Wednesday, May 24, 2006Intellectual HonestyA friend's blog up in Redding elicited a heated and passionate response from me. I wrote him a long email that he edited down and, to my surprise, posted on his column as a response.I have to say, whether it's because of the editing or the passion that inspired the email, it's pretty good. Good enough that I want to share it with my own readers. Marc Beauchamp's blog in the Redding Record-Searchlight website, May 20, 2006: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What's next? My faith, at age 53, I find, is more informed by a single night in the Sahara Desert in southeastern Morocco than by all the religious teaching and cues I've received. Since that night, roughly 12 years ago, I have slipped from belief to agnosticism to a non-proselytizing atheism. It was then, watching the universe spin slowly overhead in the desert clarity and utter silence that convinced me there could be nothing after death, just unconscious oblivion. What other possibility could there be if you were intellectually honest and opened your eyes to that benign vastness, that exquisitely beautiful and coldly indifferent cosmos? A dear old friend today said he was looking forward to something after death - something, he said, that "none of us could imagine." With respect, that fails to pass the occam's razor test. But something else he said earlier rang true: There is no meaning to life, he said. We must bring meaning to life, infuse our lives with it. Alas, many of us will fail. But each of us must try. Alone. Because, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say as his life drained away, "The rest is silence." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My response: Your blogs are disturbing these days. The death/atheism one makes me want to tenderly and gently say the following things re the following achingly beautiful paragraph.... "It was then, watching the universe spin slowly overhead in the desert clarity and utter silence that convinced me there could be nothing after death, just unconscious oblivion. What other possibility could there be if you were intellectually honest and opened your eyes to that benign vastness, that exquisitely beautiful and coldly indifferent cosmos?" What other possibility could there be? What other possibility than what our two pounds of gray matter can comprehend? Well, take those two pounds of gray matter, as wonderful and magnificent as it is, and compare it to those cosmos stretching overhead. Do you think that gray matter can understand even a fraction of even a fraction of what's going on out there, or inside, or anywhere? What other possibility could there be? I believe that if you're intellectually honest, you'd come up with the answer that there are as many possibilities as stars in the night. That even though the brain wants to know everything, it's obvious it doesn't. It can't. It's a lovely thing, our brain and our consciousness, but we just don't know everything. What other possibility could there be? There could be happiness. There could be a sense of purpose. There could be the oneness of the Buddhists. There could be the metaphors of the Hindus. For all we know, there could be a pantheon of greek gods and goddesses up there squabbling and running the show. There could be Jesus bleeding from stigmata and there could be the Virgin Mary appearing on the sides of mountains. We don't know. We can't know. You have to get out of your head because your head is only one tool for apprehending it all. And none of our tools -- intuition, heart, emotion, intellect -- are sophisticated enough to get it all, to ingest it all. I look at those stars and see infinite possibility. I look at the ocean and see that I cannot possibly understand its magnitude. I look at the world around and am humbled and inspired by that humility. It's GOOD that it's bigger than I am. It's GOOD that I'm not the biggest brain around. It's incredibly beautiful out there. What can I learn from it? How can I grow and expand inside to match its beauty? Is the point just to suffer and die? Nowhere in the cycles of the world is that the case. Nowhere does something exist for a point in time and then snuff out completely. Matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Everything is cyclical -- from the leaves on the trees, to the seasons, to the ebb and flow of the tides. Yes, you can see yourself as a leaf, Marc, doomed to bloom for one short season, fall and disintegrate. You can do that. Or you can see yourself as the tree. Always going through cycles of rejuvenation and decay. Yes, death is part of the cycle. Yes, there is shadow. But it is part of a bigger system, in which there is also life and birth and brightness. To look at only the decay and death part of it is as intellectually dishonest as looking always at the la la happy side of it. It is both. It is a whole. It is both simpler and more complex than we are. Posted by Kathy at May 22, 2006 12:45 PM # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 5:12 PM 1 comments  
Missing PiecesIt was a 500 piece puzzle.11" x 17". There were two of us. We are smart, obsessive and spatially talented. We had beer, sangria, frozen pizza, and a completely free night. How long could it possibly take? My friend Cindy's husband is shooting a small film (prophetically called "Missing Pieces") and in the film they needed this puzzle as a prop. The filmmaker had had a special puzzle made by an online company that will take a picture, blow it up, and then cut it into a 500 piece jigsaw. Cindy called me last week to see if I wanted to spend Friday night putting it together. Oh BOY, I thought. That sounds GREAT. The filmmaker had done the frame and the bottom third. The picture was of a cow standing in a field under a wide expanse of blue sky. (Key words here are "expanse" and "sky.") The puzzle was 70% blue. All the ground and a couple rows of blue were done. The blue was exactly the same everywhere, with slight gradations in hue as you moved from one side to the other. It looked somewhat challenging, but not impossible. The problem became obvious when we pulled out the pieces. Because of the magnitude of pure blue field, Cindy had figured out the patterns that the pieces were taking in each row. There were four types of pieces -- fat with two "outies" and two "innies," skinny with two and two, ones with three outies, and ones with three innies. The rows were alternating fatties and skinnies, or alternating threes. So we had four piles of pieces. We figured there would be a set pattern going throughout the puzzle -- so that one row would be the fatty/skinny pattern, the next would be the skinny/fatty pattern, followed by outie/innie threes, then innie/outie threes, and then it would repeat itself. This was not the case. More dire was our other assumption. We thought there would be a one-to-one relationship between pieces that fit. So that if you got a piece that fit with another one, you could move on and put another piece next to it, comfortable in the knowledge that these were set and done and taken care of. This was also not the case. We also thought the pieces would, you know, actually fit together. Ah. Also wrong. Two obsessives. One puzzle. NINE hours. Four rows. Four. 4. Here was the problem. Without the ability to know that a fit was right, we had to go through every piece for every other piece. If something fit (which happened too often, actually, because multiple pieces worked in the same place most of the time), we still had to try every other possibility and then decide -- based on color, "gappage" and "clickage" -- which was the best piece. Then, after we got a collection of contenders together, we'd show each other the various combinations and then decide which we thought was the best piece. The part I found most interesting was this "clickage" thing. Sometimes, after trying pieces out for so long the paint was wearing out on their faces, a piece would just CLICK. Bing! It would snap into place like a long lost lover. This was, as you may expect, an almost ridiculously satisfying moment as the hours wore on into the night. We LIVED for clickage. It felt right on all levels. Intuitively, deeply, spiritually right. It was nearly sexual it would feel so good. But it didn't necessarily mean anything. It didn't. It could still be wrong. We would still have to sometimes take a whole section out because we'd passed up the perfect piece in our rapture over finding the first one that clicked. Wow, I said, at about 12:30 the first night. Next thing you know, you've got kids, a mortgage and a divorce attorney. Clickage. How much do you trust that visceral connection? How much do you rely on instant compatibility? At about 11 the second night, I came up with the whole problem: We do puzzles to create order out of chaos. That's what's fun about jigsaw puzzles. You take a box of little pieces and you put them together to form a whole. Unlike life, there is a perfect companion for each side of every piece. Unlike life, you can take a click and rely on it fully. Unlike life, you can make things simple because you know the rules will always apply. Except in this case. This was the puzzle that mirrored the real deal all too closely. If we made a bad decision, not only would we never find the next corresponding piece, but we'd lose a piece out of circulation that would be vitally essential later. We began to find more and more places where we couldn't fit anything, either because of a bad choice or a piece that was buried elsewhere. By 1 a.m. on the second night we were laughing so hard we were sobbing. We couldn't do it. We ... just... couldn't. We gave it back to the guy with six rows left undone. Ragged stair-steps of pieces showed where we had finally ground down to a place of complete futility. Cindy jammed one last piece into the row she had vowed to complete if it killed her -- the piece was obviously the wrong color but she smashed it in there anyway, with her fist and a maniacal laugh -- and we were done. The moral of the story: Sometimes you can't make everything fit. Sometimes life looks impossible. Sometimes it is impossible. But, if we're lucky, we can all go through this journey with a great good friend. Someone who will laugh and cry with us and understand our cryptic shorthands as we try to make sense of it all. The point of the puzzle is not to figure it out and to make it perfect. The point is to work on it with someone else... knowing when to forge on, and knowing when to just let it sit in its own complexity without our interferance. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 6:07 AM 0 comments
Monday, May 15, 2006Child's Pose Tonight in yoga we did quite a few child's poses. This is a position where you are in complete surrender, prostrate before the universe. It feels good on the back and deeply restful to the soul. The first time we went into this pose tonight, I was struck by a vision so vivid I nearly started crying. I was driving down Highway 1, just north of Santa Cruz. It was a glorious day, as if there are any others up there, and the sun was shining on the alfalfa and brussel sprout fields stretching towards the sea to my right. The heat of the sun on the growing green things made the air potent with a rich loamy aroma. In the vision, as was always the case in reality back then, I was driving my '64 Chevy Impala SS. The windows were open. The windshield was broad and through it I could see the blue blue sky touching the blue blue water, the sun glinting on the whitecaps, the clouds fluffy overhead. I used to drive this road a lot, in the late '70s when I was either a student at Berkeley or Santa Cruz. I'd go up to the City, using the coastal route through Half Moon Bay, and the ride back down south was always like riding the air currents softly back towards the earth. I know I wasn't happy back then. I know that I loved the drive but that my soul was frequently troubled by one thing or another. Unhappiness in love, or money problems -- those things never seem to change in quality although the quantity may become vastly different over time. And I know I was never simple in my approach to life. But I look back on those moments on that drive and still feel the tears well up. I was... I don't know... I was CLOSER, somehow. I was closer to the core essence. I was closer not necessarily to being happy, but to my true self ... despite the money issues and the love life woes. These days it feels like my magnetic fur is ruffled in a million different conflicting ways. I long for some kind of psychic combing-out, something that will make me feel that my spirit and soul are all facing the right way again. As the class progressed I started remembering other times when I felt aligned like that. Times when I was closer to being tapped into my truth despite the external circumstances. I saw myself in my old garden, at my old apartment. I was recently divorced that summer. No boyfriend. Lonely. But still in my soul, somehow. Quiet and deeply content. I see myself back then with a benevolent smile in my heart. I was shed of so much conflict and sadness. I was through the eye of the needle and I had survived. That was just about all. But it was quiet and good. Then I saw myself embodying a particular statue that sits on the dining room table of the man who just treated me so poorly. The statue is of an Indian goddess and every time I sit in meditation, I feel myself strongly there, inside that statue. Back straight. A candle in front of me. Looking into his living room with serenity and grace. As I embodied that statue, I once again felt that sense of being close to something true. And as I felt that resonance, I tried to remember what the point was supposed to be... for me. Like, why I'm here. It's not to run around and go to work and wear lots of hats and make myself and everyone around me crazy. There is and always has been some other core purpose and I used to know it. Or at least be closer to it. I will keep what I think my core purpose is to myself. But I can tell you that whatever it is can't happen when I'm not in that benevolent and CLOSE space. It can't. There has to be an internal downshift, an alignment that enables entry into a deeper world. When I slow down enough to think about this kind of stuff, the sadness flows in like a dam whose levies have been breached. But that's OK. Sadness is better than chaos. Sadness is better than anger. Sadness is real. Sadness is. So yeah. Maybe I just am going to be sad for awhile longer. Maybe I need to find that Highway 1 in my soul and just travel down it for awhile, crying when necessary, trying to figure out what I was so close to all those years ago. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:12 PM 0 comments
Saturday, May 06, 2006Come on babyIt was a bad week.The kind of week where, two out of five days, I was in tears before 7 a.m. The kind of week where insomnia stalks and pounces and finds its mark in the darkest hours of the night. The kind of week where there were long hours of just staring into blackness and not finding much of anything else around. I came out of my own hole, briefly, yesterday at work. I started singing - badly - to my office-mate's Bee Gee's song ("How can you mend a broken heart") (of course). She has about 5000 songs on her computer and shuffles them. So we're always going from gospel to Bing Crosby to LL CoolJ to the Tubes. I use the songs as a feeble-minded I Ching, the MP3 oracle telling me how it's going to be. Yesterday it was Bee Gees. And suddenly I realized I should just wail with it. So I stood up, closed the door, and started howling at the moon -- completely out of key -- and boy, I felt better. It was good I didn't drink at lunch. (I never do.) It was good I didn't drink at my girlfriend's dinner yesterday night, either. My girlfriend and her friend had ordered me a margarita and I forced it away from me. Nope, I said. Not tonight. It would get very weird, very fast. Remember that "Kathy on a boat to Singapore" persona? That's where we would've gone. And, as opposed to last time, it would not have had a good ending. On the way home, I decided I needed to go back to martial arts. I REALLY need to get some of this energy out of me. This pent up frustration at how close some things can get, and then completely fall apart. This wailing despair that turns inward but could really explode outward, in a controlled manner, with heavy bags instead of people's faces. Young girls shouldn't die, I scream inside. But they do. Love should always work out, I insist with every fiber. But it doesn't. That's the way it is. And our choices are limited. We endure. The other choice -- if we have kids -- is really not available. So we endure. And what we do inside that endurance is up to us. We can anesthetize ourselves. We can keep ramming up against the same walls and hope someday they will crumble down. We can try to grow. And sometimes we can find ourselves infused with a blue flame of anger and madness, and go into the heart of it and really find moments of transcendence. That's what happened yesterday -- when I started practicing martial art djurus in my front yard, when I wailed with the Bee Gees. I found the blue flame. I found the part where Han Solo turns to face the Storm Troopers and chases them, with a rebel yell, back down the corridor of the Death Star. That's the moment. That's the place to be. Like FUCK THIS!!! and you race headlong into the black despair, all thoughts of everything gone except that maybe pure mad exultation will extinquish the sadness... and it does. It does. I caught a moment of Six Feet Under last night. Nate is making love with Brenda and he has a seizure. (Wrenching parallel to Chris' friend's death. ) The foreshadowing of his own death is laid out. And at the end of the episode, he gets the key to a big gorgeous Harley, left to him by someone whose presence in the episode I had missed. End shot is him blasting up Highway 1 towards Malibu, shades on, wind whipping through his hair. "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult overlaying it all. That's what it's all about. This life thing, man, it's tough in the middle. But it's the only thing we've got. And when confronted with the endings, sometimes you just have to turn and chase them back down the fucking corridor, screaming like a madman, oblivious to everything else. I leave you with the lyrics. Rock on, my fellow travellers. (Don't Fear) The Reaper [Written by Blue Oyster Cult] All our times have come Here but now they're gone Seasons don't fear the reaper Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain We can be like they are Come on baby... Don't fear the Reaper Baby take my hand... Don't fear the Reaper We'll be able to fly... Don't fear the Reaper Baby I'm your man... Valentine is done Here but now they're gone Romeo and Juliet Are together in eternity... Romeo and Juliet 40,000 men and women everyday... Like Romeo and Juliet 40,000 men and women everyday... Redefine happiness Another 40,000 coming everyday... We can be like they are Come on baby... Don't fear the Reaper Baby take my hand... Don't fear the Reaper We'll be able to fly... Don't fear the Reaper Baby I'm your man... Love of two is one Here but now they're gone Came the last night of sadness And it was clear we couldn't go on The door was open and the wind appeared The candles blew and then disappeared The curtains flew then he appeared Saying don't be afraid Come on baby... And we had no fear And we ran to him... Then they started to fly They looked backward and said goodbye She had become like they are She had taken his hand She had become like they are Come on baby...don't fear the reaper # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:16 AM 3 comments
Thursday, May 04, 2006LegacyI think it's not coincidental that the Jesus story has him rising from the grave after three days. Whether you believe its factual basis or not, that part rings metaphorically true for me. It takes about that long to process, to be in the dark. The old life starts to rot away, to decompose. And then, miraculously, after about three days, things begin to change.I saw this last night with Chris. He'd been looking at pictures of his friend online and spending a lot of time just thinking about her, and her life, and the emptiness created by her passing. I have been doing the same and last night we just sat on his floor looking at pictures on the web and talking about her life. One of the things she was looking forward to was going to the LA County High School for the Arts next year. She had made it through the strenuous auditions and been accepted. Of course, that was just one of the many plans that were ended last weekend. But Chris was looking at the web site and he was thinking maybe HE would like to go there. We started looking at requirements and realized that -- if he really worked hard -- he may be able to be ready to apply by this time next year. He thought he'd rather go into stage acting than music (he plays drums, passionately, but thought acting might be better... as that's what she was doing.) And basically, in the space of about an hour, we came up with a plan. His spirit was lighter suddenly. As was mine. Later, as we were watching an episode of Buffy, I told him: If I could, I'd write a script or a story in which a young girl dies, but gives parts of her life to her friends to use as they continue through their journeys. Maybe he's being given her path of going to this high school and becoming a performer. Maybe someone else will be given a bit of her laughter. Someone else may get a touch of her humor. Whatever it is, maybe she is handing out pieces to her friends, to do with as they see fit. He liked that. A lot. I told him the other day that you have this thing called life. It has these moments that are so bad and so awful that you really can't imagine getting through them. And it has other moments that are so great that you transcend gravity and become filled with light and hope and benevolence for all. Most of life is very much in the middle between these two extremes. Most of life, I've found, consists of pouring one cup of laundry detergent into the washer and pulling the knob to start the water. Or some slight variation on that theme. But art -- art is on a whole different dimension from that continuum. Art, whether you are creating or consuming it, is the thing that makes it all bearable. Whether it's listening to a great symphony, losing yourself looking at a Rodin, or just watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with your kids. It doesn't have to be in a museum to transform. It just has to be a product of someone getting out of the slog of the daily commute long enough to do something MORE with it than just endure. That piece of the human spirit that is compelled to make meaning out of the meaningless is the crack of light we see, shining around the edge of the rocks. It takes pieces of that occasional transcendence and uses it to infuse the horrible holes with a touch of radiance. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:18 AM 0 comments
Monday, May 01, 2006The Unspeakable ThingIt may have been the best night of her life.She had just come home from the cast party of Grease, the middle school production she had danced and sang in. It was a big production, gloriously executed. The mood was exultant. She was giddy with happiness, wearing red lipstick from the party. She had just been accepted to a performing arts high school for next year. The best was still to come. The way I heard it was this: She came home and her mom and step-dad went out. She went to take a bath. In all the excitement she forgot to take her medication. She had a seizure in the tub. And drowned. She was 14. A classmate of my son's. There is no way to soften the horror of this story. No matter what part of it you look at -- the ways it could have been avoided, the horrible proximity of happiness and tragedy, the closeness to home, the feelings the parents must have had, the absolute finality of this young girl's life -- it just gets worse and worse. I learned about this as I was walking down to pick up Chris from school yesterday. I was exhausted from the book festival, woke up shaking and feverish, and called in sick. After sleeping all morning I figured I should force myself to move out of the house. So I leashed the dog and we went down to the middle school. En route, Chris called me and told me what had happened. The mood at the school was diminished, solemn. There was a memorial for her outside the back stage loading door. Chris was red-eyed and serious. We showed Sam to her best friend, who petted him with sadness and loss in her face, her eyes softening as she touched his fur. We then showed Sam to her younger brother, who was allowed a moment away from the reality as he also stroked the dog. Her brother had to go when his dad picked him up. I cannot imagine how any of the parents could have possibly gotten through yesterday, or today . . . or tomorrow. Walking home, Chris said "she'll never have a sweet 16 party." And we both cried on the street corner, wiping our eyes and looking away from each other as though it wasn't happening. Chris and I decided ice cream was in order. We walked up to Rite Aid and found the whole cast of Grease surrounding the ice cream counter. It is a universal truth: ice cream does help. The big group took their ice cream -- some girls eating straight out of the Haagen-Dazs pint carton -- to the park. When we walked by them they were sitting in a circle on the grass, playing some kind of singing game. If you didn't know they had just lost a vital one of their number, you'd think it was a summer camp gathering. And only if you knew the truth would you notice that their demeanor was softer today, their barbs withheld, the boundaries more fluid in grief. While Chris and I walked home I asked him a question. Knowing that life is full of risks, heightened for her because of her condition, was it right for her to do a show? Should she have kept herself safe and protected? Or do you allow risk to enter the picture and hope for the best? Chris said of course she was right to do the school play. Of course you risk it. Even knowing the odds. And I agree. But it's not the easy agreement on this type of discussion that I've had in the past. In this case someone actually died. The worst case scenario happened. Because of a hideous sequence of events, that could happen to anyone. Something like this makes us all change, forces perspective. When I got home I felt compelled to write some words to someone. I needed to say I cared. I needed to get out of the precious protection of aloofness. I needed to risk vulnerability in order to make sure my heart was heard. I wanted to make sure that this person knew that I was in a different place, that life is fragile. That taking any part of it for granted is bound to cause a twinge of pain somewhere down the line, when that thing is broken or lost or gone forever. I wanted to know, within my heart, that I had not taken this new friendship for granted. That it was recognized. Today he dumped me. Today he told me he did not want attachment. That he cannot connect. That this isn't going to be happening. I have cried more today than I did in all of 2004. (2005 was a big year for tears.) The randomness of death, the pain of the revealed heart, the way our dance slices at our entrails as we insist, insist on swaying to the music. The bitter coldness one must feel when turning away from proffered vulnerability. The truncation of a promising young life. The complexity. The rich blood of it all. I desperately want to weave a circle of safety and protection around everyone I love. I want this to go away for Chris and his classmates. I never wanted him to know what a broken heart feels like -- even knowing that as my son he was bound to open, reveal, get hurt. I wish I weren't so good at it myself. And yet this is the price of admission. He has now, first hand, seen how steep it is. Her life was way too short. And yet I agree with Chris. It is better to have the night of your life and forget your meds because of happiness, than it is to play it safe, keep it quiet, and never risk. Rather than staying in the audience and watching from the sidelines, she spent her time fully engaged, giving it her all. And when she went, she went with the applause still ringing in her ears. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:22 PM 1 comments
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