Wednesday, October 04, 20069/11 - Part IIIf, as my friend Tom has pointed out, the formula for my essays can be boiled down to "Life sucks, but it's OK," then you will have noticed that I kept my first September 11 entry limited to the "Life sucks" part of the equation.It felt really wrong to ruminate about the event and then immediately go onto why it's all OK. It needed to sit. It needed to be sad. It needed to stay sad for awhile. However, I guess Tom is right. I AM compelled to always find meaning or humor or something OK in even the worst situations. Some friends accuse me of being a magnet for somewhat disastrous events ... attracting the stupidest scenarios just because I, and only I, have the ability to find the Deep Hidden Meaning underneath it all. I don't have the DHM for 9/11. I really don't. But there is a Part II to the entry. It's not as easy to come to grips with or describe, but I do believe there's an "it's OK" element to the world at this moment. My friend Keith decided, out of the blue, to come over and fix me dinner the other night. He unloaded six bagsful of food from his car and proceeded to grill up some fish and steak, smothered in scallions and mushrooms and herbs, which we ate by candlelight out on my back patio. It was one of those perfect evenings. I was piping my iPod through my stereo speakers: the playlist ("Kathy Turns 50") had been downloaded onto the iPod for my party by my friend Skye, and the connection to my speakers had been surreptitiously wired for me by my old friend Glenn, after I had bemoaned the fact that I couldn't play my iPod through my house stereo system. All my long-sown karma was coming back. Keith was cooking dinner; we were listening to serene music thanks to the generosity of my friends; I had just finished writing some words that I felt good about. I walked into the kitchen and said "Aren't there moments when life is just ridiculously perfect?" Keith laughed and commented that he hadn't, truthfully, thought that recently. And I, truthfully, agreed. It's not something that comes up regularly in my consciousness either. But life sometimes IS just ridiculously perfect. And some moments come with unbidden sweetness, in their own time, bestowing their own grace. Keith took my hand as we said our thanks before eating. Neither of us are religious but it seemed the right thing to do. "Dear Lord," he said "The world is in a shit sandwich right now. Help us make it better. Help us get out of the mess we've created..." And we proceeded to eat and talk and drink until he admitted his cheeks were sore from laughing and smiling so much. The world is in a shit sandwich right now. That's the "Life Sucks" part. We're fucking up, politically and globally. We have young men over there. We have signs that say "support our troops" and they are put up by people who are supporting our troops' rights to stay in the shit storm. For some reason, that's another phrase we lilly-livered, well-intentioned liberals have lost. We somehow lost the position we should be taking that says supporting our troops means bringing them home and stopping the madness. I suspect they would prefer that support any day. Other words and phrases we've lost control of, inexplicably and incredibly: God, America, patriotism, and life. How did we ever let "pro-life" get in the hands of the people against a woman's right to choose? How did we ever get stuck in a position of having to say "no, we're not pro-life... we're pro-choice." They get the word "life;" we get the word "choice." We need a new branding team. It's unable to be believed. But that's not what this blog is about. This blog is about the thing that I think is going on outside of and around the general shit sandwich. It's nothing that can be really spoken about without sounding New Age-y. I suspect you're going to start hearing "this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius" in your head by the time I'm through... and for that I apologize. Just try to hear me out. I am not an expert. But I am noticing something. There is a conversation going on, one that seems to be swelling and growing more resonant every day. This conversation is something that many people seem to be having. I find myself falling into it with increasing frequency. It can be seen in the burgeoning of yoga studios, the mainstreaming of authors like Eckhart Tolle, the popularity of Wayne Dyer and Carolyn Myss. Eastern healing techniques are being acknowledged by the insurance companies as viable. My most conservative friends talk about getting energy work done on them. Most people know what chakras are, or at least don't look at you like you've grown antlers when you mention them. I can start throwing out bigger metaphysical concepts in many of my conversations these day. When I meet someone new, I can usually size them up fairly quickly and figure out how much of this thought process they can take; and 7 times out of ten, I'm pleasantly surprised that they can. Do I think the Mayan calendar rightfully predicts the end of the world happening on 12/21/2012? No. I don't. Do I have a clue, truthfully, what the Age of Acquarius is? Nope, not a clue. Do I know where all this is heading? No, I don't. But I can tell you some of my hopes. It seems to me that these conversations are getting more frequent and more clear in direct proportion to the level of shit that's emanating from Washington. The more we mire ourselves in the political, environmental, economic and milataristic muck, the purer the song of consciousness that is starting to be heard. It's a dialectic. We're polarizing. The country is, truly, in the worst shape it's been while I've been alive. The fiscal legacy we're leaving our children is shameful. We're caught in a situation that we cannot win in the Middle East. We have no leaders on the horizon that seem capable of turning this around. And most of us, myself included, walk around in a self-aborbed haze hoping that we don't get touched by any of the stuff flying by and retreatung back into our iPod and TV-induced anesthesia. All the while there are more people going inward, looking upward, connecting to the spiritual world (with and without organized religion). People are learning how to get still within themselves. The vocabulary is expanding. As with all dialectics, eventually there will be a synthesis of these polarizing states. The "it's OK" part of the 9/11 musings is this: that the pendulum has to swing back eventually. And hopefully it's not going to swing back in the same way. We've been doing the inflation/recession, republican/democrat, left/right, hawk/dove dance for generations now. Maybe it's time to find some third options to those polarities. Maybe true morality can be taken away from the religious and given back to everyone. Maybe patriotism can be wrested away from the narrow minded "love it or leave its" to include people who love their country like they love their family, faults and all, and are not afraid or castigated for trying to improve it. Maybe God can become a God that everyone can access. Not just those people paying their tithes by internet to the preachers in the glass houses. And maybe we can all become proponents of true life once again. Not in terms of the abortion issue, but in terms of the way we're living. Maybe the synthesis of these conversations will enable us to put space back into our days, breath back into our lungs, enable us to work with wisdom and compassion, rather than strategy and power. And then, maybe, we will all receive our collective moments of unbidden sweetness, that come in their own time, bestowing their own grace. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:38 PM  
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