I’ve have been enjoying gardening and the specific wonders of nature this year. In the context of the confines of this pandemic, I am more aware of the small beauties in nature. There is more time, it seems, to look and notice and contemplate my surroundings. For even as the space I am living in doesn’t change, the growing things inhabiting that space are constantly changing. I am drawn into this process.
Here are several drawings from the last week that i’ve made of flowers. Two from our garden, and a few from gardens i encountered downtown on Sunday.
In late June I started writing songs after a dry spell of many years. The melodies and the lyrics are just popping up and I am letting them, giving them a space to be alive and change and grow. I am tending to them as I would a poem or any writing, but the process is different—a fluid exchange between set ideas and improvisation. It often starts with a melody and a couplet or two, and then expands as the music takes shape, because the written words on the page don’t tell the whole story.
The Roller Coaster is the third “finished” song this month, the first recording I want to share. It all started out with four lines that didn’t make it to the finished work. Those (ultimately discarded) lines formed the framework of the melody, which gave birth to the first lines of the finished song (and the concept as a whole). It was written over the course of a week, and this recording (the third in the process) was made on July 31st.
Musically, I’m in a strange place. My ear is better than it’s ever been, and my vision for what I want to do is clear. But i’m out of practice, and it takes real work to get what I hear in my brain out onto the tape. When it happens successfully, It’s a true and absolute joy. One thing I’ve been surprised by is how much the skills i’ve learned over the past several years doing non-music projects have made me a better songwriter. Things like: working incrementally and iteratively, taking breaks when things aren’t working, putting time in when it feels right AND when it doesn’t, practicing, accepting where I’m at, Taking risks.
My goal is to release a record before the year is through, but right now I’m focused on shepherding these songs into the world. I have faith that they will all come together in a way that makes sense to me, and hope that I can form them into a work that resonates with others, too.
The scene of a hundred or more “rollercoaster” takes.
The Roller Coaster
I’ve been getting high again just to come back down. All the turns you took me in turned me inside out.
As we fall, that’s all there is— I can’t even see. At the top I’m losing it, I can barely breathe.
Feels like I am going to die as I strap on in to face the fear and feel what’s here, not what might have been.
Four nights ago I heard the sweet call of fantastic vision. Hope of a life well-lived and uniquely played.
And rest.
But sunrise brought a flaming terror, and burned out the peace I had tended to over so many previous dawns. The pain of loss (not now, but soon) drove me to pull what remained.
But I have begun to dig in this new, hard ground. Cultivating the seeds of an invasive peace that thrives in the cracks between stones and spreads beyond intention.
The lump—that deep twist in my gut. I am holding too tight, even as I let go. Scooping out my melon of a belly, emptying it of everything, including hunger.
You don’t care for watermelon but I continue to present it, bowl after bowl. An offering, a show of just how far I am willing to go.
As unappealing as my misplaced entrails and the hunger that is and isn’t.
I have long respected and admired Brian’s thinking process and philosophy of life (even when we’ve disagreed) so I did the most obvious and easy thing to do: I bought the book, read the short essay on “Anger,” remarked to myself how poignant it was, and put it on the coffee table book pile never to open it again. But the name David Whyte gained a place of esteem in my head, and I’m glad that it did, because when I saw that Sam Harris had a conversation with David Whyte in the Waking Up app (which I use for daily guided meditations and recommend), I took notice. Last week I finally listened to it and it absolutely blew me away. Within the hour long conversation, David read two of his poems (“The Bell and the Blackbird” and “Everything Is Waiting for You”) and an essay on the word Vulnerability from “Consolations.”
Have you ever had the experience of hearing someone plainly, succinctly describe a concept that has been tumbling around in your head, amorphous but forming, slowly slowly solidifying? For me, as I listened to David and Sam talk, it was like bombs kept going off in my brain. David’s words turned a plethora of personal inklings into fully formed, fully realized (and actionable) concepts. These types of moments are unique, but not entirely rare for me, and I realized at once that something significant was happening.
Like a fighter pilot who has been hunting down it’s target, circling and chasing, David’s words through the hour were the missile lock, the final poem he read flipped the safety cover off of the firing pin. Locked and loaded, ready to fire. Insight, ready for action.
Here is the poem, which I share as a window into my experience, an incredible moment that was years in the making. Read it, but also take a moment to hear David read it in the video just under the poem.
Everything Is Waiting for You
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
Fatherhood has changed me, and continues to change me. It is the greatest privilege and deepest joy. It has also been heartbreaking and humbling. It is always changing, and I am so thankful for the love that remains constant between these beautiful people and me, and also the love between siblings that takes its own form.
A few years ago, I came to realize (through hardship and a great therapist) that I had a problem with self-differentiation. In my most important relationships I was being driven by a deep-seated fear of rejection and abandonment. My sense of self was WAY too tied up in others and outside forces.
Self-differentiation is a concept introduced by Dr. Murray Bowen, and here I’ve copied some text from The Bowen Center to describe a well-differentiated self.
A person with a well-differentiated “self” recognizes his realistic dependence on others, but he can stay calm and clear headed enough in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection to distinguish thinking rooted in a careful assessment of the facts from thinking clouded by emotionality. Thoughtfully acquired principles help guide decision-making about important family and social issues, making him less at the mercy of the feelings of the moment. What he decides and what he says matches what he does. He can act selflessly, but his acting in the best interests of the group is a thoughtful choice, not a response to relationship pressures. Confident in his thinking, he can support others’ views without being a disciple or reject others’ views without polarizing the differences. He defines himself without being pushy and deals with pressure to yield without being wishy-washy.
thebowencenter.org – Differentiation of Self
This is hard shit if you didn’t grow up in a family with healthy attachments. Honestly, it’s hard shit for anybody.
With the help of a this therapist, I began to try and rewire my brain, in what I now recognize as my first steps into mindfulness training. It began with a constant reminder that became a mantra: Orient Self To Self. My aim was to move away from looking to others/outside to see if i’m okay, Rather I can look to myself (hello, mindfulness!) and also commit to being the kind of person that I am proud to be, giving myself grace and forgiveness when I don’t live up to my own expectations or the commitments i’ve made to others. To be free to be okay when others may not act in the way I expect or hope for.
I’ve made some progress. Most day’s I earn a “B” in this category. Some days and strings of days, I really lock into a healthy mindset that’s even better. But on the occasions when my more intense anxiety surfaces, and my ability to access these new skills becomes compromised, I can actually observe myself getting pulled away from wise mind, sucked into fear and muddled thinking, feeling unworthy and unloveable.
Tara Brach, in her excellent teaching on the RAIN of self-compassion, refers to this as a trance, “a narrow, distorted reality that lasts for a time.” The trance narrows one’s focus to only see what’s wrong, forgetting the larger context of life. She proposes that the only way to widen perspective from the narrow focus on what’s wrong, is to shine a light on the trance itself, which I suppose is what i’m attempting to do here.
I’m going to write more another time about how I’ve been attempting to integrate the RAIN concepts into my life this year. It is slow and vulnerable work, and rewarding.
These last couple of weeks I have been battling the trance with some big wins and some sad losses. Wish me luck.
