Nail

There are nails in our lives...powerful connections to people, places, events or experiences that never get broken, never can get broken (at least not without the powerful fulcrum of an even greater experience) and that shape, control or direct our lives regardless of what we do.

These nails are not put there by us.  We do not possess the power to hammer our own nails.  On the other hand, we are the ones who hammer nails in the lives of others.

God, destiny, fate, luck...or just plain Life (with a capital "L")...that is the hammering force that drives the nail into the foundation of our existence.

We do not choose the nail.  It is chosen for us.  Our gender, our race, our genetic composition, our family, our social place, our time in history, our culture...none of these are choices.  And they are nails.  Your gender is a nail...it connects you to a basic reality that will never, ever change (OK - unless you have gender reassignment surgery...and then THAT NEW gender becomes your nail).

The nail is a tethering point.  It connects you to the foundation of reality that is your life.  It both controls you, and directs you.

The nail is like a rock in a stream.  The stream flows, but it has to find a way around the rock...and it does.  And the rock impacts the flow of the stream...from its speed, to its direction.

I am a person who is deeply impacted by the power of place.  Many places are nails for me...the airport where I took my son to look at planes taking off, Nelson's Ledges in Ohio where my family spent many hours walking in the beautiful rock canyons, Manasota Key where I have rediscovered much of my spiritual self.

There are also people, and experiences...lives and events that continue to impact and shape my life to this very day.  Move on?  I can't...a nail has been hammered into the core of my reality, and I will always be tethered to that.

So will you.  Yes, you are free.  But no, you are not.  There are nails that are tethering you to realities in your life that you can never break free from.  That is not a bad thing; in fact, it is a good thing - a thing to embrace, understand and affirm.

What are your nails?  Pay attention, learn from them, and celebrate how they have shaped, currently shape, and will shape your life.  It could change everything.

And remember...no matter how fancy the house...it is the nail that holds it all together.

Bigger As You Go

Despite what the laws of physics may tell us, some things get bigger as they move away from us.

Take, for example, my first born son.  Years of living with him at home, expecting him to be there every night, knowing he was asleep in his room, that he would be joining us at the kitchen table…all those things and more had a tendency to reduce him.

It a corollary to the old adage…familiarity breeds contempt.  In human relationships, especially, familiarity shrinks others.  The more we know someone (or think we do), the more familiar they become…the less important they become. 

It’s tricky.  That other person becomes so much a part of your life that they begin to lose significance in your life.  You take their presence, their contribution, their sound or smell or impact as they walk in the room for granted.  You expect it, and therefore you reduce it.  It is not something that you have to work for.  Eventually it becomes something you don’t have to prioritize. 

And you find yourself ignoring that person, because they are not a squeaking wheel.  They are there; they are a part of the landscape.  Other things, the things that are urgent but not necessarily important, grab your attention and suck your energy. 

Then, one day, that other person is gone.  Even though I helped him find a place to live, helped him pack, helped him move, hugged him goodbye at his new place…the moment came when my first born son was no longer in my landscape.  He was not on the couch, watching TV with me.  He was not at the dinner table.  I did not hear him in his bathroom, brushing his teeth before bed.  He did not come into my room, sit on my bed as he had done for years, and talk about the day.  He was not asleep in his bed.  He was gone.

And suddenly, he moved from being a blip on my landscape to the biggest thing in my life.  I found myself thinking about him every moment of every day.  Missing him.  Yearning for him.  Understanding how I had missed moments with him because of his familiarity.  Resenting myself for letting other things take priority over him. 

So, despite what the laws of physics tell you, there are some things – some people – that get bigger as they go.  Our greatest work is to keep them big while they are still with us.  Don’t let familiarity cause diminishment.  Don’t let the urgent rob you of the important.

Keep them big now…and you won’t be crushed by them later as they inevitably go.

Don't Let the System Rule You!!

Today is Career Day at my daughter’s school. Apparently, this is a BIG DEAL, because she has been coming home stressed out for the past few weeks – stressed about…Career Day. Why? She says that there is incredible pressure at her school for kids to be staking out their career choices, making decisions about their career lives. And as is typical with kids, many use this as a chance to brag, or boast, or claim to be better than other kids. And as is typical with adults, praise is heaped on those who have great career ideas, or who have practical career goals. Anybody who dares to say “I don’t know” when asked what their career path is, or says something impractical like “I want to be an artist”, gets the stare down, the rolled eye, and the admonition to get it together.


My daughter is in tenth grade.

And I am thinking…what the hell? 16 year old kids are being pressured to make career choices. It sounds like something from an Orwellian dystopia. Well…I guess actually it is. I guess…sadly…that is a good description of our society and our educational system.

16 year olds are carbon-based bags of raging hormones. How can they be expected to make sane choices about a career that will lock them into a life path for the next 50 years? What kind of insanity promotes that idiocy?

I’ll tell you…the machine of the public education system. Things like Career Day make it obvious that the public education system is first and foremost a system. It is a machine, and its goal is to hammer out nice, compliant, unthinking automatons that can fit into society and not make waves and not think outside the box. The goal of public education is to conform, not minds, but lives…by using a cookie cutter approach to the most important decisions that people make.

So, kids who make decisions to follow the herd, to become nice compliant citizens, are praised, rewarded with recognition, become teacher’s favorites, and are allowed to proceed without Ritalin down the assembly line. Kids who question, who actually think, who dream or envision a different future for themselves are ridiculed, ostracized, pigeon-holed (you know, the “drama” kids – tell me it isn’t so) and often are punished by teachers and administration alike. They are certainly bullied, alienated within their peer group, and are forced to learn a hard lesson – if you don’t compromise, if you don’t fit in, you won’t be accepted.

And that is how the system wins.

America has been churning out unthinking automatons for years – certainly since the advent of the public education system, which was not in place at the beginning of the last century.

I told my daughter to forget about Career Day, and to boldly challenge anybody who would try and belittle her desire to be an artist and performer. I don’t know what she will actually do…but I know one thing. At home, she will not get pressure to “make up her mind” about a career. Not now, and not in the near future. I want her to continue to learn, to question, to grow, to challenge, to dream, to resist the machine as long as humanly possible. I know it will not be an easy path for her…as if living in the machine is easy. But…maybe…she will break free. And that is the best legacy I can give her; that, and unconditional love and acceptance – regardless of what her choice – or lack of choice – about a career may be.

Fall(ing)

The season is turning and sadness is settling into my bones. Not a dark sadness that brings crushing despair - more like the gentle sadness of a late autumn wind that pries loose the last leaves from the tree.

This is a sadness borne in the realization that autumn is nearly done, that winter is almost here, and that no power known can put the fallen leaf back on the branch.

New leaves will grow - but that is next spring, and those will be different leaves. These leaves have fallen, and before long, they will be gone, taken back into the earth which gave them their existence not many months ago.

It was a good autumn...just like it was a good summer before that, and a good spring before that.

My sadness is the reaction of my heart to the soul-deep realization that I am powerless. That seasons turn, and there is nothing I can do about it. Leaves fall; winter comes.

I don't feel very connected to the world anymore. Like a leaf blazing in its autumn glory, my hold on the branch is getting ever more tenuous. More and more I am understanding that one day, my grip will slip, and I will drift down, down.

The world seems like a place for youth. As I drive, as I work, as I play...I am the old guy in the room. My ideas seem cranky compared to the ideas that drive the culture. I don't understand how my daughter can write 1,000 text messages a month. I have not even conceived of writing one-tenth of 1,000 text messages in my life. That crazy, stupid music they listen to...of course, I listened to The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa. The seasons turn.

I coached a softball team last year...there were two girls on my softball team - one  Liz, the other Taylor. One night, they were fourth and fifth in the batting order. I joked - "Liz, Taylor - hah!" They looked at me like I was crazy. I asked, and they admitted - they had never heard of Liz Taylor.

Married? Noooooooooooo...

And now I will howl.

I read somewhere that wolves howl at the moon because of an instinctive response to darkness and aloneness...wolves are social creatures, and the darkness incites them to howl to find their mates. They don’t care about the moon, it’s the darkness that bothers them, and the aloneness that scrapes against their simple nature.

Darkness. Aloneness. Metaphors for death, maybe?  Not for me...not yet. That is waiting for me, at the bottom of the long, slow descent my leaf will make when its grip on the branch finally slips.

Instead, I am like the wolf who is staring at the moon, trying to figure it out, sensing this darkness and aloneness gathering around. A howl is rising from deep inside of me. It is near.

I am the leaf whose color is changing, contemplating that day when my grip on the branch will break and I will fall. I am the old geezer who looks at the world, remembers that it belongs to the young, and is having to embrace the fact that one day, someone I love will want to put me in a nursing home.

I loved being a dad to my young kids, loved it when they curled their little bodies into my arm and slept on my lap as I read. I loved being a young stud, loving and chasing and frolicking with my wife. I loved partying and listening to music so loud it made my bones tremble.

It was a good spring (though it had its share of thunderstorms and tornadoes); it was a good summer (though it had its days of heat and drought); and thus far, autumn is turning out to be pretty nice. Heck, I even planted some new grass and hope to see a new yard in the spring.

But it won't be my yard for long. Some day someone else will live in this house, call it their home. They will walk on grass I planted, and call it their grass. My leaf will be long gone. They will never have known my name.

The season is turning, and a gentle sadness is settling into my bones.

You Can't Stop What's Coming

"You can't stop what's coming...and it ain't waiting for you. To think so is vanity."

That's what Tommy Lee Jone's character says at the end of the movie "No Country For Old Men," as he is recounting a dream he had about his father.

Of course, he's talking about death, or at least the inevitability of age. In the dream, he sees his father, riding a horse in the night, holding fire inside a hollowed out steer horn. He knows his father is going on ahead of him, that he's going to build a fire in the night, and that he will be waiting for him.

You can't stop what's coming. Regardless of what we may do between now and then, we will not stop the day of the inevitable. There will not be a Rapture - no one is going to be turned into spirits in the twinkling of an eye and taken up in the air to be with Jesus forever. We will all die. Every last one of us.

And it's not going to wait for us to be ready. It's not going to ask our persmission. We won't be able to schedule it, like we do our doctor's appointment. It will not come in any way that we can foresee or guess. To think otherwise is truly vanity, foolish beyond measure.

In many ways, this really is no country for old men. It is a hard place, and old men tend to be feeble. It is a place where memory can be a weapon, and old men have lots of memories. It is a place where the young are rewarded, and old men are...well, old.

So what do we do once we see - really SEE - that our fathers have gone ahead of us to prepare a place for us? What do we do when it finally dawns on us that we can't stop what's coming?

Well, we certainly can't stop everything, but we can do some things. We can determine how we will live before we die. And how we will love. And we can take control of the little things that we can control...not what happens, but what our responses are. We can choose to explore, or question, or trust, or doubt, or forgive.

I can't stop what's coming and I am in control of very little. But I can do some little things, right now, in little steps. Little goals, little accomplishments.

It doesn't stop anything...except me obsessing about the fact that I can't stop what's coming. I can distract myself from the inevitable. I guess it is a denial, in a sense. But it is also choosing to rage against the dying of the light. I will not go gentle into that dark night, and I will not yield to the inevitable until the inevitable murders me.

How about you?

Namaste!

Life Is Glorious

"Life is glorious, especially to the cursed and the damned."

These words, spoken by Anthony Hopkins in his role as the patriarch in the latest version of "The Wolfman", had - and continues to have - tremendous impact on me.

Life is glorious! And who better to understand that than a condemned man?

Ever since I left religion, I have felt an insatiable hunger for LIFE. I have become hyper-sensitized to the pulses and rhythms and vibrations of life around me. I yearn - you could almost use the word "lust" - to live life at its craziest, beyond full, beyond meaningful. I want to move beyond a peak state of consciousness and catapult into the universe, soaking up every drop of life that there is.

I have always had this madness for life inside of me. However, religious culture put a cramp on that in me. Religion, at its heart, is about control...a system of doctrines, roles of authority, social programming and reward that causes people to step in cadence to whatever values the religion holds dear. The expectations put on me by religion nearly killed me - while I had to acknowledge my own worthlessness and sin (which, in the religious mind, are just nomenclature for natural and instinctive desires, our animal nature), I had to acknowledge the awesome glory and goodness of God - which I did not actually always see or believe in or understand. A beautiful sunset, or a tender moment of sexual intimacy, could not be enjoyed for the pure pleasure of itself, but had to be recognized as a gift from God...the same God who apparently had no time for healing cancer or alleviating injustice or eradicating disease.

The wildness of rock music? In my particular religious group, it was declared as sin. Enjoying the "fleshly" pleasures of life - food, sex, drink, even a little controlled violence? Sin (except, of course, for football).

I think you get the point. Religion - for me - was not about affirming the glory of life, but of controlling the wildness of human nature, and therefore robbing glory from life. The Bible actually taught that "all creation groans" because of the sin of man. I agree with that to an extent - witness the Gulf of Mexico. However, "all creation" is not groaning - I hear singing, and laughter, and raucous joy. Only a rigid, frightened and judgemental religious mind could hear the music of the spheres and call it "groaning."

Leaving religion, I left with a sense of condemnation. By the reaction of many religious friends, and through the thoughts of my own mind, programmed as it was by years of conforming to the religious machine...I felt cursed and damned by turning my back on religion.

Oddly, however, I felt more alive. In the past six years, my health has improved, my attitude has improved, my experiences have broadened my knowledge, and I am a more expansive person than I have ever been. I love more, laugh more, accept more, and actually serve more.

I am a spiritual man - my hunger and thirst for spiritual things has only increased. I am currently working towards a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology, which is a study of the spiritual dimensions of consciousness and relationships. I meditate. I often journey to a "peak state" where I contemplate mysteries both ancient and future. I experience lucid dreaming. I howl at the moon. I embrace the wildness of my human beast. In my dreams, I run wildly through darkened woods, filled with vitality and energy and power. I devour everything I can. I pray. I weep. I laugh, hard. I play guitar and write songs. I paint.

I make my son mow the yard...one of the benefits of being alpha male.

I do not know if I am cursed or damned...though, when I get around religion I certainly feel that way. Occassionally, when the car blows up or the sewer line breaks, I wonder if God has cursed me for choosing not to believe in Him the way I used to. Then I wonder if He is sending calamity in order to get me to return to Him. Then I ask myself, why in the hell would I return to an understanding of God that includes Him sending calamity to woo me back into His arms? Sounds perverse, doesn't it?

I do believe in a Spiritual Mystery...a Life Force that underflows everything that is. It is good, playful, loving. It embraces darkness, violence, death, and even pain and suffering...for it embraces everything, and everyone. I don't understand it...I seek it.

In the meantime, I am daily learning how to live my life more gloriously. I am loud, I am intense, I am opinionated, and I try to be loving, affirming and to be the most intensely loyal friend you will ever know.

Welcome...to the glorious life of the cursed and the damned!

Namaste!

The Beast

I have finally admitted to myself that within me lives a beast. For most of my life, I have tried to either deny it, or lock it up so deeply that no one would ever know, and I would conveniently forget.

However, I kept hearing him roar in that deep sub-basement. I would ignore the terrifying sound, and go about my life. But occassionally, with no warning, I would see the consequences of his escape. My kids would be afraid of me, my wife cold and distant, a hole would appear in the wall at the end of my fist, something would be thrown and broken on the floor. Friends avoided me.

The stink of the beast was on me.

I would corral him, re-imprison him, put more locks on the cage, and go about my way. But more and more, his presence became something I could not ignore. He kept escaping. He kept doing damage. I kept denying...which, I later learned, was like feeding him steroids. The more I denied, the more powerful he became.

Then, I had a revelation. I thought he kept escaping, but then I learned that I was a sleep-walker. My beast was not escaping...I was letting him out. In the haze and daze of soul-sleep (which happens when overwhelmed by the meaningless stresses of our culture), I was going into the deepest recesses of my sub-conscious, and opening the cage of my beast.

I understood why I was doing it. My beast was my protector. He was my guardian angel. He was that part of me that rose up when I was afraid, or confused, or hurt...and he would strike back with his fierce and vengeful wrath. He has no rational mind...so he struck at whatever was near, whether or not it was the source of my pain. His job was to destroy that which I feared would destroy or hurt me. Period.

I love my beast. I created him...or maybe I discovered him, hidden down there in my deepest being. But once discovered, I loved him. I wanted him. I needed him. All of us need a sense of protection - and my beast was always able to protect me. Yes, he hurt others. He drove them away. He placed me in a world of isolation and loneliness. But that did not matter. In my most primitive, ancient heart, I was afraid. And to the primitive part of us, fear equals annihilation. And there is only one primitive response to death...KILL OR BE KILLED.

So the beast attempts to kill whatever my primitive mind and soul feared was trying to kill me. If he cannot do that...he will lash out at whatever he can. Innocent people suffer. Those who love me fear me.

And I am left alone.

In a way, my beast has done exactly what I wanted him to do. He has destroyed the threat, and now he and I live alone in the world we have created.

I love my beast. I hate my beast.

But now that I know about him, and why he exists, and how he operates...I think...I hope...I may, one day, be able to overpower him. I cannot banish him altogether, but I can become stronger than him.