Faith

For most of my adult life I have heard tell of a book written by my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  It was a book in which she describes her interactions with forces beyond our world.  By her definition and by wider repute she was known as a Christian mystic.  Even in my childhood I had heard whispered bits of stories about her experiences, incidences in which she would commune with ghosts or God.  Where she would in one day learn to play the piano with the proficiency that could only have been attainable after a lifetimes worth of arduous practice.  As I forged ahead with my exploration cousins of mine confirmed the book's existence and in some cases had told me that they had actually read parts of it.  My cousin Trudy who passed unexpectedly this past week was one who had read it when she was a teenager.  Speaking to Trudy about it only heightened its mythology within my mind and more recently the role that Faith had played in my great aunt Hazel's life. 

Merriam Webster defines Faith as an allegiance to, or fidelity with something.  A belief in a traditional religious doctrine ; a trust in or loyalty to something.  A sincerity in ones promises.  Putting aside the raison d'etre of Merriam Webster's mission, their definitions belies Faith's relationship with mysticism, that misty intersection of otherworldliness that can be neither seen nor touched with the solidity of the ground beneath our feet.  In a recent blog I seem to remember saying that I had received a copy of my great aunt Hazel's book. and in the intervening months I have read some of it.  It is fascinating in many ways and it has fed my need to explore it more deeply and by extension my relationship to Faith.

During my childhood religion played a fundamental role in our household.  To put it bluntly religion was the bedrock of our lives.  It wasn't until my wholesale rejection of and subsequent renewal with a protestant church of different and more accepting viewpoint that I began to understand why religion was so important to my parents, and in particular to my mom.  In a complicated way my mom believed that her religious tenets were the garments in which she could wrap herself in to find comfort, meaning, and protection.  In reality that was not the case.  My mom's childhood demons haunted her every day of her life, and by extension ours.  In a recent conversation with a paternal cousin I described my mom as being difficult.  In many ways that is a gross understatement.  My mom was a complicated, controlling, reactionary, frightened, and often frighteningly violent twelve year old child living in an adult body.  Her professed religious beliefs were not a comfort but a weapon that she would use to bludgeon those around her into submission.  I remember her always saying It's not what I say but what God says.  I came to understand during my renewal that my mom conflated her missing self esteem and self worth with that of the omnipotence of her God.  In the intervening years before recovery and early into my recovery I began to understand that in many ways I was also like my mom.  I was often complicated and controlling, at times reactionary sometimes to the point of excess.  I conflated my lack of self esteem and self worth not wrapped within religious tenets but within a sense of academic knowledge.  I began to understand why I was like my mom about three years into recovery when I started to  re-experience parts of my childhood trauma, memories that I had buried deep within me out of reach of my conscious mind.  To look into my past with a keen eye is to understand how I inhabit the present.  There's a saying in recovery that in essence says look back without staring.  Some people have interpreted that to mean live in the present with little regard to ones past.  I interpret it to mean that the more I understand how my past informs my present the more my body will transform from living in past to living in the present.  Equally important is to  understand that I am the sum total of my experiences to date on this earth.  That I can not erase my past, I can only continually build a new relationship to those things from my past that challenge me in the presence.  It is about acceptance.

How I came to be where I find myself today was more about the randomness of life than of me making thoughtful decisions based on prayer and guidance.  That has changed in the twenty one years I've been in recovery.  I am more thoughtful, less reactive, less controlling, and by extension, less complicated.  In everything I try to act from a place of intention seeking guidance through prayer.  I continue to work to deepen my acceptance of my past and the PTSD that comes with it.  I have found more clarity about my relationship to grief.  I can also say with a great deal of introspection that my spiritual practice has, over these last many years, expanded exponentially beyond my renewed protestant beliefs.  In hindsight I suppose that was inevitable.  That I find myself here, finding a different way to inhabit my spirituality by questioning the very foundations of it.  That is why reading my great aunt Hazel's book is so apropos.  She was not afraid to open up to all the possibilities, to embrace her mysticism.  She followed it where ever it led her.  Great aunt Hazel was not afraid to explore the world well beyond what the five senses had to offer.  It seems too that I am now being led through her prose and poetry toward more mystical experiences of my spirituality.  Maybe that is the role Faith is to play in my life.  For me to let go.  To follow where I am being led with a childlike sense of awe and wonder.  To allow myself to be led by Faith.  

Today

 "We can not erase our pasts however hard we try.  Instead we must carry them with us into the future.  We must carry them with us and look forward with hope.  We must look forward because to look back is to waste precious time.  Someone recently said to me we should live as we have never lived and we must, all of us, take heed and live as we have never lived for we are all mortal.  We are all fragile, and we all live under the shadow of death."

These are not my words but ones said by the vicar at the end of the first episode of Grantchester, a favorite British show of mine.  The reason they were said is not important.  What is important is that this paragraph is prophetic for me right now although I do take issue where the vicar says looking back is a waste of precious time.  I find it quite powerful to look back.  I believe to know ones past is to know oneself.  For most of my life before recovery and for a good number of years into it I blindly moved forth without the benefit of hindsight.  A bull in a china shop comes to mind albeit with some bits of grace and decorum mixed in.  I wasn't the bull because of outright malice, it was for the most part because I was unaware of my childhood trauma and the effects it had on my adult life.  To understand one's past is to know how that past informs ones present.  

I am not a very forward looking person right know although I have, for some time, been seeking guidance from my Higher Power about what my future is meant to be.  To say that my life has changed in the last three years is a gross understatement.  Three years ago my only concern was preparing for retirement.  I did not know that both Larry and Guido would pass from this earth as my father, mother, Crook, and Sylvia had before them.  I didn't know that I would be leaving work prematurely and that the first year of my retirement would be taken up by settling Guido's estate.  I thought my days would be filled with puttering in the garden, hanging out with Larry in his declining years, traveling back to Italy with Guido, and spending time with my chosen and blood family's who I dearly love.  I thought my days would be like that song sung by Marlene Dietrich entitled Lazy Afternoon.  I knew I wouldn't be spending those hazy lazy afternoons making love as she sings about.  I thought my life would be me relaxing into my post work life while the beetle bugs are zooming and the tulip trees are blooming, and the meadow cows are sleeping......  but I was wrong.  It has been about grieving the loss of the last of my animal companions and the loss of someone who also meant the world to me.  Guido and Larry loved me unconditionally as I loved them, just as I had all who I lost.  As Guido's estate finally moves towards its inevitable end my life has begun to take on more of that lazy hazy afternoon feeling but hanging over it all is one question; what is my life meant to be in my post work years?

I love San Francisco.  I love the fact of it.  The essence of it.  The power it has to warp ones consciousness.  It lures you in with its seductive raison d'etre even on its most challenging of days.  I love my apartment just as I have since I first set eyes on it.  I love how my apartment has evolved over time, how it has evolved since retiring.  I love my garden.  I love the play of light and shadow as the afternoon sun moves west.  I love how the leaves of the trees shimmer in the wind.  I love how the perennial border blooms throughout the spring, summer. and fall.  I love how the birds flit from one branch to another as they teach their young to fly.  My garden is everything I ever dreamed it could be and more.  I love that I have everything I need within a ten block radius of where I live.  That if I chose to I would never have to leave my neighborhood.  I have the quintessential urban life.  A cherished existence that most people only dream of.   I also understand just how tenuous this life is.  Heraclitus said "all is flux, nothing stays still.  Nothing endures but change."  The paradox for me right now is that I want to relax into this life I have so graciously been given while at the same time I seek to escape it.  It is as much about my fear of being vulnerable while at rest as it is about my fear of change.  To relax into my post work life here in San Francisco is patently unsettling to me.  To consider moving away is incomprehensible.  

I have always struggled with how I came to live in San Francisco.  It wasn't by my choice.  It always seemed to be because someone else said this where I should be, like I was riding someone else's coattails.  It may explain why I have never felt a soul connection to San Francisco, that inherent felt sense of homecoming when your foot touches the earth.  I have felt this in other places so it's not from a lack of understanding.  It has been present when walking the streets of New York City, London, Budapest, and Vienna.  In those cities I seem to be able to exhale in a way I could only do here when cuddling with Larry on the floor.  I'm happy to say that somewhat recently there has been a shift in this because of some guidance I received.  Basically it said, I didn't choose San Francisco, it chose me.  This has brought me some peace as guidance generally does, even if at times the answer is not within the realm of possibilities that I saw in front of me.  I was meant to come to San Francisco, to build a life here, but for how long?  Is there another place that is waiting upon my arrival just as San Francisco did for first twenty-one years of my life?  I have no idea.  What I do know is that, as always, the next right step for me is to continue to seek guidance from a power greater than myself until the answer is revealed.  In the mean time I raise my glass to the City by the Bay.  

Life on Life's Terms

I haven't been writing much lately and I miss that.  I miss it because the act of writing does for me what I can rarely do for myself.  It gets me out of my head and down into my body.  There is a quiet center in that down space, a spiritual place that is devoid of my anxiety and fears.   I feel that is why I am so strongly drawn to gardening, besides the genetics of it.  Gardening also gets me down into my body to that quiet center.  It has something to do with feeling the dirt between my fingers and aroma of the sweet loamy soil wafting up.  Cleaning the house while it is quiet does the same for me as does taking a passeggiata in my neighborhood in the late afternoon sun and people watching in the various parks near my home.  Taking a drive out in the country is also a favorite of mine.  My parents use take drives out into the country all the time when I was a kid.  They called it "taking a ride".  There was never a reason for it that I could tell.  It always just seemed like a spontaneous act where they would say, lets go, and we would all pile into the car.  They never had a destination in mind that I could tell.  They just headed away from the house in a blind act of faith.  In my adult years I started taking rides and like my parents, I would let the powers that be randomly lead me towards wherever I was meant to go.  Often times I would find myself driving some back country road somewhere as I enjoyed the unfolding scenery or climbing a steep winding two lane road only to find the expansive Pacific Ocean open out in front of me when I reached the crest.  The last time I went for a ride was about three years ago when Subie Deux was in the shop.   I had rented a canvas topped Fiat 500 for the duration; the little Italian I called it.  After picking the car up from a rental place around the corner I got the urge.  I thought, what better way to spend my day then to open the canvas top and head out for parts unknown.  Soon I found myself heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge, the great towers casting their momentary shadows across me as I drove.  Hours later I was on a back country road in West Sonoma County heading who knows where.  Somewhere along the way I found a perfect place to pull over for a nap.  After turning the engine off and reclining the seat I found myself being lolled into a peaceful place guided by the utter quiet around me, a quiet that was, from time to time, interrupted by some bird song or the occasional warm breeze that rustled the gnarled branches of an old oak tree above.    

Unfortunately I spend a lot of time in my head.  I can't fault the fact of it.  It's raison d'etre is designed to protect me.  It knows it as much as I do that being fully in touch with my physical body brings with it significant emotional challenges.  In the early years of my recovery my anxiety perpetually begot more anxiety feeding on itself like a virus until I thought I would go crazy.  It wasn't until some years later that I learned the value of cultivating quietude.  This is why I value writing and gardening so much among other things.  It transcends that anxiety breaking through to a quiet grounded center that is my safe place.  I learned during those intervening that most of my anxiety originated in the trauma stories of my childhood, tales that had lain unformed for many decades.  I seemed to had always known that something(s) were amiss but they lacked both definition and clarity.  To me they always seemed to be just a bunch of jostled consonants and vowels, ones that I kept nudging into.  It's like those buzzing mosquitos circling above you in a darkened bedroom on a hot summer night.  You know they're there but when you turn on the light.......  The majority of these stories began to coalesce in my late Forties bringing with them the aforementioned anxiety.  Thankfully, much of my recovery has coexisted side by side with my core group of close loving friends, confidants, and beloved animal companions.  Their support and love has been essential to me.  It was because of this that I was able to learn an important lesson, especially lately.  It is the concept of living life on life's terms.  I have to say this wasn't easy and lately it has gotten even more convoluted.  Lately I have come to define this current phase of my recovery as me being in a non sexual polyamorous relationship with various parts of myself and my history, all of which are filled with loads of unconditional love, great joy, even greater sadness, and unending grief just to name a few.  What did Churchill call the Russians?   "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."  That is what this time in my life feels like.  No wonder I have always had a strong affinity towards Russia, an affinity that has recently led me to buying my first icon, one I will soon be hanging in my hallway.  

Life on life's term.  This seemingly simple four word sentence is deceptively complex to me.  It means that I must sit in acceptance even though I often find myself railing against the very situation I know I can not change.  And afterwards when all is calm again I know I still have to face the inevitable fact of what I was trying to avoid in the first place; accepting the reality of my existence.  This is not to say that anger is a wasted emotion.  It is not.  It can be a powerful motivator if it is not twinned with the act of causing harm.  No emotion is wasted in my opinion.  To have a rich full emotional life is a gift from the gods.  They say in the rooms, feeling the full maturation of our emotions without being slaves to them.  There is so much more to this grouping of words too.  It is at once a powerful statement of awareness and acceptance and yet one of utter spiritual humility in the face of our emotional life.  

We humans are an interesting bunch, a fact that has been amply highlighted in the past five years. We have seen the worse of the worse, the best of the best, and everything in between; and yet we are still here, still breathing, still walking the loamy earth beneath our feet.  The Greeks had a good eye for the vastness of our emotion lives.  Their pantheon of gods were based lovingly, or not, on the richness of our human condition.  In Greek mythology the Greek god of fire was married to the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.  Aphrodite was purported to have been born in the froth of the sea when Uranus' genitals were tossed in, genitals that had been cut off by his son, Cronos ; and yet equally it is said that Aphrodite was born from the coupling of Zeus, the Greek god of sky and thunder and his mate Dione, the female side of Zeus.  

Life on life's terms.  It been a tough road, these last four years.  Besides the normal challenges of my recovery I have been faced with a number of health issues, some of which have not yet been resolved and one of which will never be resolved.  I have also lost many that I held deep in my heart.  Beloved cousins and friends; my oldest friend Kathy who I met when I moved to Colorado in 1976; my friend Bebe who I had met in the early 1980's; the last of my animal companions, my beloved cat Larry in May of 2020; and six months ago, Guido, my closest and dearest confidant of forty-two years.  I also retired last September ending my some fifty plus year relationship with the working world.  What I face now is an unknown future, one without the intimate connection of those people who brought me joy, love, and stability.  This is not to say that I haven't a friend left in the world.  I have been deeply blessed over the course of my life and I still have many very close friends and family whom I love dearly and who are at the center of my life. 

Earlier this evening before I started writing this blog I was reminiscing about the time I spontaneously hitchhiked half way across the country during the fall of '76.  I was living in Colorado Springs at the time in a flat I had rented earlier that summer.  I had been partied hard the night before and had slept well into my alarm the next day.  When I finally woke up I realized I was quite late for work.  I remember being utterly frustrated about everything and that I dearly wanted nothing more than to take a break for it all.  I remember grabbing the phone to call Kathy not knowing why until I heard myself asking her if she would come pick up my golden retriever puppy Alexander Bryant and my car because I was going to hitchhike to San Francisco.  When she arrived at my place she tried talking me out of it but I refused to backdown.  After she left I packed my backpack, grabbed the only money I had, three dollars and change, and headed down the few blocks to the Interstate on ramp.  That first night I stayed with my cousin Crystal and her husband in Denver.  Throughout the evening and well into the night they both convinced me not to go west so I decided to go east instead.  For the next week I had the best time.  I never knew who was going to pick me up, or where they would take me.  I never knew when my next meal would come.  I got rides from a father and his teenage son who put me up for the night in Wyoming.  I stayed with a geologist who had picked me up east of Cheyenne.  I got a ride with a trucker, stayed with my friend Chuck in Omaha for three days spending most of my time with an elderly woman I had met on the streets, a woman who had just gotten out of the hospital and was hell bent on having a three day bender.  I got rides from a gang of musicians who had just been released from jail, a randy monk, a gregarious guy in a pickup truck across Iowa, and an insurance salesman who took me into south eastern Wisconsin.  For the entire week I was in no communication with anyone other those who I was spending my time with.  Not once during that week did I feel in danger.  Not once did I question my decision to leave.  It was all about just living from moment to moment without knowing what my future held for me.    

Life on life's terms.  It's not a bad thing.  It's rather liberating to tell the truth because as I walk my current path I know that it is the same act of faith that I had tapped into while hitchhiking.  I know I will be taken care of by a power greater than myself just like I was then.  And I know that I will be shown what the next right step is for me and that all will be revealed when it is meant to be revealed.  And I know I will arrive at my next destination when I am suppose to arrive.  In the meantime all I need to do is take one step at a time, then another, then another.