Anxiety and Silence
I used to long for a vacation from myself. The idea meant different things at different times, but most often it was a reaction to feeling feeling exhausted by an ongoing inner monologue, a constant analysis of myself and my situations, and seeming inability to feel my feelings in the moment. The solution, I thought, was to turn off my mind, disconnect the internal censor, and cease the endless feeling of "shoulds" that caused ongoing stress. This shaped my early sense of what it meant to be liberated.
It took time to recognize this as anxiety. I knew I worried a lot, and ruminated over things for hours at a time, unable to let go. When I feared someone was upset with me, I would not ask directly but analyze the situation to death and ask others what they thought and try to come up with a plan to make it so the person couldn't be upset with me. You know, if it turned out they were.
Most distressing was my inability to simply enjoy things. I would sit at concerts, or with friends, or go to parties and get frustrated that my anxious commentary wouldn't let me be immersed in the moments. My attempts to relax seemed to pull me only more deeply into the cycles, adding judgment and arguing to the anxious thought loops. The mind could not escape its own maze. When I became more attuned to my body, I thought dancing, drinking, or sex were paths to that silence. But when I did manage to disconnect, the result was automatic behavior that was equally without pleasure. Eating half the pizza without noticing or savoring. Drinking to excess and then being too drunk to enjoy much of anything, only to spend the next day analyzing everything I said and did to make sure I hadn't any regrets.
Since beginning regular meditation and devoting myself to my spiritual practice, I've found myself plunged more deeply into anxiety. Early in my sitting practice, I had a morning in which I was startled to realize I could actually feel the tension in my leg muscles. The revelation was not only that I could have that degree of bodily awareness, but in doing so, I could allow the muscles to relax. So it was with other aspects of anxiety: I became more connected, more conscientious of cyclical thought loops that had no resolution, stressing about things beyond control, avoiding others because of my fears of their opinion of me. As with the muscular contraction, awareness brought with it the potential to ease and relax these constrictions. It has and continues to take practice, and there times when I have to make peace with the understanding that some part of me will continue to ruminate in spite of my efforts. I embraced self-observation and relaxation practices as means to understand and alleviate my anxiety. I've also engaged in psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy at various points.
In the past month, I've returned to that early longing to disconnect and now see it as a craving for the silence within, and had the sense that it could be within reach after these years of work. Though not a permanent silence. In fact, I'm no longer wholly sure what I imagine it to be like, to experience such stillness. Turning off my mind is not an ideal solution; it does not lead to greater consciousness, peace, or integrity. Neither does being wholly consumed in my mind. In the Haindl tarot deck, the Wheel of Fortune card shows the wheel spinning all manner of drama around a wounded center, while beneath, in starry bliss, the human face gazes. This is not detachment out of fear, but true nonattachment that comes through being in the world and yet able to observe with equanimity, acceptance.
I've increased my meditation practice for a time to help cultivate that inner silence, and still find there are times when I've spent twenty minutes thinking of television shows, perceived slights, gossip, or other distractions and forgetting to notice the feeling of air moving in and out of my nose, and sinking into that stillness within. This past weekend, however, I was out socially and kept noticing my anxiety come up about being in social situations, or wanting to worry about school situations I cannot control, and found that I could breathe into the stillness within me and allow those things to be as they are. Not silencing those thoughts and feelings, but meeting them with silence, a silence somehow whole and organic that allows a deeper coherence to emerge, a voice within that was ready to be heard and to speak.
I went out dancing last night and noticed again how my mind felt like a degree of separation from the joy of experience. It occurred to me that this space between my mind and my experience may not be a curse. This could be an opening wherein consciousness can hold space. Meeting my mind and experience with silence and acceptance gave birth to ecstatic dancing and joy.
rereading poetry
In my offtime between quarters of school, I've returned to one of my first loves: poetry. First I picked up Paradise Lost, which I had been meaning to reread for a few years. Then I picked up my old Norton Anthology and started paging through, rereading the poems I'd seen many times before, glancing through new ones, just enjoying the experience. A well-crafted, beautiful, and incisive line seems to me the pinnacle of magic, transformation. I used to leave such lines everywhere that I might read them, or repeat them over and over in my head.
Poetry used to be a harder slog for me, though I've always maintained a relationship with it. Each line, each word seemed so dense and carefully chosen, that I wanted to give my deep, undivided attention to the piece and understand it thoroughly before moving to the next. Which is part of the reason why most long poems (many of Pope's, for example) cause me to glaze over and simply move to the next. The effort of such deep understanding precludes pleasure, at times, rather than enhancing.
In college I took a course with a professor who taught us to see poetry first as music, and to take our initial readings as an opportunity to enjoy the sounds and rhythm. Then, with repeated readings, the deeper layers of meaning may be easier to unfold. That lesson has been liberatory for me, especially now as I live and work outside of a literary culture that would make me want to be able to cite authors verbatim at will.
Which reconnects me with the power of poetry that always calls me back.
Interview at Pagan Writers Community
The Pagan Writers Community is featuring an interview with me. My first!
fall from light
Today was a gorgeous Seattle fall day. After a somewhat lackluster summer and a rainy transition into the rainy season, it was pleasure to walk my dog in the neighborhood, smelling the crisp autumnal leaves. Rejoicing in the feeling of sunlight on my face.
There are gray days here when I wish it could be sunny all the time. Re, the father of life, always radiating upon us with energy and the energy to rise. But my body is not designed to always be in the light. The sun has another facet, the energy of Sekhmet, the harsh destructive energy that enervates and dehydrates the body, or causes malignant genes to bloom into cancerous lesions. I've spoken to people from perennially sunny climates who say they find it as depressing as it can feel to be in the gray Pacific Northwest.
My cultural resonances from Catholicism has been to associate the light with good and darkness with evil. Yet I reflect upon the protective shading of trees and the roof over my head that allow me reprieve from heat and light. I find rest and comfort in the darkness, even as I experience fear of the dark. People who have lived in Seattle for a long time seem to make the most of the summer, but turn with relief to the time of the year when things cool off. Even I have found a kind of relief and excitement in the opportunity to slow down and turn inward.
The play of light and dark moves through my experience of life. I find that an artist I admired has said things I find appalling. At times I have connected deeply to her music and her artistic vision, and then there are moments when I feel she is flippant towards something I find truly scary. I grew up in a place where virulent white supremacy and a history of Klan activity was part of our history and continues to this day. Growing up, I and many knew of at least one town in which people of color were advised never to stop for fear of their safety, with good reason. That someone could be insensitive to this kind of darkness seems to me an unfortunate flaw, and yet I know that I myself have flaws, blind spots, and ignorance that would rightly affront others. I'm not free of racism. I strive to be mindful of it. The more I can own it, the easier it is for me to avoid acting upon it, to address it when I see it.
Sparkymonster says:
You can say and do racist things and be a "nice person". Niceness is not a get out of racism free card. That not how it works.
It happens all the time, all over the world. People and institutions we admire say or do something really fucked up, beyond all reckoning, and it becomes almost impossible to reconcile the affront of the action with the reputation of the actor. So we get people in the Catholic Church covering up child molestation, or riots in Pennsylvania protecting the reputation of a man who was widely celebrated but colluded in protecting a child abuser.
Every citizen of Omelas, when they come of age, is told about that one blameless child being put through hell. And they have a choice: Accept that is the price for their perfect lives in Omelas, or walk away from that paradise, into uncertainty and possibly chaos.
A world of light is a world denying, suppressing, and feeding a terrible darkness. When a person appears to me a glowing hero, a savior, to be in some way perfect, then I am denying their essential humanity, and contributing to a terrible burden, just as I am when I look at someone as inherently broken, bad, worthless, or inhuman. Clinging to one and rejecting the other creates an imbalance, and nature does not tolerate imbalance for long. The greater the imbalance, the greater will be the corrective action that attempts to restore balance. Protecting a pristine reputation means that the explosion will be all the greater and more devastating.
stoking the creative fire
Trying to write consistently is be a challenge. For some reason, I decided long ago that long-form fiction writing would be my passion, with a side of poetry. Unfortunately, my personality is not inclined toward the precision and forethought that could really support such a venture. I dislike sitting down and thinking through what I want to say, creating an outline, and then adhering to it, though at times I've found it really helpful.
Instead I've been attached to a sort of ecstatic, mystic idea of writing; opening my skull and letting the Genius write through me. What excites me most is stumbling through the process of taking inspiration and following its uncertain thread until I reach the denouement and realize, wow, that's where it was going all along! The writing path is full of surprise and intrigue and sloppiness, and several revisions are necessary to bring the whole work in line with what I was stumbling toward. That's the idea, anyway.
Unfortunately, the thread of inspiration is geared toward shorter bursts. Short fiction, short poems, or the occasional snippet in a longer work. Which isn't to say that it's not present in the more involved work, but there are far more days when it feels like sitting down to blankness and fighting against the complete emptiness of inspiration to generate some content. I suspect this would be the case even with an outline.
This summer, I read Philip K. Dick's brilliant alternate-history novel The Man in the High Castle. In his process of writing the novel, he consulted the I Ching regularly, using divination to direct the action of the work. This seemed like a wonderful tool for connecting to the creative unconscious, and sustaining that connection for a longer work.
My writing practice already includes some of this work. At times when I feel stalled, I'll do a dream incubation. At night, while falling asleep, I'll tell myself that I want to have a dream that will provide inspiration for where the novel will go next. The dreams are rarely "about" the novel in an explicit way; however, images and occurrences in the dream become intriguing irritants in my conscious mind that inspire further work. While writing Dreams Among the Ruins, I incubated a dream that featured a cadre of clones of the X-Man Cable dressed in womens' clothing, as part of an incognito mission. The dream led to two creative inspirations: one was a plot point that occurs in the novel. Later, in between drafts and looking for a creative palate-cleanser, I was inspired to write a screenplay draft for a Cable movie.
For this process, I've turned to one of my other loves, the Tarot. When I feel stuck as to what to write next, I'll shuffle and then deal three cards. One is the Court Card, signifying what character will be the focus of the next piece. I've begun developing correspondences of which court card signifies which character. The second is a Minor Arcana, signifying the action of the next scene. The third is a Major Arcana, signifying the greater arc or spiritual theme with which the character is grappling.
When I divide the cards in this way, I feel like the deck becomes immensely practical and clear. Oftentimes I may ask a practical question and get a card that I find wholly confounding, because I don't have a clear intention to frame its interpretation. I accept this lack of precision in my personal meditations because I feel it opens me up to some broader and more nuanced comprehension of both my life and the cards, but it can be maddening when trying to work on a practical question.
Unfortunately, work on this novel has and will continue to be slow, given my current status as a graduate student. All the more helpful it's been to have a process like this.
Command/Report
Communication theory articulates two levels of communication: report and command. Report is content, the literal information communicated. Command is how the communication implicates the relationship between communicants.
This is jargon but not incomprehensible. Think about the scenario in which person A really wants person B to wash the dishes. Some people might ask, "Would you please wash the dishes?" Another might say, "Hey, the dishes are dirty."
In the former case, the report is a request to wash the dishes, and the command is a relationship between equals, or an inferior speaking to a superior. At any rate, it's a request given by person A, who does not take for granted that it is person B's job to do the dishes.
In contrast, the latter implicates a superior/subordinate relationship. Person A's observation that the dishes are dirty is itself a subtextual, passive-aggressive command to person B: hey, wash the dishes. Furthermore, such an order implies that person B should have already noticed the dishes needed to be washed, and it's an inconvenience to person A that they needed to speak in the first place.
It is possible to say one thing and completely contradict one's self in the saying of it. Traditionally masculine, logocentric discourse focuses on the words themselves. If I can say something correctly and accurately, then I cannot be criticized.
Traditionally feminine, intuitive discourse focuses on the relational context in which communication is phrased. This does not exclude the words themselves, but weighs the command dimension of speech more heavily. If you say something correctly, but speak it in a tone of irritation or condescension, then you have effectively undermined your communication. Hence it is possible to insult a person, even while paying them a compliment.
The Tower
We didn't notice it. We spent hours contemplating, ruminating, worrying, arguing, going over the plans back and forth, up and down. We had consultations, supervision, feedback. We read books, we did exercises. We wrote reams of pages on everything that might have gone wrong and how to make it right.
When it hit, we didn't see it coming. The one thing no one contemplated, or contemplated seriously anyway. A passing thought. A glance up, a flicker of an intimation: that seems off somehow.
Our precious self-concept. Our beautiful agenda. Our magnum opus. Our utopian dream. Our religious vision. All dashed to dust from a moment's carelessness, a glance in the wrong direction. How can something take so much effort to build and so little to destroy?
Yet the cracks had been accumulating. Nothing happens in an instant but the impact and the fall. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Nothing is separate. That is the lie that caused us to build. If only we can get higher from this ball of dirt and filth, if only we could touch the firmament! Then we would free ourselves of this vale of incoherence, death, and meaninglessness.
The ball of fire is the apple of chaos thrown into the party. Discordia revenging her snub. The thirteenth witch offering her unwanted blessing. And after all this, after all the heart and passion poured out, all that's left is to watch the edifice collapse upon itself.
Now we return to the dirt. Some of us are screaming and crying. Some are blaming each other, or the gods. Some choose to ignore what is happening. Some pretend we will begin again and make something better. More clinging and delusions.
We cannot rush to the next project. The collapse must be mourned. We will never learn if we simply walk away now. We may take the time to clear away, to salvage what can be saved, to dispose what must.
Having lost the center of our activity, the sterling epicenter of our idealism, we now have Geb, the open fields supporting us, and Nut, the starry sky stretching above. We have possibility, terrifying and free.
to commemorate my Saturn Return
Saturn in Libra 1. Beneath the scales dispute the blessed ones: With outstretched hand, one measures the land, dispersing food and hearth from each according to their labor, to each according to their wealth. The other, with grasping hands, demands power for what is his. In agitation, the sun glowing illuminates the work of many to feed the few. Meanwhile, her wings unfold the balance, her heart the fulcrum of understanding and wisdom, mercy and strength, love and power. 2. In my throat lives shame, who says: “Do not speak. Admire the melody of laughter, beneath which thrashes muffled pain. Smile through clenching larynx, cage the voice and leash discord.” In my belly rage says: “These assholes and fools. Admire the civility, gold-plating pasted over disdain for suffering and pronouncements of ignorant judgment.” Now seething in complicity, efforts wasted as rage and shame compound in blame. Neither reason nor justice can survive when power twists to choke upon itself. 3. If I change, so must we, and so will you. Decide for yourself what to do. You could not change while I remain the same. Stasis. 4. This blind silver moonlight is my left eye, vibrating tides of your fathomless urge, upwelling desire to flow with you. This hot scarlet sunlight is my right eye, piercing the seed to crack the shell, calling the stalk to thrust upward, to claim its due. 5. This one: the decimating desert storm blasting righteousness to unveil the wicked. The other: sky that holds us all in love, arched in witness to justice and to vice. Sickness is harmony without dissent, falsehood eating serenity of soul. Torture is aggression devoid of love, evil begets evil among the scared. 6. Let both hands upset false balance. Justice will seek its own return. The goddess bends her hip, tilts her hand. Whatever you fear most to say, speak; and then listen.
The Lord of Karma
Now is the time of what is known as my Saturn return, in which the planet Saturn arrives at the location it was in during the time of my birth. In some views, it has been occurring for the past few years, since Saturn arrived in the sign of Libra. In another, it happens officially on Tuesday, when the positioning is exact.
One title of Saturn is the Lord of Karma, and according to many, the time of return causes one to confront the essence of whom they truly are and how their lives align, or fail to align, with that essence. If someone finds they are not living an authentic life, many tumultuous changes can occur during and after the Saturn return.
submitting to the work
I've yet to find the relationship with writing that really feels right to me. Or if I have, I keep letting resistance get in the way of bringing it home.
In working on a new long piece, I've set a goal for myself that I will write 600 words, 6 days a week, allowing myself one day of my choosing to rest. I've come to re-embrace the concept of Sabbath, in giving myself a break from my regular duties to relax, reconnect to what is divine and important in my life, and allow some spontaneity. Otherwise I would plan my life to death. Truly, there have been times when I wanted nothing more than to have a fixed daily schedule in which I spent half an hour meditating, an hour exercising, an hour writing, half an hour cleaning the house, eight hours working, two hours with my partner, and maybe a half hour for unstructured free time. Thus, the logic in my head goes, I won't die feeling regret that I never achieved my goals, though perhaps I might die wondering if I had ever made time to live.
These days I work at a job where the hours change daily, and my days off change weekly. Between that and being in graduate school, I don't have the stability of schedule that allows me to rigidly plan out my life, so I've needed to be even more disciplined while going with the flow. Which means I need to make sure I write when I have time to write. The nice thing about setting limits is that I also give myself permission to stop. I don't have to spend all day fretting about getting enough done if I've hit my benchmark.
The problem is when and where. Lately I've been exploiting the hell out of a Netbook I appropriated from my beloved husband, to the point where it seems to be rebelling against me. I found that writing on the bus could be quite invigorating. Since I had a limited amount of time, I could compel myself to bypass the inner critic and censor, skip past the dilly-dallying, and just write, just get out the 600 words, who cares what they are.
The downsides, of course, were that I only wanted to write when the bus was relatively unoccupied. I hate people reading over my shoulder when working on the first draft of a piece. Such privacy is rare on a bus. If I missed my work on the commute, I would try to squeeze in writing during my breaks at work, but it became all too easy to peruse the Internet and veg out.
Turns out, I have a wonderful computer at home, and a room of my own in which to work. I love my office. I've dreamed of having one for years and now I do, and now there's a part of me that wants to avoid the hell out of it. I suspect it's for the same reason that makes it seem easier to write on the bus. There's something about actually sitting down and sinking into the work that is unsettling to some part of my personality, the one that would rather procrastinate or indulge in some fruitless vice. Perhaps it's tied to why I find it hard to settle into stillness when meditating. Is it the ego? Whatever it is, it rebels against discipline, it hates settling into the process where it's just my self and the work.
I find it easy to half-ass writing. To do it on the bus, say, or at the table while chatting with my partner, or in front of the television. All great ways to avoid totally focusing. Without that full commitment, I'm not sure I can produce my best work, but perhaps that's the out my subconscious is seeking. "Oh, if it's not very good it's because I didn't try very hard." That no longer feels good enough.
So this week I'm choosing to recommit to working on my writing in my office. Not on the bus, not at work, not on the netbook. (Naturally, I am writing this blog post on the netbook at the dining table.) The process of sitting down to write creatively, to write fiction at my computer was wonderful. I could turn on the atmospheric, spooky music I loved, shut the door, and let myself write. When I was a teenager, this was my great passion. To enjoy the music I loved and create, using my computer as the medium of creation. It's a lonely process, and there's a sacrifice in time that could be spent with others. At the same time, in doing the work, I feel freed up to be more there with others. I'm not trying to squeeze in writing on the bus or while half-assing conversation. I can do my work, unplug myself from the computer, and be there for the rest of my life.