Road Rage Teacher

After a year or so of driving to work in Chicago, my mild-mannered, Wisconsin driver persona dissolved into road rage. I raced to lights, swerved in and out of traffic, and cursed any driver who slowed me down. Once as I was pulling out of a gas station, another driver careened in, swopping in front of me so I had to slam on the breaks. It wasn't much of a slam as I was hardly moving, but I was pissed. So I flipped him the bird. The other driver put his car into reverse, floored his accelerator, and slammed into my car. He then raced off.

I never fixed the dent in my car door. Every time I got in, the dent reminded me not to escalate anger. The other driver was the one who took our exchange to violence, but I was the one who started it.

The dent also reminded me to practice. In fact, my first, regular spiritual practice was for city driving. After an initial angry reaction, I would stop, breathe, and do a chant wishing good for the other driver. Believe me, it was quite a regular, regular practice. But it slowly had an effect. I became calmer, happier and less easily angered

I long ago drove that car into the ground and sold the limping husk. So I guess, I needed another way to be reminded.

Being in a play is fraught with tension that finds outlet in all kinds of interpersonal dynamics. Partly it is the pressure of performing. But a counselor friend quotes research that acting is therapeutic, and many actors depend on that release to live with their unhealed trauma.

A miasma of backstage jealousies, shifting alliances, gossip, & awkward chitchat rises from underlying, deep anxiety. Does the audience like me? Is my part good? Did I get to shine onstage? Did another actor damage my performance? And these worries cover more important ones: Am I seen? Am I heard? Am I loved? Do I deserve to live?

Last weekend, another actor did something that hurt me - a little more than having to slam on my breaks when barely moving, but nothing serious - if I wasn't choked by an ego tangle of performance anxiety. I angrily told the other actor I didn't like what she did - a reaction that, while less than a bird flip, was an unjustifiable escalation. Before I knew it, the other actor was shouting personal threats of the "I'm going to take you down" variety.

And I remembered my car, the dent, and the gas station.

One of my favorite Gospel quotes is "No one is good but God alone" (Luke 18:19). Slant that with Douglas-Klotz's translation of the Aramaic word not as "good," but "ripe" or "mature," and the quote gets even better.

None of us are mature. We are all learners. It is not our job to be perfect enough to never screw up. That is not even a worthy goal. Instead we are here to practice.

The rest of that performance, my inner landscape remained dark. Evagrius said that it doesn't matter if the injury you received was real or imagined, it is your anger that hurts you. I could feel my anger hurting me. I didn't like it. I didn't want it. But I couldn't shake it. So in those periods during the show when I had nothing to do, I shut my eyes and asked for help.

The play ended, the audience emptied out, and suddenly I was suffused with a sweet calm and upwelling kindness. I turned and there was the other actor, kneeling alone with no one in ear shot. In that moment, all I wanted was to share the sweetness and defuse the anger. I'd been offered the help I'd asked for. With complete sincerity, I could apologize for saying anything offensive. The other actor also apologized, seeming equally relieved to dispel our antagonism.

However, by the time I had driven home, anger had risen up and swamped me again. So I called my only friend who knows both theater and spiritual development. She was generous enough to listen as I talked myself into seeing my own responsibility. By the time I was ready for bed, my inner landscape had cleared.

Practice and spiritual friends. Mostly, that's all we have. But, oh, are these precious. For so often, they are enough.

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No Need to Fear Being Dead

I don't relish the pain of dying, but I don't fear being dead. Because I remember being dead. Well, only that first, exhilarating, upward rush of release - that feels like all the graduations, birthdays, and weddings rolled into a single microsecond burst of joy. After that, I get nothing - as if an impenetrable lead curtain lies between me and further knowledge.

It is enough.

The deaths I remember (and yes, there are several) were mostly violent, only I don't remember the trauma as traumatic, or any pain.

Each death carried important insight about life and the leaving of it.

Once I was burnt to death as I slept. A big bed, hangings, furniture, my body: all went up in a great whoosh of flame, smoke, and all-consuming joy.

What I learned? Wow, death feels good.

Another life ended with beheading by guillotine. Forget the French Revolution. This was the normal round of executions of petty criminals in some smallish town. I was a poor, nondescript woman. Stole a loaf of bread or something.

Not the first in line for the guillotine, I stood on a platform looking over the heads of spectators and the roofs of houses to the deep, deep sky. I breathed in the sense of life, becoming lighter and happier. Then it was my turn. I knelt, feeling the curved wood under my neck and looking into a basket placed to catch the heads. The basket was wet. Each flat, woven reed glistened. I heard a bit of drum roll as the blade was lifted and counted, breathing in life until I was as alive as it was possible to be. I realized I could live longer, but I could not live more. If I didn't die then, I would soon slip back into a physical and emotional roil that blanked out any sense of aliveness. So I would gain more days, but not more life. Better to live fully for a few seconds and welcome the death that followed. I felt so calm, so alive, so happy. On ten, a strange shlick! Then black.

I don't have any memory of that after-death.

What I learned? More time does not bring more life. Living fully is possible, but has nothing to do with resisting the passing of a particular body. In fact, just the opposite. The more a person is caught up in resisting and bemoaning death, the less alive she becomes.

I don't generally share these memories, but hey, with economic meltdown in the U.S.'s immediate future, how else live than by risk?

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Reflections on the Wisconsin Uprising

One of these days the people in the U.S. will rise up and toss down our presently growing corporate tyranny. It has happened before & will happen again. Just won't be so easy as a few rounds of voting. For one thing, the prevalence and ease of manipulating electronic voting machines (including visual scanners) makes it unlikely that votes for a sane state are counted
Yet, even if the vote doesn't bring real change, the organizing energy is precious. Rejection of our rising capitalist dictatorship can only come when enough of us are willing to loose everything, and even be shot at. That kind of desperate courage arises out of economic & social suffering - the kind some in the U.S. are already experiencing. The suffering will spread due to the economic collapse being ushered in by extremist Republicans & appeasing Republicrates (like Obama & Reid). As we discover that we do not suffer alone, more and more of us will join together to choose life over survival.

It will take time. The tools used to jolly populations along have always been so very effective at dividing & conquering: fascism built on fear & hate of trumped up social enemies, & keeping folks silent out of fear of homelessness, starvation, and reprisal - while they must work more & more for less & less.

BUT capitalist dictatorship, like any dictatorship, like monoculture, is inherently unstable. IT CAN NOT LAST. The structure of any controlled system IS the very source of its destruction. Nature abhors perfect forms. Inherent in biology is pressure for diversity and new growth in small, overlooked spaces.

We had a vote in Wisconsin. Two entrenched Republicans were turned out of historically Republican districts. That's amazing. But it is also a bare beginning.

So the question is: how do we keep our spirits up so we can engage and live and have full, compassionate hearts for the duration?

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The Necessity of Hunger

"The number one reason to fast is that food tastes better when you are hungry." Augustine said that (more or less - I paraphrase 'cause I can't seem to locate the source). Augustine's not a guy I quote often given that he invented the doctrine of original sin, and blamed male lust on the women men lusted after. But I like this.

And I find it comforting. Especially as a strange coterie of Republican extremists and center-right Republicrates (Obama, Harry Reid & like-minded congressional "Democrats") eagerly pass legislation guaranteed to take the present, U.S. economic recession-bordering-on-depression into a full-fledged, undeniable depression. (We can't have a "double-dip" recession if the recession that started under Bush never ended - CEO salaries, global corporation profits and stock prices notwithstanding.)

But what if, in the larger spiritual picture, the role of these insulated, corporate politicians actually is to explode the U.S. economy? Could that be a spiritual good in the largest, universal picture? A creative passage of fire, a dark road that many people of this nation need to walk? Yes, huge, visible suffering will be visited on masses of folks - I expect to be one of the suffering. But out of that ash land, what might we grow?

So many of us, myself included, have lived with such a surfeit of guaranteed comfort for so long that we have no idea what food tastes like, a dry bed feels like, or how water quenches thirst. We need to rediscover hunger. For our spirits' sake.

For ten years, I walked the terrible dark road of despair and grief and self-hate. Many don't make it to the end of that road. I came out the other side with help from those I met on the way. I wouldn't wish the same journey on anyone. Yet I am also immensely grateful I was forced to go there. The perspective, compassion, presence, and humility I learned were worth the price and the danger.

I've yet to meet anyone who choose such a path. We have to be driven. Our coping strategies and comfort blankets have to be forcibly stripped off.

If the impending economic depression is just such a forced stripping away, maybe our national journey into the dark could bear equally valuable fruit.

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Of what use pain?

My left hip is the most painful, and my right knee has hurt for the longest time. Yet in a recent Reiki session, those two places were completely open. Sometimes Reiki energy is sucked up by an off-kilter part of the body like dry earth thirsting for water. This was different. Energy flowed freely into my hip and knee - no obstruction at all - as if it was poured through empty space.

What if chronic pain is not just the unhappy indicator of a broken body? What if a body in pain is not even broken. What if pain is the side effect of the body serving a purpose - and doing this job well?

Yes, my sciatica results from decades of poor skeletal alignment. Yes, that skeletal misalignment was caused by muscles held tight all my life - with other muscles pulling improperly to compensate. Yes, those muscles first froze into a trauma response during childhood. And, yes, that scenario created an unbalanced whole whose misplaced wear ended up pinching and inflaming sensitive, sciatic nerves.

But what if, ultimately, pain serves another purpose than pointing up failed function of a purely physical machine? Perhaps an invitation to life-style change. Perhaps a call to heal buried trauma. Perhaps a loving-parent-push out of the comfort zone and onto the road of spiritual awakening.

Or perhaps a sign that the body is clearing and opening to receive greater energy.

Perhaps.

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