As Is

Yikes. What was I thinking linking my babbling pages to the bio paragraph of the article I submitted to Common Dreams day before yesterday? Maybe I didn't really think the article would get published so I didn't agonize over it like I usually do? Or that this is the only blog I'm actually writing in at the moment and since I'd mentioned blogging in the article, it was only fair to link to one? Or was it the wine I had with dinner?

I know people have been here. Some have mentioned it in emails. And the count for how many people went to the profile page--which is the access to my other blogs, the ones that were meant for public consumption--went up considerably.

This blog really was intended as a writer's tool. Practice. Letting monkey mind play. Writing without the editor who loves to hover over every word. The thought police who tell me what I should think and say and feel and write and convey, that over time can be pretty convincing but not necessarily true.

And everyone knows what it feels like to have someone hovering over your shoulder when you're trying to create. Yet now I've actually INVITED people to hover! Yikes again. But maybe it's a good thing. Maybe an intensive practice whereby I really have to work through some of my bigger fears regarding writing and editing and my tendency to agonize so much about perfection and judgement that I lose contact with the small but true voice within.

Actually, writing tool aside, I'd like to recommend the true form of morning pages (as discussed in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) as a good tool for learning who you really are, stripped of who you've always been told you are. If you can learn to listen. Hence the importance of daily practice with the tool. Little by the little, with encouragement, the real voice--long buried deep within--gets stronger and stronger. Currently I just hear a faint whisper of the voice, but a whisper is certainly better than the silence I used to hear. At least I know there's life.

Interestingly, at the moment anyway, I actually feel freer to just let it hang out--despite or maybe even because of the fact that this isn't necessarily private. And, over time, as I gradually remove the 41 year buildup of so much varnish and veneer, perhaps more and more of myself will get the chance to hang out in its natural state. Not to devalue the process itself though. It's not about the destination. A snippet of memory and a 15 year old epiphany reminds me to reconsider where I'm heading with this.

I was living in Elma, Washington at the time. One--usually rainy--Saturday or Sunday a month I'd bundle up my young son and myself and we'd drive to the Grays Harbor County Fairgrounds for the local swap meet. My goal was to find at least one little interesting tidbit. Preferably something old. Something under $20. One particular morning I found an old shaving mirror. The mirror was crackled with age, the wooden frame looked like it had been painted with a hundred tiny bottles of white-out. It hung by a tangle of rusty wire. It spoke to me for some reason.

I took home the mirror and decided to see what was underneath the "white-out." While my son was napping I retrieved some paint remover and sanding paper and went out into the carport for some excavation work.

It wasn't easy getting the paint off. And little by little, as the white came away in patches, I uncovered a layer of green paint, un-ripe avocado green. And as that came away in patches I discovered that the wood beneath was honey colored oak. I sat there and thought to myself, (it's still such a clear memory, which is unusual for me), "Why on earth would anyone have painted over this beautiful oak? And why would they have then painted over the green with this ugly white?"

Then suddenly I realized, thankfully, that through all the time this mirror had been in existence, there had been differing ideas of what beauty was. Of how things should be. I immediately saw the mirror in a whole new way. Saw it as beautiful just the way it was. I left it as is--part oak, part green, and part white--as a reminder that beauty can be found anywhere along the way, if we can just behold and perceive it.

I received a touching email this morning, in response to my article, from a woman who told me about her daughter-in-law who was born and raised in Sarajevo and 15 when the war broke out.

There was very real danger all day every day but they tried to make life go on as it was supposed to. For instance she was walking home from school with a friend when the friend was shot in the head by a Serbian sniper and killed. She was deeply affected but the next day took the same route home almost in defiance of the possibility that the sniper would shoot at her this time...

...There were dance contests (tangos mostly) in cold and unlit ballrooms because the acts of dancing and singing re-affirmed their humanity and aliveness.

Because the acts of dancing and singing re-affirmed their humanity and aliveness.

The woman, (hopefully she won't mind if I tell you that her name is Glenda), ended her email with this poignant observation:

If we cannot understand human nature's demand to be human even in the midst
of terror and horror then there is little hope we can understand anything.

So...here we are, covered in varying layers of color, a few different veneers, an odd varnish or two, sometimes bordering crackled reflections, and often hanging only by a tangle of rusty wire. And while we might--in our attempts to understand what lies beneath--continue to peel off bits of old color and veneer and varnish, and often-times fume about the reflections we observe (in ourselves and in each other), let us not forget to re-affirm our humanity and beauty and aliveness wherever we are, in every moment. I'm by no means suggesting that we just sit back and blithely accept what is, to see beauty in war and greed and hate. But I am suggesting we not forget to see beauty in spite of it.

After all, (to end with a quote similar to the one A Bowl of Cucumbers ends with, but this one by Ernest Holmes):

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.