Coasting

"The silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind."

R.S. Thomas

"I know what it is to exist between the world's certainties."

Father Benitez, as written by Robert Harris in Conclave

Coasting. That's what I'm about to do: go coasting. I'm taking a trip up California's Central Coast to stay at a monastery for a silent retreat for a couple of weeks. Coasting means both "to proceed along or near the coast of," and "to advance or proceed with little or no effort." These are exactly my goals. The plan is to rest in beauty and in silence until I can hear my self again.

How hard it is just to be. To not improve or work toward improvement. To stay with nothing and no purpose and only myself until...what? The assumption is that something else will happen -- purposelessness will yield to some purpose and things will change. Always even the resting has some goal. So I just want to sit in silence for awhile. Just be. Just coast.

We've been going to Doheny a lot lately. First time I went to Doheny, it scared the shit out of me. Rocks and slimy things on the bottom; I had to wear my booties and was still freaked out. Massive crowds; I never went for any waves in the crowd. Wasn't confident enough in the line up to do that, get in someone's way. This week, I went to Doheny in bare feet and TURNED on my surfboard for the first time! I did it! I surfed down the line! Almost entirely on purpose. A wave caught me, I stood up, leaned back and to the right, put more weight on my back foot as I leaned to turn the board, and even looked ahead down the line -- I did it! But the more important part was that I went in bare feet. Bad ass. The slimy things are still there, they just don't bother me any more. The rocks are still there, I just have more confidence in my self to handle my self on top of them. I keep doing the things that terrify me and then they don't terrify me anymore. I'm seriously prouder of surfing at Doheny in bare feet than I am of making the turn.

This summer, I have made the turn -- a little, baby wave turn -- in surfing and in relationships. This summer, I have let people in. The Sisterhood has been my loving community for awhile, and those relationships continue to deepen and evolve. My Surf Sensei and I speak or text every day, another mutually supportive relationship. And a friend stayed with me this summer. I haven't had a roommate in 20 years and we did pretty well together. While having another human in my house was not without difficulty, it was actually quite nice to have someone at home with me, to care for, to talk to at the end of the day. It was good. I will miss her presence. I have more relationships that are filled with light and reciprocal now. Just what I wanted. It is the summer of me becoming a mother and grandmother -- not in the biological sense, but in the logical sense, as Armistead Maupin called it. I have built my family of choice -- my logical family -- full of friends and dogs and ocean.

Inviting people in has been so beautiful. Safe, centered people have a much different feel to them and I now trust myself so much more to be able to handle the ups and downs and emotional upheavals all people bring. Even light-filled people have their moments. I have also shared my troubles with them and they have joyfully been there for me -- such a new experience. Dejate querer -- let yourself be loved. So I have made the turn that I have been wanting to make since I started this writing adventure -- actually inviting other people into my life in a real way. I am able to look around, take in more of the full context, give and receive, glide on the waves of emotion, living more freely in the moment with other people in the line up.

So my community is thriving. Doing really well. And I am doing well in that community. And. There are things I have to do alone. Thomas Ogden wrote, "A principal goal of psychoanalysis is the progressive recapturing of self-alienated personal experience, isolated from the intrapersonal and interpersonal discourse, a process that allows the analysand to more fully recognize and understand who he is, and who is becoming.... In the retrieval of the alienated, the analysand becomes more fully alive as a subjective, historical human being. He becomes more capable of engaging in a fuller (less self-alienated) intrapersonal as well as interpersonal dialogue.... He becomes less fearful of that which he formerly isolated from himself and, to that extent, becomes more free." Both intrapersonal as well as interpersonal. My community is solid. How is my internal self doing? Making the turn internally means reclaiming neglected parts of myself, but I'm finding it's not a forceful effort. It's a gentle one. After I face my emptiness, my own internal abyss, sob it out (an ongoing process), there is a peacefulness here and curiosity. Very gentle. So how do I reclaim my self? Nourish my soul, as surf sister Kathy texted just now as I write this.

From the Insight Retreat Center Newsletter, Janel Crooks wrote, "The IRC kitchen manual establishes four 'tasks”' that frame the spirit of kitchen dharma service and set the stage for generous-hearted, practice-deepening experiences.... The first task of a cook is to avoid being distracted from their work. Simple and direct attention to the matter at hand is the basis for the Dharma of cooking.... The second task is to let go of any conceit, anxiety, and rumination that might interfere with the work.... The third task is to cook with love. This is done through feelings of care, kindness, compassion, generosity, respect and appreciation for everyone on the retreat....The fourth task is to work in beauty. Dharma beauty is a feeling of some combined sense of goodness, virtuousness, big-heartedness, generosity, happiness, and gratitude." Attention, letting go, love, and beauty. These are the stars that will guide my journey north along the coast.

So many messages lately about going with the flow. Really letting go of any control and just allowing the synchronicities to show up. I started doing Yin Yoga this summer. The teacher's instructions the other night were, "Deepening the practice. Letting go. Relaxing deeper." And, "Give yourself permission to do nothing." Yin yoga teaches me that there is always a deeper level of relaxation. I think I can't stretch any more, that I'm as much a pile of mush as I can be, then after a couple of minutes, there is another release. It just happens. I notice more places where I'm tight, and then I breathe and let them go a little more.

Blossom in what delights me. Allow the seeds to germinate. Sit on my board and watch the waves, see what's a good, green wave, observing. Enjoy the in between as much as the ride itself. What is drawing me in? Where does my body want to move? It wants the coast. Salt air. Blue expanse. Terns coasting above the water. Mountains. A little bit challenging, a little bit scary. Rugged. Wild. Silence. Nature. So there I go, trying to not try. Just coast. Set sail in a general direction and let the ride take me.

Is that even possible? To intend to have no intention? I started reading Carl Jung's Red Book, the story of his time in the abyss after his break with Freud, which he found quite devastating. It's beautiful. One footnote reads, "...Jung criticized the Western tendency to turn everything into methods and intentions. The cardinal lesson, as presented by the Chinese texts and Meister Eckhart, was that of allowing psychic events to happen of their own accord. 'Letting things happen, the action through non-action, the 'letting go of oneself' of Meister Eckhart, became the key for me that succeeded in opening the door to the way. One must be able to psychically let things happen.'" Intend to not intend. Let go completely. Wu wei, effortless action. Coast.

BTG tried to get me to lose my goal orientation, embrace a process orientation. This is the practice. Months of therapy continue to have their effects, a momentum continues. Between the therapy, meditation, retreats, yoga, loving relationships, and surfing, I have let go of a lot of who I used to be. I know who I don't want to be anymore, yet I don't entirely know who I am now. My current address is in the in between. "In a world of instability, where is shelter to be found?" wrote Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao in an article for Tricycle. "The answer is ... that not-knowing is like that which precedes the kalpa of emptiness. The kalpa of emptiness is 'the kalpa that lies between the destruction of one universe and the formation of the next.' In other words, to hold to the center in this view is to take shelter in the place before anything arises, a place of emptiness and profound silence, a place of the deepest rest where self-interest has not yet entered. This is not a void, but rather a darkness where things are not yet differentiated or seen. You yourself can go to the darkness and become like an empty vessel, empty of points of view and preferences. An empty vessel refuses nothing and receives everything that is coming at it from all directions. By practicing in this way, you can create more space to accommodate your own reactivity and the points of view of others."

I have this emptiness within me that has been scary, depressing, and hollow. Perhaps I can also see it now as the place of rebirth, a womb. I shall sit by the ocean, on a mountain, and just be for awhile. A bardo. The silence providing shelter from the points of view of others, a buffer protecting me from the constant onslaught of opinions that reinforce my ego as if by some insidious and subversive osmosis. An ego full of the ideas of others, what has been imposed upon me without my consent or awareness. I will escape it for awhile, relax into my own being, the only conversation will come from nature, Mother Ocean the only mirror. Worry about nothing but food and maybe SPF, allow myself to pause in the pregnancy of my new life.

Even that's the wrong metaphor. Pregnancy holds expectation, hope. Perhaps a better term is to rest in the hysterectomy of my existing life. Nothing might change here. Nothing might need to change here. I can rest in the nothing. Instead of absence creating harm, absence can also heal. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," warned Dante. Pema Chodron wrote, “Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.” She says, “Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” So no hope on this trip -- I'll forget to pack it. Just

go for a ride.

That's the plan anyway. Coasting. I've done a lot of work the past two years. Let's ride on that wave of effort and see where it takes me. Passing the time, letting it flower to see what arises instead of pushing it. Jung wrote, "We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light. How can we presume to want to know in advance, from where the light will come to us?" Maybe I can coast and wait for the light to come to me. Paying attention to what naturally arises to delight me instead of planning ahead and looking for something else.

Parker Palmer, one of my favorite writers and thinkers, says to pay attention to "What can I not do? What is the soul insisting upon?" He says, "...I was just doing my best to follow the track that seemed to be opening before me at the time, trying very hard not to press some design on it, but to just feel for the natural openings, that would take me a next step and a next step." He continues, "...there is a fundamental Christian belief that we are born in the image of God and that, as Quakers would say, there's this kind of divine imprint that makes every human being of sacred worth. To me that means we are stamped with a kind of selfhood. That it's important to try to discern the shape of that selfhood. To understand what this particular kernel is meant to grow into. So there's a lot of discovery to be doing, but there's always this germ of identity and integrity. And if you pay attention, you know when you're off course. You're uncomfortable. And sometimes, sometimes it's way beyond discomfort. It's into profound depression or despair, which I've known some of in my life. There are all kinds of ways in which the human self asserts itself and insists on itself when we have veered off course."

"So, there is this inexhaustible source of guidance within us, which certainly can be named True Self, something Thomas Merton wrote about a lot. Identity and integrity. It's named many different ways in different traditions, but every wisdom tradition I know anything about has a way of naming that core of self that constantly is saying, 'pay attention to me and figure out what this means in your current context.'" There is some overlap here between what Parker says and what the Buddhists say about no self. Current context matters. A spirit of allowing. Discerning the shape of our selfhood is an interplay between our values, what we naturally move toward, a whole body response, and the causes and conditions of our existence moment by moment. We can pay attention and discern what feels right to us, feels in alignment.

It seems like there is no grand plan here on planet earth, there is only an unfolding. I've made things so serious when maybe they aren't so serious. "The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness," said Merton. Play, he said. "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced," said Soren Kierkegaard. While this insight is initially unsatisfying -- actually disappointing and potentially enraging to this recovering hyperachieving perfectionist -- how much time have I wasted believing in my own dire seriousness? -- I might now be embracing it. As I reclaim my neglected parts, I get braver, am able to walk with bare feet over mysterious and scary, gross stuff underwater and have it not phase me. I can invite people into my life, see how they show up -- what actually happens and if they can meet me where I am -- and then decide what to do next, making the turn. Coasting along, figuring things out one moment at a time. Knowing it's all a part of the ride.

Terns

Don't think just now of the trudging forward of thought,

but of the wing-drive of unquestioning affirmation.

It's summer, you never saw such a blue sky,

and here they are, those white birds with quick wings,

sweeping over the waves,

chattering and plunging,

their thin beaks snapping, their hard eyes

happy as little nails.

The years to come -- this is a promise --

will grant you ample time

to try the difficult steps in the empire of thought

where you seek for the shining proofs you think you must have.

But nothing you ever understand will be sweeter, or more binding,

than this deepest affinity between your eyes and the world.

The flock thickens

over the roiling, salt brightness. Listen,

maybe such devotion, in which one holds the world

in the clasp of attention, isn't the perfect prayer,

but it must be close, for the sorrow, whose name is doubt,

is thus subdued, and not through the weaponry of reason,

but of pure submission. Tell me, what else

could beauty be for? And now the tide

is at its very crown,

the white birds sprinkle down,

gathering up the loose silver, rising

as if weightless. It isn't instruction, or a parable.

It isn't for any vanity or ambition

except for the one allowed, to stay alive.

It's only a nimble frolic

over the waves. And you find, for hours,

you cannot even remember the questions

that weigh so in your mind.

--Mary Oliver

Attention, letting go, love, and beauty. These are the stars that will guide my journey north along the winding coast. Making gentle turns toward freedom. Wish me luck.