Being Alive

Last Saturday night was dazzling. I couldn’t sleep so instead of tossing and sighing and waking Matt, my husband, I decided to walk outside. We live in the country with no street lamps and big skies. I looked up at the moon and it was as if it was just me out there in the cool night. Me and thousands of stars. Me and the haunting sound of a night bird. Me and the soft rustle of oak trees. Then I went inside and, filled with the glitter of stars, fell asleep immediately.

Later the next day, I heard that a neighbor of mine had taken a shotgun to his heart and killed himself that same night, at the same time that I was outside. He’d been depressed and according to the person who told me about his death, was worn out. So many thoughts went through my mind when I heard: sorrow, compassion, grief, concern. But then I thought, he didn’t see the stars that night. They didn’t comfort him. He won’t see the spring this year. He won’t see the acacia bloom. He won’t hear the wind anymore. Won’t see his wife’s face when he wakes up in the morning. Won’t wake up on any morning.

I remembered the times when I was convinced that dying was better than living. That I just wanted to die to stop the pain. I remembered reading about people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them who survived said: I realized in the seconds after I jumped off the bridge that everything in my life I thought was unworkable was really workable—except for the fact that I’d just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sometimes it really does seem as if it’s all too much. Too much trouble, too much suffering, too much heartache. But as I tell my students (and often remind myself), if we can drop into the feelings instead of reacting to them, we can make it to the other side. We can let our hearts break. And somehow, miraculously, feel what’s between the broken pieces. The space, the light, the stillness. The sheer miracle of being alive and being able to touch smell feel hear. The fact that we have this body that has served us so well. The fact that we can taste an apple. Or hear the unearthly silence in a redwood forest. The fact that in an instant, everything can change. Does change. Will change.

One of the assignments my friend Natalie Goldberg gives people is to write down ten things they will miss when they die. My list: Matt’s face, the smell of daphne flowers at the break of spring, the way my dog Celeste runs around in crazy circles when we come home, watching the wind in the oak trees, the sound of rain on the metal roof, 77% bittersweet chocolate, peonies, hot baths, stars on a dark night, Erica’s outfits on All My Children, ruby-throated hummingbirds (I know that’s eleven but I couldn’t help myself). Just writing the list made me realize I could write ten more things, twenty. Fifty more. A thousand.

Above Everything
I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air — a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
   ~ David Ignatow ~

Today was quite a day. A good friend called to tell me she was dying of cancer. Another friend called to tell me her mother just died. Yet another friend’s father fell down the steps and broke his neck. Then, there was the rain that never stopped. The rain that split a few trees in our backyard, broke my favorite outdoor planter with the sunflowers and then decided to come pouring through our living room. Oh, and there was the small matter of the fifteen stitches on my face (from having a cancerous mole removed) and the fact that I now look like a rainbow colored Scarface. My eyes are black and blue, my cheeks are yellow and the wound is bright red.

So all in all, it was an eventful 24 hours. And yet, life is calm. There is a sense that everything is as it should be; there is no resistance to any particular event. Not that I am not sad. I am. I don’t want my friend to die. I feel deeply for my other friends. And I wish I would have known to move that sunflower pot out of the way of the wind. (My face? Well, I have a really cool cobalt-blue band-aid with stars and galaxies covering the wound. It’s not exactly my color—I like yellow and golds—but still.) When I don’t argue with what is already happening or has happened, when I don’t want anything to be different than it is, there is calm. There is sadness or grief or disappointment but it is all happening on the surface. Underneath, there is a sense of stillness. Of rightness. Of no problem.

My friend Kim sent me this poem today by Galway Kinnell.
It’s called Prayer:

“Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.”

I love it because it describes a different kind of happiness than most of us ever imagined. True happiness: Wanting only what is. May you find yourself wanting just that. Only that. But that.

I haven’t written recently because I have had to spend most of my time taking care of my health. But it is the season of twinkling lights—and I wanted to take the opportunity to say a few words and wish you all a blessed holiday and new year.

Just seeing the way people go to elaborate lengths to decorate their houses makes me feel that all is well. I remember a teacher of mine once saying that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sitting in the darkness; the second you turn on the light, the darkness disappears. So, when you notice the blinking reindeer on someone’s lawn or the lighted carrot on the end of a huge snowman’s nose, let yourself be affected by the spirit of light itself. By the joy of it. By its ability to dispel the darkness.

And take care of yourself. Which means that when you are physically hungry, eat with gusto and pleasure. But when you are hungry for a touch, a word, a moment of contact, some time alone, be willing to ask for and receive those pleasures. Turn on the lights of the spirit. Illuminate yourself.

Here are my suggestions of ways to care for yourself during the season of darkness and light:

• Set aside some time for yourself every day. In the rush of the holidays, we often forget to do the quiet things that nourish us. We spend our time thinking about others (which, is, admittedly, a lovely thing to do) and have the tendency to forget to pay attention to our own needs. When we feel depleted, and food is as available as it is during the holidays, we use it to fill ourselves. Make an appointment for a massage, take a walk, sit in a chair and do nothing. When you take time for yourself, you remind yourself that you are worth taking time for.
• Make a list of the things you like most about the holidays. Incorporate at least one of them into each day. Give yourself something to look forward to, give yourself some power in creating a holiday that is joyful to you.
• When you go to a party at which there is a buffet, take a sampling of three dishes that look wonderful to you. Take your time eating them. Enjoy them. If you want more, take more but do it slowly, savoring each bite so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of food.
• Remember that you do not have to go to a party simply because you are invited to it. Be aware that you have choice about what you do with your time.

The holidays are the time when the sun begins to return to us, when the days become lighter and longer. They are the time when people are willing to put their ordinary concerns aside and spend their time giving, wishing for the best, thinking about peace. When I see, even for a moment, that people are capable of giving and making peace, it makes me believe it is possible for another moment and another. For a whole string of moments, for a year. For the rest of our lives. And our childrens’ lives.

I just finished teaching our Inbetween weekend—the two-day twenty-five person intensive for our Reflections and Revelations retreat students that takes place at the midpoint between the bi-annual retreats at Mount Madonna. Many of the students who come to the Inbetween have been coming to the retreats for years; some of them have attended only one or two retreats. At the end of these weekends, I am always knocked out—breathless—by the change I see in the people who come.

Some of the students came to the retreat loathing themselves. Some came a hundred pounds overweight. Some came eating only cinnamon buns for breakfast and not knowing it was possible for their bodies to feel alive and well and vital. As I watch them work with their patterns, I see again and again that if we are dedicated to our own freedom, and if we are willing to stay with ourselves when we are in pain, the most intractable behaviors loosen, open up, transform.

Most of the time we just want it to be easy. We are tired of the suffering, tired of trying so hard, tired of this weight problem that has been plaguing us for what seems like forever. We just want it go away.

It takes a long time to realize that quick fixes have quick endings.

Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run. Ask yourself if it’s only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a doorway to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter—if you are willing to use what you do with food as a doorway, as a path—then there is no end to what you can learn. No end to what you will understand about yourself. And that can only be good.

For the past two days, the newspapers have been filled with stories about how your friends can make you fat. Based on an article in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, which was based on a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, the story goes that after 12,067 people in Framingham, Massachusetts were tracked over a period of thirty-two years, the scientists deduced that there is a 171% chance that having a fat friend will make you fat. The doctor and professor who conducted this study hypothesize that seeing your friend gain weight changes your perceptions of what’s acceptable; when you see your friend gain weight, you don’t feel so bad about your own expanding girth Another way of saying this is that if she’s doing it, then you figure, what the hell, it’s fine for you to do it. Fine to eat rice pudding for breakfast. Fine to be uncomfortable in your body. Fine to be spaced out or lethargic most of the time from not eating what your body actually needs. (The study didn’t mention cats, but it makes a girl wonder: some of us are as close to our cats, closer, than to our friends. So, if your cat is fat, do you feel better about your thighs?)

I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. And I can’t refute a study that’s been painstakingly conducted for thirty-two years. But what I can say is that relying on how your friend looks for how you feel about yourself, deciding what and when to eat based on the size of your friend’s butt is probably not the best way to get to know yourself or to live a life you can call your own.

Your hunger is your own. Your appetites, your longings are yours only. When you get sick, it’s not your friend’s body that needs tending. When you are lonely or sad or grieving, looking at the size of your friend’s body will not help you. If your friend likes sweet potatoes and you don’t, if your friend is not hungry but you are, do you put yourself aside and act like she does?

I have a friend who says that we spend most of our lives looking at ourselves with “bank-camera eyes”–as if we are looking at our bodies from the outside in, instead of inhabiting them, instead of taking up the space in our arms and legs. We usually hover around and not in our bodies. When was the last time you actually felt the earth beneath you, your hands in soapy water, the crunch of the food in your mouth? If this study says anything to me, it reinforces the degree to which we are living disembodied lives, relying on external cues–the size of our friend’s body–for internal states like hunger, fullness, value, acceptance. If the food you put in your body is determined by the size of your friend’s thighs, you are disowning the power that comes from listening to your needs and satisfying them. You no longer are living the life you were given.

I just finished reading the new Harry Potter book. Amongst its many dazzling virtues–yup, been a die-hard Harry fan since the first mention of messenger owls and talking portraits–I loved this quote near the end of the book from one of the characters who thought he was dying: “…he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle it was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?”

Your body–not your friend’s body–is the piece of the universe you’ve been given. Your body–”brain and nerve and bounding heart”–not your friend’s body–is the only place you can know love, truth, joy, contentment, peace. Come home to it. Come back. It’s never too late.

This morning I read the newspaper and saw that four dolphins had washed ashore in San Diego after being shot in the head. Then I read the rumblings from the government about attacking Iran before it develops nuclear weapons. Then a friend of mine called and told me a friend of a friend had died suddenly from heart failure. And then I looked in the mirror and saw the eyebrow droop cascading down my face. It practically reached my collarbone. Dead dolphins, war, heart failure, eyebrow droop. Not a good beginning to the day. It was only 7:30.

I lumbered into the kitchen thinking about breakfast and remembered that on her show yesterday, Oprah mentioned that Barbara Streisand sent her cupcakes for breakfast from Sprinkles Bakery in Los Angeles. Chocolate gooey things and white frosty things that you pop from the microwave to your mouth in about thirty seconds. Only the best ingredients, Oprah said, as pink-cladded servers handed out Sprinkles cupcakes decorated with daisies to a thrilled audience.

This is how I know change is possible: Despite the fact that Oprah and Barbra Streisand think eating cupcakes for breakfast is a good idea, I don’t. Although it’s true that I once thought that eating seven layer cake for breakfast followed by a hot fudge sundae for lunch followed by pizza and ice cream for dinner was a sensible meal plan, those days are gone. Kaput. There is no charge around eating Barbra and Oprah’s cupcakes. No desire to eat when I am not hungry. It’s as if a different person lives in this body now. Someone who feels friendly towards her body. Someone who wants to eat what feels good in her body and is not tempted to eat food that will send her sprinkling (careening, really) into outer space. And here’s what I know to be absolute truth: If one person can change, anyone can. If I can go from insane about food to relatively sane, so can you.

Change is possible despite the heartache of death and carbon emissions and our war mongering government, and most especially of eyebrow droop. We can’t give up. On ourselves or the world we live in. One of my favorite quotes of Ram Dass’ (and this is a paraphrase because I can’t seem to find it in any of his books or on the internet) is that whether we are sailing into the New Age or facing Armageddon, our work is still the same: to look as deeply as we can into our hearts, to tell the truth, and to question our old beliefs. To be willing to have our hearts break rather than keep ourselves protected. Emotional eating is based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Wars between countries are based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Question the war inside yourself because what you find inside you is what gets reflected in the world we live. It can’t be any other way, since the world is us. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. Start by asking yourself if eating cupcakes for breakfast is an act of tenderness. Question the way you treat yourself, your children, your neighbors. Become your own beloved.