Onward!

Realized, when an email came addressed to "Onward Kay," that my sign-off had become second nature. When reading Anne Perry's Christmas trilogy, found "Forward regardless." Aha, I'm on to something. And I have my last word all ready.

"Onward" has thorny patches . . . coming to it, resolving a few issues, finding a tad of balance--these are good, right? But they mean accepting what was resisted, and resisted with good reason. ID loss, alien culture, no interest in "me"--resisting these seems good. But to balance, they have to be accepted, and "onward" has to take effect.

It is being an expat all over again. Culture shock is partly resisting ID loss; dealing with alien, unaccepting culture; mental dislocation; fight to assert the Big Self. So, say you become a successful expat, you become a real part of the new culture, and moreover, you are successful there. And happy. It takes a chameleon. This is good. But what is the chameleon's base? Neutral; transparent? No color?

Returning "home" is just another expat experience. Same ID loss, same alien culture (except this one looks frightenly familiar), same mental dislocation, same fight to Be Me.

Yeah, there are people who seem to move effortlessly and successfully in and out of multiple cultures. Are they masking something? Do they have a secret? Or are they masking something?

Rule of thumb says re-entry takes a year for every 5 abroad--well, I am halfway through and it ain't effortless yet. The Big Re-entry is upon me--going back into the new world alone. New expat time....

"Be honest without the thought of Heaven or Hell"

As a lapsed translator and great agonizer over "my miseries," this article in the current New Yorker about Iraqi translators for the Americans has been a jarring read.

There is, of course, much in the long article that will take rereading and pondering. But this quote, from a translator who had it on his wall as a young man at loose ends for lack of a job and a path, stopped me short. Because, in my current inner work, it means to me to be honest in my own mind, in my own stories about my life situation, in my own scenarios, as well in everything I say and do.

I am jarred--and sobered. By the whole article, which is, as New Yorker articles are, you-are-there style, written with people and not just the reporter's observation.

p.s. If you get into the article and are interested in George Packer's interview about writing it, you can see that interview online only.

Do you read?

Then you will love this video!

Blogging skills

After about a month of blogging, it's hard! I want a few people to keep up with me, especially now that a new transition is beginning. But I want the blog to be fun and readable, too. I want to start a public blog, and have spent a little time planning. Whew! It's sort of like starting your own business.....the time sink. What makes a "successful" blog--or is it a "good" blog one wants as #1 goal? These are different.

Boils down to focus--away from the view of the navel and onto the audience. I want to talk endlessly, the blog demands conciseness. And sure enough, in planning, one comes upon the inevitable American artifact, the personality test--what sort of blogger are you. To discover your blogging style. The more you know in advance, the better the blog will be. Like planning for the future, when the future is a moonless night in the desert.

Will blogging be my moonlight?

More GFs read blog

Second, now third, GF aboard. 2nd, Blogger helper, for photos and links (like, it seems there is this thing called a toolbar with stuff called icons at the top of a page on a computer screen; who knew?). GF suggests writing article on return of the expat for The Guardian. Inner life of homing expat? Fodder for a public blog?

3rd, longtime guide on the inner life--3rd, GF, don't smile knowingly. pls!

2nd GF said her Man thinks she's brilliant writer. Understands the writing. Thus, he feels clever. "People like feeling clever." New digression arises. More Anne Perry. Emily Radley dinner party 19th-century political-world London: "It was the greatest compliment to a man to find him interesting, and she knew few who could resist it." Southampton Row

Post à la Gail Scott My Paris.

Delicious Scott sentences fit dilemmas of inner life, "In this manner whiling away the dangerous snare of late afternoon." Oh, that dangerous snare!!! Mine!
"Time passing in stiff little clouds." "Shadow of hotel begetting surrealism."

Good Books and Good Friends are, well, G.

The Blog as Jar in Tennessee

I feel embarrassed about this inner life blog, because I don't like navel-gazing blogs....I went and found a whole bunch of blogs by people my age and they were so boring--sort of the "I had a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in the garden today and the roses looked nice" variety. But I wanted a place where I could talk (I have maybe one conversation with another person per week) and also to let some people close to me know that I am emerging from the tiny dark place I was being sucked further into. And focus on the inner work I have been doing since November that is really changing me.

I am also afraid of the conflation of religiousness with spirituality--I am surrounded in this town (not in this house) by people who go to church at least twice a week. By BAs (born-agains). I am neither organized religion nor pious, but am afraid of that labeling. Just like the hairdresser will not cut my hair short because she says people here will think I am gay. Scares me because I am sooo not gay. But being surrounded with such folks, and not being in a cosmopolitan world but in a labelers' world, does mess up one's head. Anyhow, at my age, being who I am should problem-free--never was before, but then being an expat was so liberating!

So it turns out to be a blog for me mostly. And it is marvelous---it works in my head sort of like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Post on post-caregiving

"The 're-entry' phase of caregiving – after the caregiving ends – calls loudly for a post-caregiving support system to help build or rebuild health, skills and confidence for a successful transition back into life – and into the work world," say the Canadians.

Have not so far found much on the Web--lots and lots about transitioning into caregiving, but not out. Maybe it is like someone who has become an expert at all aspects of caregiving and is often encouraged to write a book: "When this is over, do you really believe I'll want to go through it all again doing a book???"

Or Jewell's Journal, "another day of post-caregiving funk." But Jewell's got bootstraps she uses: "So here I was, indulging my angst about not having a back yard or a book project when it hit me: I do have the one thing I've most wanted for years.
Now I have time. And from that, all good things will come."

It's a place to start now that Hospice has come back into our lives. This time it looks like it is for real. Concentration will go to the Great Passage. Post-anything is a theory. But I suddenly see the real spring that sprung me into starting this blog. The Great Passage is upon us. There is light there.

"Beginning as we mean to go on"

Aunt Eva's column for desperate writers, editors and translators included an unforgettable one about "the most important thing is to begin as you mean to go on, and stick to it." I know two people who do this; they not only always have a plan, but a Plan B as well. Not me. I determine to plan first, whether a copyediting job or a Web page or, ahem, a blog. Then enthusiasm takes over like a wave of Puritan Great Awakening and I plunge in, to regret not having begun as I meant to go on.

And always wish I had.

"Darren over at Problogger.net is having a group writing project where bloggers submit what they would do differently if they were to start their blog all over again."

Cuz a lot of people don't begin as they mean to go on. I thought I did when I started caregiving 7 years ago, and moved into it full-time 3 years ago. I was in la-la land.

LARGE-PRINT BOOKS

The two Anne Perrys I wanted at the library were only there in Large Print. Remembering how I got Large Print for the 80+-year-old woman with whom I read novels once a month, and how I found the books impossible to read, I hesitated. But, no choice, so borrowed them.

Oh no! They are perfectly "normal" and comfortable to read. Another step along the road. . . .

Anne Lamott's Grace

Downloaded the podcast of Anne Lamott's interview on Salon and listened while doing my walk around the basement this morning.

Along with tapes, podcasts [and this blog] are saving me from the small black hole that threatens to suck me deeper.

I have liked Anne Lamott since reading her 1995 Bird by Bird about writing (the title comes from a story about starting "small, as their father once advised her 10-year-old brother, who was agonizing over a book report on birds: 'Just take it bird by bird.'"

The podcast was wonderful, hearing two people chatting about something serious, and being balanced about the struggle for spiritual balance. One of the points that hit me where I live just now is
[JW] "But I thought the deal is that if I get to the right spiritual place I will be in perpetual grace. Are you saying [in your new book] instead it's 'Grace eventually,' not 'Grace now,' and not 'Grace permanently'?"
[AL] "I think it's very frustrating and if I were God I would have a completely different system. I would have a magic wand and I would touch people with it, and help them be struck well."

Yes, it is "grace eventually," "satori eventually," isn't it. It has been four months since I got the first tapes to help me begin to turn off then replace the horrid ones turning in my head. And listening to so many, spiritual balance and self-motivation and stress management, I really understood that as far as I have come, I will never get "there." The work will go on forever. Every day it might get easier, but it will take relentless work, even more than "just" meditation, for me to stay in balance. Asking for, working toward, grace doesn't end the pain like buying a winning lottery ticket might.

I just hope getting to a stable spot in the road won't take very much longer. I can maintain after that, but I sure would like to find the center point and settle in for the long haul.

Yet there were some things in the Lamott interview that hit me wrong as I listened, and thought "How can you say that?":

1. One thing you [Lamott] and I [Joan Walsh, interviewer and editor-in-chief of Salon] have talked about is a sense of needing grace as you age, and how "aging gracefully" is something nobody really does.

Me: Really?? You 50-year-olds honestly believe no one really ages gracefully? In an interview about attaining "grace eventually"?

2. And I [Lamott] tease her [89-yr-old Aunt Gertrud who said, "I have lived too long" at the end of a challenging walk] about it and she loves it because she knows she has lived too long, but she still has a lot of pleasure in her life.

Me: Aunt Gertrud can say what she wants, in this case as part of a black-humor exchange with AL, but how can anyone say that someone else has lived "too long."

3. The day after the 2004 election ranks up there for me with days where cherished friends died.

This was inconceivable to me. I am glad I am not a cherished friend of AL!

I hope that when I find the center and live there, I'll have the grace such that thoughts like these will never even be conceived.

Read page 69

Marshall McLuhan recommends that when browsing a book, browse powerfully, then go to page 69 and read it. If you like that page, borrow/buy the book. So far I've not found anyone who says it doesn't work. Purposeful browsing, who knew?

What is the caterpillar thinking?

“As a survivor of a brain injury, Rick Bowie is only too well acquainted with the dramatic life changes it brings.” He has an article on “Change Happens” (look down the list for “Change Happens”) that is just down my transitions alley.

“I’ve often wondered what might go on in the mind of a caterpillar when life in the cocoon begins to come to an end. It is about to lose the safety and support of its environment and its known world is coming to an end. Even if it could see a little further into that unknown mystery of the future, it might not even recognize the beauty of the butterfly which was about to appear. Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese Philosopher, said, “when I let go of what I am I become what I might be.”

Sometimes, when the pity party is in full swing, I feel I am like someone sequestered against their will for a long time. I am not here against my will, but, like the long-sequestered, I now fear dealing with The Outside World and getting the gift of re-taking control. Not having any control over my public or private life and not having dealt with TOW for, now three years, but looking and seeming like an insider, it will be a new re-entry syndrome (the end-of-culture-shock re-entry is like this).

Rick goes on to another metaphor, the compost heap of life.

“Over a period, the heap gathers to itself all kinds of unwanted leftovers and wasted refuse. All it needs is time and warmth, and out of it will grow the most delicious tomatoes and pumpkins, the seeds of which at some time were also thrown away as waste. The same thing has been said in many different words by many different people. Sigmund Freud wrote somewhere that “one day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. The philosopher Nietzsche said ‘unless there be an element of chaos within, you will never give birth to a dancing star’”.

BUT, nice as imagining the happy retrospect when it will all become beautiful and when one will be as a dancing star, this focus is the transitioner's hurrying-to-the-other-side-of-the-street" mistake.

"Transition is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and launching forth again in a new situation. It is the natural process of disorientation and reorientation that marks the turning points of the path of growth. It would be great if transition was like the teleporter of science fiction, where one simply walks into a cabinet and says the equivalent of “beam me up, Scotty”, and whoooosh, and we were there". William Bridges makes much of this.

Hence, the waiting heart, staying with the waiting heart.

Grace and Flair

Did it again. Magnanimously gave up my weekly day off and physical therapy/weekly social hour (in Anchorage!) to do backup for the house situation of the pre-appeal telephone conference tomorrow about the cutbacks to Mother's care provider hours. Then, kept my end of the deal, but Grace and Flair must have left for South America last night because they were not in evidence in my behavior today. Yes, Mother had an agitated night; believe me, a Crone Short On Sleep can Rise To The Occasion, but with Grace and Flair? NOT! . . . more DNA searches!!!

Sassy, Funny Blog

I wish I could write a blog in the vein of Elise's.

Elise is immediate past president of what used to be Alaska Presswomen and is now Alaska Professional Communicators. I love her book, Parallel Logic. The expat experience, whether Elise in Barrow, Alaska, me in Japan, or mgf in American Samoa. The laugh-out-loud parts are what I envy. Gotta dredge that up out of the creative DNA somehow!

Stuff like Elise writes, at the end of her bio:
"Her primary goal in life now is to live long enough to spend all she has saved for her old age. Thanks to recent economic trends, this may turn out to be much easier than she initially believed possible."

Oops, in 4mgf, where's the sassy, funny part of this post, or any post?

More on prayer

Reading beyond the subject line is daunting, isn't it. But, I am so revolutionized by one sort of prayer as prayer being waiting, a new idea idea for me, that the discovery of a nun-in-the-world, drinking beer, writing a blog, as in the interview in yesterday's paper, seemed intriguing. So I went there. And looked at prayer. And clicked the link. And found goal-oriented prayer. So I left.

And I went to Kathleen Norris' Amazing Grace, chapter, Prayer. And I was reassured that religion and spirituality are not always the same thing. Which is why lots of people, me included, are turned off by Anne Lamott's religious stuff--she mixes the two up hopelessly. When she writes about writing, she is centered. When she's off being religious, she's all over the place.

But I digress.

I fixed "satori on prayer"

so if you already read it, and it intrigued you at all, read the slightly edited (with links and accurate quote) version, below.

Satori on prayer

The most "awakening" chapter for me in Kidd's When the Heart Waits is "Concentrated Stillness." Epigraph: "There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian's prayer." -- Evelyn Underhill

Kidd's is a Christian take on prayer as what the waiting heart does, but Buddhist meditation is the same thing, and relationships with the almighty being in other faiths is, too.

Matthew 26:36 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray."

Yet, "so little attention is paid in our culture to the value of waiting." (p. 123) And so says William Bridges in Transitions: "...transition is a kind of street-crossing procedure. ...move on to the other side as fast as you can. And whatever you do, don't sit down on the center line to think things over!"(Bridges, 1980 ed., p. 112) For Bridges, as for Kidd, waiting through the stages is the Way.

Wondering why she couldn't pray as she was in her dark night led Kidd to a satori: Seeing her reflection in the glass door through which was a foggy night, it came. "I was praying. My still heart, my silence, the very posture of waiting against a backdrop of darkness was my prayer." (p. 126)

Another echo, in Eliot's "Burnt Norton" (my undergraduate thesis was on "Four Quartets"): "Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is" --> Kidd's "prayer of waiting." And, to belabor allusive points, isn't this what Waiting for Godot is about?

More on Tolstaya story

Another GF wrote about Tolstaya's story: "There are so many clues given to us about how to live our lives, but we are blind to them all if not most of them.

'Because we are just as blind--no, a thousand times blinder than that old man in the wheelchair. We hear whispers but we plug our ears; we are shown but we turn away. We have no faith: we're afraid to believe, because we're afraid that we'll be deceived. We are certain that we're in the tomb. We are certain that there's nothing in the dark. There can't be anything in the dark.'

Everything is in the light, but we have to open our eyes to see them, eh."

The story shines many lights!

Writing Stories

I'm one of 284 writers who didn't make it into the winners' circle for Short Shorts. Reading through these, I learn something about writing fiction.....the contemplative mode doesn't work unless for a specific type of fiction; one needs characters and conflict! This takes imagination that reaches into another life rather than navel-gazing. The inner-life blog's gotta be the navel-gazer and outward the direction for other writing. I remember sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens and looking at people and writing details about the characters in my novel. But even in what I wrote in the early chapters, the dilemma took away from the people, even though some of the people are pretty cool as characters. And, the scary thing is that the dilemma is the same one as in the inner-life blog.

Giving away light

Tatyana Tolstaya's story in the March 12th New Yorker, "See the Other Side," illuminated another corner of my waiting heart. The interview of the author by the NY fiction editor shone with the light of alien interpretations. The author and the editor had takes on the story, not like mine of finding the man in darkness tossing out light for others, such a hopeful thought, like maybe the waiting heart can lighten the lives of others, too. "He throws coins into the darkness, and from the darkness sounds a voice that tells him, as much as it is possible, about the great comfort of beauty." I love that sentence, but the phrase left out is what rings in my waiting heart: "He throws coins into the darkness, [making corners of it light up for others], and from the darkness sounds a voice that tells him, as much as it is possible, about the great comfort of beauty."

The part about his getting a reward for the giving away of light and the illumination of beauty for others bothers me. Author's intention and reader's need diverge in the space between words.

Chapel Speeches and "Stuff"

Still trying to make something of my state of mind, reading Sue Monk Kidd's "When the Heart Waits"--about her mid-life crisis, but it applies just as well to the crisis of entering The Third Age, or some major life transition and questioning. I kept thinking of a chapel speech I gave, on my birthday, around age 40, about mid-life crisis, Dante's "dark wood" that he wrote at the beginning of the "The Divine Comedy" (beginning of the Inferno), when he was age 37-42. Going into the crisis is an inferno, and coming out must be like paradiso....never thought about it like that.

So, being in the house but not on duty in the morning today, I got out my chapel speech file to find that one, and put the whole mess in order. I had wanted to have them printed up and bound in a book (I even got a how-to manual on handmade books Japanese-style) to give key people before I left, and I never did it. Now I really see what a job it would be (should have done it then when I could have gotten former students to help type/translate!!). Anyway, it turns out that I have 30 chapel speeches in my file, 15 of which are in Japanese. From 1976 to 1996. I am sure that is not all of them, but just the ones I still have. So I sorted, and threw out extra stuff not needed, and kept the speeches and a little of the extra stuff. I still wish I would "publish" them . . . but more than that. I wondered about not remembering the start and end (how useful a journal would be!)--I sort of think I remember feeling that I was "accepted" even if the "wrong" religion in '76, and that something stopped my being asked in the late 90s.

Anyhow, a larger question arose....."stuff." I felt very "attached" to those 30 speeches, and looked through all of them, some a lot because of reordering and getting items together that had been scattered. They are a link in my "identity." As is all the other "stuff" I am still holding on to because I have a place to keep it for the moment. So the crossroads is coming---what to do with the "stuff"---will I get to enough enlightenment not to need it, to have an identity without it, to know that no one else will ever read it and understand me, and throw it away wholesale? Will I hang on to it, believing it is "me" and someone else will throw it out wholesale? What is its role in my life at I start towards age 70? Where will I keep it? What is its real position in my life?

Of course the ideal would be to retire to a place to live and muse and browse through and read and share and toss. But the ideal ain't the reality. So, a question that has been looming since six months after I got here almost three years ago.....and looms a little bigger and with a longer shadow now: what to do with the "stuff." One item of crone wisdom I have never seen anyone talk about.

Mindfulness

Buddha listed four "distortions of mind," "four basic ways we misconstrue our experience," according to the current Utne Reader. The fourth brought me up short: "The most detrimental distorted view sees a self in the body and mind." There is no real, enduring "me," and no findable essence in us or others. This is hard to grasp, and must take some deep reflection and guidance to actually grasp it, yet mindfulness of the opposite of this distortion, which is selflessness, makes perfect sense in all the world's religions. So the celebration of "the real me" that I keep rabbiting on about is off the mark, and the renunciation I've been so proud of means something different; it means "having a powerful wish to be free from" the four distortions.

I wondered if "mindfulness" meant also "paying attention." I always wonder at how people in this house remember every detail . . . like our stop at the Double Musky Inn in summer 2006, the last "outing" we had....I forgot...but I remember sitting at the bar and eating appetizers, but not what they were. The people in this house remember everything we ate that day! Perhaps the fact that I do not remember much of my life is connected to my not having been mindful throughout it.

I don't know where to put this, so I will put it here. Louise Hay's morning tape says we need to let the universe do its job; all we need to do is have positive, loving thoughts, forgive everyone, and be kind to ourselves mentally. When things here are as they are, I find it so hard to do all three, but in a murder mystery I just escaped into, Eve Dallas heroine, there is a sentence that I need to memorize for my positive, loving thoughts about the people in this house: "You do what's right, you do what matters, whatever it takes."

I think mindfulness is going to be as hard as everything else involved in the waiting heart's eventually emerging into a halfway decent butterfly. And I am frustrated that there is no humor in this post . . . blogs are, like, required to have humor. Oh well . . .

Self-Indulgent Day

A day of self-indulgence is liable to be a happy day.

A walk around the basement in the morning, listening to an audio tape from the library gives energy and fun, leftover lunch of African peanut chicken with mango chutney is delicious, a new mind map with a photo as the center starting point, a photo of the terrasse at La Rotonde with me sitting in a chair there made and printed, a poem to enter in a contest ready to submit, an hour's A&E DVD of a favorite author's book watched in the afternoon, and, if I can stay awake, the first part of "Memoirs of a Geisha," so long awaited (hated the book, but the film looks wonderful), for late tonight? . . . did the indulgences come from some sort of calm center that is happening in the waiting heart? I did not go out in the car, because I had a horrendous experience when the accelerator wouldn't work yesterday, for the second time. No one else here can replicate the situation. So "lockdown."

For the first time since I have been here, a day of "lockdown" was a day of self-indulgence and, so far, before the whole evening of caregiving begins, a day of well-being here in this house. The first. The niggling question: Is this another enthusiasm (in the Jonathan Edwards sense)? Am I a "mikka bouzu" (a 3-day monk, the person who enthusiastically enters a monastery only to leave 3 days later)? What is the inner work that was done today? How will I do on a challenging day? If I hew to the work, will challenging days just be challenging and not devastating?

Stay tuned.

False Selves

Sue Monk Kidd gives a chapter to false and true selves, Chapter 3, early on: "In March my thoughts turned more and more to the transformation that takes place within the waiting heart. What are the changes and growth I am being asked to undergo? What is the movement that is happening inside of me, and where do I begin?"

It's just started being March, and I wondered about false selves while I put off writing to my blog--I thought that blogs were false selves because I cannot really write what is in my thoughts, I must be public with something not boring and whiny. Then, I thought that this blog was made to help fashion the true selves that are hidden under the clinging to the false, because the false ones are so familiar and it is so comfortable to wear them. That they create misery is just part of the package, misery is the Order of Things. But, when a day's gift is that I say, at the end of it, 'today I felt like --me-- again,' I see the true vs. false selves. What Kidd doesn't go into, is why we need false selves under certain circumstances. And that is where Byron Katie (thank you, Maurice Leconte) comes in. False selves must exist because of what Katie calls 'being in other people's business.' It is being reactive.

True selves must be when we hew to nothing but the voice within, when what others do or say does not change how we see ourselves, and then, the other learning curve, since last November 16th (borrowing of first of audio tapes from library), is controlling that voice, i.e., thoughts. But the controlling of the thoughts comes before hewing to the true self's voice. And controlling the familiar misery-making thoughts is hard because it takes us as actor on center stage off somewhere dimmer.

March comes in like a lion in the inner world, roaring at all the false selves. Will it go out like a lamb, with a more precious true self?