It Takes Two to Tango.

This statement appears to be true. And it pretty much takes two to argue or to fall in love or to make a seesaw work smoothly. But how much influence do we really have on each other?

Last week I was visiting with some friends who were a bit frustrated with a slowdown in a project they are facilitating. R. asked somewhat rhetorically, "How to you get people to change?"

Bingo, That. Is. The. Question.

I asked myself ,"How to I get myself to change?"

And the answer is that it is really hard. The things that aren't hard, I am not counting in this discussion. And, full disclosure: I am a creature of habit. This is sometimes a good thing and sometimes, not so good. I am somewhat rational, somewhat educated, somewhat energetic, somewhat lazy. In my thinking, most of us are pretty complicated and at the same time, pretty simple.

I guess that change comes partly from running out of options. I have mentioned before this astoundingly fun and brilliant shrink I knew in Puerto Rico many years ago (1968). He said "The imperative to change is death." I get that. I know a bunch of people who quit smoking when a doctor mentioned cancer. Just never smoked again. No program, no fuss, no gum or patches. Over.

But my friend was asking about how to influence people to create a more sustainable energy plan. I remember the gas lines during the Carter years when suddenly we were developing car pool lanes and creating good intentions. When the oil started flowing again, all was forgotten and cars kept getting bigger and hungrier all the time. I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee that got 8 miles to the gallon. Loved that car.

When the Fukushima disaster happened three years ago, Germany decided to shut down all its nukes. The USA is building a new one (tax payers subsidizing and insuring) for the first time in more than 30 years. Interesting reaction. Bringing that down to a dumb personal example, I keep telling myself that I won't buy any more water in plastic bottles and then making endless exceptions for myself. I know the plastics (all plastics) are toxic and yet I bought one today. Here in Nica, they get recycled by the people who pick the garbage, but that doesn't account for the toxins which enter my body and the toxins and oil that are necessary to make the plastic and all that stream of stuff I should not be buying into.

It is possible that being conscious will eventually get me to stop. But why is it hard? If I have trouble with simple little stuff like this, how do we get billions of people to change their habits? I don't know. A lot of Americans have stopped throwing trash on highways. That was a big campaign by Lady Bird Johnson. (cool name) but we have created billions of tons of new crap that is bad for the environment and is now floating around in our oceans.

I'd be interested in thoughts on how we get ourselves and others to make changes. I assume we all need to.

Mark Twain famously said...

something like "The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened." Couldn't agree more. Today I am playing with the idea that everything that ever happened is connected to everything else simultaneously and completely. If this is so, then everything that happened or is happening is fully a part of the experience of all. There's that OM thing again.

I have been reading, Proof of Heaven, a Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. The ideas in this book are by no means new to me or probably you. I am somehow annoyed at times by the author's shock at how a brilliant scientist like himself (his own characterization) could discover spiritual realities. I assume that it is because many scientists are a bit thicker than most people, or rather convinced of the idea that their reality is the only reality.

This is a bit strange when you think of how fast the facts of science change and how stable the fundamental principles of most religions have been. There is more to this game than meets the eye, or one does better now and forever if one adheres to guidelines like not killing and stealing and so on.

From Dr. Alexander's book:

In the 1920s, the physicist Werner Heisenberg (and other founders of quantum mechanics)made a discovery so strange that the world has yet to completely come to terms with it. When observing subatomic phenomena, it is impossible to completely separate the observer (that is, the scientist making the experiment) from what is being observed. In our day-to-day world, it is easy to miss this fact. We see the universe as a place full of separate objects, (tables and chairs, people and planets) that occasionally interact with each other, but nonetheless remain essentially separate. On the subatomic level, however, the universe of separate objects turns out to be a complete illusion. In the realm of the super-super-small, every object in the physical universe is intimately connected with every other object. in fact, there are really no "objects" in the world at all, only vibrations of energy, and relationships.

There is no reality possible without consciousness. OM again. And what I am wondering whether it is all available to all at anytime anywhere. So, maybe remembering things that never happened when we are older is more a symptom of a looser etheric body and an ability to tune into other vibrations with ease than of a crappy memory or a gone wild imagination.

(He wasn't old when he did this, but I used to think Garrison Keeler went into a bit of a trance when he told stories about Lake Woebegone and was just telling what he saw. Cool thought.)

Hit the Wall.

Several things happening. Well, many actually. At the risk of boring you more than I am boring myself, I have parasites again. And I am suffering. And, yes, I have a well trodden path from the house to the lab to the doctors office to the pharmacy. The lab people look happy or sad when they hand me the envelope. Good news one week, bad news the next week. It isn't just Nicaragua, I got them in Thailand also. The reason I am going on about this is it certainly has interrupted my blog..big time. Remember how everything in the body is connected? It isn't just the body. It is the spirit also. And that stuff about thinking, feeling, and willing well, that all gets muddled up when any major organs are compromised.

That being said for the umpteenth time, another repeat issue, only this time with more clarity. I am so excited to have met the character I want to write about. You started to meet her in the last three blogs I posted. In college, I went on about my plan to write autobiographical fiction. I don't think it is a contradiction in terms, just a loosening of the edges of the genre. She finally came to me.

I had this idea that it would be fun to just throw her into my blog and begin a book. It is fun, but I don't think I can make it work for this reason: I can't seem to make each entry into an autonomous blog post. Many of my readers do not and can not read daily, nor do they by any means read sequentially. This produces confusion in both me and my readers.

I am going to continue with Ask Julie and write my autobiography in another sitting. I am afraid that I am already falling for the priest and this is exciting.I have to go get a manicure before we meet up this afternoon for our chat. Do you think he is so shallow that that will make a difference? I hope not, and yet.

Yo y El Padre. Part 3.

I felt shy. I wasn't even shy when the Dalai Lama held my face and kissed me. With Father Francis, my inner experience was moving faster than 'reality'. There was so much to say and at the same time, there was nothing to say. I was present.

"Have you been in jail?" I asked. Where did that come from?

"Si, pues."

I didn't have to ask. I already knew.

"Me, too."

"I know."

I started to laugh. "The first time was because my dog wasn't on a leash in Eugene, Oregon at 8:00 on a Sunday morning. Well, not because of the act itself, but because I thought it was so stupid that I didn't pay the ticket and ignored the summons regarding it. I was in contempt of court. I was in contempt of everything. This was 1970 and we were raging against the Vietnam War. (In SE Asia it is more aptly called The American War.) I ignored every summons they sent me which gave them the excuse to pick me up late at night and take me to jail. I stayed over night because we didn't have the $30 to get out. I was angry, insulting and defiant which was not cool because most of the police hated us because of our antiwar activities."

He laughed.

Maybe the hard stories would come later.

"Why are you in Nicaragua now?" As he asked, we both knew the answer.

"To meet you."

When I get really nervous, I talk too much or show off. I struggled against this. That little rap about jail was nervous twitter. I pictured my Buddhist teacher and started to breathe slowly. I didn't want to blow this off.

"My father was Roma, but he gave it up for farming. He said a fortune teller told him that it would be the survival of his lineage. We were practically the only ones to make it past Hitler. My mother yearned all the time to be on the road. A wise man told me that I would never have a real home but that I would always feel at home wherever I was. His name was Francis also. My middle name is Francis"

Oh shit, I am babbling in spite of myself. I will stop.

What happened next was.....Part 2.

I walked into the room and my head began to spin and at the same time I felt that I was on earth, awake and present. We sat down in the usual uncomfortable wooden Nicaraguan chairs. He offered me cold tea. I took it. He reached out and held my hand and looked at me intently for a bit. Then he asked, "How did we find ourselves here?"

He was part of me. The other part. He was the masculine. He was the establishment. He was sitting in his huge church with his every need taken care of, even his eternity, if the story can be believed. We were one and the same. I was a woman, jobless, homeless, drifting on a hope and a dream, with something inside me shouting, "I am here! I have arrived full circle. I am happy!"

His eyes told me the same story that I was feeling. No, guys. This was not sexual. This was not an hallucination. This was not a mirage. But the question remained: "How did we find ourselves here?"

When I was a child in Romania, everyone celebrated me. It was just a fact. I was the golden kid. My mother was a fiery red head. My father was a great farmer. Everything he planted grew and thrived including me. I was born in the caul which greatly pleased all the old ladies who held tight to their superstitions. I was strong, pretty, smart and I 'knew' things.

I went to hear this Cuban priest. Part 1.

Over the course (curse) of my life, I have fallen for a number of priests. When I was a child, it was mostly visiting Irish priests. They were sometimes so cute, and those accents, and those dancing eyes, and the fact they they were funny. They told jokes. Imagine. There was also a bit of a blur between some of them and some of the handsome young actors who played priests in the movies. All very heady for a young girl.

The same thing happened with the occasional beautiful young nun. What was her story? How did she know her vocation at such a young age. Did she hate her family? Was she a orphan? My childish mind didn't have too many stories to plug in. But I did manage a few massive crushes which kept my faith strong and possibilities open. "If such and such happens, I can always become a nun."

Part of me knew it could never happen because I can't carry a tune. How could I sing those lovely chants if I was off key the whole time.Ii imagined the priest and the Mother Superior giving me the stink eye and the whole effect being ruined.

When Patrick and I got stuck in Reims, France drinking the best champagne ever made for days on end (we couldn't seems to find the way to the road to hitchhike out), we met a derelict priest. We drank some fine champagne with him. And a bit more and figured he had about thirty years of this on us. He finally got all whispery and led us down into the sub sub sub basement of the catacombs. He was muttering about the history of France. He showed us this ornate glass case which held a skull. He talked rapidly. We drank sagaciously. He then handed us the skull. I passed it over to Patrick. It was Clovis, The king of the Franks who had unified the Franks into an empire. (What did we know?) It was a cool, strange, unreal, event. We dug it and then went to find some bread.

Many years later, the month after my mother died and having had a lot of life with little or no Catholic influence, I came to Guatemala for a month. It was a month soon after 9/11 and there were few travelers. I stayed in Antigua, Guatemala and found myself going to La Merced Church for 5:00 mass every afternoon. It was a nice familiar place to have some quiet contemplation and there was the gorgeous visiting Cuban priest with a lovely voice. I felt soothed when he spoke. I had a little crush, no different really from my mad on the Dalai Lama. Previously, I had also suffered some acute crushes on priests who had become revolutinaries in the various struggles for the human rights of the poor.

Ray Bourgeois, where are you? And Father Francis in his weaving monastery up in New Hampshire. But last week I was hanging out in the Cathedral in Granada, Nicaragua when it happened again. I was there because I believe that when I am in a Catholic country, it is often the situation that much of the cultural and social and political life takes place in and around the church. Same scene in Buddhist countries or Muslim countries.

So, I met Father Francis and my whole life is changing again. We went into a conference room and talked for about four hours. Already a thousand pieces of my erratic path are falling in place. Mas manana.