Float like a Waterbug, Sting like a Bee

It isn’t so much that I’m afraid of heights as it is I’m afraid of falling from heights.  Therefore, when, 2 months ago, I found myself in Moab, Colorado dangling on the side of sheer rock face struggling to find a toe-hold in the millimeter-wide crannies, I began to panic. 

Now, to pull back the scene a little bit, I was about 15 feet off the ground, strapped into a harness, and attached to a grounding line held by my belay partner only a few feet below.  But it didn’t feel safe.  It felt like I was stabbing the rock cliff with my feet, trying desperately to find purchase in thin air, my adrenaline kicking up so high I could taste it.

Muscle-fatigued and terrified, I called to my partner below that I wanted to come down – I was done.  The rock climbing guide on our trip overheard my plea and walked over from the lines and climbers parallel to me.  He suggested that I sit back in the harness, take a break, feel my weight being held, and catch my breath.  Then he called up, “You can come down, but if you want to keep going, I’ll help you.” 

Later that evening, back on flat earth in front of a crackling fire, he chuckled he could see my shoulders slump at that moment, a moment of resignation, a knowing that, indeed, because of his help, I was going to and was able to keep going.  This sanguine moment of, “Shit, alright, fine.  Let’s do this.”  And, together, we did.  He called out places where I could find my footing, and shortly thereafter I was at the top, my heart a fluttering canary, stress-tears straining back in my eyes, weak from fear and exertion – and once safely back the 60ft to the ground again, proud.

He told me of a concept called a “retro-climb.”  It is only after you have accomplished this ridiculous feat of effort that you feel pride, accomplished, and glad you did it at all.  In the moment, you only feel fear, anxiety, terror.  Honestly, I’ve not felt so frightened in recent memory, despite the intellectual knowledge that I was completely safe, held, and cared for.  (My naturopath had a field day turning down my maxed-out adrenaline once I’d returned to SF!)

In my own personal work lately, my mentor suggested I seek an internal guide to show me my blind spots.  As some of you know, I sometimes use a Shamanic Journey meditation practice that introduces you to internal guides of both human and animal form.

And so, the other morning in meditation, I “went in” to find a guide to show me what I’m missing, since there are whole areas of my life that still feel unresolved and cause me distress (see: "romance and finance"; aka serially single and perpetually under/un-employed).  In this meditation, as the title of this blog may suggest, I came across a waterbug.

… Now, the waterbug does not seem like the fancy-dancy spirit animal one would hope for!  It’s not a lion or eagle or even antelope.  And yet, here it was.  I won’t “bore” you with the details of the meditation, but the lesson was clear: 

The waterbug floats on the top of the water, not because it is defying the law of physics, but precisely because it knows, believes, and trusts in them so completely that it knows it will be held on the surface.  It is not defying gravity, it is embracing the truest knowledge that because of the laws of nature, it must and will always be held.

The rock climbing guide and I had a long conversation one evening about spirituality, and he revealed that his largest question for “God” or the Universe as he continued to expand his life and open his vulnerable self and admit all parts of him was, “Can you really love me that much?”

I replied to him that my question is, “Can you really hold me that much?”  Can you really let me know, help me feel, to my core, that I am held?  That I am safe? 

The waterbug teaches me that it floats because it doesn’t tense and struggle.  It floats because it relaxes and trusts, and simply embodies a knowing that if it steps onto the clear surface of a pond, it will be held.  And furthermore, having seen that it has been held and carried before, it doesn’t continue to question whether it will be held again in the future! 

So this is my lesson for the moment: to embody the true knowing that, like sitting back into a climbing harness, I am expertly and even lovingly held.  And, should I ever choose to question (as it can become a choice rather than a habit), there will always be help offered me.

And p.s., if I mess up and tense up and fall through the surface of the water… I can swim.

Hands in the air -- Reach for the sky

When I first moved into my Oakland apartment 5 years ago, I pasted up onto my refrigerator a piece of black-board contact paper.  On it, I’ve written a chalk list of tasks with check boxes that I mark with a colorful chalk X when they’re complete, and eventually erase with an old cloth.

At this moment, included on my multicolored check list are:  Thank you cards, Laugh, CSET #3, audition pieces, Fall teaching, and Own my Power.

“Own my power” has been on there for some time and this morning, I was thinking about what that might actually look like.  Because perhaps it’s not something you can check off on a box.  Perhaps it's not something that you actually complete. 

I’ve been thinking about the difference between struggling and striving.  I have tended to be someone who struggles, mostly against myself, mostly in some twisted effort to move forward that I thwart with habitual fears and paralyzation.  But I think these two ways of being may be one and the same, simply subject to a shift in perspective or focus.

There are so many check-list items that I’ve put on my chalkboard, thinking them hard, impossible, and out of reach, but the fact for me has been that each time I have reached for something I didn’t think possible, I had to stretch beyond my normal scope, try a little harder, work a little deeper – and in the end I have “miraculously” accomplished these goals.

Before I had written “audition pieces,” my task was “next audition.”  Ages before that, it was “real headshots.” 

Each of these seemed like Herculean effort, stretching my own belief in what was possible and in what I could attain.  So what is the difference between striving and struggling, if both are reaching in an uncomfortable way toward something new?  A truckload of serenity, I imagine!

Striving seems to me to be born of a positive self-image, whereas struggling does not.  You may disagree, but for the purposes of this blog, let’s consider it so.

And in all of my strivings, as I’ve reached just that little bit taller, higher, almost tipping over with the effort, not quite in view of my goal, I’ve had to stretch, work, believe, try -- and grow.  And here’s where the whole “Own my power” thing comes in:

If I have gotten “bigger,” taller, stronger, more breadth and depth with each of my strivings, then there is never going to be a complete “owning” of my power (whatever I consider that to be: my truth, my voice, my wholeness).  Every time I grow a bit in my self-esteem, in my confidence and competence, I outgrow a shell.  And the power that I am hoping to own grows with it.

There is no end to it – you simply need to become bigger to fill the new proportions you’re now striving to embody. 

Instead of lamenting that this striving is some endless Sisyphean task of perpetually pushing a builder up a hill, this newer understanding feels emboldening.  Widening.  It feels instead like a miraculous series of open doors, from one room to the next to the next, each holding that new space for the new bits of Molly that I acquire, uncover, and come to believe in along the way.

So maybe I need to modify my chalkboard task from “own” to “embody” my power, and allow that body to grow with each ticked off challenge.

The Facts of Life

Not like “the birds and the bees”; like the theme song: “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…”

In this great rumpus race for which we have signed up by the very nature of being born, we are subject to a variety of experience.  Some of these we deem good, some bad, and being pleasure-seeking beings, we are partial to those we deem good.

In my own personal relationship to the universe, life, fate and its many faces/facets, I have oriented my understanding to be one that says, Everything happens for our own good.  Even the bad things.

For my alcoholism, I have found recovery, a community, and way of life that brings me fellowship, understanding, pleasure, laughter, and a sense of being deeply understood.

For my childhood, I have come to tell myself that because of my experiences, I've become sensitive, compassionate, empathetic, resourceful, strong, and creative.

For my cancer, I have taken my struggle and survival as impetus to engage in my life more fully, playing in a band, flying a plane, acting and singing in theater.

For all these horrors and more, I can look back and deem them “good,” because they have led me to becoming more useful and engaged as a human.

And yet.

Fuck. All. That.

That we are thrown against the shores of life brutally onto the rocks of experience, shaping us, reshaping us, and winnowing us down to the raw beauty of ourselves—  Hey Universe, would you lay off a minute, huh?

Because perhaps, Shit. Just. Happens.

And that is the worst understanding of all for me.  It is the least controlled, the least controllable, the most chaotic, disordered, entropy-laden reasoning for it all.

What it means is that we are not “safe.”  And if there is anything I have struggled for in my lifetime, it is to feel safe.

But in this quest, this blazing, self-propelled quest for safety, I have built up around myself an armor, a buffer, a multi-layered sequence of dance steps that I believe if I dodge left, you, it, experience, failure, hurt, calamity will needly dodge right.

Yet, the Universe has its own dancesteps, and sometimes they are to bowl you over like a rhino in a football helmet.

Furthermore, by dodging experience as a whole --monstrous as I believe or fear it to be-- I also dodge whatever good that rhinoceros might be trying to hand me.  And therein lies the rub, eh?

As I mentioned a few days ago about the dam, restricting my own self, need, and experience out of fear of what might happen if I let things flow, I am scrubbing up against my own realization that I am restricting myself for fear that bad shit might happen.  I am hoping to control the all of my experience so I am not harmed anymore.

Because forget all the above bullshit (which I also happen to believe) about all those bad things becoming or being seen as good things – don’t fucking think that I want or wanted them too.  They were all still egregiously painful.  And, as I mentioned, human as I am, I don’t want pain.

In my attempt to restrict my experience of pain, however, I believe I restrict my experience of benevolence.  Grace.  Fulfillment.

And so, I am stymied, victim of my own prison, of my own design to be safe, I am restricted from the greater joys and rewards of life.

“You take the good, you take the bad… “

Am I willing to expose myself, to be vulnerable and open to the whole of life’s experience, knowing that in my disarmoring, I am (also) opening myself to unforeseen goodness?

"Admitted we were powerless over Netflix, and our lives had become unmanageable"...

There is a great proportional equation in my life: The more fearful I am, the more Netflix I watch.  Perhaps you have a similar equation?

As Summer School draws to a close -- both my morning job teaching it and my evenings learning from it -- I begin to feel more anxious.  I begin to poke around job sites, as half-heartedly as I have been for weeks since this summer school job began, but more fretfully as the job nears completion… tomorrow.

As I look at teacher jobs, I am reminded that, honestly, I feel out of my depth to put together full-time lesson plans, learning arcs, and curricula.  Hence my desire to earn a teaching credential, aka more schooling, aka not til next Fall if that happens.  There’s plenty of “go get ‘em” attitude in me that says, “Meh, who needs it, you’ve taught, you’ll be fiiine.”  But there’s a great dose of reality that reminds me that as someone who's never taught full-time it’s not fair to me or my students to simply “wing it,” to throw something together -- and to throw myself into the deep end.

And it’s unclear to me which of these voices is more valid.  So, I poke half-heartedly.

In the meantime, as I have come home these 6 weeks from my morning gig teaching a creative writing elective to middle schoolers (which, yes, I love more than any job I’ve had), I have a few hours before my evening physics class at a nearby city college.  In those hours, I could: study for the physics final, which is this evening; I could look for work; I could reach out for help; I could learn my monologue for Sunday’s audition; or… I could watch Netflix.

Oh!, you great and terrible time-suck!

And cowing under the realization that I am unable to moderate my time spent … wasted … whiled … and lost in front of the pixelated numbness, last week I began to try to find ways to moderate.

Oh, it’s not like I haven’t tried to reign myself in before.  There’s my “Anything more than two hours is avoidance and isolation” awareness.  There’s the “Never after 10pm” rule.  There’s the “Just one more episode” mantra that somehow repeats unto the depths of my pockets of time.

And so, I decided, Enough!  I looked into suspending my account (at least until I’ve found a job), but you can’t do that.  I even enacted parental controls to restrict my access to the website, even by a few steps, but instead I managed to prevent myself from even accessing my email.  I found a way around those restrictions (since I still can’t figure out how to undo them), and Lo! found myself right back in front of the “Continue Watching” button.

Finally, with a deep mood of disgust, regret, and resignation, last week I cancelled my Netflix account.

And began rereading all the Harry Potter books.

Buying Desire a Hat.

I was at my therapist’s once several years ago now and we were talking about my closest friendships.  I was telling her how I was scared to admit my full self to someone because I feared that my full self, my full array of needs and personality, would be too much for them to handle.  I explained to her that I felt like my needs were like a tidal wave, that letting them out would be releasing one, and I couldn’t do that to any one person.  Or to any several people.  Better to keep it all locked up tight.

But what if I begin to think of my needs and desires not as a tidal wave, but as held by a man-made dam?  A dam has immense strength and power; the pressure behind it is exponential.  The power there, the pressure, comes from the restriction of motion, from the forcible and intentional holding back of something that had previously flown free.

You can see where I’m going with this, no?  I’m no expert in engineering, so I don’t know how one goes about dismantling a dam—and maybe for the purposes of my own internal metaphoric dismantling, that might be interesting to learn—but I do know that once the dam has been removed and the water again flows free, it’s not a potential tidal wave of need anymore.  Now it’s just the normal, everyday flow.  The normal, everyday rise and fall of desire.

Without the restriction and denial of qualities such as desire and need, they are free to be absorbed into the landscape, a part of the whole, neither something to be feared or ignored. 

Desire in our culture has a pretty bad rap of it.  Desire, the seat of sin.  And yet, what is it but simply an expression of self, like humor or wit?  My mentor and I have been discussing and prodding at my relationship to my own need and desire, to try to bring them out of the haunting shadows, to not treat them like the disturbed family members you try to forget you have, til they show up on your doorstep at Christmas with soggy string bean casserole.

What if, instead, they were invited guests?  Do I even know anything about what and who they are, after being so keen to shut them out for so long?  Or do I only now know the legend of them, instead of the qualities themselves?

There is a bit of terror and a bit of awe as I begin to reintroduce myself to these qualities of self.  As a person who is so adept at self-denial and deprivation, to allow that there might be a proper place for need in my life is... incomprehensible.  Like someone who’s been on a Paleo diet for years, touting the benefits, trying to recruit converts, suddenly being told that in order to live they must eat cake.  Because not only will it change their entire metabolism for the better, but, hey, it’s fucking delicious.  And you’re allowed to enjoy it.

Permission to be allowed to enjoy.  Permission to be allowed to want.  Permission to be allowed to need.  And actually, screw the whole permission thing – it’s not that at all.  It’s not a choice.  Or an earned prize.  It’s a basic human right. 

To deny yourself a basic human right, like having chosen to drink fetid water your whole life because you’ve somehow made yourself believe pure spring water wasn’t for you or that your imbibing it was a danger to the balance of existence… well, self-denial like that causes a whole host of problems, not least of which is unfulfillment.

So, the dismantling, the right-sizing of desire and need, the introduction to them as they are, not as I’ve feared them to be.  And why?  Because I have a suspicion that fulfillment, purpose, and wholeness are on the other side of that shift.

Snookered.

See, the thing about being saved is that it’s not an absolution.  You aren’t swept back from the cliff’s edge and wrapped in a cosmic swaddling, rocked into unseeing bliss.  What you are is placed back firmly onto a path.  A long one.  Back from the edge, back from the place of giving up on the work of this lifetime, you are nudged—not so gently, but not without compassion—onto a path that will require of you work for the rest of your lifetime.

The cliff’s edge, the leap from it, the ultimate sacrifice as it might be called is the choice to give up all the work that will ever be asked of you.  It is to say, Forget it, too hard, too much, there’s no help, no hope.  To be placed back onto the path you had made some kind of decision—by omission or commission—to leave means that you are now responsible to take up the work you’d abandoned.  It is to look up from your crumpled knees and see winding before you the path of your lifetime, the work that will surely be needed to accomplish it, and the knowledge that to be alive is to do that work.

To be alive is to agree.  To be alive is to sign an agreement daily that you will, however falteringly, place one foot before the other.  To be alive is to agree that you yourself and your life are more worthwhile than eliminating all the possibilities it holds, all the better and all the worse. 

And so, pulled back from the edge, “saved” as it were, you walk with a grim humor, knowing that somewhere you have chosen this.