The tracking of self

It is quiet as a cat steps, the gentle return to the self.  Delicate as this as well.

When I was growing up and we moved from the old neighborhood of Baltimore suburb sprawl to the country woods and backroads further south, my closest friend lived across the street from me in a house that was built at the turn of the 19th century.  It had kitchen stairs, which if you're from the east coast you know are the narrow shoulder-squeezing curvy steps meant for the servants or slaves to use.  Honing the return is always like this.  Knowledge of the secret passages crept and kept, how to use the quiet shadowed light to slip unseen through the house.  How to recognize when some part of your self has become subservient to an other.

And so it was I went away.  North on the 1, for many hundred miles.  Slept under canopies of trees so deep the green looked black and the sunshine wasn't so much as a yawn.  Spent hours of extra hours of travel time just to be able to drive the quietude of mountain roads.  As it always goes, I was not the same and more the same than ever before when finally I returned. Drove the Grapevine in panic up- down of body exhaust and got delirious on the man-friend for trying to get too close. It took me a full week to stitch it all together again, what all of that--the departure and return and rupture at the end--might've meant and still could mean.

Now, I move about the hobbit house on quiet cat-step toes.  Set the slow cooker to high after it sat on the counter for three hours ingredient-full but not plugged in.  Mistakes are made: I'm not wholly present, but know as much--can see at least that I'm not which is as close an assessment of the truth as can ever be seen.  I open books, close them, adjust the light.   Take notes. Miss movement in my body but know this is temporary, this physical time-out.  Feel certain of being on the verge of things.  A surety of witnessing: the stealth and knowing look of being so close to, and at once amid, the ever-endless circle of tracking and tracking the tracking of self.

More about fear of "God" & the authentic life

A friend from college Mike told me once that laying awake in bed in the middle of the night trying to force ourselves back to sleep is actually leftover childhood psychosis.  Still subconsciously being reliant on the long-ago established inner-parent voice and our unquestioned compulsive adherance to the "right" way of behaving.  We should, in the event of mid-night sleeplessness and according to my buddy, get out of bed and eat ice cream instead.

Wise words.  And the idea has me pondering the continuation of my response to a different buddy of mine, this one's over at The Vent.  Garret's working out his troubles with organized religion right now, and that my friends is territory where I've spent an enormous amount of time wandering. 

I recently posted about the idea that human beings are afraid to be still with themselves (and thereby mostly unable to pull from their own essential power) because they are afraid of the programmed ideas lingering within that might arise.  I claim that often at first stillness opens up in the form of bad feelings or fear or anxiousness.  I went even further to claim that these anxieties are actually rooted in our programmed ideas, beliefs and essential fears about GOD.

So let's talk about Joe Campbell.  He's the one who tagged the phrase Follow Your Bliss.  He was a world renowned mythologist (and if you've never seen it, his PBS interview with Bill Moyers changed my life.) Myth is story, to keep it simple.  And in Campbell's words (from the book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation)  "...I don't know what consciousness is.  But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.  If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already."  Thick with simply explained instruction--he suggests that we cant get to our bliss until we are willing to investigate the "given social order" to which most of mid-America gives her or his energies.  IE:

"He has a nervous breakdown--this is no joke; this is a phenomenon that the United States can document, millionfold: the man who thought he knew what he was working for.  He was working to go fishing.  Then he suddenly found that he was married, had kids, and had to work like hell, and everybody was sort of helping him get through this with the hope that someday he would retire and do the things he wanted to do...Or Mother; we all know Mother: she's given her life to us, she's given everything she has to us.  Then the kids go away so it's an empty house.  So it's an empty life, and on comes this fury to grab life again.  She goes crazy; she becomes what's known as mother-in law.  She's bringing up your kid, she's telling you when to shut the window, when to open it, how to fry eggs..."

Our solution?  To tackle the mommy-daddy-as-god element within our psyche.  And how to do this?  To brave the big, the scary, the outward beliefs of the "given social order."  The religion.  To recognize how we internalize religious judgement by never questioning the psychological programming we receive from our very first gods:  mom and dad.

Let's be clear now.  Campbell's not bashing religion, far from it; and nor is he demonizing mom and dad.  What he does instead is present a reasonable (okay powerful--as this was his life's work, his bliss) argument that actually all religions have at the core similar stories or myths, and it is those stories meant to be studied and applied to grow yourself as a unique human individual.  And that this is actually the true moral calling of man, to evolve himself.  To play the hero in his very own life.

Most religious instruction, if interpreted in a strict moral way, presents the idea that to be true to ourselves is wrong because it is selfish, godless, hedonistic even.  Mythic instruction (applying the moral of the stories on which religions the world-round is based) actually says yes, yes, why aren't we being true to ourselves?

I'll tell you myself: because meeting the devil--your internalized ideas and self-judgements about right and wrong and "being" good or bad--is hard, hard work.  Aint for the faint-hearted that's for sure.  This, to paraphrase Joe Campbell, or Socrates, is THE trouble with God.  The unexamined life.  Not examining it doesn't mean it wont come to get you, you know?  In fact, it's almost a guarantee that it will.

Dont let "God" be the excuse NOT to Follow your bliss.  Owning what you absolutely must do to be yourself is the most holy thing there is, and the only one who can do for you is you.

Cut the hippydippy horse**** . Tell the truth.

I want to write a little more about just what this means--authenticity.

I mean let's go ahead and immediately address all notions of Pollyanna perfection and sappy feel good emanations  here shall we?  Bc believe it or not Spiritual Kel cant stand being associated with any of that NewAge hippydippy horseshit.  And as that is the case, it's a fine line I dare to walk on this here blog. Because I will gladly use touchyfeely words like "authentic-self" and "inner-life" and "emotional work". I will readily speak about sitting down and "finding stillness" and "taking quiet-time."  However, it is precisely because I live daily with my own crazy fucked-up head piece that I value and emphasize these things.

What's that word mean when I use it anyway?  I'm not even gonna lie, I'm not sure.  I dont know the answer.   Does it conjure someone who stretches long on the floor each morning doing her daily yoga moves or who allows 20 minutes of calming reflective time with her steaming cup of chamomile tea at night?  Cuz it shouldn't, or at least not without the other side of the picture to make it entirely whole.  That same tea-drinker deep-breather also leaves work gets in her car and starts screaming at the very top of her lungs (with the music turned up so in case passing cars or dog-walkers see her they think she is just trying to sing.) She sends text messages to her best friends that say I am sad and fucking lonely right now: WHY DONT I HAVE A MAN!? or Could you help remind me right now to treat this evil part of my head like the terrible crazy sock puppet that it is...

Authenticity is about being honest.  And honesty takes courage and that's all I know about that.  I mean, once I avail myself to being true as I can to me, well.  Then the Real Work truly does start.  I already posted last week about the immediate complications that lay directly on the other side of such a decision.  Ernest Hemingway sort of said it when he said the writer's job is to tell the truth.  "I would write one true sentence," he said,  "and then go on from there."  Pretty immediately it gets tough because so often what's true means what we're feeling about something, and as I tangent-ed last week  most all of us are walking around with the superwall inside built on the society lie that feelings aren't real or valid.  Soooooo.  How the hell are we supposed to keep it real if that's the confusing message we're still trying to decode.

This all comes down to a sneaking suspicion I have, and I am going to go ahead and put it out there right quick.  And let me say here that credit for these ideas, or anyhow what prompted them are a buddy I'll call T3 who recently started his own blog.  T3's first post got me really thinking and in response to what he's writing about allow me this--I think that the reason most people are scared of allowing themselves to sit with how they are feeling is because they are scared to feel fear.  EVEN THOUGH FEAR IS THE MOST PRIMAL CHEMICAL RESPONSE THAT OUR BODIES KNOW HOW TO ILLICIT.  And further, most people are terrified to feel fear because it almost immediately makes us question one inherently archaic premise:  Life, plain and simple. Or anyhow our existence, and if there's any point. And this friends brings us face to face with the playing with our own bellybuttons issue of issues... (du du duuuu)...God.

And my oh my does he really exist.

Ahhhh head for the fucking hills!  And while you're there, sit a while would ya?  And ask yourself the questions that count.  Dont bother with the freaking answers you know?  Let them arise as they will when you stop fighting and trying to figure it all the fuck out.  Just be brave enough to sit inside those questions even as they haunt you.

I got news friends.  We're all spinning and sizzling and rocking and rolling across this crazyrad galaxy alone and therefor completely together--it's what we all got in common, answerless questions, afterall.  What I know from my own keepin it real diligent adherence to living a life that is authenticaly fulfilling to Kell is just this:  I am who I came here with, I am the only one going through this thing every step of the way with me, and I am leaving out of this place one day with me, alone, too.  So I might as well do all that I can to be intimate as possible with me, this person with whom I am in charge of steering along in order to enjoy the hell out of my ride.  And that means getting to know--consciously with my cup of chamomile tea, or batshitcrazy screaming my mentalmess at poor Beth or Katie over the phone--who I am in this moment by being honest and trying not to hide from myself.  And the very next step I can take on this path--hey blogoworld--is then being honest with you.

The Authentic Life. Begin Again.

The authentic self is the soul made visible.  ~Sarah ban Breathnach

Upside down the view is touching and real as anything going on when my feet are on the ground, in fact, life felt most open, most real, most expansive and in touch with what my insides crave from that exact perspective.  I was naked as the day is perennial, floating inside the earth in hotspring mineral water that came from deep inside the belly of the land.  My head was leaned way back, resting on a rock, staring up at moss then roots then the trees arched over me then beyond.  And me close as I could be to deep, deep under the Cascade Mountains, Northern Oregon, USA.

This was May, last year, after I quit my career and went on a month long sabbatical in the Pacific Northwest.

My friend and wise woman Gretchen had her buddy pick me up in Portland and drive me the three hours to her and the cozy room in her cottage on the coast. Gretchen lent me an old beater pickup and for three weeks I went where the wind wanted to take me.  I spent a lot of time with her, my wise woman friend, and with Paul my brother in rebel-peace-making who I met working in a roadhouse steak joint on the Oregon Coast in 05, and also with Beth, my friend with the Lungta-Spirit and Anusara-calling.

I called my mom crying after the first week, saying how much I had ached to be there with people who I intrinsically considered my tribe, how very much alive and like myself I finally felt again.  Beth and I floated in those hotsprings and slept in the cold, pointed night in Paul's tent in the lush evergreen woods.  We hiked the coast range and communed deep with the well of wise woman wisdom which is found easily and naturally within when we take the time to still, and listen.  And what I told them, Beth and Paul, again and again when they asked what was next for me was that I was giving my spirit all the time it needed to answer that question.

No time-frame, is what I said.

I had weddings and family obligations back at home, and a job waiting, and a room at the beach.

This morning, in that very same room, I thought a lot about the past year and about the importance, the commitment, of always returning back to our selves.  This is the wild woman wisdom, the intrinsic trust in one's own connection within.  I was 21 when my aunt gave me the daily meditation book Simple Abundance, and it is that book that I credit for Confirmation.  Confirming the yearning.  The natural and legitimate siren ring from inside myself that felt like propulsion and being stuck at once that was pressing me towards hand-creating a life that was meaningful, and real, to me.  And that life has always begun first with settling in to find "me".   I handed that book over to a young wise-woman to be this week, knowing well that it landed in the right hands.  And in the mean time, I returned to my quiet space today, answerless still, but with a clear knowing sense from cultivating that connection: My next move harmonious to my spirit is soon to present it self, so long as I continue a day at a time to show up to me.  To show up and begin again after for example 8 days of living out of my car through the tangled holidays stretched along the Baltimore-Annapolis corridor, to be willing to sit back down and begin again.

The process, even when not looking, is unfolding all along.  I sat down a long time this morning, and yesterday afternoon. I walked long on the beach today and re-found and breathed in deep that feeling of the trees from upside down and the hotsprings and warm earth's belly.  I am willing, and shall continue, to begin again, begin again, begin again.  Every time I leave me it is all I ever, ever have to do.