Sunday, December 30, 2012

A Walk In The Woods

I`m reading Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods in preparation for the book I'm going to write next year.  It's funny, but only about half way through did I realize, at a deep level, that it was about trees.  My mind this year has been so on technology that I've forgotten how important the natural processes of the world were to me.  But technology works best when we understand what it already wonderful and powerful in the world. It also works best when we realize what is vulnerable
  Consider the natural technology of the tree, from Bryson's book:
 
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.  All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue--the phloem, xylem and cambium--just beneath the bark, which together forma a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood.  However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.  These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do it is one of the wonders of life.  Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water--several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day--from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere.  Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter f machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water.

This has been without contest, the most difficult, uncertain and painful year of my life.  I have no doubt that there are many other uncertainties in my future.  But this year was just profoundly stressful at my core.  It is a really frightening thing to be poor, and I never want to be that bad again, and I would never want that for anybody.

But I survived and I have a year of writing ahead. For the next year I am doing the thing I have always wanted to do, the thing I have always dreamed of doing, writing a book.  Writing a book with no pressing responsibilities, other than to write that book.

To do this I need a lucid mind, a strong core, faith in myself and my abilities.  Faith in the value of my project.

To build these things, I will stand.


Sunday, December 23, 2012

Nervous Breakthrough

This has been, as far as I can remember, the most stressful year of my life. So much fell apart.  The newspaper where I had a column for twenty years folded.  With it about fifteen years of archives of my work.
  I faced more professional rejection than I`ve ever had to face as a I tried to make the transition to long form journalism and sell a book proposal.  In part to make ends meet, I took a deal to move out of my apartment at the end of my lease.  But with no income coming in, I worried how I would     find a landlord willing to rent to me.
  With so much anxiety and stress blowing around in my mind, it was hard to meditate.  I could feel my physical and mental health ebbing away as the stress proliferated.
  But I made  it through.  A few days ago  I got news that I'd received a grant.  Enough money that I can spend the next year working on a book project. Enough money that for the next while, I can breathe.
  During a period of deep crisis a few week back I reached out for consolation from my brother. A deeply sensitive person and a gifted actor, he has struggled all his life with low self esteem and obsessive compulsive disorder.  It seemed to me in the last few months he's been able to pull himself out of a terrible rut and get his confidence back.  I've always tried to be there for him, but this time I really needed his help.  He turned me on to the work of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
  I'm sure I'll be writing more about him in future blogs, but one of the he tells a story in the opening chapters of his book  The Joy of Living about the anxiety and panic attacks he struggled with as a child. It must have been a stressful childhood, given that he's an incarnate, declared  the reincarnation of a seventeenth century rinpoche.  That's a lot of pressure for a kid.  But towards the end of his teenage years, as he struggled with this chronic anxiety, he had a realization.  This anxiety wasn't a deeply entrenched fact of his brain.  It was more of a heightened awareness of the anxiety that most people live with.  Many people have nervous breakdowns. As he worked through it, he began to think of it has his nervous breakthrough.
  This has been a year of nervous breakthrough.  I have questioned my path as a writer, over and over again.  But I didn't fall apart.  I kept writing.  I kept standing even if I could stand it for more than twenty minutes.  I know I watched too much television, but I made it through. And now I approach my fiftyeth year with more confidence and peace and money than I had last year at this time.
  My one goal for next year is to write a book. To support that goal I plan to do a lot of standing, and do a lot of rebuilding of my sense of peace and equanimity.
  Or let me tweak that. Do much rebuilding of my awareness of peace an tranquility.  Because it has always been there for me.  It is always there for me, and it will always be there for me.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Standing or Writing

For the last many years now, I've struggling with a choice between two loves.  Standing and writing.  If I could only do one upon waking.  If I should only do one upon waking, which should it be.  And also, why do I think it's a choice. A do or die choice?
It's like my life has always been set up as a double bind choice.  Which parent do I choose mother or father.  Which path do I choose artistic, or economically satisfying.  I've believed all my life I had to choose, but I did I?
 In the end, I never really had to choose between my parents.
 Do I have to choose between standing and writing? Can they be different forms of meditation that I use depending on what I'm cultivating at the moment. The core loop is meditation. Or rather the core loop is awareness, whether I achieve it through writing or standing isn't as important as keeping to the core loop.
  All the rest is background.