Don't Be an Idiot! Take this Advice Now!

Don't use texting for emotional communications. Don't. Don't talk about feelings in text messages. Don't.

Firstly, text messages don't just disappear. You might delete them, but they are still around.

Secondly, and most importantly, they will get you in trouble. I am unequivocal about this advice.

As I have said before, I am a bit of a troglodyte. But in this instance, that is not relevant. For the past few years, I have seen example after example of texting emotions (good or bad, happy or sad) causing misunderstandings, embarrassment, and dissension. I mean it. Texting is an excellent medium for saying, "I am going to be 10 minutes late", or "I forgot my gym shorts, can you drop them off on your way to work.", or "Meet me  in Tahrir Square tomorrow to overthrow the government." Simple, clear messages. Cold info.

But here is a scenario I have witnessed over and over: Someone tells me that they met a nice man at a party. They hung out a while. There was a spark. Three or four days later, I hear from the someone and they are distressed that they haven't gotten much encouragement from the guy. It is depressing.She feels bad. What could be wrong? I ask whether she texted him.  Yes she did. Did he answer. Not really. And not right away. What might she have said in her texts? "I told him how much fun it was to meet him." "I told him it made me feel good." "I asked what he felt." "I asked him why he wasn't texting me back." "I told him that I was having doubts about my initial feelings because he wasn't responding."

Shit man, get a grip. This is harassment and would end anything including true love in its tracks. So, picture the other side. The guy had fun. He has a job or a career. He can't chew gum and walk at the same time (most men a terrible multitaskers) and he might have hoped to see you again and he might have had a lovely time too, but he wasn't going to think about it for a few days and now these texts come, turning a potential thing into BFF chatter. He doesn't give a hoot about your day at work or your hair cut or that you need new tires. These things mostly aren't interesting in any case, but certainly not as news flashes about someone he hardly knows interrupting his life.

This is one example from a million. Texting gives us a chance to say dumb things really fast in an offhand way. Can it come as any surprise that people get into trouble with it? Impulses might be healthy or destructive but waiting until you take time to sort out what is appropriate, what someone might want to read while doing their taxes or going to the bathroom or waiting for a job interview, this might bring you much closer to the intended result.

When someone over texts me, not only do I get irritated about the interruptions, especially if I am doing nothing which is a fine use of my time, but I wonder whether the other person has a life. Like, if you are at work or visiting with a friend or jogging, why are you texting me? You aren't in your life. You can't be.

This sounds a bit like I am on my high horse. I don't mean to be. I am writing this because I have head from distressed people who have messed up their lives with this. I would like never to hear the long pause when I ask, "Have you been texting? A lot?"

Take a step back. Put yourself in the other person's shoes. When in doubt, don't. Amen.

I can't get rid of nostalgia for the "Good Old Days".

Nostalgia has got to be a natural feeling for older people. It makes sense that this would be so. But, this combined with a feeling that things are moving very fast and maybe it is not all good, has me irritated. I get irritated with myself for not being able to see the future. Then I get anxious about being a troglodyte. I really don't like that idea of myself.

A lemonade stand is what got me going. My daughter and grand kid are working to set up a lemonade stand. They have made a beautiful sign and are strategically planning the whole endeavor. It is a nice healthy project, I think. Then the nostalgia kicks in. Then I start having these feelings about the good old days when life was more simple and this takes me on a wild trajectory that ultimately robs me of the fun in today. I have to stop this.

The first time that my brother and I made a lemonade stand was when some water lines were being put in by our country home. Normally we wouldn't have had anyone to sell to. We told Mom about our plan. She told us that whatever mess we made, we would have to clean up. Duh. She always said that. We knew that. We then started this huge project that began with finding an old board. We painted it with house paint (oil based in those days) and that involved opening the can, stirring forever, washing the brushes with turpentine, all that. Then, days later when the sign was dry, we found rocks and boards to make a table and we made ice and put the ice in a big bowl and then we had to shine glasses and find some fabric for a table cloth. We counted our savings and walked to the store to buy lemons and sugar. Getting the final approval from Mom and a final lecture from Dad about putting the lids back on paint cans correctly, we opened our business.

We knew exactly how much we had spent on our supplies. We knew exactly how much money we made. We were extremely gratified with our social interactions. It was very nice. When our customers moved on to the next block, we hung the sign in the garage with other summer memories.

Now, suburban kids would be total freaks if they approached the lemonade stand as we did. Today, they get in the SUV with Mom or the nanny and buy paper cups and a bag of ice and a poster board and lemonade and that is that.

So, why would I get in a dither about this? This is nice and sweet and fun. That is the whole point. My way was no better, just different. We wanted a lot of what kids have today. We had no idea that anything like a cell phone would ever be invented, in fact, at age seven, I had probably never talked on the phone. I certainly hadn't seen TV but we made home made walkie talkies with string and tin cans. We made stilts from those tall juice cans. Today's children will invent stuff I never dreamed of using their imaginations is ways I can't even fathom.

My task is to remember a more simple time and throw away my rose colored glasses. When I was a kid people were working very hard to forget the horrors of the Second World War and redefine normal. Now we have other challenges and we will need everything the kids can muster to meet tomorrow. I suppose that they will look back on the simple times when all you had to do was to get in the SUV and drive to a store to create the fun you wanted.

Lama Marut revisited. How to get rid of an irritating person. Thank you Guruji.

Re-re-re-visited, actually. I probably can't do justice to this, but I know it works because I have used it. As with any spiritual practice, I have to remember it in the midst of being irritated. Because it is hard to remember when things are out of control, Lama M. suggests that we make the practice using small impact situations until we get it into our routine. Then we can go to the practice in desperate moments.

I find it very sweet, in a way, that he uses the word 'irritating'. This can mean a person jiggling his knee next to you on a train or it can mean someone pointing a gun at you, and anything in between.

He speaks humorously about simply removing yourself from the situation. Using a magic escape phrase, "Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom." You can always find something to make this a true statement. Wash your hands or something. If you are stuck with this person (one reason to avoid sail boat trips with unhappy people.) you have to work a bit more.

The real gist of the practice is to look at the person attacking you or yelling at you or being mean to you and have compassion for them. You can not hold anger and compassion at the same moment. If someone is irritating you and you think about how much pain they must be in to act so horribly and how much bad karma they are creating for themselves, you get a gift of objectivity and clarity which allows you to experience them differently. They must be in so much pain to allow this behavior or these words to come from their mouths.

This switch in your mind can make a huge difference. I was in a non-violent action training many years ago at a homeless shelter in Boston. The trainer had us roll playing. The roll was that someone would verbally attack us and we had to diffuse the situation rather than taking the bait. I was paired off with a huge guy who really got into his role of attacking and intimidating me. I got frightened by his intensity and in my fright, I stood tall and looked him in the eye and said, "I love you." He reacted as if he had been hit with a knock out punch. He started to cry. He said he couldn't remember ever having those words said to him. Then I started to cry. That was so sad.

That was before I knew Lama Marut, and I take that as a gift from the gods. But there it was, in a flash. It is probably better to practice in easier situations. When some driver is acting like a real ass hole, instead of giving the finger, as is my wont, I could think, "It must be very hard to be him today." Changes everything.

What, actually, is awesome?

Don't we all get a huge kick out of the jaw dropping, mind blowing, no shit! experience of coming across something that is awesome? This has to be such an individual thing, the trigger for these moments. It definitely has to magically catch us at the right time and the right place.

As you remember your experiences, I will tell a few of mine. I am a lucky woman in that quite a lot of things blow my mind. The people who study brain chemistry might have a good explanation for this but can they show us how the process gets rolling? I mean, it is like labor in childbirth.  We know a lot about the hormones involved. We certainly know the process, but I have yet to hear anyone with a clear understanding of what actually triggers the start of the labor. Is it the alignment of the stars after all? Does science begin when spiritual science lets off? Just wondering.

What got me onto this subject today was my experience at church this morning. I have been going to a little Catholic church in Larkspur, CA. I was drawn to it because it looked a little more New England than many of the West Coast churches. Then I found the bonus of the wonderful Father Lawrence. Enough said. Today's mass was nice. It was friendly. There were tons of people especially with young families. It was mundane. That's what got me thinking about the several times in my life when going to church has been awesome.

They were pretty big events. The first time I went to what used to be called High Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. High mass when I was a kid was Gregorian chants, tons of frankincense incense, elaborate vestments , big flowers, the whole nine yards. I was struck silent. The mass at Campostella at the end of the Camino was awesome. It was not only big in every way...thousands of people, dozens of priests, all the mumbo jumbo anyone could wish for but everyone there was not only giving a huge collective exhale but I have never felt such a collective gratitude. (Must have been that on a gigantic scale when WW11 ended. I was too young to remember.) We had made it. Whatever 'it' was.

I have felt awe at a few concerts. Hearing Pablo Casals play cello, hearing Miha Pogacnik  play violin, these were big experiences for me. Seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time at sunset with the setting sun's rays coming through the waves. Oh my God!

At High Mowing School on a freezing mountain top in New Hampshire, I was pregnant with my third child. Samuel Kaymen was our resident farmer. (He and his family later started Stoneyfield Yoghurt). Samuel sent someone to fetch us when a horse of his was starting labor. Watching this horse foul was unbelievably awesome to me. When I lose the ability to speak, it is a big deal. I hope many of you have a chance to see such power in your lifetime.

 The mother horse paced. She went around in circles. She shuddered a few times. I thought we were in for the long haul. Not so. She calmed down and focused (no kidding!). Then she kind of groaned a few times. Then her muscles tensed. Then steam rose from her body. I mean enough to fill a steam room. She didn't move her hoofs. She pushed. Out slid this perfectly gorgeous foul fully in the caul, The steam stopped and she looked happy and normal and we were all speechless. I don't know, I have seen many women give birth, the usual dogs and cats and pigs, eggs hatch, but there it was, the birth that blew my mind.

I hope everyone gets a lot of these moments. I would feel bereft if I couldn't feel awe. 

Why Was It So Hard to Stop Above Ground Nuclear Testing?

There was no lack of proof that this practice was incredibly dangerous. Even as a kid, I knew that the mushroom cloud was awesomely frightening. Any idiot could see what evil the bombs we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima had unleashed. It was no secret that the bombs worked. It was no secret that they released deadly amounts of radiation that hurt everyone in the path of the wind.

Women were much more affected than men. Yet, we exploded more than 325 nukes in our country and in the Marshall Islands. That was many more than all the other countries in the world combined. This is bad shit. Aside from being the only country in the world to ever use a nuke, we were the country that seemed determined to expose our own citizens to the most amount of radiation. What is this? How can we live with ourselves? Who are we?

Yesterday I talked about trying to get some objectivity and perspective on personal situations. How about big national ones. When President Kennedy made his first moves toward nuclear detente, he had to do it in secret, behind the backs of Congress and the military. This was because it was a hated step. When he averted the nuclear threat in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was reviled for not using nukes! This is sick. The people of the US, I am certain would not have voted to start a nuclear war which could have wiped out a huge portion of two huge countries. Most normal people would never say "Oh yes, expose us to terrible effects from nuclear testing and we and our offspring will be happy to be sick for generations to come. Sounds OK to us."

And I can't abide the "We didn't know it was dangerous." argument. Bull. Just like the ridiculous notion that we smokers couldn't figure out that a couple of packs a day might give us problems after a while. No one is dumb enough not to figure that out. Reports were everywhere about the radiation poisoning in Japan. Why would our test bombs here be any different?

So the question is do we want to kill masses of our own citizens? Or who wants to kill masses of us? And then, why do we let them do it? In the case of the test sights, it was the military and the alphabet organizations (CIA< NSA<FBI) and the John Birchers and the very conservative big business influence and the anti-communists. The same people who somehow pushed through Agent Orange, Depleted Uranium, GMO crops, Aspertame. All agents of destruction of ourselves as much or more than of communism.

So, I will conclude once again that we seem to be the most willing people on the planet to sacrifice the health and well being of ourselves for the ideology or profit of our military and big business. It is down right medieval.

It seems that it is subversive for us to object to practices that most other countries halt. It is subversive to want to eliminate toxic and deadly exposure of masses of people. We need to evaluate carefully whom we listen to. John McCain and Dick Cheney would have given us many nuclear wars by now. Who will watch out for us if not we ourselves?

This Isn't My Circus, These Are Not My Monkeys

When I read most books or watch most movies, this objectivity is obvious. I am not a Chinese woman during the Cultural Revolution. I am not a Russian countess. I am not Theodore Roosevelt on a river in the Amazon. So, being involved and yet not part of the story is easy.

Real life makes this a lot harder. In the past, I have used a simple technique that John Gardner taught me. I pull my viewpoint far away and look down on the situation as if it were a play that I was watching.  This allows a certain objectivity that helps get things in perspective. I can get the same help from telling someone who doesn't have a dog in the fight. A little outside perspective always helps.

But when it is a big, personal, emotional, life threatening deal and I have all the right answers and I know exactly how things should play out and the other person doesn't - well, things get a lot harder. I know! Meditation. Prayer. Pleading with God. Promising to become a nun if I get my way. (I did this as a 10 year old and was so relieved when I didn't have to - mostly because of the shaving the head thing that was necessary in those days) Let Go and Let God. I know and I am pretty good at all these things. I can make my prayers sound like greeting cards, so perfect, lovely. Why don't they work then?

Is it possible that I don't know the future? Is it possible that I am not God? This can be extremely hard to bear. Is it possible that my back is not strong enough to carry my burdens? Yes. Yes. and Yes.

My friend Lisa teaches us in Satsang, teaches by her example, to go deeply quiet. I used to be very good at this. I was always very good in emergencies, going to that still place and acting like I knew what I was doing. One of my best moments was in Concord, NH many (33) years ago when I found myself at the public swimming pool with about 50 kids. At that exact moment there were no other adults and only one lifeguard. She had a seizure and fell and cracked her head on the cement. This was long before cell phones. I became a strong general. I ordered the kids out of the pool, told two older girls to go to a neighbor and call an ambulance, covered the lifeguard with a towel..all the right moves. Because of my calm and my authority, the kids all sat quietly out of the water and everything worked out well.

The deal is that I went outside my personality, got strength I don't own and managed. Sometimes, especially of late, I don't find myself doing that. I have a little hysteria that is closer to the surface. I have been thinking (saying) that I am more fragile. One of my kids tells me that that is a self fulfilling mantra. But I think it is right. What I have been forgetting when I feel weak is that I don't have to carry this load. I am not a donkey. I can let some strength come into me. I am not the master of the universe. I am a servant. And the phrase that gets me going on this much better, much calmer, much saner path is "This is not my circus."

The Magic of Old Soap Operas

I have a daughter who watches Reality TV. I don't like the shows. I am a hard sell for almost anything on television. Yes, I am a fan of Masterpiece Theater and once upon a time thought CNN was interesting. What happened there? Now it is fodder for late night comedy. 24 hour coverage of a missing plane with experts thinking it might have gone to heaven. Very thought provoking.

I have several totally cliche favorite watching moments.  The most significant were shared by zillions. Seeing Elvis and then the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Iconic. Then I have the very special moments. There were some days when I sat on the big chair in the sun room with my mother and we watched Shirley Temple movies together and cried and laughed. There was the day when I was watching the Guiding Light with our cleaning lady and drinking gin at noon. A character named Julie died in a drunk driving accident and we were so shocked. She was a favorite of ours. We had been at this activity for some time by then and I kind of freaked out at Julie's death. I had a bit of an epiphany in that moment. I decided to go back to college. I did.

The first time I ever saw a Soap Opera was two years after we got our first television. I was born during the war but by the time I hit third grade, the baby boomer epidemic hit. We were in prefab classrooms on double shifts. I went to school morning shift. My mother wasn't working. When I came home for lunch and the rest of the afternoon, we started watching the Soaps. This was the bad year when my very active mother had a depression. Her parents had died and she had a miscarriage. When I look back, I wonder whether only depressed, stuck at home people watched those shows.

Other people's misery is fully distracting. Those were the glory days of Soaps. The shows were live and the rehearsals were mostly for staging. (who walks in the door and when she walks in) The actors were so familiar with their characters that they 'became' them on the shows. There were some funny moments when they flubbed their lines or fell asleep on the operating table. When spring came, Mom got a grip and turned off the TV.  In spite of the gap of many years, I was able to pick up the stories when I took up the shows again. I guess I was having my own dark night of the soul.

There is something about going into other people's lives for an hour or a half hour 5 days a week. That is one thing that keeps me from connecting to reality shows. Firstly, I think most of the contests are idiotic an boring. Secondly, the shows repeat and repeat and show scenes over and over from previous shows and then there is that thing about the voices. I can hear the tension and fakeness in a Housewives or a Kardashian voice two rooms away. Thirdly I am a bit of a snob.

I have to laugh at myself when I look at this picture. I can be a snob preferring Soaps over Reality.  Who am I? I do admit that two of the smartest men I knew from college ended up being writers. One wrote for All My Children and another for the Guiding Light. These slips we treated with humor. It wasn't much different from the doctor who was going to save the world ending up doing nose jobs or the lawyer who was going to help the poor working for Halliburton. Shit happens and there can only be so many great American novels after all.

It was, after all the writers strike that jump started the Reality show industry. What goes around comes around.

Talk About Karmic Connections, How I Met Sonja

Well, we could, I suppose, think back on how we meet any person who ends up being important in our lives and step back in awe at how amazingly the universe arranges things. I am going with the idea of karma, but call it what you may, life is just remarkable.

I understand the karma which brings us together with a college class or a gang at summer camp or meeting kindred spirits on the Camino. There is a logic there. We choose, apply, show up and are bound to have things in common. But the seemingly random encounters that turn into big friendships, how random are they really?

I met the Packards in Battleground, Indiana when Patrick and I walked by a funky little house that had a sculpture of a foot in the yard. It actually was a foot stool. Get it? It was a carving and a chair shaped like a foot. And when we met them Joan served us cold blueberry soup. A great encounter. But we kind of had to meet because we were the only normal people in that town at that time. Almost everyone else was some kind of weird Christian Republican throw back to the post war (WW11) years. I mean Watergate was going on in the rest of the country but in Indiana, oh man.

I just can't imagine not having met Sonja. It couldn't have been random but it happened like this. I was in Granada, Nicaragua and I was having a lot of dentistry done. A ton (refer to early blogs for grim details). I had met this lovely man from Seattle, WA.  I actually can't recall how I met Doug. I think someone introduced us. Doug was walking his way back to health. He had been hit by a truck in Brazil and nursed back to health by the family of the people who found him injured on the street. He was in very good shape when I met him. He is one of those kind souls who checked up on friends. Several times he offered to come to the dentist with me when I was having big stuff done.

We ended up taking walks together or going for coffee. One day we were walking down the street near the big second hand store when a woman came running out of a house yelling for help. We couldn't quite catch the full story but we did understand that she needed a taxi and it had to be very fast because her dog was choking? dying? something. Doug ran to Xalteva to flag down a cab and I went along with the hysterical woman to get the dog. We had some complications getting to the vet because of one way streets and not knowing the name of any of them. The dog got saved and we got out of the cab and continued our walk. Now I can't remember whether we stopped in on Sonja when we ate at the Mexican restaurant that was next door at that time, or whether we just ran into her after that.

But Sonja became a very important person in my life. I think the good gods organized that moment in the street. Sonja is a person who is up for doing things. We ended up taking a lot of outings together and then another year when I was terribly ill, nearly dying, and having my house situation explode because of Suzanne Prior's drinking or drugging or all around psycho life, I called Sonja who was just about to embark on her venture of renting out rooms and she invited me to move in that day. My healing started when Gretchen and I fled to her house. Thank you, Sonja.

We are the most unlikely friends. I am an old hippie, radical anarchist. I don't worry much about how I look. I am an intellectual and a Buddhist with Catholic leanings. Sonja is a Texas Tea Party, born again Christian who plays online poker and has a house full of dogs. She always looks perfect and designs her own clothes. We love the heck out of each other.

Now Sonja is dying. I am not there to be with her but I am so grateful for our unlikely friendship. It has meant so much to each of us. I don't think it was an accident that Doug and I were on that street at that moment.

Doesn't Darth Vader Ever Get Vanquished?

Sometimes I think that living a long life is a curse. Not that I have done so yet, 70 is kind of nowhere. Not long. Not short. But here stand I. The thing that I am allowing to irritate me these days is that things that seemed to have been accomplishments not only fade, but come back as new challenges in different forms. It gets hard to see progress.

Getting fabulous, never ending media coverage was one of the great triumphs of the Anti-Vietnam War movement in the USA. In previous wars, the general public saw the propaganda films put out by the military machine. Most every depiction was of our handsome heroic boys saving the world. It was pretty much the same from the German side.

In Vietnam, intrepid reporters sent images around the world that horrified, stunned, mobilized, and finally had a good part in exposing and ending the insanity of that War. We had learned how to expose the machine in real time. Yea! Except, that triumph was short lived. The powers that be also learned their lessons. In subsequent wars it has been impossible to repeat that. The purchase of the major TV outlets by the great arms manufacturers, the blackout of access to war zones except with embedded reporters, the publishing delays for stories that might have saved many lives (Think about Seymore Hirsh's story of the El Mazote Massacre in El Salvador). This was like a full stop of media until the exposure couldn't influence the outcome.

Now we have our every communication watched and listened to. How different this is from the CIA and FBI guys that would hide behind doors at anti-war actions and occasionally step out and flash a camera in our faces. Whistle blowers are no longer protected, but rather criminalized. Any progress that was made toward openness, has now been quadruply eroded.

My melancholy is not reflected by the greater thinkers. Chomsky, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, these great men see humanity making great progress. Why would I feel a personal defeat in the loss of the triumph over the media? Well guys, it is a bit about the ego. I would guess that the need of my little ego to think that I had been part of something important is a character flaw that still irritates. Great human beings are those who get over the need for these self important pats on the back. Mea Culpa. Change is important and unstoppable. I know this.

The Fine Art of Hanging Out

Doing nothing is a very refined skill. Once lost, this ability is hard to recapture.  Children are some of the best teachers, but, these days even they might need some guidance. I have watched kids look around for an activity, ask to use an electronic device, attempt to get some attention that they don't need, and then settle into an amazing meditative state. They might start to build a fairly house.  If you leave them uninterrupted by idiotic questions like "Are you OK? Are you having fun? Do you need some water?", they can go into their own little world for hours.

In their play, they are relaxed, setting their own pace and engaging their imagination. "The grey rocks are the good soldiers, the white ones are the enemy." "Shush, the fairies are asleep and we don't want to wake them up." Kids are amazingly resourceful. A dead leaf can be the roof. A tiny wildflower can be the tree. Then, maybe cloud watching can turn into a day dream. Hopefully, you all have had some childhood experience of this.

Then we grow up and we have to do lots and lots of things to keep the show going. And now we have all these devices to keep charged and get interrupted all the time. When do we get to look at the clouds? When can we stay in the daydream and not fall asleep from exhaustion? I don't have a very big problem turning off my devices. I do have a lot of interruptions caused by my relationship to my body. "I am hungry. I am thirsty. I am cold. I am hot. I need some caffeine. I want some nicotine." I am my own pain in the ass.

It feels kind of abrupt and rude when people ask me what I do and I say "Mostly nothing." This, however, is the truth. I discount the stuff we have to do to stay alive. I don't count throwing the laundry into the machine or putting the dishes away as "doing something". I don't discount these activities. I am happy I can do them, but I consider them, for now, just one step up from saying I am breathing. But, therein lies the rub. If I can breathe consciously or do the dishes as if I am preparing for a visit from the Buddha or the Christ, then I am not only doing nothing, but I am doing the greatest task of my life.

I suspect that when a child is playing alone, unguided, and uninterrupted, he/she is fully present. I aspire to this state. It can't make any difference whether my activity is able to be labelled 'productive' or 'unproductive' if I am present and aware. This is different from being distracted or entertained. And being distracted or entertained is different from being moved by a song or a painting.

I guess my theme for the day is to learn from the wonder of childhood and be here now. I am awake, even if I can only sustain it for a few minutes.

Life Following Art Following Life

So, months ago, I wrote a few blog fictions without changing from my normal autobiographical blog stuff. Not that we aren't a fiction of our own making no matter what. Long ago I realized that I pretty much dress for the part that I am playing at any given time. If I am the sick lady, I wear PJs and a sweat shirt. If I am the proper woman, I wear my pearls. If I am the sport, I wear my trainers. We all do. My home is the stage set for the current drama. My story is the internal monologue I run. Today I am a victim. Yesterday I was the proud grandmother. Another day I might be the world traveler.

In those 'fiction' blogs, I was meeting with a priest and it was intimate and powerful. This week I did just that in real life. A few weeks ago, I went to Mass here in California. The priest was a tall, handsome man from India. Lovely Indian accent. I don't remember what he said particularly. I do remember having a feeling of being quieted and when he spoke the word 'love', I felt something. A transmission of love.

As the days followed, I was beset by disharmonious feelings. I was on an emotional roller coaster. One such day as I road my bike past the church, I ran into a woman coming out of the office. I asked her if she worked there. She did. Could I make an appointment to talk with a priest. "I guess you could." she said and gave me the office number.

When I called I said I needed to talk with a priest. I know the receptionist was a little baffled because I was no one she knew and I didn't offer any explanation of my business. She gave me an appointment for the next day. I didn't dare hope it was the Indian guy.

It was. Father Lawrence. I said that I was having a crisis of faith. When I needed it the most it was alluding me. He said he had prepared for our meeting in prayer and he felt that I was having an ego problem. Oh My God. I was. I didn't want to be the person who was losing her shit. I didn't want to be the frazzled one. I wanted to be in control of my life and I was pissed off that I was friggin'  human. God was fine. I was fully in the way of any help or comfort that was being offered me.

You are probably thinking that this is generic God talk and that Father Lawrence had no insight into my very special very ME situation. I assume that he did and he didn't. The thing was that I felt the same transmission of Love coming from his heart to my heart that I had during Mass and the way he spoke communicated to the wounded ego me as well as to the higher being of me. It was a powerful good meeting.

This is what I was going for in my fiction and then I was gifted it in real life. Who could have known?

Don't You Hate Concepts Like "Humility"?

My friend Greeley doesn't like people to use words like 'hate'. But despite his preferences, I often go for the most simple and dramatic word. It gets my attention. You have to understand that it is not the word or even the concept of 'humility' or 'gratitude' that I dislike so vehemently. It is the ever changing goal post of experience that is so very difficult for me.

It seems as if, as soon as I think I have become humble, something much bigger and deeper and harder comes up for the next lesson. "You think that is humility! Try this on."

I finally understand that it is seriously not a good plan to have any spiritual hubris. But what is wrong with allowing myself an occasional pat on the back? My current conclusion is that it is as big a crime as murder. Because spiritual pride means starting over. If we have to 'die to become' then pride in anything brings that ego right back and feeds its insatiable hunger.

Humility is a rough one. If you play it like "Poor worthless little old me, I am less than a bug on a rug." are you denying the glory of God's creation? Are you seeking compliments? Are you looking to be knocked down or built up? Sketchy stuff. If you go to "In my humble opinion, blah blah." are you feeling righteous. You are. Your thoughts are better. They are right. You have the truth. You might as well say "In my all-knowing and perfect thinking, here is your answer." Nothing humble there.

I thought I had learned a lot about humility. I am not possession proud. But am I proud of not being possession proud? Ya, probably. I am not looks proud. I am kind of a natural, nothing fancy kind of woman. But does some little part of me think that is just a little bit cooler than the women who spend all their time and money being worked on? Ya, probably.

Getting old does a good job of knocking out pride and teaching humility. Think about it. Daily something sags or wrinkles or looses it's full abilities. It isn't a subtle thing. It is a sledge hammer action. So this aging thing, like this parenting thing, as with the creative thing, this life thing,  conspires to bring us to our knees, to teach us what is real, to expose the very essence of life.

So, it is all good. No one ever said it would be easy.

Your humble servant,

Julie