Hudson Valley Magazine People to Watch 2012!

Bookmark to:

Again.

The other night during the news there was an announcement for a rerun of the interview done with the Madoff family. I looked at my husband, the question in my face.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“They interviewed the Madoff family???” I asked anyway. Sometimes you can’t help these things. It’s like an emotional Tourette’s.

In any case, I came to learn that recently there was a flurry of media activity related to the release of two new books by Madoff family members.

ABC aired the first Madoff family member interview on October 21, when Mack, the widow of Bernie’s son, Mark, appeared on 20/20. The show scored its best ratings since February 2010, with 7.6 million viewers overall. Surely not coincidentally, The End of Normal, published by Blue Rider Press and another book, Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family, hit bookstores in October.

Now, while it delivered wonderfully high ratings for the media, it did little to inspire book sales.

I’m not surprised by the fact that fewer than expected sales were reported. Who wants to give the Madoffs any more money than they already stole?

But I am—though I shouldn’t be—surprised by the fact that ABC and CBS both took a huge amount of time (and money) with these moguls of misfortune, these scoundrels who are now bleating poverty and victimization.

Why is anyone listening to them?

Why is anyone paying them a dime for their opinions when they haven’t paid a dime in compensation to their victims?

Worse, yet, why are we watching them? Not just once, but in reruns.

It seemed to me to be a form of bizarre cultural rubbernecking, not much different than what we do with car wrecks; a minor fender bender off to the side of the road can cause a ten-mile back up on a major freeway even though all the lanes are actually open. The jam is only because we slow down to look: Is there any blood? Any bodies? Despite all the anatomically correct horror shows on TV (CSI, Bones, Criminal Minds), we can’t seem to get enough of it. We want to see all the bad and awful things that people do.

This is even more pointedly true with famous people. There’s nothing the media or the media generation likes more than watching the crash and burn of a wealthy celebrity. Hence the inordinate amount of attention given to the slow, sublimating near-death experience of one Charlie Sheen. He even had live video to capture his expected demise from alcohol, drugs, and sex addiction and to disperse his rants about being dumped from Two and a Half Men all over cyber-land.

And, as far as I could tell, everyone was watching. It was amazing, but they were watching themselves watch him. And the media talked about it as if it were as important as the impending collapses in Greece and Europe, the epidemics and violence in Africa, or the economic issues in this country. If we measured importance in terms of airplay, I think Charlie won.

What does that say about us?

I am loath to consider the implications.

Because, in my experience, what we look at tends to reflect what we are. What we choose to do tends to be an expression of who we are.

Which says we, like Sheen, are on a slippery slope towards self-indulgent suicide. We, like the cyber-voyeurs who wait for the shape-shifting demise, are caught up in our own “near-life” experience. We, like the Madoffs, are prone to expect something extraordinary for nothing. We too are entitled. We too want our 15 minutes of fame, sometimes at the expense of our good names, even our souls. It may be more a matter of degree than essence.

Not because I am immune to any of the above or because I don’t sneak a peak at traffic accidents, but because I had a momentary lapse of sanity, I turned the TV off and left the Madoffs to their new book-sale travails and to their lonesomes. In fact, the more lonesome the better.

Bookmark to:

In My Lost City, Fitzgerald wrote, “I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage.” He was referring to the life and the loves that he and so many others had enjoyed in New York when it truly roared in the 1920’s.

It was a giddy mirage, an imagined impression across the distance of a desert; a time of the swirling, singing nouveau, the sultry and seditious slipping off of Victorian repression, of skyscrapers and millionaires and railroads that seemed to be able to leap over mountains, of planes that hurled themselves through the air. It was the era that led to the consummate American hero in 1932 with the birth of Superman. It was an era of Romance that made people feel they could finally catch up to the horizon, and—better yet—go beyond it to a life never imagined before. The possibilities were limitless. They were limitless.

Until, as all great romance must eventually, it crashed.

And all the wild speculation encouraged by big business at the time came tumbling down like a torn party dress around the ankles of the people who could afford it the least. Farmers, small businesses, dreamers, and desperate immigrants were swindled into sinking their lives’ savings into high-risk real estate investments, even though it was plainly evident that the need for space was almost nil, production schemes, even though growth was slowing, and consumer gimmicks even though they were as shady as an unregulated economy had ever been.

Sound familiar? Seems we have neither changed nor learned much since then.

It was heartless scheming. It was ruthless capitalism. It was cronyism at its worst. All true. Yes. But it was the Romantic Vision that allowed and perpetuated it. It was the insistence on the impossible and the belief in the limitless self that made people easy prey.

When I speak of romance in this sense, it is not just a reference to that flurry of the heart when we are falling in love. It is there then, as well. But it is more than that.

When Romance Is Good

In The Four Loves (1960, Harcourt Brace), C.S. Lewis talks about Romance as Eros and distinguishes it from lust by defining it as the rapture of the divine, the emotional foreplay of the gods within us.

When we are moved by this sort of romance or Eros to “fall in love,” what we are actually doing, he says, is seeing the divine in the other. When that happens we are inevitably guided by the impression that “Love conquers all” or that “In love all is possible.” It was the guiding principle of the late 1800’s and has been, in one form or another, one of the American four basic philosophical food groups since then.

He says, rightly, I believe, that this willing self-deception is both necessary and good for meeting and wooing the Beloved.

“By Eros I mean of course that state which we call "being in love"; or, if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are "in"…. 

“Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved. The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”

This state of heightened awareness and ecstasy is precisely what allows us to become blissfully unaware of the Beloved’s imperfections and to begin a relationship which we might otherwise too quickly dismiss. For a relationship in which perfection is no longer necessary, we must move past Eros into Friendship.

To the extent that romance allows us to struggle through obstacles, hold out hope when it is truly needed and helpful, and imbue our lives with both promise and purpose, it is good. Meaning, when it serves us—when it helps us to build relationships, conceive of such miracles as airplanes, anesthesia, or cell phones, or push through malevolent military blockades to rescue the innocent—it is a blessing.

When it leads us to see ourselves as somehow beyond the laws of nature, as capable of controlling what is not controllable, as immune to the inevitable draw of gravity, it is a curse.

When Romance Is Not So Good

All things must ripen or fall off the tree too early and die. It is the way of things. Often it brings terrible sadness to us. Sometimes, shock. It is never easy to see the sun come up after the revelry and delight of dancing gods and goddesses; even harder to see what the brighter light reveals about who we’ve been dancing with.

But for us to have the lives and loves we long for—both individually and collectively as a culture—it is absolutely necessary for Eros to be replaced by a more sanguine and subtle understanding. If it doesn’t, we wind up like Fitzgerald, lost in a lost city, besotted by booze and benumbed by grief. And our society winds up in the same position we found ourselves in ’29 and in ’08, bereft of our fortunes, throwing ourselves out of windows in despair and shame.

Eros cannot tolerate bright light. It must either die or flee or be reformed by a new reality.

If it is reformed, we will be transformed.

We will stand ready to see clearly and know the Other. We will stand ready to be seen. Not for who we might be, who we represent (Venus or Mars), but for who we are.

Easier said than done.

We are surrounded by forces—economic and cultural—that will do anything to keep us from making that transformation.

If you look carefully at what happened in the twenties, you may notice a profound connection between the rise in advertising as a broad medium of communication and the rise in a sort of cultural far-sightedness, in which we could only see that which was far away and nearly out of reach. (“You, too, can have this X, Y or Z when you just send us…”) We became in many ways the nation we are now—consumers and climbers, always waiting on line for the next version or the newest sensation that will somehow make our lives what they “should” be.

This is the romanticism that is sold on Madison Avenue, not the Romance of the gods.

And, I believe, it is the one that has shaped us as a country and kept us from that which we long for most: love, joy, gratitude, companionship, a sense of belonging, purpose. So long as we exist for the revelry of Eros, dance only in the dark, and shield ourselves from the morning’s truth by turning our faces inside out so we can only see our own ideas, we are trapped in a lie. We may become mortals without morals, but we cannot become humans without limits.

The irony is that we are so much more.

"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

–C. S. Lewis, From The Weight of Glory.

Bookmark to:

I've dreamt about farming all my life. You wouldn't know it by the way I live, but it's true. Somehow over all these years, my dreams and my realities have been separated by an inexplicable chasm.

I think for most people it is the same, or at least similar in essence. We dream or plan or talk more than we do. We blame our unrealized dreams on circumstance, other people, lack of support, money. Sometimes we call it luck—good or bad. And I think some of you already know that I think luck (however we define that) is a bigger factor than most of us care to admit.

But the other day I met a woman who really did it, who turned a whimsical idea into a reality in a big way and it made me start to wonder a bit about what really kept me from doing what she did. It wasn't for lack of capacity or cognitive muscle. I could "visualize" as well as anyone. So, what was it?

I met her via the Internet. We just moved into town and we were looking for someone local to supply grass-fed beef. We found a few local people, but were most attracted to a small place called Brykill Farm.  After a few rounds of phone tag, I finally got to talk to the owner and manager of the farm, Susan. “Come on down,” she said as if she were inviting us for a picnic.

We turned onto her road, a winding dirt and gravel mix that crossed over a small river and led us through a dark thicket of oak, maple and birch after which it burst open onto pastures as broad and green as Ireland itself, each hill studded with what had to be the happiest cows on the planet. In a whispering huddle to the side were three or four iconic stone buildings from the 1700’s.

We wandered around with a cattle dog trailing behind us for a few minutes, unsure which door to knock on when a woman came out, barefoot, smiling, a youngster trailing behind her. She looked to be in her 40’s but her manner was youthful and energetic.

We were escorted inside to a kitchen that was clearly the heart of the house, filled with books, cups, flowers; we chit-chatted a bit until I couldn’t resist and asked her, “Who started this?”

She said, as matter of fact as telling me the time, “I did.”

I looked at her. Her hands were of average size, her face still unlined, her posture relaxed but straight. A cattle farmer? I had to know more. She was living the life I had told myself I always wanted to live, but this, that and the other thing had stopped me somehow.

She was born in Connecticut and in her 20’s, around the time that my friends and I were consumed with going out dancing, she invested in land. It was her idea. She was not married. She had no backers. She had no training.

Then she bought a couple of cows. Her friends thought it was “cool” and she eventually slaughtered those cows and bought more. Then she got a bull and the farm began in earnest.

How did that happen?

How did she do what seemed so insurmountable to me?

It wasn’t some outrageous fortune, no Mega-Lotto win. I don’t believe it had anything to do with any universal “secrets.”

It wasn’t the forceful hand of fate…she hadn’t inherited a farm she didn’t want or become indentured through familial obligation.

It seemed to be as simple as a decision. To be more accurate, a series of small, but decisive ones.

The Power of Thought or the Punch of Will?

In recent years, Descartes’ axiom—I think therefore I am—has been transposed, sharpened to an unprecedented perversion: I think therefore I have. Or the newest interpretation of the American Gospel: I think therefore I deserve to have. Our lives can be perfect, abundant, sublime…if only we think it so.

Was this what had taken place for Susan? Was it only a matter of thought? Was her belief what propelled her?

There was no denying that some of her thinking predisposed her to the choices she made, but as she described it to me, this was a case of Will leading the way. How else does a divorcee from Chicago wind up running a restoration and beef farm?

It started with one book that resonated with her, Chicken Tractor by Joel Saladin, in which she was exposed to the idea of homesteading. (As I see it, this is the first piece of evidence that Will is at work: unexpected and unconscious resonance.) As the ideas fermented in her, she stumbled onto the Brykill estate, which also appealed to her. What was it, I asked, that was so appealing?

“It was going to take a tremendous amount of work to rehabilitate it and I would be able to just plunge into a project.”

Again—this simple statement takes us way beyond mere thought to the potent underworld of Will and character. For most people work is the big turn-off, rather than the turn-on.

Initially, she lived there alone with her two labs. “There was maybe one working bathroom and ceilings came down in some rooms, but the more time I spent out here, the more interested I became in the farm’s history. While my father was incredibly handy and loved puttering in the garden no one in my family since the Eltings have been farmers.  My dad was an engineer and my mother was a homemaker.  It was Miracle Grow all the way…”

While a few “bravos” could be heard from friends, most folks, she recalls, “thought I was nuts.

“There was this wonderful local man named Pat Kelly, who is sadly no longer with us, who really egged me on.  He would stop by a lot and give me advice here and there.  He sold me my first bull and a cow and her calf—truly the most pathetic looking cow you can possibly imagine.  I'm sure he got a good chuckle out of all of it.  He sold me my tractor too.  It was sort of a Martha Stewart moment when I would bring a few packages of ground beef from our "herd" but while my friends couldn't understand why I wasn't raising horses they all asked if next time they could get more.

“Because the process was totally grueling, I had no background, had to learn everything from books or the internet, the learning curve was brutal. Yet it seemed like something I really needed to see through. I would get such wonderful help from our neighbors the Watchtower guys and from our local vet Lyle Goodnow who just tirelessly helped me deal with some of the realities that comes with raising live animals.  Those people just seemed to enter my life to make sure I didn't abandon the project.”

In listening to her talk about sustainability, humane treatment of animals, living in a beautiful environment, I asked myself:  Hadn’t I had the same thoughts? Hadn’t I believed the same things? As far as I could tell, I had. What stopped me? What swept her up?

I believe it is something that few people talk about today because it has become so awfully unfashionable. I believe it was two things, actually:  Will and character.

Will may arguably be a function of thought, but I believe it is much more than that. Will starts before the thought itself and extends far beyond it, long after the thought has made an appearance and taken its bow. Will is the motor, the very engine that expresses spirit.

Thoughts are extensions of that. We think “I like this” or “I hate that” or “I shall do this tomorrow” or “that dress is so lovely,” but all those thoughts are expressions of Will, which may also be seen as a reservoir of our deepest longings. So we may find ourselves thinking thoughts of delight (“how wonderful my friends are”) when we are given what our Wills crave (attention, respect, tenderness—all according to the individual constitution) or thoughts of terror or rage (“I wish they’d disappear” or “I’m going to die”) when our Wills are frustrated or threatened.

Character is the drive shaft of the Will and, similar to thoughts, expresses the Will in ways that are more directly palpable to others. A person with a strong Will to live or to love may show tremendous fortitude and patience where others who have a strong Will to possess material goods may demonstrate a gross lack of tolerance.

What I lacked in my twenties was more than luck. I have survived those years, so in my eyes, I had more luck than many of my peers did. What was missing was both Will and character.

What I truly longed for—more than the simplicity and solidity of a farm life—was the activity and attention that the lifestyle I was living brought me. I was more beguiled by “cool” than by cows, no matter how much I thought I wanted them, no matter how I “dreamed” or visualized.

I could have said a thousand aphorisms a day, but they would not have changed an iota of my Will.  And they would have done even less about my character, which was, to be polite, “budding” in those days. My life was a continual manifestation of what I wanted at that time—and it wasn’t Green Acres.

In our discussion, Susan called it “good fortune” to have found an incredibly capable farm manager (Carlos) and an animal whisperer (Peggy) who eventually helped her develop the land and tend the animals properly so that it became a true working farm. I was not convinced, and left wondering whether it was fortune or fortitude.

To answer that, I started where she did: It was not the book or the farm or the friends or the thinking. It was the resonance of all those things with her Will. Any of us could have read the same book, driven by the same rolling hills and looping river and said, “How nice,” but never been moved to act. She was touched the way a single note vibrates crystal.

The magic, the surprise is in discovering precisely how that crystal sings in response. It’s often not what we “think” but better yet.

“I guess I had this vision of myself in the beginning as being Audra from the Big Valley,” Susan recalled. “Do you remember that show?  I thought it was going to be all me with great hair coming out with lemonade on a tray for all the cowboys.  It wasn't until one afternoon of sorting cattle in the rain and yelling at everybody and coming inside to write checks and balance books that I realized, ‘Oh, God, I'm Barbara Stanwick!’”

What Susan made clear to me was not just the “power of thought” but the manifestation of Will and the necessity of choice, of making the right turns in the road, of taking hold of the wheel and steering, gripping it when the pavement ran out.

On very rare occasions I have seen good fortune just “drop” into someone’s lap. I can count those instances on one hand. On every other occasion, I have seen goodness, purposefulness, and the sorts of green pastures I saw at Brykill Farm seeded and grown by deliberation over years of sweat, sacrifice and a steady hand.

We are all tossed and tumbled by circumstance, by forces we don't understand. But there is one force we do understand and it is the one that pulls the sails taut and turns the ship into the wind. That one is up to us.

In closing, Susan told me, “I think being a little bit of a control freak is part of it.  I want to control what I am eating and serving to my family, even if it’s a teeny tiny particle of a powerful food system.  I'm also just sort of oblivious sometimes to why I can't do something.  My current headaches with trying to start a restaurant in Gardiner are more proof of that.  I just think, ‘how hard could it be?’”

Indeed.

Bookmark to:

This is a guest blog by author Vanessa Van Petten, creator of RadicalParenting.com a parenting website written from the teen perspective to help parents understand them. She is also the author of the parenting book, “Do I Get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded?” (http://www.radicalparenting.com/books-and-products/book-youre-grounded/)

Was there ever a moment when your teen said something snarky or gave you a dirty look and you thought to yourself, “Who is this person living in my house?” There seems to be a time for many parents where they realize their once loving child has turned into an adolescent, moody, quasi-stranger.

I often hear parents saying things like, “I swear, she woke-up and it was like I didn’t even know her anymore!” or “When did my son turn into a man?” These statements are usually tinged with both regret and nostalgia as parents realize their child is not only growing up, but turning into what seems like a new person.

Even though this can be disconcerting for parents, many adults do not realize that there is a flip-side to this knowledge for your teen as well. Teenagers often tell me that they also have a moment of apprehension when they realize their parents still think they are children—and they no longer feel like children. They say things like, “I liked the Simpsons when I was in 5^th grade, my parents don’t realize that I have changed a lot since I was 11!” or “My parents think they know everything about me, but they don’t, I’m not a kid anymore!”

Both parents and teens are going through their own confusing ‘aha’ moments of their own adulthood. I find one of the best ways for teens to feel like their parents are accepting them as adults and for parents to feel like they still know their children is to ask some character defining questions.  In my book, “Do I Get My Allowance Before or After I’m Grounded?”  I talk about some great questions to get to know your kids. Here are my favorites, feel free to expand this into some great get-to-know-each-other conversations:

Conversation Starters to Get to Know Your Teens

1. What is the hardest thing about your life, what do you worry about most?

2. Is there something that you wish I knew about you?

3. What are three words to describe you?

4. What do you think is the most important quality a person can have?

5. How were you different five years ago from who you are now? What do you think you will be like five years from now?

These questions are meant to not only help you get to know each other, but also help get your teen thinking about their own identity. By discussing these issues with them in an open-minded fashion, they know they can come to you when they are trying to figure themselves out…and when you want to figure them out as well.

Here are some more: 20 Teen and Tween Conversation Starters (http://www.radicalparenting.com/2008/06/02/table-topics/)

Bookmark to:

I was my own worst nightmare, a caricature of the anxious stunt-mom, the stuff I have warned my sister about far, far too many times for both her and my own liking. And even writing this to you, I am embarrassed. I'm supposed to know better. This is generally the sort of thing I teach to parents — how to generate a sense of authority, safety, and assurance and then transfer that to their children or loved ones. I'm supposed to be the maven of ,Verbal First Aid not the Grand Ol' Mama of Woe and Oh No.

But as I look back on it — and how I had to retrace my steps, backpedal, and make it right with my niece (first with an apology and then with some true correction), I see it more as a gift. As hard as it is to let go of the people we love, it is that easy to grab them right back. Control is like a tether ball. It may look like you've slapped it past the horizon, but then there it comes around and slams you upside the head.

What I've learned is that letting go of someone I love so that she may properly live her own life is an ongoing struggle — at least for people like me whose natural tendency is to fret. For others who are more like my husband, it is a grace, a way of walking and breathing in the world. So I went back to basics. As she talked about all the things she was going to do I went through the list I teach but forgot to practice:

1. BREATHE! I honestly forget to breathe more times than I care to admit. It's a wonder I'm not perpetually cyanotic.

2. CENTER! This word has a multiple meaning for me. In one, obvious sense it means to get centered physically in my own body, which is the only way to manage an unreasonable anxiety, even though everything about anxiety pushes us in the other direction… to leave our bodies. (If it's going to feel like this, I'm OUTTA here!)

The other thing it represents for me is a spiritual center. I have to remember, or to be more accurate, actively remind myself by reading something, praying, talking to someone who knows better than I do, who I really am, who she really is and what our ultimate destinations are. Even though I love her as if she were my own child, she is far, far more than that and has her own purpose in life. She is God's child, just as I am. She has never belonged to me (or anyone else for that matter) even though at times it may feel like that.

3. The ABC's of Verbal First Aid with children and adults. Even though this was not a "crisis" (at least not for anyone but myself), it was a good opportunity for me to remember what makes for truly therapeutic communication–Authority, Believability, Compassion. Usually these qualities are important to cultivate when someone is in shock or had a traumatic or frightening experience so that we can lead them towards health or healing. In our case, it was oddly reversed. I was the one who, with my fear, was creating a traumatic or frightening experience where none did or needed to exist. To reverse it, I had to go back to what was the essence of any good parent or healer relationship: the ability to be a leader (to help her to move forward without the unnecessary baggage of MY anxiety), to be believable in my assertions (not a fear-monger), and to be understanding. She was tired and desperately wanted a vacation. If she wanted to see Donald Duck and be a little girl for a week, who was I to judge? And where did I come off assuming that she didn't have enough sense to get out of the sun or find a chair in which to rest her weary legs? I had messed up on all counts.

4. Rapport. In this case, because I was such a worry wart, I had to re-establish what I once had but rapidly lost because my fear had begun to affect her. The more fear I had, the more I lost the rapport we had cultivated over so many years. Obviously it was not "lost" in the sense of "gone forever" but it was tenuous in the moment. With every "what if" she had to defend not only her status as an adult or her decisions, but her sense of well-being. The more afraid I was, the more she really had to resist me. I remember quite a while ago when I was undergoing these quick twists and turns with my parents and how their fear had more than annoyed me, it had angered me. As the years passed, I realized why: it resonated with me. If they were afraid (and if secretly I was, too), then there must have been something to be afraid of. I didn't want to be afraid. It made me feel helpless rather than empowered and alive. And being pervasively (as opposed to realistically) fearful never gave me a single useful tool in my life.

So, this time, I was lucky. Not too much water or wasted emotional energy had flowed under the bridge before I caught it. I was able to recapitulate in short order and she, gracefully, laughed at her aunt once again. When, inevitably, I imagine her walking across miles of parking lots and waiting on long lines in sweltering heat to get through the Pearly Gates of Disney, I will instead take a breath, sit back, remind myself of the basics and think of her as a brave and happy young woman with a baby on the way, running up to Cinderella and smiling from ear to ear.

Bookmark to:

Am I?

Yesterday I sat watching a storm tumble in as they can do only in this region of the country — catapulting, cranky and fast. There were spiny shards of lightning, whipping sheets of rain you could see approach from a distance of 30-40 miles, and a thunder roll that had three large dogs shaking behind my legs.

I was mesmerized. I gathered up the dogs and went inside to watch. It was not a small storm. It brought hail, the noise of nightmares, darkness and ferocity.

And I had this unbidden, strange, delicious thought: I am created. I am a creation.

It seemed more like a letter addressed to me than a self-generated idea and what it appeared to be telling me was this simple and magnificent thing: I am not my own. I no more created myself than the thunderhead before me or the mountain with which it collided.

Now, to me — as much as to you — that is a very strange idea. It is almost a cultural betrayal. Like everyone else, I have told myself many times that I am very much my own. I have not only told myself, I have repeatedly taught that idea to others. I was told to believe in myself, so I cultivated that belief. I was told I am my thoughts, so I have aimed to think well. I was particularly told to think well of myself and have developed what is generally considered to be a healthy sense of self esteem. I own my home. I have a career. I build friendships. I am ME. I am MINE.

But then the storm said, "Well, not exactly…"

It went on to say that I was not my own, certainly not in the way I had thought. It said I was God's. That, like the thunder, the lightning, the birds taking refuge in the trees, I was His creation and that it was all constantly unfolded, rolled into motion and kept in existence by an act of Will that was not by any means mine.

Given how I was raised, trained and educated, I would have more than expected that thought to be anathema to me. What do you mean I'm not my own??? It was an odd moment overall. But when I think back to other moments of great understanding or fragments of Grace, I think much of what has been shown to me has been odd. Some were real head tilters. I imagine they made me look like my dogs do when I start talking to them. And in some ways, those experiences weren't much different. It was as though I was hearing a language I'd never heard before except that I could understand it — just not with my ears or my conscious mind. And this was no different. It was very strange and very big. Much bigger than my body, my mind, or anything else I considered proprietary.

Looking back I would've normally expected myself to be either a bit frightened or annoyed; it surprised me to find out that I was actually relieved. If I was created, my existence not only had meaning, it was personal.

I finally began to understand what "self-esteem" alluded to but never gave me: a sense of belonging. In that storm, a new truth was revealed; none of us — not me, not the dogs, not the mountains or the rain — stood solely for ourselves. All of us in unison pointed to Something Else, a Magic that was deeper than magic, a single Breath that filled the lungs of all life. And all of it inhaled, hoping for more. Self-esteem had never been enough.

Not for a moment in that reverie did I feel as though belonging to Another had stripped me of the ability to choose. The moment came with an invitation, not an ultimatum or a compulsion. I could continue to rely on myself — or not. I felt perfectly free to choose what I did next: ignore the message, dismiss it as unscientific, laugh at it, write about it, sit with it. The possibilities presented themselves and later that evening I chose (as you can see). And as I wrote, trying to sift through the sensation (because it was quite physical) of being actively, consciously and purposefully created, I found that it made me more than I was, rather than less.

Fear And Control

A bit of history might help you understand why this is such a great relief for me and why I chose to write to you instead of to ignore the experience.

Most of my life has been spent in fear, fighting fear or treating fear. Of what? Of everything. Of death, of life, of loving, of losing, of being well, of being sick. The why's are too numerous to go into here (maybe another essay), but suffice it to say that it was exhausting, at times incapacitating. It's been many years since then, but the body memory can be recalled with ease.

The natural result of all that fear was — for me — the futile attempt to control my circumstances. If I can "just" drive this way, or I can "just" get him to do it that way, or if I can "just" keep my schedule in "just" the right order, all will be well, I will be safe, I will be loved.

Needless to say — and you all surely know this from your own experience — it didn't work. I just spent more and more time trying to ward off an army with a toothpick. Controlling didn't bring love, never guaranteed safety (only the temporary illusion of it) and never made me well. If anything it called forth the opposite: It made me annoying, it put me in situations which I should have hastily avoided, and it weakened me so that I took sick.

As I watched the storm I began to understand that the fear had the power it did for so many years because I had felt utterly alone. Of course, I wasn't alone — neither in the social sense, the psychological one, nor the spiritual one. But I felt alone, on my own the way a forsaken orphan does, one who mistakenly struggles against the world with the full load of survival on his way too narrow shoulders. And because of that I believed I had to manage everything. If I didn't, who would? I was convinced that it was up to me.

That is the price of separateness. I was mine. But, then, with that, so was everything else.

I'd like to share with you a wonderful idea. It comes from a book entitled "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton. In one segment, he talks about the Will that beckons us from behind every rock, breeze and berry tree, and how the perceived repetition of nature (the sun that rises again and again, the tides that rush in and out at the same time every year, the exchange of synaptic chemistry in predictable ways) is due not to a series of unimaginative scientific laws or a dull and insensate lifelessness but to a conscious vibrancy, "a rush of life."

He likens it to the way children kick their legs back and forth, back and forth, enough to drive more sedated adults to distraction, not because of an absence of vitality but because they have so much of it. He recalls also (who hasn't done this?) the way children will happily hear a story over and over and over, pulling on someone's shirt sleeve, "Read it again!" The adult may be bored to tears, but the child is enthralled every time.

Because of a child's unbridled enthusiasm for life, because they are still unfettered in spirit, everything they see bares the stamp of the Great Magician, all of living is an act of mystery, daring and surprise, every day is prefaced by the curtain being pulled up to reveal a new rabbit or an inexplicably empty box.

He says,

"It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. May be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy … our Father is younger than we are."

He goes on to reveal that he has always seen life as a story, and "that if there is a story, there is a story teller."

I saw at least a bit of that story in the dark clouds and torrents of rain yesterday and finally, finally got a sense of the Great Story Teller Himself as he wet his thumb and turned the page and asked me, "Would you like to see what happens next?"

And my heart leapt and my lips said "Yes!" glad beyond words that finally I did not have to know the ending, that I could be a part of something much grander and beloved than I ever could have if I had tried to do the writing myself.

Bookmark to:

She cried for a while and then she asked me: “What did I do wrong?”

At first I heard her as any therapist would. Many, many—too many—children blame themselves for the horror they are born into. Why? Mainly because the people who are hurting them tell them that “it’s all their fault” and because they are children, they simply don’t know any better than to believe them.

But then I heard something else. I heard the recurrent theme of a culture obsessed with success and the exterior trimmings of “wellbeing” as a manifestation of our inner grace, a culture that has rejected the entire idea of luck as the limping hope of the loser and has embraced the personal accountability of the Individual as All. This takes us to many places, not all of them bad, but decidedly not all of them good. This child was one example of what happens when personal accountability is perverted.

I had another client who had difficulties with finding work in a professional field. She went on interview after interview but she kept getting turned down. Finally, I asked her how she went to the interview—what time she showed up, how she dressed, how she spoke. “I go like this,” she said and waved her hands in front of herself proudly. “I go as myself.” She was dressed in flouncy pedal pushers, ankle socks, shoes that seemed way too comfortable (especially for an interview), and a short-sleeved shirt that stuck out of her waist. Her hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail. With every non-judgmental muscle in my mind working in reverse, I could not help but see her as responsible for her difficulty.

But what about luck? What about those people who seem to have all of it? And those others who seem to have none?

Yet another individual comes to mind: a young illegal immigrant who literally crawled here from south of the border. I mean what I said. She crawled on hands and knees through jungle and tunnel for miles, the only female with 40 men. She had been beaten mercilessly as a child. She had been taken by a man to be his wife without her consent and tormented by her husband for years. She had been tortured and thrown around so badly that she lost her eight-month pregnancy and spent a month in coma. She finally left because she was certain he would kill her and reluctantly left her only child with her mother. She grieves every day for that child. Was that her fault? Were her beatings a product of her own negative thinking? Would a couple of aphorisms have changed what she had to deal with? The family she was born into?

I think of another immigrant with a very different outcome. With a similar state of abject misery in his early childhood, he scrambled into this country by jumping cargo trains. Finally, starving, he turned himself into a slave laborer on farms across the southwest, drinking and drugging to oblivion. During those intoxicated years he committed a series of crimes for which he is deeply remorseful. But he—as opposed to our young mother—had the good fortune to 1) never get arrested and 2) marry a woman who stayed with him, who raised their daughter kindly, and kept a decent job. Then he had the even better fortune to have a moment of divine grace that got him to put down the drugs and alcohol for good. He cannot explain the moment or the grace. He just says, “In a second, it all changed.”

I mentioned my thoughts on this to my husband. I told him that I thought our culture had gone too far with the idealization of the self, that certain things are and will remain a mystery, that bad things happen and we very often don’t know why, that some idiots get all the girls and gold but some of the finest people on earth suffer in endless silence.

I asked him: Whatever happened to luck? Or Providence? Or mystery? Whatever happened to not having all the answers? Whatever happened to the simple compassion we should have for those who don’t have it as good as we do? When did we start lecturing the poor and sick on their lack of positivity and forgetting that we all stand on the edge of an abyss? When did we come to rely so heavily on the “power of intention” and turn our own cortical functions into a spiritual platform?

Does anyone really believe that Trump deserved all the money he inherited? That somehow his mental state was sufficiently advanced or positive and healthy enough that he “drew” that energy to him? I continued on my soapbox: When did we become masters of the universe, whether by our quantum minds or our technology? When did we start thinking that somehow we could control what was around us that way?

And in his typically Montanan manner, he said, “But life without that idea in some form is hopeless.”

Of course, as usual, he was right.

And as usual, things were never quite as linear or straightforward as I might have liked. Life is a mess. This issue is no exception.

A culture of control

Where it goes wrong is in degree. America is a culture of extremes and control. It is perfectly reasonable to say that one's choices make a difference or that one's thoughts have a profound impact on how one feels. It's an entirely different thing to insist that the self (whether that's my thoughts, my choices, my ideas) is all that matters in the formation of a life. There are way too many things that are beyond our control for this to be absolutely true. I may be able to manage my thoughts, but I can't change the global politic.

It also goes wrong in its reductionism. Things must be understood in linear ways. They must make sense, the columns must add up. If they don’t, it’s because we lost control and did something wrong. There must be someone or something to blame.

Two traditions perpetuate this:

1.     Calvinism and the doctrine of the elect/predestination;

2.     Eastern philosophy and the concept of Karma.

Both interpret our station in life (good or bad) as a function of either our grace or enlightenment. While “karma” is a relatively new ingredient in America’s philosophical soup, Calvinism’s doctrine of the elect permeates the American root system. In both systems, nothing is random or mysterious. Your good fortune is either God’s personal choice for you and you are obviously one of His favored, His elect or it is because of something you did or did not do in a past life. If you are poor and suffering, clearly you deserve it. If you’re not slim and simultaneously pushing a baby stroller while running a board of directors, there’s something awry. And that can mean there’s something wrong with you now (your intentions are weak or not right) or there was something wrong with you a hundred years ago and you’re paying for it now.

Some people interpret this to an extreme.

I remember a woman at an animal training workshop I took some years ago. It involved some psychological techniques that were much like Cesar Milan’s dog whispering. Somehow the conversation got diverted to the spiritual state of animals, particularly dogs. That woman told a story about a dog who was always tied to a tree, who was clearly in pain, and was often neglected or beaten. I piped right up: “And you got him, right?”

She said, “Of course not. How do I know it’s not his destiny, that he’s supposed to be there because of something he needs to learn?”

She smiled, quite satisfied with how spiritual she sounded. I nearly jumped out of my seat. I do not suffer fools gladly and I especially do not easily tolerate the smug, intellectual dismissal of pain and need in others—particularly children and animals.

The power of proper rather than positive thinking

One of the most important pioneers in Mind-Body medicine, oncologist Dr. O. Simonton had a unique perspective on thinking and healing. Quite a while back he was asked which individuals were more likely to survive cancer. It was clear that the author of the question assumed Simonton would say, “but of course, the positive thinkers.” He didn’t. He said that pure (sic: unbelievable) positive thinking (“I am healed,” for instance) actually worked against patients as much as grossly negative thinking (“I’m dying; there’s no hope”). What seemed to make a difference was what he called realistic thinking. When a person could believably say to him- or herself that everything was being done to help and they were doing everything they could to be better and healthier every day, they seemed to cross a threshold—from the fanciful into the possible, which is where real hope exists.

I say a prayer (often) that I’m sure most of you know: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

To me this is truly hopeful. This puts an appropriate percentage of responsibility in my hands. This says I can do something, but not everything. I can do what I can do and I will. I can use imagery to help myself heal (yes, that works). I can use proper medicine (I choose classical homeopathy).  I can pray. I can eat right. I can sleep, play and work in balance. I can choose to forgive and stay in gratitude. I can use the tools I am given with all my heart and all my strength.

What I can’t do is lie to myself. I can’t use my thoughts to manipulate others, create opportunities that don’t exist, or generate mounds of cash in a toppling economy because “I’m worth it.” I can’t pretend that everything makes sense or that all suffering is self-generated. I can’t make the columns add up when this universe doesn’t add up. I can’t believe that a child who was nearly killed by her own parents somehow merited that because of something she did.

I can believe that the young woman who crawled here from South America did nothing to “deserve” her pain but that, with help and patience, she can find ways through it and possibly even to correct it. When I last heard from her, a fund was being taken up by people she had met in this country to help her get her child and mother to safety. It was a spontaneous and unexpected act of love and kindness just when she had nearly lost all hope.

I believe that good things happen in the same way as bad things—mysteriously and surprisingly. I believe with all my heart that everything does have a purpose, that I can have a personal relationship with God, and that eventually what is wrong will be made right. But I don’t know how or when. In the meantime, I ride the waves of good and bad as they come without pronouncing judgment about them or using them as philosophical weapons of self-justification.

In the documentary film, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” one of the doctors interviewed said he had a hard time with aphorisms and, to paraphrase him, he found them vapid and unbelievable. What he could say to himself and what allowed him to be hopeful, sometimes courageous, and hard working, was this simple idea: “I can always be surprised by how good it gets.”

Amen.

Bookmark to:

Who’s the next one? Where is he? This is how our culture works. As soon as one terror is wiped up, another one is splattered across the screens.

There’s actually word that he’s an American, possibly from New Mexico, that’s he’s smart, a savvy recruit with an intimate knowledge of the American psyche. Which then begs a more important question: If he’s American (or Western) born and as clever as we’re hearing, what does he know about us? What is the American psyche at this point? How are we motivated?

Unconscious Fear-Mongering

Well, I can tell you this much: He knows that he can reach us with fear and with not much effort. There is a slow, steady drip of terrorism in the United States. I am using it in the strictest sense of the word: the inducement of fear or terror via threats or intimations of violence, destruction, or disease. But it is not just where we think it is, ensconced somewhere in the Mideast. It is all around us, all the time. Perhaps, as my friend said, it doesn’t make a difference what the precise fear is. Perhaps what is important for our purposes is the way fear manipulates and motivates us not only without our conscious consent, but without our knowledge. Once again, to illuminate the point I raise the specter of advertising. What do we see and hear? What chord are they plucking?

“You’ve got just a few hours left, gentlemen. It’s panic time. But you can get the gift you want at….”

“It’s beginning a lot to look like weight gain…get PRODUCT X and head those pounds off at the pass…”

“What’s happening with those allergies? Stay tuned to see where the pollen’s been, where it’s going, and if you and your loved ones are at risk. Also….we’ll have DR. X from PHARMACY X to help you prepare your medicine closet for those more dangerous symptoms like asthma.”

“If you don’t have high-definition, you don’t have what it takes…” “We deal with the serious diseases. Together we can prevail…”

Advertising has become even more intrusive and quietly manipulative in that it is now embedded into entertainment programming. No longer do we hear, “Buy our new, improved…” No longer are commercials announced for what they are, sales pitches. Products are introduced into the fabric of television shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. They are shown in Sex & the City in ways that weave into our psyches without our knowing so that we unconsciously associate Absolute Vodka with incredible sex appeal, and who doesn’t want or need that? The medium is more sophisticated, but if we’re smart and aware we can see the same old messages over and over.

We are told we are too fat, so we better resolve to lose weight. We are told we need a makeover, so we resolve to get new clothes and change our style. We are told we are unattractive to the opposite sex if we’re over 25, so we better get a credit card with a low APR for that face lift we have to have. It’s all about “buy me!” “No, buy me!” “Hey you! I’m over here! Buy me!” The snake oil has been repackaged, but it’s still snake oil.

And for a country as sophisticated and slick as we are, we can be terribly gullible. Is it gilding the lily or out-and-out lying when Johnson and Jonson markets an insect-killing product as green because it uses a pesticide that is made from African flowers? The ad is delightful…beautiful flowers, bees, children, a productive little village that is being given a chance because of J & J’s beneficence. But the ingredient is pyrethrin, which is a known toxin acting on the respiratory system of bugs and humans alike. It doesn’t mention that.

If the next Osama knows this about us, he surely knows the shortest route to the American heart. The American Club We may not be conscious of it, but there is a “club” in America. We are very socially motivated. We need to be thin, to be hip, to be up on the latest “thang.” We need to be perfect mothers, perfect friends, perfect bosses and perfect employees. We need to wear the right clothes, have the right date, watch the right shows so we can join in on the water cooler gossip. We are very easily shamed by exclusion and as a result, very motivated by the current of popular opinion.

This last one is evident in children as young as 5 or 6 years old. In yet another life, I worked as a clinical social worker in a small school system along the Hudson River in NY. I can recall clearly this small boy with red hair playing with wood blocks and babbling about a cartoon character. I think it was one of the Ninja Turtles. Three other children were playing with him, building something that looked like the beginning of a castle. One of them, a little girl who was clearly Hispanic, looked at him sideways and said in a thick accent, “Who’s that?” He turned to her and, with a tone he could have only learned from an adult, said, “You don’t know? You’re stupid.” She hung her head and walked away, tears filling her eyes, shame filling her heart.

Over the last thirty years shame has been berated as “toxic” and banned from a parent’s tool chest of consequences. Psychology shamans have even tried to get us to ban it from our emotional repertoire, to lead “shameless” lives. But, in my opinion, it is not possible for three reasons:

1) It is one of the oldest human emotions;

2) shame is thoroughly necessary if we are to live with one another in any form of structured society; and

3) shame is hugely motivational because it is so closely related to fear. Belonging, conformism is partially built on this need to avoid shame, to be included, to be an integral part of the pack. Its foundation is a practically limbic fear that if we do the wrong thing we will be excluded. I believe this is traceable to the limbic system primarily because exclusion in our earliest history would have been tantamount to a death sentence. No one could survive alone. And in many ways psychologically and emotionally we still can’t. We are pack animals. Like dogs, horses, primates, meerkats and beavers (among many others) we work, love, play and thrive in groups. Loners either become ready prey to the elements or the local predators.

A Collective Whatever and Later…

Resolutions are a perfect example of this phenomenon. We traditionally put off for later what we can or should do right now. This is a vital piece of information about us as a culture. We tend to procrastinate. While fear motivates, it also paralyzes. It has three sides, rather than the commonly cited two: fight, flight, and freeze. When there really is something to do (e.g., run, jump, etc…), we don’t do it. We stay still. We hear about “disasters” all the time. And people panic. But most are woefully unprepared when the real problem is upon them.

Part of the reason we make resolutions is because other people make resolutions. Who wants to be left out of the biggest conversation of the brand new year? And in a culture where self-improvement is the shrine at which we bend our knee and power gurus now reign via fiber optic cables, who at the lunch table would dare to say he had nothing he needed to do differently, nothing he needed to improve, nothing she wanted to learn from Tony Robbins? What colossal nerve that would seem like and what a price the poor soul would have to pay in the currency of corporate politique. But it is also because we are creatures of comfort and sometimes doing things differently takes too much effort.

A woman I know used to have a roommate who had a colorful little compulsion. She was addicted to M&M’s and she would pop them one at a time into her mouth while no one was looking. She also would only go grocery shopping late at night when no one was there because she believed (inaccurately so) that she was “fat” and didn’t want other people at the checkout line looking at her and judging her purchases in the context of her obesity (as she perceived it). Every year she would make a resolution to break free from those little chocolate beasties and to lose the weight she didn’t really need to lose. And every year she would white knuckle her way through a week or two or a month and then cave in.

Who was she making that resolution for? Was it for herself? Or was it because she so feared the opinion of others? I know someone who resolves every year to lose fifty pounds. And it would be good if she did. She would be healthier and have more energy. But it’s not critical and she never makes it past the five pound mark. Ever. Because the truth is she doesn’t really want to lose weight or change her diet. But she wants everyone to think she does because that’s what she’s told to do. Maybe she should resolve to not care what other people thought one way or the other. That would at least have a chance of making her truly happy.

Bookmark to:

To see the video, click here.

Bookmark to: