“Questions that tap into our mortality, our pain, our selfishness, our basic needs, questions that arise from the immeasurable darkness, light, or mystery of our lives, require more than Answerization. They require our suffering, steadfastness, silent yearning, and deepest faith.”

Amen

While I don’t want to admit it very often, I spend a lot of energy wondering whether I’m enough. Is this just a human thing? Are there folks out there who don’t spend energy this way?

I keep thinking to myself that the moment all of us just know that we’re fine is the moment gazillion tons of energy will be freed up for far more life-giving things.

There’s a radio station in our area that I used to listen to while driving. One day last month its rag-tag mix of 80s, 90s and current music got replaced with country. And not just country, but no-commercials-at-all country. When all the other stations are droning with hours of business jingles, this one is playing actual music. So nearly in spite of myself, I have been listening to country.

What has struck me more than anything in this new endeavor, beyond the worldview that’s felt more entrenched in traditional gender roles than most I currently observe, is the enoughness that permeates so much of it. People are singing about simple things, often very basic things, things that have little to do with money or education and a lot to do with friends. With love. With faith. And they’re belting it all out like it’d never occur to them that there are people who would be embarrassed to admit liking these things. That there are people who would never in a million years admit that their greatest dream is not to be famous or well-respected in fast-track circles or to be rich and beautiful or to travel the world on every holiday, but rather to live in a humble home, not even near a big city, to drive an old car, and to be rich only with food enough to eat and people to love and laugh and be neighborly with. To be rich with smelling earth smells, with growing things, with seeing the sun rise and set over mountains, rather than row upon row of buildings.

I live in the Silicon Valley, where money and multi-million dollar homes and ingenious intellectual and business pursuits are as common as air. I live where “enough” feels like a word from another planet, or if not that, spoken only to waiters about pepper or parmesan cheese.

So it has been with delight and a small sense of subversion that I have kept my radio tuned to the same station it’s always been, feeling my afraid-I’m-not-enough soul being nourished and healed in this most unlikely way. I come home from writing and from errands fretting less about what I don’t have or haven’t yet accomplished, content a lot more with what I actually *have* done and *do* have. The latter being foremost food, shelter, and wonderful people to love.

“Hell yeah, you’re enough!” I hear this music say. Or in Alan Jackson’s words,

“…it’s alright to be little bitty
Little hometown or a big ol’ city
Might as well share, might as well smile
life goes on for a little bitty while”

I’m still trying to make sense of what happened a few weeks ago when I got word of the second death threat to an AJS worker. Something broke inside of me. It still feels a little bit broken. Every so often this happens, and to this day I’m not clear how the thing gets fixed again. Or whether it ever does. Maybe it’s always broken, and one-two punches of very dark things are just enough to remind me of it. To make its feelings grow conscious.

Its feelings are a lot like those I’ve had around sports competitions, where both sides really, really want to win. The inevitability of one side losing takes the fun out of playing or watching for me–at least a lot of the time–because I hate it that everyone can’t win. What’s the fun of winning if you know there will be people devastated by it?

Hope feels this way to me sometimes, too. Like dancing on the sidelines of a funeral procession. There are people living horrors every day. And I don’t mean only minimal horrors, either. I mean the kind that make your bones turn cold. The kind you don’t ever want to talk about, let alone see.

The reality of this is what knocks me flat on my back sometimes. Is what makes my happiness and hope feel like masks I wear, or any of us wear, to cover over what’s true. I know darkness is only half the story, give or take, but sometimes it feels like a hell of a lot more give.

So. Here’s a shot at a paradigm shift that seems like it holds promise–of helping hope seem totally called for, every single day:

What if instead of expecting that humans should be nice, should know how to share, should not throw sand in one another’s eyes, or bullets at one another’s chests, we expect that humans are just another part of the animal kingdom. They’re a part with far more destructive weaponry than any teeth or tusks could bare, but still: they’re animals. They operate by instinct. They rise and fall as top dogs and peeons. They spawn offspring and run around trying to get theirs without thought of offspringing consequences. They kill when they think it’ll benefit them. They don’t when that seems better. They do whatever it is their instincts push them toward.

The beauty of this view is that it makes me far less scandalized by the reality of our world. We’re animals, for crying out loud! Who holds animals to standards of morality? It’s the absense of morality, isn’t it?, in places where we expect it should be, that causes all our scandal.

The greater beauty of it, though, I think, is that humans don’t actually always act like animals. There are spots of un-instinct-like behavior everywhere. People loving each other deeply, past thought of reproduction or the status it might bring. People forgiving. People caring more for the common good than themselves or their tribes alone. People thinking about long-term consequences. People writing and painting and composing and organizing things that inspire us to live more equitably, more beautifully. More fully at peace and at rest.

Rather than some expected norm, these spots of behavior become sources of gladness and wonder. Reasons to think “Wow! What a world!” with a smile, rather than despair.

Maybe, in a world such as ours, we need to push the dehumanization that’s destroying us far further than it’s ever been pushed, so far that it inspires the kind of wonder and joining-a-renegade-mission mentality that I think it’ll take to save us from ourselves.

(This is continuing the conversation started here and here.)

When I was a child I don’t think I ever heard about clairvoyance or other kinds of outside-of-what’s-normal-for-most-of-us psychic phenomenon. Probably the first time I heard of such things was from television, where the pseudo-documentary shows always had deep, male voices narrating, like the one that does the trailers for movies: very dramatic, intended to spook you out, or get you thinking this is the most amazing, unbelievable thing you’re ever gonna hear. I always loved seeing those shows, and loved believing with only about a tenth of myself that the stuff they were showing was real. Most of what I saw seemed staged, or at the very least over-inflated, and the reports explainable by other means than actual psychic phenomenon. I wished I could talk with someone real, who really had such experiences and wasn’t always voiced over with that dramatic morning-voice guy. Would they be able to just talk…normally with me?

Spring of 2004 I started working on the novel that I’m working on now. I knew I wanted to tell a story about human motivation, and some of the common things I think all of us carry around inside. The seed for my story was a boy who has a gift for seeing in picture form, as well as actual scenes, what’s really going on inside of people. Like in his mind’s eye. He is the catalyst for most of the story’s conflict, because what he sees so often contradicts what people actually say their motivations are.

Anyway, I was in the beginning stages of dreaming up this character and forming a story around him, and decided to have him write me letters, telling me about himself. I didn’t use the word “clairvoyant” when thinking or writing about him because I had no category for his gift. It was just a gift that I gave him, and one for which I had to work out the “rules” (like how exactly does it work? when does he see these visions? can he see inside of everyone?).

So there I was, spending lots of time getting into the mind of this kid.

One day as I was working, I began to get an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t indigestion, and it wasn’t that I was realizing I had done something wrong, or forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. It was a different flavor of uneasiness than any of these things.

I kept working, trying to ignore it, trying to swat it away, and even got up from my desk and cleaned the whole house, trying to ward the thing off. But it persisted. I couldn’t get away from the sense that it had to do with someone else, someone that wasn’t me, and that whoever it was was feeling the very feelings I was, only way, way worse. The thought seemed strange, and wasn’t one I tried to produce or puzzle out–it was just a kind of clearness that was with me, like when you’re having a dream and just know something to be true.

Finally by early evening I felt so bad that I simply had to stop and listen. If this was about someone I knew, then I figured I might as well try and figure out who; if they were feeling these feelings worse than I was, surely they were suffering.

So I sat down on the floor and tried to listen.

Instantly a dream that I had had the night before and forgotten about came to my mind. In it I had watched a friend of mine at his place of work leave with two others to deal with a fire that had started in another part of the building. My friend had told those of us in the first location to stay put, that he and these other two would deal with this and be back soon. And everyone but me did just that.

I did not want to stay put, though, and so followed after them to see what was actually going on. Would they be able to put out the fire?

Then I woke up.

So as I sat and listened, this dream popped into my mind, and another knowing feeling came, where I knew it was this friend who was suffering so badly. I also knew his suffering didn’t concern me, and wasn’t something I was in a position to do much about. So I sent out all the strength and help I could wish and pray for, and tried to continue about my day.

That night I still felt awful. I went to bed, but had only fitful, frustrated sleep. I kept getting this image in my mind of a letter, though I couldn’t ever see what it said. All through the night I saw that thing, over and over, often in dreams, sometimes in half-sleep. It was charged, somehow, and deeply connected, though I did not know how, to whatever my friend was wrestling through.

I still felt bad the next morning, but within a couple of hours of rising, something dramatically changed. I had been feeling like something was making it difficult to breathe, a pressure on my chest and a kind of metaphorical smoke, but almost instantly that feeling was replaced by the freshest, most peaceful breeze. I can’t say literally, since I was in my house with all the windows closed, but more…internally. I actually got an image in my mind of a beautiful blue sky with bright white clouds and clean air. And again, that knowing feeling, this time that my friend was fine. I knew that whatever thing he had been struggling with was through.

The experience puzzled and perplexed me. It had come unbidden, and left within the day. And it brought to mind similar experiences I had had at other times, too, but without accompanying dreams. Occasionally I would get an image in my mind of a certain location–a parking lot, a street, a home–and the distinct feeling that something bad was about to happen there. I’d usually pray, feeling helpless to know what was actually about to happen or how to prevent it. The images were fleeting, but super charged–a whole different quality from the kind of images any of us gets in a day as memories are sparked, or daydreams wander through. I never thought to call this clairvoyance.
Given I was just in the thick of developing a character with a similar sort of gift, I started feeling strange inside. Wobbly. Shaky. Like life was getting too weird all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Like I was taking on this gift that my character had…which I had thought I had only made up.

I wrote to my friend.

“You may think I’m crazy,” I said, in effect, “but…did anything difficult happen to you on such and such a day? Here’s what I was feeling then, and the things I dreamt about before and after.”

He wrote back with only confirmations. He couldn’t betray any confidences, but said that the day I had felt so bad, he had become nearly debiliated by the afternoon from a conflict that was in the works. He and two others were involved in it, and he wrote, “I felt as if the air was being squeezed from me, the forces of Death looming large.”

The next morning, though, he got a letter from one of the people involved that cleared the whole thing up. The person had had a change of heart, and a truly awful situation got completely turned around. By means of this letter.

That week I had two other dreams/feelings of the same quality, but without any clarity as to who they were about, such that by the time I visited my therapist the next week (on a normal weekly visit), I was all worked up.

“What do I do with these things?” I asked frantically. I was feeling like I was back in time, playing some of the guessing games with God that had so characterized my young adult days of Christian evangelicalism. My beliefs at that time had made every day feel like a test of my faithfulness and attentiveness, where I was supposed to do and say specific things in specific instances, but never given clear instructions as to what these things were. It was up to me to figure them out, and I never felt like I knew if I got them right. It was crazy-making, I tell you. No way to Live.

“I don’t think you have to do anything,” my therapist said. “If these things come to you, just acknowledge them, and move on.” She knew me and wisdom well enough for this to resonate right away as what I needed to hear.

As time went on, my experiences like this lessened. I was fascinated by them, though, and could not help wondering about them. Why did they come when they did? Does everyone have these experiences? My dabblings in physics and Eastern thought made me search for some kind of theory on this stuff, some way to make sense of it. The explanations I would have made earlier in my life–having to do with God, and God’s urgings and conveyings of information–didn’t seem to describe what I was experiencing, or jive with my emerging concept of God. Jean Bolen’s The Tao of Psychology and Belleruth Naparstek’s Your Sixth Sense, were helpful reads at this time–the latter a very practical, down-to-earth discussion of the ways some people have actually nurtured this kind of gift. Naparstek thinks everyone is capable of having it, though some are much more naturally wired for it. I considered trying to nurture it more in myself, but never felt right about doing so. The possibility felt charged with danger for me.

That winter I stumbled into a comment left on someone’s blog that referenced this kind of thing–a kind of clairvoyant “knowing”. I emailed the commenter, asking him more about his comment. We proceeded to have a fascinating conversation, in which he described his own clairvoyant gift, as well as the gifts of some of his family members. His father and his daughter communicate regularly, he said, telepathically. His daughter can move physical objects with her mind. For years he was involved in the darker side of these things (I’m not sure what he meant by this exactly), but as an adult became a Christian and chose to use them only when he feels led by God to do so, and within his Christian framework for understanding things. He was a warm and generous fellow, from what I could tell, and it felt wonderful, on one level, to finally talk with someone so normally about these things.

But then my own “knowings” started to return. And unlike that first experience, they weren’t accompanied by clarity as to who they were about. They’d come most often as I was trying to go to sleep at night, like when my conscious mind relaxed. And again they began raising my anxiety about what to do about them, and also that crazy sort of feeling you get when it feels as though things you take for granted–gravity, for instance, or physical distance between people–are presenting themselves more as illusion than fact. I wonder how many people we consider insane in our country are actually in touch with everything this way–in touch in a way that makes it impossible for them to function normally. We need our illusions, I think.

One night as I lay there trying to sleep, I felt as though my brain tapped into a firehose of knowings. I wasn’t trying to know anything, but there I was, getting some of the most awful images. All of them were intensely charged. I felt like they were from people in the near vicinity–maybe the apartment complex next door. I got up and shook my head and shut my mind’s door. And decided this had to stop.

Reflection and another conversation with my therapist convinced me I didn’t want to pursue this at all at this point (i.e. try to develop this gift more, or continue conversing with the guy online). I was pregnant at the time, and, for the life that was growing in me, needed to be as grounded and centered as possible. I didn’t want to pry into anyone’s business, and didn’t want to play guessing games about uninvited information. And, tangentially, of course, didn’t want to feel or become insane. So I ended my conversation with that fellow online and kept my inner door shut. And have ever since.

Occasionally I’ll get a dream that feels more charged than usual, but generally I’ve been “knowing”-free for a couple of years now. And it’s felt great.

My take-home from all of this, including the research that I’ve done, has been a deep conviction that the psychic stuff people report isn’t all hogwash (including telekinesis, ESP, precognition, etc.). Though some of it surely is, it isn’t all made up. I’m convinced we are all interconnected in some mysterious way, and that time and space are both shorthands for something that’s bigger than both, that contains them both. I’m convinced that love makes time and space between people disappear sometimes–even into the past and the future–and opens up channels of communication that otherwise exist, but don’t get tapped into. And I’m convinced that at least in this season of my life, I don’t need to try to know, firsthand, how true all of these things are.

How does all of this jive with any of your thoughts or experiences? I’d really love to hear.

I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

A couple of years back my father-in-law forwarded me an article about neutrinos. Knowing I was into physics, he thought I might be interested. Was I ever! I’ve just tried to find the article and can’t, and so have spent the last half hour surfing websites, trying to get my bearings again. What I have concluded is that a) I need to get a masters in physics to understand most of what I’ve just read and b) OMG! This is crazy shit! (In the most respectful, awestruck use of the term, of course.)

Here is my laywoman definition of a neutrino: a very, very small particle. So small that any mass at all could not be detected for decades worth of testing. So small, and so amazingly constructed, that it can move through matter practically unhindered. Wikipedia says it would take a light-year of lead to block half of the neutrinos produced by the sun.

The article I first read about them talked about them moving so fast, and so unobstructed, that an explosion in space, some light years away (if I remember correctly) sent neutrinos to a detection tank, on the other side of the earth from where the explosion actually occured, instantaneously. They went through the earth, is what I’m saying. Instantly. From very, very far away.

This may not knock your socks off, but the first time I heard it, my feet were dern naked. Instantly.

Why, you ask?

Well, here’s the thing. If there are particles this small and this free of limitations…and this difficult to detect with all our most fancy neoneopostpostmodern trillions-of-dollars-worth scientific techniques–particles we’re only beginning to understand, and that challenge us to speculate on other sorts of undetectable “things”–then it seems plausible to me that some of the psi phenomenon that people observe and experience (clairvoyance, esp, psychokinesis, etc.), and that scientists have so far been unable to conclusively prove, are actually the result of matter like this. Little tiny particles traveling between people. What if we are all emitting particles, all the time, and it is these that are resposible for people knowing, for example, from a distance that a loved one has died or been injured, like right when it happened? What if the phenomenon of discoveries happening nearly simultaneously across the globe–like in science or math, for example–could be explained, in part, by actual particles traveling instantly outward from their sources (i.e. the people making them), enlightening others in the field in a subconscious way?

What if all the phenomenon that people have for centuries attributed to a spiritual realm, are really all part of the material universe? What if physical and spiritual are really the same exact thing??

I’m going to write more on this topic next time, but let this intro suffice: I totally get off on this sort of thing.

Wow.

Since about the middle of September, Elijah and I have been part of a play group (beyond the impromtu one we have each day at the park). This group meets every Monday afternoon at various parks in the area (there–I’ve already said “park” now twice–okay thrice–in one paragraph, so you can only imagine how much more it gets said in our household these days). Elijah seems to enjoy the other kids, and I’m enjoying getting to know the moms. They’re easy to connect with, friendly, good conversationalists–and this despite the challenges posed to our talks by wobbling toddlers and play structures.

Two weeks ago we joined a spin-off of this group. A couple of the moms with experience in preschool education decided to spearhead what’s turned into our own little preschool, complete with planned educational activities, songs, snacktime, etc. And the cost? Free! Having no extra money for things like this these days, I feel like I’ve struck gold.

Last week was our first week attending, and our first time seeing the home in which the group gathered. It’s in downtown Palo Alto, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s just say small shacks there probably cost more than a million these days. This particular one was of a more…expansive size.

So I was silenced, to be honest, while walking to the door. The woman who owns it was the same warm, easy-going self that I’ve gotten to know and enjoy at the parks, and everyone inside seemed well at ease. But I found myself internally goggle-eyed. I’ve never been up close to so much wealth.

This week my experience was similar. We met at a mansion in the hills of Los Altos. The rooms in which the kids were free to roam could each hold most of our apartment. The toys available for play made our collection look like one you might fit, in its entirety, into one of those plastic eggs you buy from the gumball machines. Elijah went nuts for the first hour, running everywhere, playing with everyone and everything, and then finally stopped in the middle of it all, overwhelmed. He turned a few slow circles, taking in all the options, and then started to cry.

I left there quiet.

Wealth is such a relative thing. By most of the world’s standards–indeed, much of our own country’s–I’m more than rich. At times I have felt awkward, since moving here, to see our home become more posh than ever it’s been before this. Our couches, lamps, lamp table, area rugs, curtains, artwork, dining set–all of this is less than two years old. This, after having furnished our place ten years ago with fifty bucks, spent at a handful of yardsales.

But our standard of living compared with those of many in our playgroup is pittance. From toys to vacations to clothes to dwelling to the food we buy to eat, there are significant differences.

What do I do with these disparities? And the ones between me and those who have far less? What does it mean that some kids will always have everything money can buy? What are their advantages? What are mine?

I want to say everything is equal; everyone comes from different places, has such different stories, that to put a moral value on any standard of living–high or low–is unfair. We’re just people, right? Doing what we know to do?

But something inside of me says that’s not the route I want to take. Not exactly. It’s the part of me that knows globalization means knowledge, at least on most of our peripheries, of what consumerism is doing to our planet, of the growing gap between haves and have nots, of the interconnectedness of people on both sides of borders and jailbars and oceans and tracks. It takes all of us to make our systems what they are. We’re all to be lauded and blamed.

In light of this, however, ascetisism isn’t a route I want to take either. Or guilt, or self-righteous indignation. Any of these sucks life clear out of me, and no doubt from those within my reach. I’m interested in something more…inspiring to fill my thoughts about bank.

I’m inspired by people who are wealthy in things like compassion, mindfulness, involvement in public life, at whatever level. I’m inspired by people who have learned to be content with little, and not because they’re obsessed with levels of consumption, or looking down noses on those with much, but because contentment and gratitude are things they genuinely want to have. By people who are curious, people filled with wonder, people awake to the interconnectedness of us all. People who feel privileged to know you, and you, and you, no matter who you are, how much you own, or how pleasing you are to look at. I think this sense of privilege goes along with being inherently curious. And jolly.

My list could go on, but it seems like everything on it doesn’t have to be correlated with a particular income bracket. My guess is that wealth and poverty and the entire middle class all carry inherent challenges for cultivating the kind of wealth for which I long. Life does.

But this, too, feels like a conversation cop-out.

I want to think more on this topic, and reflect on it here. But I’d love to hear what any of you think. How do you feel about having what you own? About the amount of money you make, and the challenges and opportunities made available because of it? Have you found a way of sidestepping such questions altogether in pursuit of something better?

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, The Devil and Miss Prym, and was surprised to be confronted in its preface with a belief I thoroughly own. The surprise wasn’t in the belief itself, since on tons of levels I resonate with Coelho’s thought, but rather in realizing it totally contradicts, at least on first blush, another of my convictions. So I want to explore this contradiction and see if it really exists.

Here’s the quote:

Each of the three books [in Coelho’s trilogy And on the Seventh Day] is concerned with a week in the life of ordinary people, all of who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death and power. I have always believed that in the lives of individuals, just as in society at large, the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame. When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.

The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

My view of destiny is broad, and is more about a pulse inside of us than any pre-ordained script, so maybe don’t get caught up on that part. The idea I’m most intrigued by is this one that “the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame,” and “a week is more than enough time” for such changes to take place.

I think Coelho’s right. Totally. For all the apparent slowness of progress–inside ourselves, in the world around us–big things often happen in an instant. Big ideas get born, equations get solved, accidents kill, decisions get made, yeildedness happens to an inner voice, or to some person that we love, but haven’t been able to reconcile with. These things happen quickly, don’t they?

Or do they?

One of my biggest frustrations with certain brands of Christianity is the way conversion is understood in them. In such places, conversion is seen as the moment when a person magically transforms from something they’ve always been into something totally new. Bam! No process, no recovery, no counseling or hard work. A single prayer and the person is, or should be, if they were sincere, a happy, joyful God-child. Forever.

I have many problems with this, but for now I’ll focus on one: that person who prayed that special prayer? They won’t be happy all the time. They won’t always have joy. And odds are the same patterns that got them yearning for salvation in the first place are still, moments and even weeks or years after conversion, just that. Patterns. Anyone who has broken a pattern knows, with a few remarkable exceptions, that patterns take lots and lots of practice to break.

The transformations I’ve experienced thus far have taken terribly much time to happen, or at least I experience their unfolding that way, and the happiness and joy that I experience now, in far greater abundance than ever I experienced in any orthodox fold, have been won by terribly much work. Hundreds of hours of journaling and pondering and reading and talking and sleeping and waiting and sighing and crying and laughing and going to therapy. I’m an evangelical believer in healing and transformation and redemption and change. But I’m an angry mama bear at the suggestion that such things should happen quickly, or easily, or in response to some pre-scripted prayer.

But–and this is where the yieldedness I mentioned earlier comes in–I do believe in tipping points. I believe processes, for all their infinite unfolding, contain moments like Coelho talks about, choices that confront us, and on which mountains of things, whole worlds of things, depend.

So here’s my conclusion: I believe in conversion (religious and not), and that a choice in a moment, experienced as a turning from old to new, can make all the difference in the world. I believe a week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destinies, and also that our destinies are far more tenacious than to let us go if our choice, in such a week or moment (or weak moment), is against them.

Heather asked about my mention of fear in the last post, about how the undoing of it is one of the things I’m giving my life to. So I’ll try and explain more of what I mean by that.

I think fear is at the heart of our world’s problems. How’s that for a bold statement?? I think it’s at the heart of our individual problems, and at the heart of our collective problems, and the reason why it’s such an uphill thing, at least much of the time, to work well (or at all) together toward good.

Pushed far enough, maybe the core of our fear is fear of death, but I don’t think that’s what most of us are conscious of. I think most of us are conscious of fears like that of loneliness, joblessness, lack of clear or appealing identity, debt, getting dumped, getting raped, getting robbed, being ugly, being fat or thin in all the wrong places, losing health, losing respect, losing popularity, losing our minds.

I think there’s another whole layer of fear, though, that we’re not so conscious of, and that may be far more toxic than the rest. I think it has to do with who we are in a very deep and vulnerable place, and the kinds of questions we ask from there. Are we loveable?, is a big one. Are we okay? Is the world an inherently hostile place? Will the people I love abandon me? Will they get taken away? Will I have to suffer more than I can bear? Does God exist? Is God as critical as it seems sometimes? Are you going to hurt me? You? How ’bout you? Are you going to make me feel small? Will you take advantage of my weakness if I show it…or can’t hide it like I’d wish?

At heart, and of course to varying levels, I think we’re all afraid, and that every one of the “stupid” things we do collectively or individually can be traced to this. I think they can be traced to trying to protect ourselves, or keep from gaining or losing the things we’re afraid we’ll gain or lose. Traced to making sure that whatever hurt us before won’t ever hurt us again.

Surely many of our fears are well-founded. They make sense, and they’re there for good reason. But I think far more often than not, they’re bigger than they need to be, and when acted upon, only perpetuate the need that we and those around us have to be afraid. If I get defensive, for example, because I’m afraid you’ll trump my view, then my defensiveness will cause your voice to raise, and your defensiveness along with it. The two (three?) will escalate until we’re saying and doing things we never thought we would, given how we felt only five minutes ago. We will be fanning the flames of distrust for future interactions. We will be fanning flames of shame for having overreacted, if indeed we see that’s what we’ve done. We will be shrinking the bold, expansive, playful, curious, eager, trusting parts of ourselves that can’t come out when fear is at the helm, and nurturing an inner tightness, a vigilence, self-consciousness, clenched fists. We won’t be able to think about the common good, but be consumed with shoring up what we personally (as individuals, groups, nations) haven’t yet lost. At the farthest, most gruesome extreme, we will start wars.

I think versions of this process happen constantly, at every level, around us. It’s a web of fear and subsequent violence…and subsequent woundings, and the needs that follow our wounds to be afraid and protect ourselves…that we all get born into.

So. I want to be about the undoing of fear. I want to be about the shrinking of it, where it’s grown too big. I think the opposite of fear is trust, so I want to be on expeditions everywhere to unveil reasons for fear to actually turn into trust: trust that life can be good, that we’re okay–all the way to our core, that healing can happen, that no critical God exists apart from the ones we’ve grown inside ourselves, that our vulnerable selves can actually find safe places to be seen, and loved, and nurtured on toward Life, in the very best sense of that word.

I’m a writer, so written words are what I use most toward this end. But I think the shrinking of fear and the growth of trust can happen by many other means. I’m experiencing it through Qigong. I’ve felt it in Tai Chi, and the belly dance classes I’ve taken. In therapy. In laughter at no one’s expense. In sex and hugs and friends’ and mentors’ presence. Through music and visual arts. Through the work of raising my son. I see it happening as people love their pets, and as the motley crew of us gathers daily at the neighborhood park to talk and watch our kids play.

As far as I can tell, fear feeds on judgment and criticism and threats and looks of disapproval, so none of these, despite our best efforts at using them on ourselves or others well (said partly in jest, but partly with all seriousness), can lead to the alchemy I’m talking about, I don’t think. Trust is allergic to them. I think trust is allergic to many of the concepts of God that we work hard to feel loved by.

So this–this work of undoing fear and cultivating trust–is what I’m giving my life to. It’s the wind that fills up my sails and urges me on to write.

I’m thinking about Plato today.  I know just enough to pretend I have a working knowledge of his thought, so that’s what I aim to do.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m thinking of Plato because of what I wrote here about love.  And Love.  It looks like I’m Platonic, no?  That I think there’s this universal form called Love, and that all the human things we call by that name are just shadows of it.  Imitations, and at that, only varying levels of partial.

I think that does describe what I think.  I’m pretty sure I have yet to experience or offer Love fully.  This doesn’t mean I think love with a lower case ‘l’ is bad or stupid.  I’m not zoroastrian, or whatever you call someone who thinks what we have in the flesh is evil.  I’m just saying I don’t think any of us loves completely, without at least a good dose of other-than-Love mixed in.  How’s that for a specific recipe?

What I’m not so comfortable with is equating that form of Love, that ideal that we can talk more about sometime, because I’d love to try to understand it better, with God.  Since we’re talking recipes, I think this is one for something bad.  Maybe even poisonous.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about the reason why I think this matters at all, or a lot, rather, which has everything to do with growing up.  It has to do with a process in which I think we’re all participating, more and less willingly, and with varying levels of success, which is coming to terms with life being not what we expect it to be.  Those who appear most deeply at peace, I mean far deeper than surfaces, seem to be those who have faced some pretty major challenges.  They seem to be those who have not skipped past their challenges, either, or been stoic or a forced kind of optimistic in the face of them, but rather have let themselves feel the confusion their challenges have naturally invoked, the consternation, the rage, the depression, the despair.  They’re people who have confronted the beast that is Life Isn’t What I Thought or Expected It To Be, and sat with it long enough to realize it doesn’t have to do them in.  That, in fact, they can make a sort of truce with this animal, which…might even move toward friendship.

It seems like in these kinds of people an ironic sort of lightness starts to grow–in spite of, but really also because of all they’ve been through–where bitterness and clenched-upness and mental and emotional fatigue begin to fade into something more like hope, and not a hope that has to be worked at, or conjured up, or willed and prayed into being.  It’s one that comes of its own accord.  Usually very quietly.  Even imperceptively, especially at the start.  And it doesn’t depend on everything going right from then on, either.  It doesn’t depend on people always coming through, or even God existing and being good, but rather on a deep down conviction that it’s okay.  That somehow, some important thing lives on.  Maybe a person–you, even, because God knows some of life’s challenges can make that look unlikely, or someone else you care about–but maybe something broader than that, like love in the world.  Like babies getting born and fed and raised.  Like sunlight being soft sometimes, and plants somehow knowing how to grow.  Like the cycle of water moving up into clouds and back down to earth and streaming to the places where it evaporates again.  Maybe it’s just inexplicable, an inexplicable sense that things will be okay, that what needs to happen somehow is.  Or will.

Whatever it is, whatever comprises this hope, I think these people have it.  And I think this thing that gives them hope is rarely something glorious or triumphant.  Their challenges have made that pretty impossible.  I think it’s edges are rusty, and there’s chips in its paint.  I think its hair is a little greasy and maybe it hasn’t brushed its teeth for a while.  And maybe it never had cool clothes to begin with, and especially not the right color socks. 

But it exists–it, this hope, this sense that something important lives on, and somehow, because of that, things are okay.  It exists in an earthy, un-plastic way, and can’t fall out of pockets or disappear if you look at it too directly.  It can’t get stolen by someone who says it’s stupid, or whose "it" is much bigger, or looks like something taken from a magazine cover.

It can’t get lost because it already has been, and was found again.  It already died, so it can’t get killed.  It’s already all dinged up, so there’s just no worry that it might get scratched.

But back to Plato.  And Love.  And God.

I think this same process of growing up in relation to life needs to also happen in relation to God.  I think there’s danger when it doesn’t, because an idealized version of God can’t stand on its own.  It has to be protected.  Fiercely.  The same things we do to people or circumstances that threaten the Life We Thought We Should Be Able To Live, we have to do to people who challenge our notion of God.  Ignore them.  Belittle them.  Berate them.  Talk bad about them, or people like them, behind their backs.  Patronize them.  Turn them into projects to try to make them see things our way.  Or work on some serious efforts at denial.

I wonder what would happen if we set God free in our minds to be whoever or whatever God is (and isn’t).  I wonder what would happen if religious people let their true feelings about God surface, their true questions and frustrations, and stepped out from under any obligation to believe God is any certain way, out from any work to have faith in God’s love, for example, or God’s power or personal presence.  I wonder what would happen if all the stuff we equate with our being good and faithful and making sure we have some reason left to hope or know among so many options how to live well got turned completely upside down, and the opposite of all of our definitions for such things got unveiled as being the real deal.

The God that would show up in such an upset, the God that would be left, I think would be a lot more like the hope that Peaceful people have.  A lot more like that Volvo that keeps driving 300,000 miles strong, and just doesn’t matter if someone opens a door into.  A lot more like something that needs little protection, and therefore is cause (or justification) for very few wars.

If you want to call that an ideal, a form, to use Plato-speak, so be it.  I think I’d prefer calling it lived, experienceable reality.

I think the process of growing up well involves coming to terms with things being far less perfect than we thought they should be, far less ideal, and learning to be okay with that, and to find beauty and wonder and that sparkly feeling in your chest and your fingertips that used to come from reading fairy tales not by imagining an ideal that exists outside of us, apart from us and this banged up thing that is our world, but by looking at what we’ve actually got, in and around us.  By looking at it deeply, being as honest as we can about what we see, and feel, and know.

I think the same is true of growing up in relation to God.