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.

The Eternal Now

An old friend of mine recently wrote a blog about keeping an eternal perspective in the here and now. It got me to thinking in a big way...what is an eternal perspective?

Obviously, for Christians, it is Heaven...being in the presence of God eternally, not being punished for sins on earth in eternal torment, enjoying whatever bliss God may have planned for that infinite space.

But - I think - an eternal perspective on that simply means making sure you meet the qualifications to enter Heaven upon your death. Which means acceptance of Christ as Savior. In the evangelical Christian belief system, good works don't matter - "all of our righteous deeds are filthy rags." Good works only have value as they help other people make the right decision about Christ, and therefore go to Heaven when they die.

Even as a devout conservative evangelical believer, I had doubts about this view. Certainly eternal reality meant more than just getting to Heaven. And is death the only things that demarcates the reality of eternity from our here and now? Are good works only a form of proselytyzing, trying to "bribe" others into belief because you are caring for their needs? That always bothered me, and often made me feel hypocritical when I was "doing good works."

Nowadays, I have a much different view of "eternal." I do believe in some type of consciousness beyond death - but that is only belief, I have no proof. I do not believe that eternal equals infinite in time. Eternal means - to me - different, other, above me, bigger than me. It means mystery. It means something that is so big, so vast, so incomprehensible that it brings a certain type of definition to my life.

Eternal reminds me that I am not...eternal, that is. Even if my consciousness survives my death, it won't be eternal...because it does not extend to the infinite beginning or infinite end. At some point, in this life, I will cease to be. Eternal reality helps me to understand that, embrace that, and seek to live a life that matters.

For me, eternal means now. In fact, I believe that eternal has no value at all if it does mean now. Because my time is limited, and because there is something bigger and perhaps more real than me, I am motivated to understand and live my life now with every ounce of energy I have. And there are so many ways to do that - another gift of eternal. Loving others, helping others, experiencing joy, acquiring wisdom, forgiving, trying new things, watching the glow of the sky during the sunset...and on and on.

Last summer, my family and I walked a rigourous mountain trail and came to a beautiful, isolated waterfall. I stripped off my shirt and jumped in the pool at the base before I had time to think about it...and nearly imploded with cold! I couldn't catch my breath for a few seconds; but, after that initial shock, the pristine crystal clear water, the remote location, the beautiful mountains and the perfect sky above my head brought a sense of renewal and life that I can still feel to this day. It seemed as if years poured off of my body, and pure light and life poured into my soul. I got out of the pool minutes later, but years younger.

That is eternal, and that is now.

Namaste!

The UnDecision Decision

"There are no neutral decisions in life. Every choice either does or does not get us closer to our goals."

I saw this posted recently on facebook. Wow! I had to comment - "whew - that's alot of pressure."

Welcome to the purpose-DRIVEN life, emphasis on DRIVEN. Being all about purpose is the latest trend in human development. It sells books and makes celebrities out of people who preach it.

But, I got off that train a while ago. I do not want to be DRIVEN. I want to flow. Being purpose-driven stirs up the image of a slave being driven by a harsh task master with a whip in its hand. I would rather jump in a river and let it take me where it wants me to go, while I lay back and bask in the hot sun and the cool water.

Life in our culture is driven to the point of despair. Sadly, most people I know live life under the incredible pressure of every decision being crucial to something - their success, their failure, their joy, their wealth, their health. Yes, I realize that actions are important, and have consequences...but not every decision is either a "make it or break it" fulcrum.

Some decisions can be meaningless, fun, irrelevant - and should be.

I don't think life is about reaching a goal or arriving somewhere. I think life is about living - about being the flow, enjoying the ride, and learning as you go. I had no idea I would end up here, and I have no idea where I will be in ten years. I had goals and plans, but none of those happened the way I envisioned.

The river had other ideas.

Recently, I was trying to decide where to place some landscaping stones in my back yard (yeh, a big decision that is really going to impact the direction and purpose of my life!). I thought and thought, and could not decide. Finally, I asked my son. He laughed and said "it doesn't matter; you know and I know that whatever decision you make, it will the wrong one."

So - here's to making a decision that is wrong! An undecision. I choose not to choose. I don't have a purpose. Or, better yet, I have a purpose, and that purpose is to UnPurpose, to let go and let God, to go with the flow.

See you wherever we end up. Or not.

Namaste!

An Efficient Life

Recently, I watched the movie "A Serious Man." Being a typical Coen brothers movie, it was glib, dark and comic in a side-ways sort of way. At least no one was brutally murdered...a change from their most recent flicks, like "No Country For Old Men."

However, the central theme of "A Serious Man" was a brutally beautiful one...and that is, a life lived seriously is in danger of losing its meaning in a heartbeat. The protagonist in "A Serious Man" is a man who tried to build the meaning of his life on his possessions, his position, and the perceptions of others.

And, as the movie shows, that is a bubble that is perilously easy to pop. And once popped, what becomes the meaning of that life?

Our culture - and sadly, religious culture may be the most guilty of doing this - puts pressure on us to be "serious" and "efficient." We are given this view of adult life that is filled with discipline, control, and accomplishment. We need to look good, act good, and make sure there is no dust in the corners. We are expected to be efficient...budgeted and balanced.

The reality is, however, that life is not like that at all. There is dust out there, and mold, and dirt, and rot, and imperfection. Try as we may, we cannot keep clean. We cannot stay balanced - life demands inbalance and chaos. And it will get it whether we like it or prepare for it or not.

The concept of impermanence, which lies at the heart of Buddhist thought, teaches that nothing lasts. Nothing. A chaotic impermanence is at the heart of existence and reality, and struggling against that (by denying it, or putting more trust in rules than chaos) is what leads to suffering.

I don't know about suffering (still working that one out) but I know it certainly leads to confusion and exhaustion. The more we struggle to be efficient, the more frustrated and tired we become, because the universe just is not commited to efficiency.

In fact, the universe is commited to lavishness - and I think lavishness is the only way to live life. The universe does not seek to preserve energy, but to expend it. Thus, novae and nebulae and laws of inertia (which states that an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force).

I know this sounds alot like carpe diem - "eat, drink, for tomorrow you die" - and it is! And yes, even in a reckless way.

There is an old saying - nobody says on their death bed, "I wish I had spent more time at the office." I would embellish that - nobody says on their death bed, "I wish had been more serious and efficient."

A good friend once told me - "if something is worth doing, its worth doing wrong." I agree! Too many times, we wait until we have attained what we think is some level of readiness, or worthiness, or perfection before we launch out and live. But let me ask - were you perfectly ready when you had your first child? I wasn't - and yet it turned out to be the most amazing, beautiful, transforming and joyful experience of my life.

One of my favorite verses in the bible is from the book of Proverbs - "Where no ox is, the manger is clean. But, much increase comes from the strength of the ox." Yep - dirt, messiness, inbalance and inefficiency are all signs of a life well lived!

Namaste!