Happy Halloween, Witches! Our surf coven surfed in costume this Halloween season and had a wonderful time on a glorious morning. A froggy, Cruella de Vil, a muggle dressed as a witch, and Luna Lovegood all showed up on Halloween morning to surf the baby waves. Blackies hosts a costume surf every year the Saturday before Halloween (Minerva McGonagall was present!), Wahini Kai hosted a contest (a wetsuit became a surfboard costume), and we did our own surf on the day. I'm so happy that I'm with a group of women who value PLAY for themselves, no matter our ages. There is a gendered nature to fun -- men are allowed to play games all of the time; in fact, are highly compensated for it. But women...it's harder to just get out there and play, especially when you have a family. Getting out from under the masks that society has placed on us by simply going out to play is subversive. Happy to surf with these rebels.
For some of us, this midweek surf was a treat. Weekly surfing continues with the Sisterhood and some people are able to go everyday. Surfing every day really does help you progress much more quickly, but I am still a twice/week surfer. I am still struggling to catch and ride waves. I can still get up, but my feet aren't quite landing correctly. I need to practice my pop up more and develop more upper body strength. I'm also working on popping up quicker -- at the top of the wave. I'm still working on embodying the movement -- flowing with the wave, allowing that energy to go through me, getting rid of my fears or doubts that keep me looking down at my feet instead of where I'm going. Finding balance at the top of the wave and riding down the face. Just going for it without all of the baggage in my head. I can get up and get my feet on the board, and now need to get them in the right place every time, automatically. Muscle-memory taking over. I'm moving to a new level of mistakes. I am so happy I can see the growth in better quality, or at least a different set of, mistakes. I did catch this wave and pop up at the top of it. I'm on my way! The t-shirt costume and Luna Lovegood glasses may have actually helped! :)
Since I was a fifth grade teacher, privileged to teach ten-year-olds during the Harry Potter phenomenon, I have dressed up as either Harry or McGonagall. I had a beautiful red velvet cape and the round glasses. I no longer have the red velvet cape, and it would be impossible to surf with it anyway, so this year I went as Luna Lovegood. Her fabulous Spectrespecs making the wrackspurts around me visible, even on the waves. Wrackspurts are invisible creatures that float through your ears and make your brain fuzzy. Wrackspurts are like society's expectations of us women -- sometimes invisible, but most often alarmingly obvious, expectations that we remain confined in our neat little boxes, serving others instead of ourselves, following instead of leading, working instead of playing. Our brains are fuzzied by these expectations: both men and women. Every woman I know has had to organize their life by navigating around patriarchy. The statistics around how many men of color voted for the male candidate in the recent US election has shown me how ingrained sexism is in men's heads. They'd rather have someone in office who called them trash, promised deportation, and threatened their very lives than have a woman lead. Let alone a woman of color. White women and some women of color failed to turn out for the female candidate in the numbers needed to triumph. Patriarchy is everywhere. Sexism, racism. Wrackspurts fuzzying our brains. These are the macro expectations that we all deal with. I have sorted through these for years, so now working on the micro expectations that affected me from a more personal context.
The important thing to me about Luna Lovegood is that I think she is the highest, most transcendent and evolved character in the whole series. Luna is the picture of a fully actualized individual. Luna was the most non-discriminating figure in the books, the most accepting. The most genuinely herself, the most joyously, weirdly herself no matter what. She is very often peaceful, the picture of equanimity. Luna was always uniquely herself, despite the ridicule she endured: other, less evolved characters called her "Loony Lovegood." Not surprising that other students didn't understand her; they hadn't gone through what she'd gone through. There are no inner dichotomies to resolve for Luna. She accepts herself fully. She experienced enormous grief, accepted it, continued to feel it, and moved through it without avoiding it. And in moving through it, it possibly cleared out the ego stuff the rest of us deal with. She surfed the waves of emotion with grace. She accepted the supernatural in life, wrackspurts and nargles, and was the only other person who could see the thestrals besides Harry. Thestrals were the bat-winged horses who can be seen only by those who have witnessed and accepted death. She shows up in Book 5, after Harry saw Voldemort kill Cedric, after Harry and Dudley were attacked by the Dementors. As Harry enters the nadir of his story, Luna appears, the picture of love, a goddess who can understand his pain. The sympathetic witness Stolorow talked about in a previous post, so Harry won't feel so alienated by his now compounded grief, rage, and fear. Luna has grief to match his, yet she is love and good.
Luna is actually who I aspire to be, so I love that I dressed up as her for Halloween. I didn't think about it much. Perhaps an unconscious desire to resolve my inner conflicts, fully accept myself? Putting on this costume to cosplay what I am working toward? An unconscious wish to be whole? I am moving through my inner conflicts, trying to see the wrackspurts making my brain fuzzy, clearing them out. I had another dream the other night. A good spooky one for Halloween. I'm in a dark and empty house -- empty of furniture and art -- nothing in it but me and a demon, a shadowy figure standing next to me in the firelight, familiar. I am unafraid. I have saged the room in which we are standing and ask him if he is protected by the smoky herb. The doors are closed and I tell him that I'm going to leave the room to look for more demons. He says, "I'm not going out there." I tell him that I'm going out there, and I fling open the doors and run into the foyer. The front door bursts open, a storm thundering outside, lightning illuminating the trees blowing in a violent wind. I have a rope in my hand that I wield like a whip, yelling, "Come out here! Face me! I'm ready!" But no one comes out. Nothing comes through the door. There is a moment of confusion, then I'm filled with fear. Are they invisible? Have I let in something invisible? Then I wake up. The thought I had after I wrote down this dream was, "Why would I protect a demon?"
What or who is it that I am protecting? I have been spinning with many memories of my childhood and first independent life lately, memories of my mom. In a previous post, I discussed how I thought my perfected existence protected her. I figured out a new layer of that this week. I am coming to terms in a deeper way with the childhood I both had and never had and the person I was never able to become, because I wore a mask in order to protect someone else -- or rather, the mask was imposed on me. BTG explained that as children we sometimes have to idealize the parent who is caring for us, ignore some of the behaviors to get the care that we need. It has been easy to be angry with the parent who wasn't there. In my family of origin, Dad was gone, absolutely unreliable. The one who was feeding us, paying attention, helping us with homework, doing everything was Mom. She was the one who needed to be catered to, protected, because that's where my basic needs were being met. But, in my mind, Mom's care came with a price. As I explained before, it was conditional. I had to be the child she needed me to be in order to get that care, so I cut off the authentic parts of myself that weren't welcome. I adopted some of her ways of being in order to fit in with her. Care and harm were linked, intertwined. This is the demon I was protecting. I haven't been able to see this until now. Now, I have achieved some level of safety, and I see myself as a separate person. With these prerequisites in place, I was able to witness my thoughts after an extraordinary thing happened.
I have been awash in the warm glow of loving kindness ever since the girls gave me such lovely support when Lucy died. I wear the bracelets they gave me daily and have hung the beautiful prism and stained glass in my home. I have had six dogs altogether in my life, but I have never before received such loving support, such generous understanding from a group of friends when one of them died. I have actually thought of myself like Luna with the murals of her Hogwarts friends on her bedroom ceiling. "Friends...." BTG added to this warm glow the other week with another gift. In session, I shared that I was worried about finances due to a possible health issue and may need to take a break from therapy for awhile if I can't afford it. He said to me that my inability to pay him didn't need to interrupt our work together, that he would continue seeing me for free. Just like the gifts from the girls, this generosity and kindness floored me.
As the Buddhists say, we use our everyday life to wake up. The conditions in our lives are enough to help us wake up, so I paid attention to the thoughts in my head over the next few days. I had a series of reactions which showed me clearly the poverty of mind I've been living with. I am happy that I can see this series of thoughts -- that I am making better quality mistakes, in a way, by seeing clearly. And, processing this has been exceptionally painful and scary. I'd never shared the full extent of my defenses before, the full crazy, haven't been aware enough of them to do it. So sharing all of this with BTG and now you has been nerve wracking. In response to BTG's offer, I reacted in the following ways.
I was confused. Why would anyone continue to perform this service without pay? I have a purely transactional relationship with BTG. I pay him to listen to my bullshit and he does a lovely job of helping me sift through it. Why on earth would he put up with my whining and carrying on if I'm not going to pay him?
I was suspicious. If I don't owe him money, then what will I owe him? I've always had a hard time accepting gifts, because they come at a price. In exchange for my mom's care, I had to be a certain way, act a certain role, wear a particular mask. Care came with harm. So, I assume that I will owe BTG something in exchange for this. Harm and transactionality are my assumptions in relationships. BTG and I have our sessions in Zoomland, so I wasn't sure what I could possibly give him in exchange, what abuse could possibly occur, so I didn't stay here long.
I was despondent. I was convinced I was damaged beyond repair, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me to react this way. Will I ever be able to accept kindness with grace? Will it ever feel like love instead of harm? What is it even like to be in relationship as a normal person without all of this insanity?
I was sad. It won't matter. I'm too old, too gray, no one will want me now anyway. Love is a bus I missed decades ago. It's too late now. Nobody wants me. Nobody will ever want me.
I was angry. Understanding what true kindness and unconditional love feel like at this late stage is almost cruel. I didn't know what I was missing before. Now I know what I'm missing when people just care about you without an agenda of their own, and I have few options for such loving relationships at this late stage.
I felt trapped. What does it mean that he'll continue to see me when I can't pay him? Is there no way out? That felt claustrophobic. I need an escape route. I assume that someday I'll need to run, because relationships come with harm. Love and care come with harm. I will obviously need to abandon this relationship at some point and one of my escape routes has been cut off. I felt fear. So who is the abandoner in my life? I am. I run when it gets tough. One of the big lessons of my meditation practice and work with BTG has been to see the benefits of sticking with things longer than I would normally do. But I still felt trapped. I gave him an out and he didn't take it. That's confusing.
Finally, I was convinced there was something wrong with BTG. If nobody wants me, and I am willing to run at a moment's notice, so I don't even want me; and BTG is saying something like, "Well I'm willing to stick with you;" then there must be something wrong with him. Why would I stay with a fool like that?
How exhausting to be so afraid of relationships that I contrive all of these excuses to get out of them. I have assumed people are burdens, because I felt like I was a burden. Dad was off on his own, not really involved with us. I don't know if he wanted to be involved or not, all I know is what I experienced and felt. Dad wasn't around, so I wasn't worth sticking around for. Mom was present and full of expectations I couldn't really fulfill as my genuine self, so I experienced her presence as punishing any part of me that didn't fit with those expectations. My authentic self wasn't worth caring for, and care came with punishment, criticism, or harm. My presence was a burden to my parents. They got knocked up, had a shotgun wedding, and I was a constant reminder of the life they could have lived if that didn't happen. Such delusion, such fuzz clouding my brain. Can't swat the wrackspurts until you can see them.
I have separated myself in these ways since I was a small child, never really sharing my full self with anyone. Always keeping things back. Until now. The generosity and loving kindness shown by the girls and BTG have really unlocked a new part of me, the loving part of me. In a show of Lovegoodian bravery, I shared all of these reactions, these masks, all of these attempts to disconnect, with BTG. In his Buddhist therapist, Lovegoodian fashion, he just accepted it all, even praised this willingness to see my ugliness, my willingness to share and accept my whole self. I don't know what to do now. I feel a bit empty, exposed. A little adrift. I shared my ugly bits and wasn't punished. What do I do now? These defenses formed a structure to my life and now the walls are gone. Feels a bit chilly. Naked. Nowhere to hide. And...quite peaceful. Confusing.
In the book Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, Pema Chödrön writes, "You can feel like the world’s most hopeless basket case, but that feeling is your wealth, not something to be thrown out or improved upon. There’s a richness to all of the smelly stuff that we so dislike and so little desire.” She writes, “That which is unwanted and rejected in ourselves and in others can be seen and felt with honesty and compassion." BTG did that with me; the girls did that with me; now maybe I can do that with myself. Pema continues, “...we are not as solid as we think. In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives. [We can] see that the sense of a separate, isolated self and a separate, isolated other is a painful misunderstanding that we could see through and let go.” If I can move forward with self-compassion, my capacity for being compassionate and connecting with others will grow. Just like Luna's pain allowed her to see the thestrals and be a compassionate presence for Harry, removing my own masks allows me to be present in the world for others in a more complete way. More fully human.
In a conversation about grief, Anderson Cooper spoke to Stephen Colbert in an interview after Cooper's mom died. Both men have suffered incredibly painful losses throughout their lives. Cooper said he wished he had a scar like Harry Potter or a Bond villain, so people would know that he is not the person he was supposed to be. The scar would be an acknowledgement, an outward sign, that there is an alternate timeline where this pain did not occur and his path was not twisted. This is exactly what I've been struggling with. What I am mourning is the person I was supposed to be, the life I could have lived, the unconditional love I could have felt, could have given. Colbert interviewed Andrew Garfield on his own show recently. Garfield spoke about his mother who recently died, "I love talking about it, by the way. So if I cry, it's only a beautiful thing. I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her." I might be mourning all of the love I didn't get to give in an unconditional way. I was always hedging my bet, one foot out the door. I am haunted by the love I gave so imperfectly, so selfishly. “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have,” said Søren Kierkegaard.
Colbert tells Cooper in their interview, "My experience... is that there isn't another timeline, and this is it. And the bravest thing you can do is to accept with gratitude the world as it is."
Cooper answers, "You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, 'Love the thing that I most wish had not happened.' You went on to say [a Tolkien quote], "What of God's punishments are not gifts?' Do you really believe that?"
Colbert says, "Yes. It's a gift to exist. It's a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that. But, I didn't learn it, that I was grateful for the thing I most wish hadn't happened, is that I realized it. It doesn't mean you are happy it happened. I don't want it to have happened. I want it to not have happened. But, if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to
do, not everybody is, and I'm not always, but it's the most positive thing to do, then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. And, then, so what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss. Which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it's like to be a human being."
Colbert continued, "If it's true that all humans suffer. And so, at a young age I suffered something, so that by the time I was in serious relationships in my life, with friends or with my wife or with my children, is that I have some understanding that everybody is suffering. And however imperfectly, acknowledge their suffering and to connect with them, and to love them in a deep way that not only accepts that all of us suffer, but also that makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered, so that you can know that about other people. And that's what I mean. It's about the fullness of your humanity. What's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be?"
I am listening to Cooper's podcast All There Is, which continues this conversation about grief. I am so grateful for these conversations. They are teaching me the magic of acceptance, how others have moved forward hand in hand with grief. Looking at all of my inner divisions, all the ways I've kept myself apart from people, all the life I haven't fully lived are the ways that I have not accepted myself and reality. It has taken awhile to get to a full understanding of it and really feel all of it -- or as much as I can. In the first episode, Cooper talks about his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and how she lived her life in the presence of all of her losses. He talks to one of his mom's good friends, Wendy Goodman, who talks about how his mom handled grief. She says, "I honestly think the tricky thing about grief is, like anything that is so uncomfortable and so painful, you want to push it away. And I think she understood, if you do that, it will always come to try to get you again. You have to go through it. And if you don't go through it, you won't empty yourself then receive the new life that's coming in. And she just always understood this whole river of life.... What Gloria taught me is it's not about what if, because Gloria was able to take everything that was her reality and transform it. And if she hadn't had those experiences, she wouldn't have been who she was. So...it's not about you imagining the life you might have had, had you only been. It's about embracing what did happen to you."
Cooper said, "I still don't know how my mom did that, how she remained so open and so vulnerable in spite of her losses. I see now how much of a wall I created around myself after my dad died and after my brother. A wall so that I wouldn't feel hurt again. And that works. But it also means you don't really feel anything else again either, ever." That's exactly what defenses do. Defenses are erected against feeling, not against other people. It has been through my willingness to be vulnerable, my willingness to feel, that I've been able to come this far. Like Rumi's poem, The Guest House, says, a "crowd of sorrows" might be "clearing you out for some new delight."
Colbert says, "We think we can win against grief. We think we can fix it. But you can't. You can only experience it. And to fully experience that, you have to accept that it's real. The loss is real... That grief itself is a form of death... We don't want bad things to happen, whereas grief is not a bad thing. Grief is a reaction to a bad thing. Grief itself is a natural process that has to be experienced." Accepting the reality, really taking it in, and only then can it be transformed. It took nearly 40 years for Colbert to come the realization that he was grateful for his grief. This whole podcast is Cooper struggling openly with his. I can give myself the time it takes to transform. I might be trying to force some closure when there isn't any to be had. The only closure is, as Colbert described, "the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut." Who I was supposed to be is no longer an option available to me. That door has closed and "there is no knob on this side."
"Even when the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is," says a line from a poem in the book Lord of the Butterflies. Cooper said that the one thing that has helped him is being able to talk about his grief and to hear about other people's experiences. Same here. I have written this blog not only for myself. Writing only for myself would have been in a journal, paper and pencil, safely and privately put away in my nightstand. Publishing this, forcing myself to publish this every time, is about my hope that something I say in here helps someone else with a similar struggle. This blog is a testament to the hope underlying my grief. The hope that there is indeed something more beautiful than this, a different way to be, for all of us who are struggling. Sharing this story, working my shit out here, has hopefully cleared some things out. Perhaps now I'm free to find my new path, fully feel my way into it. My fears and doubts no longer blocking me, making me stare at my elusive past instead of keeping my eyes up and looking toward where I'm going. Embodying a new life. One that includes my grief as part of being fully human. If I can do it, then you can do it too.
It is also worthwhile to clear out our shit and become whole, because the connection to others is what's going to save us in the long run. Those macro expectations we all suffer under? Those are just more ways we delude ourselves and separate ourselves from each other. The more I can deal with my demons, the less I'm going to project them onto the world. The more I can connect deeply to the whole human experience, the less separation I'm putting out there, the more beautiful and complete and unconditional my love will be toward everyone I meet. I will be less likely to demonize anyone, less likely to keep people tucked neatly into the box I decide they should live in. In the book Opening to Oneness, Nancy Mujo Baker writes, “The main thing to work with is our relation to our own faults. Can we befriend them or compassionately allow them? The main thing is not to suppress them, act them out, or split them off onto others. Disowning our faults or even just disparaging them only piles separation onto separation, which creates disorder not only in our local sangha but in the whole world. We can see that Plato understood this well when he tells us in his Republic that harmony in the state is a function of harmony in the soul.”
We accept all parts of ourselves because when we don't, we tend to project our rejected bits onto others or work really hard to avoid our faults, building walls around ourselves that prevent us from truly connecting. Sharon Salzberg wrote that loving kindness "is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world." Pema wrote, "The reason people harm other people, the reason that the planet is polluted and people and animals are not doing so well these days is that individuals don't know or trust themselves enough." Suffering closes us off. Thich Nhat Hanh said, "When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help." The Dalai Lama XIV said, "We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves."
So my willingness to clear out my stuff is a first step toward healing in the world. The micro affects the macro. Acceptance of myself breeds more acceptance of others. More acceptance, less division, within and without. TNH said, "We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness." Albert Einstein, not a noted Buddhist as far as I know, famously said, “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
The girls accept me for who I am; I was held tightly in a parking lot when I cried. BTG took my crazy and transformed it by acceptance. Maybe now I can do the same thing. Seeing my demons, opening the door wide to them, asking them to face me, but doing it with loving kindness, not violence, not anger or rage. Luna Lovegood took a class on Transfiguration at Hogwarts. Acceptance seems to be the magic that transforms our muggle world. I wonder if my house is really empty now that I've identified the demon I was protecting and faced it? Care is now separated from harm. I've opened the door to experiences that might be truly loving, removed some more masks. With all of this gone, who am I? Trying not to get lost in the past, who I could've or should've been, but look to the present, right now. Who am I right now? Rilke said, “And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.” I'm not sure what that looks like. But seems like surfing as Luna Lovegood is a beautiful place to start. Wrackspurts gone, I can see love is good. Spectrespecs working fine, love is good.
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