Waking Down into Singularity

This morning, waking up in a strange bed, I had twe thoughts right after my eyes opened. The first was the realization that when I have been sharing my pain with Nancy, a little part of me has been wanting to punish her with it.
"Here, look what you've done, you short-sighted pretender! Suffer along with me, you deserve it."

Along with that realization came the certainty that it has to stop. It's not fair to Nancy, of course. But it's also untrue to me. If I use my pain to punish her, I'm not really feeling it. In fact, I'm diluting and perverting my experience. That's not who I am.

My second thought was that I couldn't remember if that was hypnogogic or hypnopompic. I think it's
-pompic.

My third thought is that there's something key-like here. If I'm angry with her, I will tell her. When it hurts, I'll tell her. But I can't heal if I don't own the whole damn ugly stinking thing. And my goal is to come out of this a whole man. I can almost see that state of being, even from here. It's in the distance, and I can see it.

I still feel why Nancy thinks she has to leave and I want her to have the man she wants, the relationship she wants. I'm also still not ready to say that her decision was good: (visual words come to mind-short-sighted, blind, myopic.)

Whatever goodness her decision might have for her, it's only a disaster for me if I don't take it on with my strength instead of with the weakling move of punishing her with my pain. I have what it takes to get through this in a way that will make me like myself, and that starts now.

We Both Feel Sad

So, I've been demoted.

A few weeks ago, I was a partner. Now, I'm a friend.

I haven't exactly been kicked out, but I've been shown the open door. Everything is in halves: maybe we'll make love sometimes, maybe we won't. What does it mean to be a friend when you're in love?
It means trying to cherish your beloveds distance from you. It means having an acre of love and a tabletop to put it on.

Tonight, we're not sleeping together for the first time in a long time. Nancy calls and says she's sad.
I'm sad too, but it's not the same sad. She's doing something that needs to be done and she's sad because she knows it hurts me and because she's going to miss the goodness between us. I'm sad because I think this is a waste and waste is ugly. I hate wasting beauty, I hate wasting goodness.

I want her to have what she wants to have. I do. And so, I'll do all the right things, take myself out the open door, not hang around or act as if I had some right to be near her. I'll protect my heart, I'll cry, but I won't burst in.

I'll even try to be a friend. I will, and I can't imagine what will happen on the day she tells me there's another man. I should probably arm myself: go online, be charming. But I think it would be another waste.
I'll take the opportunity to feel the pain of this. I'll medicate judiciously: creativity and good food, maybe some art and music. But mostly I'll just feel the pain and see what comes of it.

The bright side? You mean there's a bright side? Well, maybe. I've been wanting to do some deep diving into my self. I don't want to do it for someone else and I don't want it to be too closely supervised by my lover. This needs to be me alone doing the work with a therapist, or two therapists and a guru and a counselor and a facilitator and maybe even a personal trainer. In a certain world, it would be a good thing that nancy dumped me. I just don't happen to live in that world yet.

It's not the booby prize-being able to do this growth work now, but I wish...oh, you can guess what i wish.
---

The worst part is going to bed. I could play with the pain downstairs, but I dread getting into bed.
So I've medicated by staying up-watching youtube videos- now I am drunk with fatigue.

I used to Drink and Now I Don't

The end of my love affair with wine and beer wasn't terribly dramatic. The diagnosis wasn't pointing toward doom, it was pointing toward discomfort. The best cure? Take antacids and stop drinking coffee, wine and beer.

I tapered off. Wine wasn't much fun since my bout with throat cancer so I was only saying goodbye to beer. I ran through my stock at about one-quarter my usual rate. I have beer twice a week now, just one. I drink it with dinner and I drink it with reverence for the sheer generosity of the taste of it.

The first few days were weird. Kind of like when your dog dies or your best friend moves to California. All the usual beer times were empty-nothing to do. My friend the buzz was gone too. I felt sad in a low-key way and I stared at my water glass at dinner as if it were a cruel joke.
Then I got used to it. I made up the calories with ice cream and I contracted my diet away from the things that called for beer. In a few weeks it became the new normal and then something odd happened.

Some underground well of energy got tapped. It came out in the form of picture-making. I was seized by passions for making collages, drawings, illustrations of things that nobody had asked me to illustrate. My hard drive became cluttered, my computer slowed down. Files built up, sometimes two a day.
The same flood that brought the pictures carried off some diffidence that had characterized my relationship to my work. I started sending stuff out: pictures, poems, requests for reviews. And the universe, as my sweetheart says, seems to be answering my call.
Since I stopped drinking beer, I've had a book published, lined up two exhibits, gotten hungry and more curious about my world. Life is OK, sometimes it's good and occasionally it's filled with love and greatness.
---

And something's lost. To pretend that there's no loss would be to imagine that everything I learned and did was just medicine. In fact, wine and beer put me in contact with the truth about civilization, with some vaultingly beautiful tastes and with some very interesting people.
I hope to hold the loss as both real and surmountable. I plan to tell the truth about it. Finally,
if my experience and my truth can stimulate someone to a larger vision of themselves and the world,
I'll drink to that.

I Used to Drink

I have a life long romance with wine and maybe a half-life love affair with beer. My uncle Alex Anguert introduced me to French wine when I was ten or eleven. He also taught me to play chess and be kind to ladies. He and I were the only wine-lovers in our family and I can't say when the sense of being bigger than the stifling little life we had left off and my raw admiration for the taste of wine began.

I didn't have a sweet tooth, ever. As a six-year old, I loved raw rhubarb, and I drank strong tea. I loved big, earthy tastes and fat creamy ones. The crisp fat on a skillet-cooked lamb chop, grilled mushrooms, well-cooked bacon baked in custard with lots of black pepper and stinky cheese were my childhood treats.

So I was over Manischevitz and into scratchy Bordeaux by the time of becoming a bar-mitzvah. I liked the smell of smoked fish and smoky whisky. And I liked the way my different preferences made me feel: they made me feel special, they set me apart.
There was more. My sense of taste was a private, walled-off place where the grown-ups couldn't get me. Their truth didn't matter in there, I knew what I knew.
--
Now, in another person's narrative, this would be the place where the foundation of meaning in my life begins. I'd start a career in the kitchen, I'd open my first restaurant when I'm 15, leave home a year later and apprentice myself to André Soltner. It would be the beginning of the Gourmet Hero Journey. But that's not how it went.

In fact, my love of wine led me to a wonderful side-effect: the buzz. It's funny how we try to diminish the meaning of the effect of a glass or two with a simple little almost onamotopoeic word: buzz. It was so much more than a buzz, that first bloom of a wine head. It was distance in a world that was too close, it was privacy in a world that was so invasive. I could leave town with my wine and they couldn't get to me. By the time I was sixteen and off to college, the deal was sealed: I could calibrate how much 'they' could get to me, I could tune my brain.

The instrument wasn't perfect and I made a lot of misjudgments, but overall, it worked. Better yet, wine was a tool that grew in usefulness the more I knew it. A glass of wine became medicine for lots of ills: boredom, lonliness, longing for meaning, anxiety. It became the natural companion of sociability.
At this point, a lot of people would stop. I took it further. I discovered a world in which wine was the object of admiration. Sort of like fancy handbags in the suburbs or muscle cars in Alabama. To know wine was to be part of a world, and what a world it was. The people who loved wine looked and felt like the family I wished I had. They were interested in things and they were capable of becoming interested in new things. They respected knowledge, they respected taste. I felt at home for the first time.
And then I went deeper. I found out that beer is as old as civilization, that the turn from hunting and gathering food to producing it is intimately tied up with the discovery of brewing. I learned that the act of brewing made water supplies safe at the same time that increasing population density made water unsafe. Places that brewed (or made wine) were healthier than those that didn't.
There was more, lots more. The organization of medeival breweries provided (along with shipbuilding) a model for the industrial revolution.

--

So wine, and later its more complicated cousin beer, came to be a hobby, a religion, a clubhouse, a textbook, a friend. As time went on, my world and its got closer. Most importantly, wine became an answer to a whole lot of questions. Was I bored? How about a glass of wine? Was I purposeless? Lonely? Sad?
I wrote The New Short Course in Beer. I taught classes, I got invited to Europe. I gave tastings and I visited wineries.
In some tiny circles I was the beer guy. It was an identity.
Like any other religion, wine had its anti-christs. There were the flaming prohibitionists: the Baptists and the Moslems. But there were also the cerebrally-eviscerated middle-class Jews and the buzzed-down budweiser heads. When I started to teach wine classes at university,
there were priggish and provincial academics. Wine-love came with its built-in friends and, conveniently, with built-in enemies too.
One week in 1981, I tasted Saison Dupont and Chimay Blue. I made a new friend and I wrote The Short Course in Beer. In a few years, wine and beer became my friends, my clubhouse, my flag, my allegiance.
Wine and beer were something I drank and something that medicated my cares. Then it became an identity: something I was.More to the point, they were a source of meaning in my life. I was that wine guy, then I was that beer guy and I really enjoyed that.

There was enough to know that not everybody knew it. That world was attractive enough that people wanted to know more. The folks who already knew were an attractive crowd: they spoke languages, cooked good, gave parties. I felt at home.
---

Now that's gone. Just as I expected it would, some doctor came along and said my drinking days were over. So what? That is, so what happens when a love affair and an identity mask die? Who am I?

Stay tuned.

nancy my dear,

i can really see how my way of being leaves you feeling un- or under-related to. frankly, i have no idea of how to grow out of it. i  really think it's a shame that you are involved with a man whose stature doesn't match yours.

for instance: in the rich mandel instance, i recall my own feeling of insecurity at the table that night and my sense of estrangement from all the confidence-in-vulnerability that i felt around me. what could i have done about that? i don't know. would i be different now? i don't really know that either.

for instance: with dave and marsha i can imagine that sometime or other i might feel free to address the crowded atmosphere and insert myself into their show, but when i think back to that night, i can't see myself being very different (maybe it's a version of not going where i'm not wanted)

for instance: when you respond to my enthusiasm about a vista by saying 'how is it different from any other view?' it recalls to me your equation of walmart and the woods. it says to me that the thing that's putting me in touch with the sublime is really not special, in fact not worthy of admiring.

and i hear it this way even after reading what you wrote. how is it different from any other view? doesn't make me feel related to, it makes me feel like you took my enthusiasm and used it to begin an argument for some philosophical point.

i don't want to talk about filing cabinets, i want to argue: i don't want to tell you that i understand how you could ask that,i don't naturally turn to 'nancy, i felt misperceived' i want to tell you that you got it wrong.

and when i replay it in my mind, even with the most loving will in the world, i can't see it much differently.

on the other hand:

when i think back to wellfleet, i can see myself being more concerned for you and therefore more aware of the wind.

when i think back to vernick, i can imagine being in a studier place with the waitress.

when i think back to tango, i remember our do-over and i see it differently because i have some new information.

when i think about dave and ally,i think i felt shy.  i think i could have prepared my thoughts beforehand so that i would have felt sturdier and therefore spoken up.

---

---

taking in everything, i can see why you would be disappointed. i see that my limited filing categories and response-ability make it hard for you to be my friend. it is largely on me and it makes me very sad. i see too how this limits your sense of possibilities for us going forward. 

perhaps i've been too optimistic in thinking about a future without offering you the necessary personal infrastructure. i certainly accept your reticence and dampened curiosity as inevitable sequilae to my limited filing space.

so what shall we do? i would hate to lose you and to give up the vision i have of the mutual healing and creative doing we might experience. l love you.  but i also won't hang around (won't be where i'm not wanted) and be a pest if you are feeling pessimistic. i thought we were making progress. perhaps you do too. maybe my pessimistic take on your letter is a pure projection and in itself an example of the limited filing categories of which you complain. i don't know how to read your energy about this, so:

i am here for you to make it better if you want to take it one instance at a time. i'm willing to look at myself because i know that you'll do the same. i love you and i also recognize that for you, this may be a case where love is not enough.

holding you tenderly in my heart, lev

-------------

ps. on the matter of 'people who like wine and beer....' i think i'd like to discuss that in front of lance

we're missing each other here and i think those words have aroused something that we could take a look at.

The Irony Angel

Every couple of weeks, the woman i'm in love with tells me that we're just too different, that she worries about our future. The night before last, she said it again with emphasis. we can't be partners, we have different paradigms.
now the truth is that we slept together that night and last night too. but this morning i told her that these ruptures make me physically sick: that just as she worries about our 'incongruity' giving her cancer, i see our ruptures working on my heart.
she explained again about all the ways in which we are different. she went over every incident of my handling something in a less friendly, less relational way than she would have. she says i'm 'sub-social' and what's worse, i blame my sub-sociability on others. i don't chat because x doesn't seem interested, i make a sharp response to what i see as rudeness.
these episodes are the mythic tales that form her perception of me. they have changed in her re-telling. changes in myth are interesting, they reflect the shifting social basket in which they're held. what makes me sad and sick is that the changes don't seem to me to reflect any growth on my part. all of her re-tellings instead seem like adding another course of bricks to the wall between us.

she also tells me again how difficult it is to be with a man whose main energies are not directed to personal growth. i see myself as an advocate for her feelings and i see how it would look that way to her. i also hear the tone of her description getting darker and darker. she says that maybe we can't be together at all, she wonders if we could be friends, not partners, not lovers.

and what i'm hearing is that she's already made up her mind. maybe she doesn't admit it to herself, but she sounds like someone planning the kindest, gentlest break-up in the history of  love. she promises to let up on the relentless barrage of earnestness that sounds so angry and tests the limits of my growing residence in my own self. even the quality of her voice has become softer, less strident.
--
so: back to me.

i ask her for a reprieve. i say 'let's explore these differences for a fixed period' i suggest that we talk for a few weeks-'til new year's day. i ask for her co-operation in my pursuit of non-defensiveness. i ask her to be as skilled with me as she is with her clients. i remind her that she has a lot to gain and grow from being with me (she thinks of me mostly as entertainment, not education)
at the moment of asking her to take her time with this separation, i'm thinking 'if i can persuade her to support my growth, she'll see that the gap between us is narrowing'. it feels to me that if she gives us a chance, we have a chance.
but i'm also thinking that this is a shot at some personal growth that doesn't come along often. suppose i just assume that we're not going to make it. suppose i use the next two weeks as a growth intensive. how can i do this knowing that the outcome is going to involve a heartbreak? how can i not do this?

so there's the Irony Angel-i have to keep my head about me and my guts inside while going through a tragic loss. the payoff will be attaining that state of non-defensive, loving being that i'm being faulted now for not having. my lover, who is no longer invested in the long-term with me has become kinder. one possible outcome is that i will become who i want to be and who she says she wants me to be and lose her at the same time.
and my poor twillow? she will think herself better off, she will certainly be more at peace

here's why i hate the irony angel:
•in order to endure the next two weeks, i will have to act as if i didn't know this is the end and acting inauthentically in order to acheive authenticity is the self-defeating instruction of all time.
•twillow may leave me authentic and authentically in mourning for our love: i may end up loveable and without a love.

so: here it is my dear. i'm greedy to continue the work i started at hoffman, i'm hungry to be my self,
to find a calm center from which to reach out to the world. if i pursue that in the hope of keeping you in my life, then i'm not really pursuing it, i'm pursuing you-which is self-defeating. so i have to calm my yearning for an 'us' in order to find my 'me'. and if i calm myself by assuming that you and i are done, then i may be fulfilling my own prophecy, acting inauthentically in the process and doing myself the second-greatest damage imaginable.

what i need to say to you is this: i want to be me. that's primary. and one thing that 'me' wants is 'us'. i am torn. part of me needs to pretend that we're finished in order to pursue my hoffman mission without giving it the secondary job of keeping our relationship alive. and an authentic part of me is so sick at the thought of losing you that it's hard to imagine standing in that space and functioning as a seeker.
ps. maybe that's the key. maybe i have to be in the misery to be true to myself. maybe i just have to shut up and do it anyway. wish me luck.

A Reservation Concerning Complete Openness and Truth

Be it known:

that i am irrevocably placing the following restriction on the Agreement Concerning Complete Openness and Truth that exists between me and one Dr. Nancy Dreyfus.

i hold in perpetuity the right to keep certain secrets. to wit:

•any considerations, preparations, experiences, feeling, thoughts relating to a surprise delight for said Dr. Dreyfus are my privileged territory.

•any humorous reservations i hold about her high seriousness that soften such seriousness' landing without diluting its importance may be taken as an internal higher counsel.

•any pissy, pedantic thoughts that arise in the course of our conversations shall be kept in a playroom of their own where like can frolic with like.

The Life I Want and Never Talked About

how odd to finally say it:

i want to make utterances and have them heard. and i want to hear back from beloved others and reply. yeah, i want conversations, gentle and stimulating and weird and outrageous and private and public. i want to hear and i want to be heard.
here are some pieces: i want to make pictures, i want to write poems, jokes and stories. i want to promulgate silliness. i want to create fun because i think it's the raw material of joy and joy, if it isn't nirvana, is at least the earthly paradise. my joy is in creating joy. students applauding at the end of a semester isn't about my ego, it's about the joy.

and to make that all happen, i want to teach. there is a part of me missing when i'm not teaching.

and there's love. i want this woman. i want her to want me so much that she's willing to listen and trust that i'll be there for her. i want to do with her and be with her. i want declarations, celebrations, pronouncements, awesome silence, electric contact. i want to make love with her once, just once and i want that once to destroy time or at least mock its seriousness.

and i would like rituals. i want the doing that has the meaning that supports the feeling in a big geertzian triangle. i left judaism, but it left me first and i want to feel in the sacred without feeling silly.

and of course, there's me and the outside. i need to feel, not just think, my connection with the world. i need to deny what i was told-that it's not real. i need trees and bugs and butterflies (oh, butterflies!) i need to see the birds and watch sun coming through green leaves and smells and the wonder of it all.
i know i am forever when i take my temporary self out into the forever and i see there's no distance.
i do this best on the water. i need to be near water, it's my truth.

and i need the city. i need the bop-biddy-bop of new york and philly. i need the smell of deli and cheese shop and the taste of beer and fish and fruit like at uncle charlie's. (funny: that silly guy knew me so well that it freaked me out and i never let myself get close to him). i need the variety-vitality of the mix. when i die, i want a city street named after me. if i can't have that, a library will do. or a three-tap beer bar where the management swore allegiance to delicious.

I couldn't do without old friends and the simple love of them: the whole Silkman family, Nyheim, Julio, Gilmore, Welsh. And of course-I'm almost too scared to say it: my darling Spencer who's turned into an amazing human being (and i wonder if it's in spite of me.)

and i need the non-human beings-the dogs and cats, those friendships that have no ego, just love and touch. i want to sit at the magic dinner table with bill and spike and muscular and lola and bodhi and frankie and jersey. and i don't want to have to apologize to a single human being for the holiness of these other beings.

i would like to thank Nancy Dreyfus, Lance Roberds, the Hoffman Process, Stuart Shils, Hal Sirowitz, Kathy Bonanno, Jon Deutsch and Spencer Hoffman for keeping this vision alive even when i forgot to give it water and light. oh and did i mention Nancy Dreyfus? she's the woman in question, the woman i want for the rituals, and the talk and the joy and the one-time only love.

it's odd that i got this old before she came along
it's odd that i got this old before i said this all aloud
but life is odd and that's what i want: life.

What to do if you're too angry to Do-Over right.

There's a moment when you know: this argument has gone the wrong way, things are out of hand, no good can walk through the door we just opened. The realization may hit you on the head or it may sneak up on you.
If you've been practicing the art of the Do-Over for a while, you'll probably get that sense pretty soon.
But sometimes, if you're new to it or if passions are running higher than usual, you may find yourself angry or confused. You may sense that you'd end up repeating that same agitated, angry or off-center rant that got you into this in the first place.
You need a safety net. You need to climb back down from that high horse, take off the armor and meet your partner (remember, this is your loving partner) in a gentler place.
--
What makes this so hard is that you and your partner may find your very voices distorted by the anger that comes up. You want to stop the fight-cycle but even your request for a Do-Over has a toxic, hostile ring to it. The Do-Over itself may be doomed by the tension between you.
One proven way to neutralize the poison and get back to the love is to remove your voice from your words. You could point to a favorite biblical verse, I guess or dig out a particularly apt Valentine's Day card. But if you want to be sure your message fits the circumstance, there's another, more efficient solution.

Chapter Y: How (Why) it Works

   Chapter Y: How the Holy Do-Over Works

• We understand your skepticism. You may feel that what's done is done and if you could have done better, you would have. It may also seem that looking at a better way to do the same thing can only lead to pessimism about ever getting this relationship stuff right.

If you regularly pretend to be a fireman, that doesn't mean you should rush into a burning building to rescue someone's puppy.We began this work only because we were so frustrated with our merry-go-round approach to working through a conflict. We had an awkward conversation one night: someone was testy, someone else got defensive. It didn't get better from there.
When we tried to talk about it, we repeated the same pattern as we talked. You said, I said turned out not to be very productive. We love each other, we wanted to work this out and we each wanted the other to feel heard and respected, but explanations and self-justification just weren't doing it.
We decided that we just had to do the damn thing over again, go back to that stupid conversation and do it right this time. After a few false starts, we got it right.

•This approach works by modeling behavior that leads to both people feeling better and their relationship working more smoothly. The good feeling (positive reinforcement) attaches to the new behaviors themselves and the content of your Hold Do-Over quickly becomes part of your repertoire of inter-personal skills. It works because you feel better immediately.

•Holy Do-Over has been used in  tens/dozens/hundreds of situations by real couples who have  faced problems like yours.

•The approach works whether you "believe in it" or not. There are two negative outcomes possible. The worst possible result of a Holy Do-Over is a repeat of your first conversation. Everything is the same as it was, you each do what you did in the Original Incident.  Less worst is the possibility that you go through a HDO and you still don't feel any different. (This can happen for several reasons) in that case, what you've done is modeled a different approach to your problem. When the problem comes up again (and it will surely come up again in one form or another), you'll have an alternative way to deal with it and each other.

•There's research behind it.

The Holy Do-Over

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, we played a lot of games that were improvised versions of the serious, canonical games that we saw played on television. There was stickball which looked like baseball with a broomstick bat and a pink 'spaldeen' ball. it was played in the street, usually with a manhole cover as home plate and temporary bases assigned to car doors or fire hydrants. the rules were sort of ad-hoc and in the absence of umpires, there were a lot of disputed calls. since the game was far more important than the outcome, we never let a disagreement over a fair or foul ball stop play.

If we couldn't agree on a call, the most common result was an agreement to do it over. Once both sides acknowledge that the other isn't willing to concede and neither is interested in taking the ball and going home, we'd agree: 'okay, it's a do-over'. A do-over wasn't, of course, a replay of the original event: that would have been impossible. Instead, a do-over was a completely fresh iteration of the opportunity that had just occurred. It's still two strikes and one out and you're still up and we take it from there.

A Holy Do-Over in a relationship is a little like that. Something bad happened: something where neither of you did your best and the outcome isn't very satisfying. He was accusatory, she was defensive. He sulked, she yelled. She was unkind, he was deaf. The outcome sucked, you both feel terrible. Chances are that you can't unwind the event, you can't blot it out and your mutual failure sits like a smelly embarrassment between you. You can't have an Undo, but you can have a Do-Over.

A Do-Over is an agreement to suspend your feelings for the moment, to see them as mere artifacts of a need, whiskers to be shaved off and allowed to grow back in a different color and texture. In a Do-Over you return to your needs, consider your love, take up your courage and act the way you might have acted the first time if you had been true to yourself.

Of course, the kind of Do-Over we're talking about here has higher stakes than the street ball version.You're playing with each other's humanity, which is to say that your staking your own on the outcome. In a Holy Do-Over, everybody wins.

Guidelines for a useful Holy Do-Over

•wait as long as you need to, but no longer

one necessary pre-condition is that both of you have taken a step back from where you were emotionally. you now see your behavior as a 'thing-you-did' and not as 'you'. As long as you're still identifiied with what you just did and said, you can only have a Repeat, which is not the same as a Do-Over.

with practice, the latency period can be very short. Couples who have learned to play the game can sometimes regroup immediately as both of them realize that their best selves weren't operating.

•replicate, don't duplicate

in so far as you can return to the place where the first event happened, do so. if you can make the situation similar in any other way, good for you. it's a mistake to strive for cinematic perfection though. For one thing, all that obsessing just gets in the way. More importantly, you want cues in the environment that tell you that this is new, that you are free to do and be as you didn't the last time.

•immerse yourself in the feeling, but don't rehearse.

the point of a do-over is to enlist your best self to show up and be you. one way to scare that best self away is to give yourself a script.

it doesn't matter if you wrote the script or if you borrowed it from someone else: a re-do is not a performance, it's a natural emanation 

of your reflected, refined essential self. if you be you, but don't be rehearsed.

Magic has responsibilities. 

Religions have forbidden magic for a reason. Salem witches, ecc. the magician abrogates the powers of the divine: 

in truth the magician commands what the religious supplicant begs for. 

When you mess around with the laws of  nature, you're very much obliged to respect the outcomes of  your experiments.

so what you're doing here is dangerous stuff: powerful and sacred. done frivolously, it won't work; done half-seriously it could make you crazy.

you're playing around with two natural laws. 

first, you're denying time; you're going backwards by acting as if time hadn't elapsed and you have your hands on the hands of the clock.

second, you're screwing with cause and effect. you're taking the effect of some previous act and using it as the cause of the original act itself.

(stay with me now) your do-over is an effect that's (in effect) becoming the cause of its own cause.

dizzy yet? good.

so that's why you have to approach the act of the do-over with a certain gravity if not outright reverence. you're bending the laws of nature for your own interests. make sure it's worth it. don't joke, pray.

Miraculous Thinking

i quote her to herself as 'quote of the day'. this is her response:


Thank you for making the reservation, Honey...how about coming here 6:30?   Very looking forward to going there...I think you'll really like the food.  And I like that we are celebrating our celebrating!

About the drink classes...you know me, always happy to offer "input, " but here, I kinda draw a blank, not sure what to tell you (maybe why you are also ambivalent, not sure...)

I guess you have to feel in as to whether the experience would be: enlivening enough...lucrative enough...or in some way expansive of a vibe that mattered (an not necessarily alcohol...simply an opportunity to teach something new....)  Curious to hear about your process,  though....

Yeah, I know who said, "Love is all its cracked up to be..."  I've said it somewhat mindlessly for so many years, I'm actually dazzled to find out it is true."

Thank you for pointing out the significance of the Melanie-Walter episode.   I actually got to understand more of what I actually do.

I'm the one who is so into "real."  And I've needed you to show up to make Love real to me.

So looking forward to having my arms around you.    N.

-----

The woman i'm in love with is completely in love with me. she tells me this two, three, seven, twelve times, each time in a different, enchanting way. we are going to cape cod together. we are planning things. let's attend a workshop, let's. she tells me how much i mean to her and my heart, which is not used to this at all is full to bursting. this is not the miracle.
 my feelings are so intense that i long for little bouts of boredom to make it real. i want to read the times with her, i want to run errands, go for a walk, cook a quick dinner and see a movie. i want to tell her about that time in college, i want her to tell me about when her daughter was born. i am fond enough of the mundane that this is not the miracle either
--
there are agenda items of course. i am still an undergraduate in the department of 'other people's feelings are only their feelings'. the ground on which my self stands is a bit crumbly, but she seems to like the location. she has chosen to make this work. that's the miracle and i have no choice but to become a miracle myself.


if you read this blog from the beginning, would you have believed this ending? i can barely go back to read it myself, i fear i'll recreate it as true. however, it's time to be fearless again.

WGLB radio-the glibster

The woman i'm in love with hits me over the head. "what i want is a man who's not like my father. my father was an infant. i have almost no memory of him ever acting competently."
then she shows me a list she wrote 30 years ago: all the qualities she was looking for in a man. it's three pages long, handwritten. as soon as she shows it to me, she decides not to share it.  i urge her on.
"something from the middle of page two!" i suggest. she looks at page two and says nothing. " read that one!" i say, pointing to a line in the middle. something about the line jolts her. she reads "He will like food and cooking". and then she reads me the rest.
the rest sounds-if i do say so myself-a bit like a description of me and us. and this is when i realize that my neediness in this relationship has been undermining the strength of this relationship. i don't blame myself much, the potential for growth in contact with this woman is tremendous. i could see the me that i want to be growing out of it. that i became less of me in order to reach for more of me is just one of those little 'fuck you's from the irony angel.

---
something else happens this weekend. we are getting closer, no, really closer. she tells me sweet things and i respond in my father's voice ratcheting down the emotions with a joke. between saturday night and sunday, i do this three times. the third time, she cries.
of course, i'm flabbergasted. i think i'm acknowledging the feeling while lightening the tone. giving the message wings and taking away some weight. she doesn't see it that way, it makes her feel less willing to share the really important stuff that's coming up for her.
since her intimacy is my new oxygen, i take this very seriously. i'm also disarmed: it's like finding out that your daily vitamin pill is giving you cancer.

to complicate things, she does this too! she writes me a sweet email on sunday afternoon saying that 'there will be no more of this reading  the sunday times alone, not-negotiable'. the tone is light and sweet (reminds me of her coffee) and it makes me smile and it makes me feel wanted and it sends a message of more closeness. i reply

well, if you insist...feet up, coffee smells, smoked salmon and cream cheese roll-ups. i guess i could handle it. . . .

it feels to me that i've matched tone for tone, that i heard her voice and my heart called back in the same language. she calls me to make sure that i got the message that she really sent. poor lynn is misunderstood again.
---
so let's put that one aside for the moment. the real question is 'what am i doing when i dilute the seriousness of what she's saying with a turn to glibness'? i need an answer because it's such an easy response for me and it hurts her feelings. i also need an answer that respects my needs as reflected in the glib gambit. i know i'm not being a jerk, there's something kind and good in that light response (i can feel it). but i have to undo it because it's not working.

i have two clues: one is that the voice is entirely my father's. the second is that it's a reflexive-no thought-response to some kind of discomfort. 'things are getting very serious here, better lighten them up'.  i guess that's an adaptive response from some other time. when? what?
now i'm out of clues.
---
at the gym, sometime around the 20th pull-up, it comes to me. i say that silly shit because there's nothing else in my experience. that would be a serious problem if i were looking for a recipe for trout. but i'm not. i'm looking to respond to the woman i'm in love with in a way that answers her genuine love with mine.
i could just wait for next time and go to the genuine love locker and pick out whatever comes up. but i think i'll be more chefly and get my mise-en-place together. i have a half hour before dog walk and i think i'll go to the cushion and see what arises. if it turns out that it's really blank in there, i will confess my blankness in the face of her love. i'll offer it up like a lamb.

and then we'll  see what happens next, for in the end i always fill in the blanks.

Taking it out in Public

The woman i'm in love with asked me to come to a party with her today. the host is a former client and he and his family credit twilw with saving his life. it was our first public appearance as a couple. i was thinking about judith taking me to main line parties and her being a bit ill at ease,  like she was worried i'd burst into song or goose the hostess. so i'd been here before and i was alert and relaxed.
what happened was the opposite of what judith did.  twilw bragged on me. when we were standing together, she moved her body closer to me. she held my hand as we left.

back at her house, a ten-minute scheduled queest turned into two hours of passionate closeness. terms got coined, plans got made, dreams got shared. all of a sudden, her frame of reference for us started becoming long term. she talked about me as a culmination of something, not a digression.\

can you imagine how i feel? can anyone see the tendrils growing, connecting, rooting?
----

we talked about sex although she said that 'sex' doesn't seem quite adequate a term. what is this thing we're doing, bodies wrapped together, eyes open, mile-wide grins? she doesn't recognize it. me neither. it seems like 'making love' is the best we got but that seems to cover everything and so says nothing.

was it just a week ago that i was pretty sure it was over? amazing and still somehow totally believable. i wonder if she'll comment on this post. . . .

The Tea Cup Problem

You have this cup, see. it's on the table in front of you and you are eager to take tea. i brew it just the way you like it, perfect time and temperature. You're excited, i'm beaming. i pour and you smile. maybe you even wiggle a bit in anticipation.
the cup fills and when it gets to the brim, i keep pouring. the hot tea spreads out over the tablecloth. it stains the rug, scalds your lap. the cleanup takes days.
---
We try again. this time you have a larger cup. this time i notice where the brim is and i stop pouring way before i reach it. you ask me for a bit more. i pour and i pay attention to how much space there is left. the tea is delicious and you smack your lips. i smile. and when you're done and we put your cup away for the day, neither of us really notices but: the cup-all by itself-grows just a tiny bit bigger.

---

the woman i'm in love with replies :

There is no way I am going to spend next Sunday reading The New York Times alone. This is non-negotiable

Pour away....I just love you.

i respond:

well, if you insist...feet up, coffee smells, smoked salmon and cream cheese roll-ups. i guess i could handle it. . . .

and then, an explosion

The essence of Nancy's message (One Lynn seemingly has wanted to hear):  I am letting the tea cup expand...I want more of Lynn in my life..."Pour away.." suggesting, Don't stop being with me...I want more and more of you in my world."

Lynn (in Nancy's experience) doesn't join Nancy in the Essence of it...the space he is in when he blogs.  He chooses to join with her in Glib-land.

The problem isn't this isolated incident--although given the movement on nancy's part, it's not a little thing.  It's how characteristic it is, and how it invites me not to be naked with you.

And this morning was so reparative.  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line...but you need to know what that second point feels like.  This morning? 

"Personality" would have gummed up the works.

love! N.

The Best Date Ever

---

-----------------

we have tickets to a concert in camden. i barely know the band, but it's an outing and we haven't
done much out in the world except for eating in restaurants. we park at penn's landing, we take a 
ferry, she's nervous about the water, i'm elevated by it.
we make our way to some very good seats and three songs in to the performance, we both nod
that it's time to leave.too loud, not musical. we have a head gesture that we use to signal let's get outta here. 
we go.
the ferry won't be back until the show is over so we find a bench by the river and as the sun sets over
philadelphia,
the woman i'm in love with tells me a story. it's a story about how she learned so much and a story
about the price she paid to learn it. there's a guru, an estranged sister, a kid at risk and a husband 
who worried about makeup on his shirt after they embraced. there's room in the story for lots of 
emotions and she's worried about the shame. she tells me anyway. later, she admits that this was
hard for her-she'd been avoiding this particular disclosure, afraid she thinks. it turns out that it 
was easier for her than she imagined: 
something about park benches and rivers and loud music coming from far away.

when the story's over, we make out like kids on the bench. the woman i'm in love with kisses me in 
that way that she invented, in that destined, tried out on somebody else, but really designed for me
way that she has.
-------------------------

we come home exhausted. we're naked. we kiss standing up, we take to the bed and we lock our bodies
in a way that's becoming (for me at least) a signature 

of our intimacy and we go to sleep with the street-light shadows of the blinds drawing lines across her shoulder 

and breast. as we drift down, the woman i'm in love with says "are you disappointed that we didn't

 make love". i tell her that i'm not disappointed and what i'm really thinking is "silly woman, 
i can't remember 

ever making love like we did tonight 
on that park bench by the river."

we sleep late. there are hugs and a hard on that's pressed against her belly. it's a banner ad for wanting, but

it's not to be: no time, no space right now. she asks me if i want to masturbate. i say 'no, i think i'll keep this one

for later.' and so i pack up my erection and take it home with me where it keeps me company all day long.

thinking about it (if you had a day-long hard-on, you'd think about it too.) i realized i had more to say. so 

i wrote:

watching a man masturbate may be fun (i wouldn't know) but it probably isn't very instructive about a man's 

sensuiality/sexuality. we mostly jerk off to get off and be done with it. i guess it has something to do with 

childhood fears of getting caught and something to do with 'sex-is-an-itch-so-scratch-it' that pertains when 

one is partnerless.

what i have right now is the warm, crotchy sense of being naked with you this morning. i think if i had 
masturbated, i wouldn't have that right now and you know how us romantics are about stoking the 
fires of the feelings.  but next time, if you insist. . . . 

----------------

the woman i'm in love with writes back;

  1:45 client just arrived

So to be brief: re graf 1: you have no idea how much I love it when you teach me stuff, Lynn...

graf 2....  Not unrelated to savoring...and simmering...another thing related to you that I love...

and i wonder if i was being stingy. maybe next time she asks i'll just assume that she wants to watch. maybe
i'll do it more self-lovingly for knowing that she's there. maybe we'll both like it.

---------------

so i guess what i'll do now is walk the dog and then head to the gym. when i'm done working out, i'll take a shower,
a cold shower. and then i'll go to her and we'll have the long night all to ourselves.

This Stuff is Hard

The woman i'm in love with is very generous in reminding me that i sometimes (often) respond to her statement of feelings by justifying, explaining or contradicting. what i fail to do is simply acknowledge her.
this hurts her. she wants to be heard and values being heard above most things.
i get it and i'm working on it. it's hard for me-the little man inside hates to be misperceived and he hates to let a problem/pain go unaddressed. and i'm working on it.

this is hard stuff to work on, the impulse to set things right is almost automatic. for instance, this morning i was telling the woman i'm in love with how powerful the writing is in her book. and i admitted that sometimes the book is hard for me to read because it's so full of her old boyfriend.
immediately she responded "well, you know, he was there when i was writing it."

so if this advanced soul can miss her own mark so dramatically, what hope is there for me? i guess i'll just have to keep paying attention and remind myself that the beauty lies on the path to perfection.

it shouldn't be hard at all

----

i have a new word: pivot. to pivot is to notice that you're heading down a deadening alley and to spin immediately and head back in an enlivening direction. when i tell the woman i'm in love with that i caught her in mid-air over her own petard, she says:

good point ... I would have been fine if you pointed out that I wasn't walking my talk when it happened.

she pivots and the fact of her matter is that she would have been fine. for the moment, until the right muscles develop, i'm borrowing the yoga of the word itself-"wait! i'm pivoting"
----
we are testing upper limits a bit tonight and tomorrow. we're going to a concert then spending saturday night together and attending an open house on sunday. four days in a row, hmm.

Lower Tolerance for Upper Limits

The woman i'm in love with decides, after some intimate time together, that sharing a shower just isn't the right thing to do. "It's an Upper Limits Problem" she says: too much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing just because we unprocessed creatures have a low tolerance for good things.

fair enough. i don't want the new car smell of our time together to disappear so i back off and leave with a gentle, below-the-limit kiss. however, being a curious soul, i ask for a commentary, and she sends me a chapter. the title is something like "the only relationship problem you have to solve" which immediately got my attention. the only problem? let me at it.

the writers (and i assume by proxy the woman i'm in love with) maintain that the cycle of excess good feeling leading to bad feeling can be moderated. we are capable of growth, not prisoners of a binge and purge prison.

 one way to keep good feelings from mutating into bad is to give and take space: take a breather, make a break. go for a walk, retreat to your pad. i need less of a break, the woman needs more.

another way is to move: run, dance, breathe, stretch, dance. the authors call it hauling the ash, as if the uncombusted products of passion gum up the works of love.

non-sexual touch increases the space for good. so does talking about what's going on.
---

i find this all good.
i think i will indulge my propensity for giving by giving space.
i think i will punctuate that (and honor myself) with tiny bursts of intimacy-a ten minute dance, a twenty minute queest, a half-hour making out on the office sofa.
i like that she can claim her space easily. i like that it reminds me of dancing not contesting.
i like that this reminds me of cooking: a question of applying the senses to make a beautiful outcome.

i have spent a lifetime discarding preferences and now i see that was really so that when the time came, i could focus on what counts.

On Her Beauty

I was awoken this morning with and by an image of her. She's standing naked in her kitchen, dizzy grin, glasses down on her nose, arms half-extended to me. in my hynopompic fantasy, i wait to take her in my arms so that i can admire her. the feeling is a bit aesthetic, a lot lusty and a bit of raw gratitude, but it's much more than that. i'm wrestling with understanding it.
-
when i first met her, i responded warmly to her looks. i am not driven by looks at all and at the same time, i'm a sucker for beauty-any beauty. i remember being transfixed (pierced through, impaled) by a landscape in the veneto and losing an afternoon gaping while my wine evaporated. there was the brewhouse at budvar and the lectern at st. stephen's. and so on and on.
so i found her, sitting across a table, to be fascinating, challenging, prickly and smooth all at once. i came home from meeting her carrying a swarm of impressions and her appearance was a pleasant, if minor buzz in the cloud.

last weekend, i was swamped with her beauty. yesterday, i got a shiver. a week ago, when i was sick with loss and anger and self-contempt, i barely noticed how she looked. i may have screwed in the diffusion filter to gauze her out of my vision.

so what's up? the easy answer is that i and we admire what admires us back. our appreciation increases with our affections or our security.
but wait, butt weight, there's more: beauty itself moves background-to-foreground. last week's world was uglier. no pictures made, no quick trots into the museum. this week's world has Nymphalis aliopa
practically landing on my shoe.

let''s get all solipsistic on this. let's say that beauty is entirely an internal creation: i made my morning erotic image, i made the butterfly land and i made the ice cream taste so good. if that's true then either of two things might follow. one is that i create how i perceive the world: matisse didn't do anything, georges perrier is just another cook, and the beauty in the world is all me. 

another is that beauty-hers and the world's-exists as a co-creation of the beholder and the world and that i push it further away or closer in with my croupier's rake. maybe it's a system with each end of the rake calling the other. so, the whole and happy me moves the beauty closer and the beauty calls out and slithers the world to my attention. 

this morning, awake and tumescent, i don't really understand what's going on. her beauty persists, it follows me home and spends the night even when she doesn't.  i have a motto instead of a thought and the motto is something like:

me happy, me see pretty

i think i'll just sit with that awhile.

I Want My Life to be My Art

I Want My Life to be My Art

that's it. those are the words for the thing i've been fumbling to since i was clear of cancer. that's what the poems and pictures have all been pointing to. look at the pictures!

 

the whole thing has been so fucking 'message-y', how could i have missed it? 

it took a catalyst, an enzyme. we'll call it nancyase. stay tuned. what's the art in question? dunno. going to find out. stay tuned.



















_____________________________________________________________________

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man



gifts from the woman i'm in love with:

this book, queesting, a new understanding of holding hands, , this book, consultation abt spencer, reflection on my marriage, making me talk about childhood wounds, dancing in my kitchen, tasting-even when she really didn't want to, the warrior training, coffee for the ride home, the constant challenge, forgiving me for tango, offering to learn to tango, this book, trader joe's key lime pie, her bean salad, engulfing my hardness in the sweet slippery softness of her, kissing me the way i like to be kissed, setting the alarm for very early, walking out of bad movies, teaching me how to listen in spite of my handicap,
oh. and this book too.


----15, 31 and 33

the end of the whole thing is my being. the beginning too. if i cultivate the garden, there will be fruit. and so on, rumi-like.
what's happened is that i've lost my balance. easy to see how it happened, she gave me a hard shove. but why the shove? maybe because i was losing my balance.
the secret (i think) doesn't lie in caring less. it's in caring about what's in me and caring about that first. the garden i need to tend is me, in spite of all those other childhood messages. in spite of all those other childhood messages. and in spite of all those other, contrary childhood messages.
to be a man now, to have a life now, to have anything in so far as any thing can be had, i have to start centered, low to the ground, laughing and entirely myself.
the intuition about tai chi may have been right on the mark. in spite of all those other childhood messages. in spite.
----------------
this is a different way of being with a woman. it's about a difference, not about the similarity.
it's different from our friend terry real, it's scarier because you always have to be in translation and it's more exciting because you have to adjust your brain to think a foreign thought. this is man the hunter.
i'm out of practice, but the ground of it feels good.

                                                             

-------------------

--5,7 and 8

this is scary stuff. what's my purpose anyway? my mission? it's to make the world a kinder, more beautiful and more delicious place. is that the end of it? probably not-there's probably something after that and maybe even after that. scary? yes.
fear needs to become your friend? we got pretty well acquainted this week. had some good moments because of it, and i think i'll give fear some (limited) playing time.
also, if there ever was a call to go back to the mat, this is it.

--9 do it for love?
yeah, i think i'm signed up for this one. no, i haven't given my fullest gift yet and i'm scared that i'll never get to. and i want to give it to someone who can see beyond the wrapping and into the heart of the thing. i want to be heard, even if i have to be quiet.


---12
be willing to change everything in your life? how oddly appropriate, how write (written) out of the ol' jungian synchronicity engine. yup. i just saw an old subscription expire. i'm giving myself a three-month sabbatical with tuition benefits to figure out what's next.
in the meantime, i have some rules for living in the sabbatical. some different grounds on which i'll stand.

--11

if you don't know your purpose, discover it? easy for him to say.

--16

women are not liars? you bet your life they're not.
he says to believe women only when their love is flowing. i add: believe all the warnings when it's not.
in the end it seems to be about standing inside your own space and not being drawn out to protect your ego. this is a discipline for me to learn. it's a kind of confidence that i'm worth it whether you think so or not. it's what the sabbatical is about.

29
choose a woman who chooses you?

i can always tell when somebody is inviting me in, but sometimes i have trouble telling when they're

inviting me to leave.  i want to be wanted.
have i been leaning in while you've been leaning out? have you read essay 29?
do you already know how this ends?
i don't have friends to ask (as he suggests). i 'd have to ask your friends. what would they say?
-----

the woman i'm in love with has become a lot more sexual in the time i've known her. it's not just that we're having more sex, it's that sex has changed for her. she says it and i feel it. i could make some
cause and effect suggestions here, but i won't.
what i will suggest is that there's maybe more where that came from.
the woman i'm in love with has been through some changes in the time i've known her. maybe she's grown a bit too.

here's the last thing for today. my love for her won't stand for some second-class, one of the boys treatments. we have to give this a true test to see if we can grow spectacularly together. i propose a moratorium on other dating: temporary monogamy. let's go for spectacular or not go at all.