Sunday, July 26, 2015

Visit to self. It has been too long. Only you can answer why. Maybe it is the voices.

The morning was full of rain and I feel oddly liberated with an awkward bouncy buzz sensibility hovering almost audibly above my brow. "It's a new day, a new dawn." Both exhausted and energized, it was a feeling I absolutely knew I wanted to ride into a new place leaving the knotted mess of pulleys and chains behind and to let the voices name my knots would contaminate my mood so I attempt a refocus on my present.

Showered, sadly a notable accomplishment, dressed in simple attire with a few somewhat routinized chores done: the backyard cats had welcomed my late arrival, the newspapers gathered from the driveway yesterday's wet and today's bagged by the carrier and now a decision to not walk Jake as it was raining with intensity again.

It is Sunday Morning. I prepare to watch the CBS version with tea. My voices begin "Will you pick up the right television clicker? Will you enter the right code?"  Then in retort the judging voice declares; ”Living as you is a roll of dice in all things.” 

I push remote control buttons intending to enter 1-0-0-3. I land on 1-0-3. I stay. OWN is the channel bug. Oprah is speaking to Jean Houston. My frazzled brain tries to make connections. Words that have been in my ethos surface before me in competition with an annoying large fly: Heroes Journey, Joseph Campbell "Finding Your Bliss" 

My voices attempt to control my moment and my reactions: The classification begins putting boxes around all input: "new age" yet not so new as it is somewhere in my memories of the 1970s.
My gut says "listen". My brain says "listen with a pencil". Another disconnected voice in my head begins with the self-inquiry "Are you with this? Where do you stand?" 

The judging voice that constantly reminds me of my shallows declares: “You owned the books? Did you read them? You did watch the television series. It was like Cosmos, Connections and once the smartest man in TV Steven Allen's brilliant show "Meeting of the Minds". A PBS quick fixes of your past attempts to engage with a world larger than the one you inhabited. Campbell surfaced in the late eighties. You were a mom then. You knew you had dragons and a priest. You had large secrets. 


The fly is now dead and so is most of your memory.

Your take heed and pencil in hand you scribble in every direction several incomplete statements. Passion4Possible. The lure of common. Midwife of souls. Provocateur of possible. A barely legible catalog of your grasps of now for later. Insightful. Clever. Curious. No time to dissect merely transcribe.

You remember you too admire Eleanor Roosevelt. It is a feeling, not a knowing. They (Jean and Oprah) quote Eleanor. It is familiar. "Women are like teabags, put them in hot water and they just gets stronger." She will be quoted again "The future belongs to those who believe in their dream's".  She would be a great conversation but you know you could never hold up your end.

Jean Houston tells the story of being six and praying in a closet; after asking nuns "Did Ezekiel see the wheel when he was drunk?" You feel dumb not knowing of this wheel. A shallow voice says: "prophecy" but not with the knowing of google, a scholar or even a good catholic.

She describes leaving the closet and feeling a sense of awareness; not bliss. Oprah asked if this new awareness remains throughout her life? I lose track of the conversation, lost in my connected child-god-calling recurring memory.

I am now in a large Catholic Church. My son age five walks through masses of people in dark heavily wooden pews to the alter. He is radiant. He is already a master of the microphone. He takes it to his lips and says "I commit myself to priestly knowing". I see this scene often. Maybe it is out of guilt. His voice is so calm and precise and clear for a person of five. Maybe it is his phrase.  Not the priesthood; not the ways of priest but to knowing. Then I recoil. I never want to stay in that amplified memory too long. I shake it off. The dragons were already on his shoulders. Am I guilty? I wanted then to believe it was a blissful calling. What do I want now? A good story, a fairy tale ending? A son set free from those certain dragons and any others gathered in his journey.

A poem title comes to me "calling, heed it!". I try to catch up with the OWN conversation with its relevance to me. The next scribble '2nd Genesis" There is more to me than that. My voices, her words. O am uncertain. Scrambling in the murk of words "women of a certain age", which includes me, have an expanded inner capacity for radical empathy. Do I believe this? Do I know it? There is no longer an emphasis on how one is seen but rather a focus on service. 

The voices are now disagreeing with each other and the authenticity of both of these women each with means and public personas. I wander... are selfies taken phone in hand by grandmas any different than selfies of others? I think not.

There is a book to be sold, or read, The wizard of us? I am captivated by the question "What is your tornado?" The metaphorical allegory of the dis-empowered characters and red shoes again seems familiar. But I have not kept up with the television personality's conversation. 

I scribble another poem title "Either/Or". My A-D-D brain has me thinking about a recent family photo of my niece and her new son. It is captioned "Until you have a child you don't know all the places in your heart". It is all connected. I regroup and wonder if those parts of the heart get the reallocated when your child is grown or if they merely mature to be more embracing of others in the world?

I'm now writing around the edges of the notepad instead of going to the second sheet of paper. I have no idea why I do that. Maybe some latent fear of using too much paper.

The next note finding its edge is "Think Quotes: collect moments one by one." I write the quote "Be the change you wish to see in the world" - Gandhi. It is the cornerstone of my son's essay to a college in California that did not accept him. I have no quote of my own. My childhood dream was to become quotable, to someday have my words as a quote in Reader's Digest or in a fortune cookie or among the wrappers of chocolate or tea - a place of ordinary inspiration.

I'm not familiar with this channel 1-0-3. I don't know if "THINK" is some sort of a public service or arts project similar to "Before I die". There are people writing quotes on large yellow and blue post-it note cards and putting them on a very large wall. The wall spells out in robin's egg blue "think". The video captures what seems to be random ordinary people telling stories about why they picked their quotes. All the quotes were good and reasons for picking them even better. Right now I could not repeat one quote that I just heard. I such have a indescribable but palpable sense of the experience. It seemed uplifting and authentic and artsy. Experiential art.

During the TV ad, I clicked to the originally intended cable TV station: 1-0-0-3. I hear a story concluding. The topic is 'passionate kissing'. The the take-a-way is 'passionate kissing' burns 2 calories and eating a Hersey Kiss adds 22.2 calories. I am left flat. I do not know what this is intended to mean. Maybe the conclusion of this video story needed Act one. 

More ads. More clicks. One mistakenly on my smartphone. 

My attention is drawn back by the Super Soul Sunday OWN show. In conversation I hear both women claim to pray daily. Oprah's prayer is simple: use me. They seem consumed with changing the universe, my universe is hyper-local. I can not remember when I last looked up to the stars but I do make sure NASA stories are redistributed as educational TV. What does that say about me? A loud voice wonders?

My smartphone beeps me to its attention. I seq-way is to mass killings and what does media do. My voices panic in escalation knotting me up again with a sense of uselessness and insufficent knowing. More to watch, read, see and try to remember. David Harris-Gershon and a Newswipe by Charlie Brooker. More scribbles: the commentator describing media's mishandling of crimes committed by those seeking fame: do not use images so pix-elated that it looks like reports from Lego convention. His words my reaction I do not know. I am nodding and can hear myself saying: I agree. The beast must be fed. Why? Media does enable terror and commercialism. The right thing is elusive as we write today's history. My bliss is now in an overcrowded closet. Opening the door will likely suffocate me. I can not answer simple questions: Your favorite quote, movie, book is?  I can not remember but somewhere inside me is a voice about notes that fails to follow the lines.

As I get on with my day: my shallows posit a question "Will you follow-up on either of these things? your personal spirituality journey or the role of media and the saturation of insanity in today's culture. 

This blog post is far from the poem that my morning wanted. 

I feel good about 'a better knowing' of 75 year old Jean Houston. The mystical question causing a news burst @1996 simply being "Who would you love to have a conversation with? And Hillary's logical answer: Eleanor Roosevelt hearkens back to Steve Allen. What I have come to understand is that Ms. Houston is about transformation not mysticism: the closest she is to a GURU is the embodiment of this caricatured phrase is her approach to life: Gee, yoU aRyoU!  

In conclusion it was an informed, if not fruitful day. And, In three minutes it will be tomorrow.