Saturday, there was a shooting on the pier. Someone accused of shooting another human in another town drove their car to Newport Beach, chased by police. They then drove their car to the end of the pier and the police followed. There were gunshots. The man died. An officer caused that death. There were no winners that morning. The headlines read something like "murder suspect killed in police shooting." Surf Sister Ashley was there walking my grand dog on the beach and caught the whole thing. Our peaceful haven suddenly shattered by gunfire. Incredibly sad.
The whole beachfront was abuzz with updates, gossip, and the general agitation that comes with such an event. I sat with Surf Sister Toni at Beach Ball; she's back to driving herself to the beach! Not yet healed but cleared to put weight on the ankle she broke two months ago. It has been a long journey and I was glad to be sitting with my friend again, drinking a kamikaze and a beer (her) and Coke (me, lightweight), discussing our lives amidst the tumult. Later that day, Toni painted our nails: Nail Day declared a local holiday. I told her she was the Nail Boss, and she chose a beautiful light blue color. I have accent nails with glitter and wave stamps on my thumbs.
Living here in a both/and world, chaos and calm, sisterhood and shootings, the What'sApp chat has been intense this weekend. We've discussed SO many things!
Surf companies going out of business in the US and our massive buying spree as a result of the sale. I think the Sisterhood cleared out 60% of their inventory.
Please do yourself a favor and view the Donut Daddy on Instagram.
Future fantasy surf trip plans to Australia and how too many poisonous things live there for a future fantasy surf trip to Australia.
A dead guitar fish found on the beach.
The shooting.
The girls ran the Huntington Beach 5K marathon. We called it the marathon even though it was the 5K, because a 5K may as well have been a marathon for those who ran.
The disturbing difference between (the real) UGG boots (Since 1974) and (Made in China knock off) UGG boots, culminating in a discussion of capitalist UGh boots that we all apparently own.
We are together even when we aren't together and it is hilarious and beautiful. Such a joyful chatter. Hundreds of messages over three days. Blue nail polish has reminded me all week that I am loved, that I not only have a new life, but that I have been made new again through my connection with this sangha. Norman Fischer wrote in an article for Tricycle, "We’re not anyone in particular. Every moment, in response to the conditions in front of us, another person, the sky, the flowers, we are created again. That’s who we are: our relationship in this moment. Yes, of course, conventionally, we all have identities, commitments, loves, hates, and preferences. No one avoids that, and we wouldn’t want to. But that’s not all of who we are. That’s the point of Zen practice and, I think, of all spiritual practice: to get in touch with the person that we are beyond the person that we seem to be."
I think this is the Buddhist idea of emptiness, that the "I" that I know my self to be is really nothing solid at all by itself. What I take to be my self is a product of my relationships, continually renewed every moment in my interactions with others and my surroundings. "I" only exists in relationship to everything around it. My latest incarnation wore blue nail polish this week. Every time I saw it, I felt like Harry Potter staring into the Mirror of ERISED and seeing my family manifest before me. A family that formed on the sea. I have people now, and I needed them this week.
I had to have a follow up mammogram after my annual and they found something this time. I had to have a biopsy. I am fine -- results are in and all benign -- a near miss -- but what a week. I have used all of my strategies to maintain some kind of calm amidst this crisis and everything really worked. Though definitely a rollercoaster of emotions, I handled them. I was navigating this situation as the captain of the ship instead of flailing about as the rudderless boat on the stormy sea. It felt like a "therapy practical exam" in many ways, and I think I passed.
The most important thing I did was tell people. I told my surf sisters. I let people love me this week by accepting help and support. And this is a huge breakthrough for me.
Dr. Thema Bryant was interviewed for her new book. She said, "A lot of times perfectionism comes from a history when we couldn't depend on people." The people we've chosen previously have not been able to support us, which leads to "the tendency to isolate when we're having difficulty." In her new book, Matters of the Heart, she writes, “Others grew up with emotionally fragile parents who couldn’t handle the truth of your life experiences, so even as children, you felt like you had to take care of your parents and carry the weight of your experiences and emotions alone. As a result, you learned to lock away your feelings and needs, not requiring anything of anyone.” So, when "we can only let people see us shiny and perfect," it "means no real intimacy."
She advises those of us recovering from this dynamic to "let people love you. Let people show up for you, and know you are not a burden." (Ooof. Punch in the gut on that word "burden.") "Let the friendships actually be mutual.... It is necessary to cultivate spaces where you do not have to wear the mask of perfection, where you can speak freely about what is going on in your life rather than hide behind the automatic response 'I’m fine. How are you?'" Dr. Thema goes on, “Greater connection requires require greater vulnerability. Although vulnerability can feel scary, being really and truly known is worth the risk. This is what it means to be at home with yourself, not with a script or a mask, not as Superwoman or Superman, but as the real you in the company of another.” Super risky and I did it. Instead of isolating and allowing myself to buy the lie that I am a burden to others, I let my people support and love me this week. And it was good. So good! They showed up in so many beautiful ways. What a strange and beautiful thing to be able to count on people, to be in it together -- actually giving and receiving -- for real.
I also found that I could count on myself in a new way. I pulled out every strategy BTG and I have discussed.
Self-compassion was flowing constantly. I spoke to myself gently.
I cared for myself. Ate good food and napped when I needed to. I took days off from work to heal.
Stayed in the present moment. I didn't spin out into future scenarios.
Fully accepted the reality of the situation. I didn't deny anything or stuff any feelings down.
I named and felt my feelings.
I noticed my thoughts and gently allowed them.
I had a couple of guided meditations that I know soothe me, so I played them when I needed them.
I relied on the wisdom of spiritual teachers to provide a larger context to and make meaning of this struggle.
Lots of good stuff that showed me where I'm at on this whole spiritual path thing, that all of the work I'm doing is actually paying off in real ways. Even in the midst of this particular storm, I had a measure of peace and made conscious choices to maintain that peace.
The biopsy was on Friday, and as I walked out of the office on Thursday, I felt myself getting anxious. I was able to distract myself with work all day, and was headed home to the quiet of my apartment to sit and wait until the morning. As I turned off the light in the office, I noticed feelings of anxiety spinning up. I named that feeling, "I'm worried," and said to myself, gently, "Is it happening now?" No, I thought. "Then we don't have to worry about it now." My True Self speaking to soothe me, and it worked. I wrote in my journal that night, "Today, I am deeply ok. It's weird." I kept using that strategy when I started worrying about results, freefalling in the interim that felt like a hundred years. I said to myself, "Is this actually happening now?" No. "Then let's not worry yet." I think the "yet" gave my anxiety some room to know it could still speak up later, now was just not it's time. "Right now, I am ok," was a mantra that got me through the pandemic, so it worked again here. Be where my feet are. Present moment.
After the procedure, I sat in the car for a bit before driving home. I breathed. I cried. I wondered, "What is this going to teach me?" Always, I will make meaning of what happens to me. It's not an "everything happens for a reason" kind of thing. Making meaning, finding a larger purpose and context for this experience, is how I get through. Adam Grant summarized, "... Pennebaker’s research has shown that writing about traumatic events only improves health when people describe facts and feelings. Together, writing about what happened and how they felt about it enables people put together a coherent story. By putting their feelings into words, they can start making sense of a negative event. They come to understand it better, gain insight and perspective, and sometimes even find silver linings. Now that they have a coherent story about the negative event, it’s easier to summarize and move on." I journaled a lot.
There was also just this level of acceptance I could feel deeply. The same way that I do not even consider controlling the ocean, I didn't even consider trying to control this. So in a way, surfing helped too, as a practice of dealing with something over which I have no control. Just like a rogue wave on the ocean, if cancer is coming for me, there is nothing I can do about it. It reminded me of the Three Tenets from Bernie Glassman and the Zen Peacemakers again. Nothing like a potentially devastating health issue to focus the mind on our constant state of not knowing, but I was resting in it, not trying to deny it or make it different than what it was. Full acceptance.
I remembered that I had just spent a couple of weeks worrying furiously about a nodule found in my lung, which turned out to be nothing to worry about. A week later, I'm socked with the possibility of breast cancer out of left field. So, really, why worry when we don't have any idea what's coming? I'm reminded of the quote by Chögyam Trungpa, “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” I felt the freefalling this week. When I got the news, my insides disintegrated. I felt lightheaded, dizzy, lots of vertigo. It literally felt like falling. But after tuning into that feeling, I could breathe through it and found that it wasn't necessarily bad. Like floating on my surfboard in rolling waves, when I first paddle out, it takes me awhile to sense the speed of them before I try to surf. I usually sit outside for awhile to get acclimated. In the car, I felt an underlying realization of "Oh. This is how it is now." Life is going to continue throwing shit at us: shootings, broken ankles, stolen bicycles, devastating wildfires, and cancer diagnoses. And we will continue to handle it. I can breathe and settle, take my time to get acclimated to this new, viscerally felt reality. Freefalling this week, not arguing with reality, and breathing through it maybe is how we become "stable in flight," like Roshi Joan described.
Philosopher Ami Harbin names this kind of experience a "disorientation." She defines disorientation as, "experiencing serious disruption such that we do not know how to go on. To become disoriented is, roughly, to lose one’s bearings in relation to others, environments, and life projects. Experiences of disorientation prompt sustained uncertainty: Who am I now? What should I do? How should I relate to others? As disoriented, we can feel out of place, uncomfortable, uneasy, and unsettled.” She says that these disorientations can actually be beneficial, that we grow new capacities when we navigate and survive them. She named four: the capacity to live unprepared, the capacity to sense vulnerability, the capacity to go your own way, and the capacity for "in this togetherness."
The capacity to live unprepared means we know there will never be a ground. We never know what's on its way, what's about to drive down the pier. If the next time I jump off my surf board, then I will be the one who breaks an ankle. What color of polish my Nail Boss will choose next. Letting go of the illusion of control is a different version of adulting, which I am embodying more and more each day -- that surfer strength I'm developing. It's one face of the Buddhist idea of not knowing. It's what my job has taught me: to be ready for what walks in the door at any given time. There's is actually a peacefulness in that approach to living. I don't actually need to plan ahead too much or expect to get everything perfectly right. There is nothing to get right; there are only responses, choices, and consequences. We do the best we can at the time with what we are given.
The capacity to sense vulnerability means we are "tenderized" by such moments of disorientation, sorrow, and grief into a new awareness. She quotes Judith Butler who described vulnerability as, “...the fact that the “I” who seeks to chart its course has not made the map it reads, does not have all the language it needs to read the map, and sometimes cannot find the map itself." We understand on a visceral level that we have no control over life and no one really has any idea what they are doing, so we decide to treat each other with great care, knowing how vulnerable -- and therefore how powerful -- we are. "We more deeply understand our power to wound and be wounded." I am softened by this knowledge. Opened up. Life is indifferent; we don't have to be.
In fact, because of the random meaninglessness and indifference of life, I choose to be kind, compassionate, and open. Like Naomi Shihab Nye wrote in the poem Kindness, "Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside/you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing./You must wake up with sorrow./You must speak to it till your voice/catches the thread of all sorrows/and you see the size of the cloth."
The size of the cloth.
Life is the same for all of us: seemingly indifferent and dishing out some serious shit. I understand that when I'm surfing, the ocean is indifferent to me; it is up to me to learn how to work with it. Learning to surf on land means to develop these capacities to deal with that indifference and not knowing. Father Richard Rohr writes in Eager to Love, a book about the way of St. Francis of Assisi, “I have come to believe that Jesus’ solidarity with suffering on the cross is actually an acceptance of a certain meaninglessness in the universe, its nonsensical, tragic nature, a black hole that seems constantly to show itself to sensitive souls. To accept some degree of meaninglessness is our final and full act of faith.... How hard that is to do sometimes. The final and full gift of meaning is ironically the incorporation of 'no meaning' and 'not knowing.'" In the face of indifference and meaninglessness, what can we do? Uchiyama Roshi wrote, "The starting point for Buddhist practice is how a person chooses to live out his or her life." Some people might choose to harden, wall up, and shut down. I certainly did in a past life. This time, I'm making different choices.
So that deep acceptance of our reality sank in last week. It's not that I wasn't sad or scared. I was. Both! Often! But I allowed those feelings. Named them to myself, "Oh. This is fear." I cried it out when I needed to cry, rode the whole wave of the emotion, and by allowing it, saw it fizzle out and pass. I breathed deeply when I needed to calm the anxiety. I did a couple of guided meditations. Moments like this show me how much I've grown in my ability to tolerate my emotions -- my real, viscerally felt emotions. Not stuffing down emotions is so freeing. I was able to take the time to allow them and release them. (Part of the privilege of living alone: I can sob at the kitchen sink and no one will bother me about it. I don't have to protect anyone else.) I also had the energy to deal with them; it's amazing how exhausting it is to deny my emotions or stuff them down. Allowing them was difficult, yet easier than the alternative.
I was also aware of my thoughts. I noticed my fears and named them. I wasn't actually afraid of the ultimate concern: dying from cancer. I was more often fearing the consequences on my body. Nearly all of my concerns were about the practical discomforts that accompany a body in decline and disease: painful procedure (and maybe more in the future) and painful recovery, impacts limiting my ability to live my life (can't go surfing with needle biopsy holes in your boobs), costly medical bills, and medications with uncertain side effects. Dying actually never made the list as a worry. Audrey Lorde said, "We've always been temporary."
But it was something I thought about. One of my surf sisters has had breast cancer. She is now five years cancer free after a double mastectomy and a year of treatments. She was at stage 3c when diagnosed. A friend of hers was at stage 2 when they met and her friend is no longer with us. She asked, "Why would I survive and she didn't?" We don't know.
Yet, I wasn't afraid of dying last week. There is a big part of me that knows that I have already died many times during this life. I've lived many lives in which I was so sure of everything; everything planned and perfect. And mercifully, it all fell apart. Twice now, it has all fallen apart and I had to pick up my life and reassemble the pieces. In The New Saints, Lama Rod Owens writes, “Struggle is the experience of truth working its way into my body and mind, rubbing down the jagged, rough edges of my delusion.” Richard Rohr writes, "...to accept full reality will always be a kind of crucifixion, both for God and for ourselves. For us, it is a sure death to our easy opinions, our forced certitudes, any futile attempts at perfect control, our preplanned life, any intellectual or moral superiority, and eventually any belief in our separateness...." This time, I'm choosing different pieces to assemble.
The capacity to go your own way means to live by an internal guidance system of values. That capacity is hard won. Nye wrote, "Before you know what kindness really is/you must lose things,/feel the future dissolve in a moment/like salt in a weakened broth." I have lost things. Last week, I stood in the ruin of myself and surveyed all I have lost in this loop on the spiritual path. Things external to me and beliefs internal to me. Externally, I lost a deeply fulfilling job in which I was at the center of a community doing good work to help people. Thirty years of professional accomplishment, two master's degrees, and a PhD are all irrelevant to my current employment status. My body is declining: no longer pretty or athletic, I am mushy. Hair gray, skin freckled, eyesight diminishes annually on a predictable schedule. Heart and thyroid issues limit me; menopausal hot flashes set my body on fire; I am held together by modern pharmacology and caffeine. Both my beautiful dog and the man I considered to be the love of my life died this past year. Everything I've ever taken pride in, sought refuge in, garnered purpose from has gone.
Internally, every notion I believed about my upbringing has been upended. I had a difficult childhood it turns out. Revising that history has been something else, I tell ya. Talk about groundlessness. Turns out, I did not have the good parents. Actually, I am not ok. I have experienced trauma and abuse. I often don't feel real, like I'm floating through life, detached from reality, unconnected, apart, all alone in the world. I now know that's a trauma response. Instead of being a high-achieving, professional, well-organized, delightful individual, turns out I'm afraid of everything and everyone and have a deeply held belief that absolutely no one wants me. Pink sings in the song "I Am Here" that, "I've already seen the bottom so there's nothing to fear." I thought I was at bottom -- gotta be pretty close to bottom there, right? -- then, "Hi, you need a biopsy of both breasts." Well.
I will not ask "What else can I lose?" because I know there is still much more I can lose. Yet, for this spin around the spiritual path, I'm hoping this list is good enough, that I've lost enough of my delusions to get to the next level. I've died many times. I've lived many lives and died many times. As it is not bad to die to your egoic existence, it also might not be bad to die to your physical existence. A favorite children's book I used to share as a fifth grade teacher was Tuck Everlasting. Spoiler alert: the Tucks are immortal. They live outside the wheel of life. It turns without them and they are stuck in time. Living forever is a curse. Instead of impermanence as the cause of suffering, impermanence might be a gift. Thich Nhat Hahn wrote, “When you practice looking deeply, you see your true nature of no birth, no death; no being, no non-being; no coming, no going; no same, no different. When you see this, you are free from fear. You are free from craving and free from jealousy. No fear is the ultimate joy. When you have the insight of no fear, you are free. And like the great beings, you ride serenely on the waves of birth and death.” Can't say my little ride here has been serene, but I did sense a taste of that.
Richard Rohr in Eager to Love writes, “...it is the necessary dying through which the soul must walk to go higher, further, deeper, or longer." In Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama Roshi talks about impermanence being one of the "undeniable realities" of life, "There are indeed some undeniable realities. For example, all living things die. There are no exceptions! No matter how much one is opposed to it or resists it, everything dies. This is an inescapable reality." He wrote, “What exactly is it that we have to learn from this first undeniable reality? We have to clarify what life and death really are. We have to know clearly just what it means to be alive and what it means to die.... It means knowing clearly just what death is, and then really living out one’s life. That is the most important thing we can learn from the first undeniable reality.” So what have I taken away from this midlife death?
Freedom.
More freedom. I am not afraid anymore. Because I've lived so many lives and died to them, I know I'm not really real. Any identity I claim today will be temporary. I can hold my stories, my beliefs, more loosely. I can choose my own values and take responsibility for my life today. I also know that if I'm not real, then others aren't really real either. That hurt people hurt other people. The vast suffering of the world spills over into hurtfulness to others; it's not personal. It, too, is indifferent. It's not about me. It's about all of us being ignorant to what's really real. The more I deal with my own shit, the less my hurt spills over into others and the more I can see any harms done to me and the world come from the same kind of suffering.
At this time, this is the story I'm telling myself. This is what I have constructed out of the mess. One of the characters in the movie A Single Man says, "Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty." This story is fundamentally different from the one I was telling three years ago when this part of the journey started. This one is more open and loving. There is a peace here that stands beside all of the difficulties and I can call it up when I close my eyes, when I am deep in the pit of hopelessness and despair. Is that what this stage on the path has been about? To exist in both realities at once? To have an experience of oneness not quite "take," but to be friends with it, see it out at the beach sometimes, while life goes on here in the "skin bag," our separateness and suffering louder somehow, harder to take. At the same time, there is more joy. From Pondering Pool artist Susan Mrosek, "Today will be joyous for the beauty slamming against my face is unwilling to be ignored." It's a both/and world, shootings and sisterhood, chaos and calm.
I am reminded of the Czesław Miłosz poem, “The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness/And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,/And for me, now as then, it is too much./There is too much world.” Sometimes, it's hard to take. I feel very much like an outsider.
Then I am reminded of one of my favorite words ever. In the book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a Sanskrit word she encountered on her path: antevasin. She wrote, "It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times, this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villager’s anymore -- not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent -- not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.”
Father Rohr again, “It is ironic that we must go to the edge to find the center, but that is what the prophets, hermits, and mystics invariably know. Only there were they able to live at the edges of their own lives too, not grasping at the superficial or protecting the surfaces of things, but falling into the core and center of their own souls and their own experiences. Now, let Francis and Clare show you how to die into your one and only life, the life that you must learn to love. It will show itself to be one continuous movement—first learning to love your life and then allowing yourself to fully die into it—and never to die away from it. Once death is joyfully incorporated into life, we are already in heaven, and there is no possibility or fear of hell. That is the Franciscan way. The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world."
Father Rohr wrote that people who had midlife deaths, “...could trust the eventual passing of all things, and where all things were passing to. They did not wait for liberation later—after death—but grasped it here and now.” The Buddhists say similar things about oneness, that absolute level of existence. We "concretize the eternal," and "enact the unity of present and eternal." This week showed me that the choices I'm making are helping foster my liberation. I am moving in alignment with a deeper self. Instead of rigid boundaries and walls, I can ride that flexible boundary between sea and surfboard, ready for whatever comes along. The capacity to go my own way.
I am not afraid anymore. I am not afraid of my feelings or other people or of what’s coming next. Or rather, I am afraid and it no longer stops me. What I thought I couldn’t handle, I can handle. I've apparently faced enough of my shit to come out the other side to feel a sense of security. How bizarre! A totally out of control situation gave me a sense of control. Instead of being that rudderless boat on a stormy sea, I found my inner rudder. I was at the helm the whole time. Father Rohr, “They lost and let go of all fear of suffering; all need for power, prestige, and possessions; and all need for their small self to be important. They then came out the other side knowing something essential... who they really were."
But I'm not really alone when I go my own way. Disorientations also produce one more capacity: the capacity for "in it togetherness." Roshi Joan again, "The final resting place is not the ground at all...yet here we are, together, navigating the boundless space of life, not attached, yet intimate." As Nye wrote, "It is only kindness that makes sense anymore." Intimacy and kindness helps allay the fear. I have lived many lives and died many times, yet there's a part of me that keeps going, "the person that we are beyond the person that we seem to be." Finding that person has happened in community. The Sisterhood has held me while I have walked this Road of Trials and lost several inner and outer layers. I am cleaner now, thanks to them. Emptier.
The biopsy showed me what life is going to look like for this time being. I showed up for me this week in a more healthy way than I ever have before, and my sangha showed up for me as well. I sank into my people and was surprised by the buoyancy. I'm so glad I met women who surf -- who know how to ride the waves on land and sea. We show up for each other. We are together even when we aren't together and it is hilarious and beautiful. The Sisterhood has formed a consistent companionship, a mutual positive regard, lots of support going in all directions. We forgive each other's failings and make room for each other's faults. We are not perfect; we do not have to be. Before I had results, I thought at one point, "Cancer or no cancer, I'm going to be fine." I'm not alone anymore. I am my full self here. I am loved. I show up and so do they. There is joy and laughter, challenge and failure, shootings, broken ankles, stolen bikes, wildfires, and cancer. There is also matcha and croissants, guitar fish, Australian surf trips (maybe), The Donut Daddy, kamikazes, and UGh boots. Through it all, we are in it together. New wetsuits and pretty surfboards, rough seas and calm, we show up. Wearing fabulous blue nail polish, we show up.
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