part of the process, perhaps a new willingness simply to allow all that is me without my own ever-present stink eye given when I fall short of some artificial ideal.  I cannot even pretend that I know how to fall in love with my arthritis, with my fatigue, my too-often indifferent ways.  So I am going to walk around the table and come at all of this from a different direction.  "I'd really like you to stay around," I say, making new friends from old afflictions.  In unison, they answer, "Thanks, but we gotta get going."  I hope with hot and spangled passion there will be more to report. xo

Attributes of the moth

"Moths of Orange County, CA," photographed by Peter J. Bryant

A pair of comet moths, photo by Johan Nijenhuis

By now, which means after more than three years of blog writing,  some of my secrets have been pulled from under the couch cushions and put on the table.  Among these are the revelation that I find life to be teeming,  jumping with symbolism, that I willingly allow a representative portion of something to stand in for the still-to-come whole, that metaphor is my native language and very little is only what it seems.

In a short, perhaps five-minute segment of a recent podcast, there was a meditative exercise in which  listeners were directed to find a spirit guide.  The practitioner spoke of eagles, for the ability to fly would be required of the guide.  Mine arrived.  It was a moth.

It may be my most basic belief that we are here - wherever we are geographically, emotionally, physically in this moment - to be of assistance to each other.  Assistance, in this case, can mean anything.  Without rushing to Google, I thought of the moth, an extreme example of transformation, starting life as one form and becoming a different creature.  I am not who I used to be. Teachers, awareness and opportunities continue to find me, carrying me out of dimness, discouragement, into a brighter land.  Mulling and pondering - and daydreaming - are natural states, taking the measure of a situation, mostly by intuition, interpreting, perceiving, feeling.  Feeling my way toward knowledge, insight, information.

When I looked into what moth brings as a totem  I found: the ability to perceive with clarity, strong healing abilities, protection for traveling between darkness and the light, finding light in darkness, metamorphosis and, in common with the phoenix, rising from the ashes, in moth's case of the flames to which it is drawn.  What better sidekick?

The title above is one of those, "Quick, write this down," flashes that fill the scraps I mentioned in the previous post.  Attributes of the moth.  Forgive me, please, if I repeat myself.  Life as I have come to know it is fraught with meaning; likely it always was, but I had no skills.  These, too, are days of myth and fable, truths revealed in waking, walking dreams.  No wonder fiction explores parallel universes, wormholes, wrinkles in time.  How else to explain being conscious of treading the ordinary path of oil changes, bill paying, medical procedures, clothes that need washing or detecting an unpleasant odor in the refrigerator and, in the same moments, seeing the story within the story, the plan behind the random event, the bigger picture. 

For some of you, this will be like my talking in tongues.  That may be a fair comparison.  The best we can hope for is to know our own truths and to allow others to know theirs.  If we share common ground, there is much to discuss.  If not, I may be found in a somewhat unkempt state wearing soft clothes that feel like pajamas, pencil-callused fingers turning the pages in The Great Big Book of Moths.