Cactus Juice

Joyeux Deuxième

I started the day reading an intensely intellectually and spiritually satisfying book (there will be more later!), and scribbling madly in my journal.  Something, somehow, today, had to tell me why I am here.  If I'm expecting something to change in my life this weekend, that is still no reason to be here.  If I'm here for the race, at 20 pounds heavier than I have ever completed a half-marathon, it's not a very good reason.  If I'm here to spit in the eye of the universe and insist I will not be bullied by anyone- well, that doesn't quite meet the requirement either (even if it is something I have to do).

The twists of fate left me sitting on the wall in front of the Legion of Honor art museum for an hour with nothing to do but stare at the view.  Still waiting for my epiphany.  Eventually my friend arrived and we took her two delightful children to Fisherman's Warf, where they had never been, and dinner at the Franciscan Crab Restaurant, where I had never been.  After sending them on their way I made my annual trip to Old Navy to get some throw away clothes for the early morning mists of the race.  Walking down Market Street in the early evening, I finally realized why I am here: because I love San Francisco.  I would like to finish the race.  To put one foot in front of the other in an organized event is a worship of place like no other.  I may fail in that, this time more likely than any other time because really I am not well enough to be doing this, but even if I do the fact is that I came here because this place is wonderful.

Joyeux Vole

 My flights were not nearly as traumatic as I had imagined.  One version had me in tears, but in fact I read two books (which you'll be hearing about) and sat next to a talkative mother and adult daughter.

The plane was equipped with wireless internet and I observed a woman video-chatting.  Telephone calls have been available in planes for many years I have made an in-flight call myself, but to actually be able to see someone on the ground (to actually be able to see someone on the plane!) was truly astonishing!  In fact, I ended up in the video myself, so someone on the ground saw me!  In contract, the in-flight magazine still advertised Michael Jackson's tour as a reason to fly to England.

I myself am caught exactly between the future and the past, but that is the reason for the trip.  Today the pleasure of it slightly outweighed the discomforts of the unavoidable purgatory.  After arriving to a picture postcard perfect day --San Francisco indeed exists mainly to break my heart-- I had myself delivered to a luxury I had forgotten that I had selected for myself.  With the addition of an upgrade because it "it is so nice to see you again."  If one is to serve out a purgatory, one could do worse than my present arrangement.

For my afternoon, I wandered by a See's Candy store where I was sold a chocolate for $1.40 with cold efficiency and immediately left to myself while a chocolate and a banana was delivered for free to the gentleman residing on the front step.  A bus passed by featuring three penis's discussing the importance of STD testing.  I continued to Alexander Book Company, where the book covers curl in the ocean dampness but no one closes the front door.  Ah, San Francisco!

Christmas Experiences in Miami: disenchantment and enchantment

Spirituality without morality is simple fantasy; spirituality with morality is incarnation.

(Norvene Vest, Desiring Life, p. 116)

I spent Christmas afternoon on Lincoln Road, South Beach.  All the stores were open, it was the very image of one atheist's dream when he said that someday Christmas will be "just another day."  One pathetic Christmas tree, lost in all the lights and activity.  The Jews do slightly better: a large and beautiful menorah of sea shells and some very serious young men in yarmulkes standing in front ready to give you information about the religion.  Still, I'm not sure the best answer isn't just to move a block over.  I won't be going back next Christmas.

Lincoln Road has a peculiar magic, and community.  This rooster, well known, generally is seen settled half-asleep on the handle-bars while the bike owner goes about his appointed rounds.  I had never met the rooster before he breezed past my lobster ravioli at my sidewalk table.  Later, my South Beach friend & cultural interpretor commented about a passer-by: "I can't tell if that's a girl or a guy."  Me: "That seems to be a standard problem around here."  Though only a problem of interpretation; far more serious problems exist in the social structure.

Every time I go to South Beach, I learn something new about the vile and soul-destroying culture.  A Pat Robinson or Jerry Falwell criticizing it from afar has no idea what he is talking about: it is really so much worse than that.  As my local friend pointed out and I could already gather for myself, homosexuality has very little to do with it.  I always find myself disturbed that more whole/holy cultural alternative isn't easily accessible by my gay friends.  However, as my Miami friend once again points out, the community is so small that subdivisions are difficult to create.  Even if my local congregation were to welcome a young gay boy with open arms (which they actually would), the fact would remain that he would be the only gay boy around.  I don't know the solution, I just know that the more the vileness is seen the more difficult it is to be the clueless tourist enjoyed a colorful subculture that was there the day before I showed up and will still be there the day after I leave.  Education and wealth leave you the opportunity to drop in culturally and geographically, but others have no real options for dropping out.

Maturity, responsibility, wholeness: all these things are more likely to make magic dead.  An unhappy paradox is that the person seeking these things is more likely to end up dour, humorless, and lacking the joy of humanity.  One step forward, two steps back.

For my Christmas gift, my friend got us tickets to Corteo by Cirque du Soliel.  In the show, the Clowness, played by Valentyna Paylevanyan, is made neutrally buoyant by a set of balloons.  Going beyond bringing a midget into a show in a non-exploitive way, this show makes you want to be Ms. Paylevanyan.

We sat behind a group of about five young girls, perhaps nine years old, and one young boy.  I commented to my friend that these things are best seen with children, who still have such a great sense of magicalism.  I was perhaps thrown astray by my sister's reporting of my three-year-old nephew's excitement over Christmas morning the day before.  These children were tri-lingual, multi-urban between South American and Miami, nasty to their male relative, and quite beyond magic.  They were resolutely ignored by the clown they set about teasing, and were not even impressed by Ms. Paylevanyan floating over their heads at the point where she jumped from palm to palm, held aloft by her wonderful balloons.

These girls made me think of a movie from several years ago.  At the climax of the movie, a virgin must read the magic script to save the world from evil.  She completes the reading and the evil continues to advance.  The heroes of the movie look at her, questioning her virtue, and she wails: "Well, it was just once!"  They finally have to coach an eight-year-old child through the text in order to obtain the required virginal reading.  Maybe magic only exists in the heart of a three-year-old on the other side of the country.

Our last stop before I returned to Raleigh was brunch at the Biltmore.  We had been once before and had been, well, stunned.  Brunch is served in a beautiful interior courtyard.  The food is the best of everything, as well as being everything.  The very best preserved meats in three varieties, the very best breads in some far greater number of varieties.  Breathtaking desserts.  And everything else you could imagine.  It is an adult version of the Willie Wonka fantasy.

After everything I've seen in the last few days, it is no wonder that I hesitate to say that it is the magic I can believe in.  As far as I can think, it is a magic that is clean of the vileness just outside the courtyard.  On the previous trip my friend attempted to inject some cynicism into the experience by joking with the dessert attendant, "What, no cheesecake?"  The answer: "Just one moment, sir."  And the gentleman returned with a cheesecake.

It is a mercantile experience; this is magic that is paid for.  But it is paid for fairly, at the value of that which is received, with an experiential value that exceeds the simple things being purchased.  The magic doesn't tread across the surface of something crass, but aims squarely at an ideal of abundance that every person hopes for.  An ideal which, at the Christmas season, many people hope may be reality for those they love and care about.  Certainly there is magic that is free, but for now I'll accept magic that is merely clean.

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Grace:  I wrote most of this post at the airport waiting for my plane.  When I moved from my desk out to the terminal, I ended up sitting next to a young man calling his mother.  Age 25 to 30, black, perhaps gay.  He had apparently gone on a cruise at one point and decided it was the thing for him and was returning from another trip.  Explaining to mother that of course there wasn't anyone on the cruise like him, certainly no one his age, but you "just have to get past that" and meet people and have a good time.

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(I find myself unable to attribute the rooster picture; it came from that jumbled mess that is myspace where you can never figure who came from what, and the flickr source link refused to reveal itself.)

The End of the Road: Finding Rest after Naivety

How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of the bullocks?  Ecclesiasticus 38:29

 

Friday evening the last plane of the last trip landed at 8:30 PM and my new life began.  I unpacked my suitcase for the first time in five years and put it in a closet.  I removed my frequent flier cards (be very afraid: that's platinum on American, gold on US Air and silver on NWA) from my pocketbook and placed them in a desk drawer.  Ecclesiasticus goes on to honor the worker: I did valuable work on the safety of new medications and spent the last two years on a product that has the potential to prevent death in otherwise hopeless situations, and I will continue to do the same kind of work from home.  But the text is right that one is working or one is studying.  Just as there really is no such thing as a work/life balance, there is no balance between the ox and the scholar.  One is engaged in either the task of one or the other.  One can only try to create a life where the times and seasons of the activities somehow match up with the unifying goal of a life well lived.

Sixty posts and almost a year ago I started this blog, first with a declaration of 1 Corinthians 13, noting "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity..."  Hope was a guiding star in the desert.  Hope was not safe, but it wasn't a reason to come in from the playground.

I didn't think I would ever find a reason to come in from the playground when all of North America was my back yard, but I have found a reason: I am tired.  I need a nap.  I performed a record setting number of work trips in the first nine months of the year (I have the accolade from my employer to prove it), while simultaneously gestating a still-born romance.  And ran two half-marathons and a 20K, trained for a marathon, completed a triathlon, and read enough books to prickle my brain enough to write this blog.  All while carrying on, in some form, the normal duties of an American householder.  I expect it may take as long as a year for my exhaustion to recover.  I've realized that I've been sick almost every six weeks this year, compared to not at all the year before.  Sitting in my bathtub last night, I found that the persistent airplane bruises on my lower legs have turned into a large hematoma on one calf.

As my exhaustion set in two months ago, I dreamed every night of gamblers throwing up their hands at dinner tables, on front steps of foreclosed houses, after divorces, every night the gamblers wailing together, "We've lost everything."  Despite the loss expressed in the dream, I did not wake up with the sense of grief that I have been experiencing in real life.  I went on the road five years ago without concern or forethought, not knowing that after five years on the road you really do lose everything.  And the last thing to be lost is the only thing you had left: the road.  So I face the return home with some trepidation.   I've discovered that there is something to lose after the loss of innocence.  There is a loss of ignorance: you knew it, but you didn't know you knew it.  Sometimes that is called naivety.  Arthur Koestler wrote of his own pretended naivety:

"The one 'diversion from the class struggle' that did not make me feel guilty was love.... With most men, at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries, sex is the main source of guilt and anxiety.  In my case, it was the only pursuit exempt from guilt--perhaps because my attitude to women remained basically naive and romantic, imparting to each liaison a flavour of uniqueness; and the feeling of uniqueness seems to me the only criterion of purity in matters of sex.  The squalor of promiscuity prompted by mere pleasure-seeking lies in the drawing of comparisons.  To be compared in one's most intimate behaviour to others is a degrading and wounding thought, and probably the main reason why we set so much store on exclusive possession.  The phantom-chaser, however, who discover's Helen's image in each beloved face, feels each time that 'this is the real thing', set apart from all other experiences, past and future, and hence not comparable with them.  It is a feeling that automatically conveys itself to the other person, and creates an oasis of innocence round both, leaving regret but no resentment when the illusion dissolves." The Invisible Writing, pp. 41-42

The real end to naivety has both regret and resentment.  Each choice is comparable with the other choices that could have been made.  I went on the road with naivety, not knowing what I would lose of home.  I come home without that naivety, knowing that I can only have a new life by losing the old one.

I've mentioned that I have lost my sense of spiritual connection since the time when I was having those dreams of loss.  Part of the intentionality of this new life was that there will be time for God, but God flees from being a fall-back position.  Still scurrying after God, I dreamed more recently that I tried to steal a life purpose from the innocent.  In the dream, I walked very far to a rural high school and broke into a boy's car and went through all his mail, trying to find an idea for how to live my own life.

Things are going to change a lot over the coming year.  For a short time I had a terror that I was completely lost.  However, after visiting more than 150 cities this year the fact is that I know that my place is in Raleigh and not in any of those other places.  As imprecise as that is, it does narrow things down a lot.  Indeed, it proves that my place is meant to be something other than exhaustion.

Fugg-it: I've Become Nicer

I've had suspicions for a few weeks, but it was confirmed tonight when a car ran a stop sign at a converging "y" intersection and raced down the street ahead of me.  I screamed out loud as our cars nearly collided, then landed on the horn even though the danger was over.  Watching the tail-lights disappear down the road I thought to myself, "Oh well, he must have been confused."  I realize this thought is positively un-American, and I swear I have never thought such a thing before in my life.

As my readers surely know by now, a couple of months ago I fell down, down, down and have re-shuffled my entire life in hopes that it will pull me back up to the light of the human world.  Despite the above referenced oddity, which seems to indicate a long-term change in character, I would say that I am getting better.  At my darkest unhappiness, I went from being ready to attack the next person that caused me the slightest inconvenience (and by this I mean to say that the volatility and rage was even more extreme than the usual road-warrior road-rage state) to, well, this:

I was in LAX and needed to grab a couple of things from the shop before I got on my plane.  If you're familiar with how these shops are set up, you'll know that the registers are usually in an island in the center of the store.  The island is inconveniently rounded so that there is no clue where the line should go or might go.  One individual was making a purchase, I stood to the right of him such as "in line" and almost immediately thereafter seven people lined up to the left.  The attendant looked at me, and said, "You need to get in line."  I couldn't go to the end of the line because there would not be time to make my purchase and my flight, plus I was there first.  I was certain that the second person in line was aware I was ahead of him, which was why I hadn't opened a discussion with him.  The attendant, who had been standing directly in front of me the entire time, seemed to somehow be unaware that I had existed before the moment when the line was seven people long and looked at me as if I were the worst kind of line-jumping salamander.

I moved myself and my two carry-ons into the minute space between the purchaser and the second person in the line saying, "I'm sorry, she wants me to stand over here.  I was here first."  To this person I am now the obnoxious pushy woman who has dropped her luggage virtually on his toes, and unnecessarily asserted that perhaps he was trying to cut in line, something we both knew was not the case.  "Hey!" he says, "Was I saying' anything about it!"  And then to his wife, "What is the deal with people who have to say they are first."  I completed my purchase with the attendant, who was now certain I had cut in line and hated me too, and burst into tears.  It was the classic no-win situation, which usually makes me angry.  Instead, I was profoundly sad that the world had completely run out of people who might view me as a good person, and that indeed I probably was not a good person.  Since my job is to audit people and tell them what they do wrong I had at least one opportunity a day to feel this way, though most days it was more than possible to fill the quota well before I got to work.

I wanted to just concentrate on getting myself sorted out, but my doctors convinced me that not crying at work, at airports and all night while I did my sorting out was also good.  In fact, I had not slept for several weeks, so I took the medication I was offered.  The medication worked great for sleeping at night.  Then the days improved because it took so much effort to get up in the morning and stay up for the entire day that there was neither energy remaining for a potential travel homicide nor for self-loathing introspection.  I quit taking the pills.  And then the next week something happened that showed me that I was coming back into my Cactus wholeness:

The flight was late to load and the woman sitting next to me and I had not had time to get our books, chocolate, etc. from our luggage.  After we took off we had only a moment to get the job done because of an approaching beverage cart, but after we stood up we realized we were in the way of someone coming from the opposite direction trying to get to the toilet.  When we moved to get out of his way, he said we should go ahead and finish and then also looked irritatedly at us as we grasped at the items in our bags.  It was all too much for a couple of road warrior and when we sat down we forgot to close the overhead bins.  As he passed he said, "You could close the bins."  I immediately jumped up to fix my idiot mistake, just as he added a taunting, "Maybe."  I hollered down the isle after him, "You could be polite... maybe."

Somehow a little blip into depression before returning to my old self turned into being understanding of dangerously confused drivers and nicer to people in person too.  Something that miles and miles of running, hours and hours of meditation, painstaking 12-step evaluation, and an occasional sense of spiritual wholeness could not do.  Indeed, the changes to the body and mind caused by six sleepless weeks are extreme, and one of them has been to completely lose my sense of spiritual connection.  Yet this niceness thing is happening, and I'm again becoming pretty sure that I'm not only a good person, but a continually better person.  Part of the problem, which would take too much introspection to explain on a Friday night, was that for a few weeks I didn't think it was possible to be all three at the same time.  Objectively, it isn't, but being close enough is okay.

A Wander Completed

Last weekend I took my version of a vacation, which is to say that I made my way from a conference that ended in Vancouver on Sunday to work in Seattle on Monday via ferry and seaplane with an overnight at the Empress Hotel in Victoria.  The evening was perfect, and I took in an outdoor dinner at the Bon Rouge, complete with the knowing ministrations of a waiter who had just finished a five year wander of the world and was settling himself in for a while there in Victoria.

I returned to my room and found The Bridges of Madison County showing on the television.  I hadn't seen the movie since it was on the big screen.  I was 20 years old, struggling in a difficult marriage, and intrigued.  My husband was appalled.  Now I'm twice divorced and heart-broken a small number of times --a little more experienced-- and a wanderer myself.  I'm at the end of five years of constant travel in North America; the last time I spent an entire week at home was in 2007, for an entire month I would have to look back to 2005.  The movie looks a lot different.

Meryl Streep still moves me, but I don't believe Clint Eastwood anymore.  The movie tells the standard story of the wanderer who breezes in and revitalizes a woman, while at the same time redeeming more sordid bits of this kind of story.  Reading the reviews, some people dislike the insertion of the adult children into the story (apparently not part of the book), but I find that they turn the movie into as much what one is to do with the story as the story itself- a clever means of forcing an interpretation upon the audience.

In a story like this, the wanderer has some special wisdom.  As they say "a BS'er can spot the BS," and I can tell you that while all who wander are not lost, they are definitely not found either.  Insofar as a wanderer may have some inborn sanity, it can only be to know that she is not whole and that everyone is incomplete in some way.  If you weren't looking for something, you wouldn't be there.

We believe in wandering as a form of exorcism.  A person with troubles is advised to take a vacation.  Every culture has rituals to confound evil spirits- certain Asian cultures never call a child by his given name so as to keep it a secret from the spirits (I read now that that Roma follow this practice as well), we put groups of men and women into clothing similar to a bride and groom (although I have also read that this has been meant to confound a more pedestrian kind of evil- kidnappers).  The vacationer takes herself away and brings herself back, but somewhere along the way the evil spirit wanders off.  The success of this technique has had its measure taken many times in novels and film; Legends of the Fall comes to mind.

My own history has been left all over the continent.  My childhood home and the home in which I now reside are nearly blank slates, despite the significant events which have occurred in each place.  My mother died at the first location, but for me her death occurred in various locations in Manhattan and in the Crown Plaza of downtown Philadelphia where I made myself ready to return home and face her absence.  Friends have visited my home, but significant conversations occurred there, in that chair in my room in Vancouver, and there too- any hotel I walk into I can remember specific conversations that occurred there.  One hotel in Houston I call my crying hotel: after a divorce and days after I resumed dating, three match.com conversations ended there in one afternoon; my cat died there; it is always the place where loneliness swoops in.  Over these five years I have shaken loose a ghost in every town and city and airport and highway that I have visited, though they visit me again when I return.

I've stayed on the road for five years because at each juncture the courage it would take to live at home was greater than the courage it took to live on the road.  To stay in one spot, surrounded by one's visiting spirits in their variety from beneficent to benign, but always with the possibility of being outnumbered by the malicious, was more terrifying than the constant motion of the road.  My tenure as a wanderer has been a success- I've shaken off what there was to clap my heels at and my home is clean.  There's not much more beneficent than Brewster at the door of his house chattering his teeth at me.  It's going to be good to go home.

 

Brewster, looking beneficent.