proteanme

This will be pretty fragmented, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell about ourselves,  the narratives we construct to make sense of ourselves to ourselves, and how careful one has to be to not to get jammed up by blowing the dark ones out of proportion so we can’t redeem ourselves, or the stretching out the good ones into these grand myths where we don’t need redemption.  You don’t really  wanna buy into the hype either way, ya know.  In fact, sometimes you just wanna look at why your even telling this one story, over and over.

I have this dreamy play list in constant rotation. It’s a little sad and a lot of longing and I can’t stop listening to it. I don’t even wanna stop. It feels like I’m poking around at all the corners I’ve kept covered up so tightly, prying loose old memories, shaking the dust off things I forgot I ever wanted in the first place.  A bit of re-remembering.  It’s funny I could have forgotten what it is to imagine.

The song that’s breaking my heart right now, is Cat Power’s cover of Joan Baez’es Song for Bobby.

Lately for lots of reasons I find myself feeling pretty dreamy and pretty hazy and it seems to be a good place to be for processing thoughts and feelings, but not exactly lending itself to a coherent narrative for blogging. Sometimes I feel I’m just holding lots of fragments of things together in my head, and some fragments are the tip of an iceberg, and some are just jetsam maybe.

At best this is gonna be a fragmented. I was waiting to get my haircut last week and listening to these women talking about the NIU shooting. I was particularly tuned in because my one of my dearest and oldest friends teaches there and was on campus that day and in short, she is ok. These women were talking about how they thought the world had become more violent and they blaming it on video games and violence on TV and in movies, etc. They continued that way for a while, in that banal vein, with me holding my tongue, in part because I am fascinated with how people try and make sense of the fucked up shit that happens in their lives. It’s like grasp, grasp , grasp, look for someone or something to blame so we can push away to a safe distance the awful randomness of violence, the real potential that all of us are easy targets in a world that has no particular interest in our personal well beings. Plus, I was thinking more violent than what? than a horrible history of lynching, than a world war only 60 years ago that took 72 million people’s lives, than soldiers coming home these days without legs and arms, than women systematically raped and tortured in Darfur. It’s when violence hits to close to home for the comfortable mass, that everyone throws up their arms in alarm. I feel for my friend and all the faculty, students and staff at NIU and for the shooter and his family. But I’m sorry the world is not more violent.

I had this realization last night riding home from yoga. As much we make might make plans to mark events or celebrate the milestones in our lives, ya know that trip to Europe you’ve always wanted to take or your big 40th birthday bash, much of life is about the getting from here to there, taking things out and putting them away, saying good morning and good evening to your co-workers and students, washing your clothes, wearing them, and then washing then again. And it’s best to find some way to bring meaning and joy to that minutia. The grand stuff is icing on the cake of a life that doesn’t owe us a damn thing.

I think that’s why I like being a bike commuter. It brings some meaning to getting from here to there and back. I notice things, like the way the new glass towers on the waterfront rise up like a sci-fi poster behind the old Victorians that line the streets of my yoga studio. I feel the weather and when it’s raining and everyone’s griping I get to be the badass that shows up in the grocery line, wet and splattered with some grime. And even when it kicks my ass like it did last night, I get grounded in my body, heart beating, lungs breathing, legs pumping as I move myself through space on my elegant, efficient machine.

A teaser for a headline, but I’ve had some whoppers, well little whopper insights lately.  Today’s insight is that being busy with interesting work can, not always, but can help create a little breathing space around heart ache.  I’ll take a little space.

I’m feeling done in and undone at the same time and I’m completely uninterested in embracing this process. Sometimes, I just so sick of it all.  I’d like to just put my heart on ice.

From Pema Chodron: We may doubt that we’re up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

Am I a glutten for punishment? I dunno. I don’t think so, but it’s easy for me to let other people construct that story about me. Frankly, it just takes me a while to figure how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking unless I’m really angry or super hurt. Given that – the murkiness of my emotional landscape, if someone else comes along who’s got the volume turned up to 11, it’s easy for me to get lost in their sound. I used to be able to brush this part of me off, but it’s not so easy now. I guess it’s not working any more. Inside I’m in transition I think, which is is awkward. I wish I came with a key or a better compass to navigate my emotional landscape.

Ok. I get it. There’s no trick, no magic bullet, no paradise…but there is this one person who takes the edge off, who turns the volume down when I’ve cranked it too high, who’s face when I look at across the table from me makes the world seem a little less cruel.

I read that on a bumper sticker once. I wish I could take that advice to heart right now. It’s as though my mind is searching around for some new torturous thought or image to do battle with. Good lord, do I have to be such as expert at beating myself up?! It is amazing feat. I am able to conjure up the most exquisitely painful scene, the hook ever so sly and subtle, but once I take the bait. . .

I understand how people turn to Jesus, not that I’m going there, in hopes of alleviating their suffering, heal their addictions, restore their humanity damaged by stealing or cheating, redeem them from their cruelty. I understand it because the belief that there is something outside myself that’s gonna save me from me, man, that’s a very, very enticing idea.

I’m scared and sad and feeling terribly lonely, in other words heart broken. And I can’t find one damn distraction that works to get a break from it all. I tried to go to a movie last night, but just couldn’t escape into it, so i left about 1/2 way through, and came home and made some angry art, hoping it would alleviate that big fucking knot of anger. And there was a little looseness but not a lot. And then I stayed up way too fucking late, because I didn’t want to have to battle my thoughts as I tried to fall asleep. Instead I got to wake up to battle them them a little this morning.

I don’t want to go down this fucking stupid heartbreak path. Again. I’m just so fucking sick of it. C’mon! If there is no there there, what’s the point of this awareness and practice. Fuck process. This shit is not like a movie or a song where the right something comes along and makes things better. There is no right thing, even if there are a lot of wrong things. There’s just fucking practice.