What Feeds The Waters of Heart: The Care We All Need

I woke up one recent Sunday morning with chest pain. As I got out of bed, the pain gradually grew until there was almost nothing else left in my mind and body but pain. Each breath was a question. Most of us know what’s it like when we have some physical ailment and don’t know the cause; and thus, we don’t know what to do about it. The not-knowing becomes an additional mountain of pain. We don’t know how serious our situation is. We don’t know if we should go to the ER. I would’ve called a doctor, but it was Sunday⎼ none were available. Was this IT? Was my life at stake? Could I die?

 

My wife and I were hesitant to go to the ER because we’d been there earlier in the week and had spent hours without getting any clear answers. But pain can overwhelm doubt and provide its own dictates. We went.

 

The drive was both horrible and hilarious. It was early in the morning. I wanted my wife to drive through stop signs and redlights. She wouldn’t. She said we’d get a ticket. I said if any cop stopped us, they’d escort us to the ER. I turned on the flashers. She turned them off. We laughed; we wanted to cry, or I did, but didn’t. It would hurt too much. I was never so glad to see the mechanical doors of the ER.

 

I had called the ER before leaving home, and maybe that helped get us in sooner. Still, it took hours before they could get a hint about what was going on with me and do anything at all to reduce the pain, let alone begin treatment. I wound up being admitted for 5 days. And this changed my whole perception of hospitals.

 

I’m lucky; I still have good health insurance from my former job. My room was on the fourth floor of a community hospital that overlooked a lake carved out of steep hills by ancient glaciers. At each different time of day, and differently each day, the quality of light changed. At 5:00 am, amidst the thrill of mutedly hearing through the thick walls so many birds greet the morning, the trees and hillsides appeared in the lake as cloudy representatives of themselves, vague mysterious hints of who they were. In the afternoon, maybe at 3:00 pm, the light was stark. The reflections, if there were any, were clear. They tricked my eyes; I could almost see the reflection as the reality.

 

Each day, I walked the halls as much as I could. And as I did so, I realized I was learning lessons I never anticipated. I was learning respect, for one thing. Not just an obvious respect, of not talking too loudly, not disturbing others at rest. But a respect for a shared humanity. This was a unique situation. All around me, the normally hidden was exposed. I heard people cry or shout out in pain. I heard buzzers ring for nurses. I heard a team of doctors explain to my roommate their diagnosis and need for possible life-saving surgery. Luckily, everything turned out fine. Pain and suffering were right there for all of us. Our mortality was right there. And it was accepted, let in, so it could be faced. So, it could be admitted.

 

And care, compassion. This, too, surrounded us. It was the core of the place, despite the profit motive, despite insurance company dictates, rigid procedures made to protect the hospital and caregivers at least as much as patients. Despite an often-formulaic education that made it difficult at times for doctors and nurses to see me, the individual human in the patient. Sometimes profession got in the way of avocation. But the compassion was there, with both doctors and nurses. Patients learn to care for others from the nurses, to care for each other. I had a roommate and after 2 days we were sharing phone numbers. When we care, our perception and thinking opens. We see more.

 

And I noticed something weird as I walked. My mind was in a way like the lake. Amidst all the pain, a pain that felt unendurable at times, there was this quiet base. Just as I could see the beauty of the lake even as I felt in myself confusion and fear, there was this base of sheer knowingness in everything perceived or thought. There was an awareness without pain. That felt as real, as immediate as life could get. That made everything possible, all of this, all of what was frightening, what was hopeful, and what was joyous.

 

And who knows how this happened, but in the morning of the second or third day at the hospital my wife was helping me wash and change clothes. I was trying to put on shorts, and for some reason I felt incredibly astonished that I had 2 legs. Can you believe it? I had 2 legs? And I started laughing. My wife thought I was going nuts and asked what was going on. I tried to explain about having two legs being so much fun. And that my shorts, too, had 2 openings for legs. A perfect fit. And this was the most amazing thing in the world. And then she, too started laughing, giggling crazily, which made it very difficult for me to get my shorts on. It was a breaking or waking point, maybe, for us in dealing with the whole situation.

 

And it wasn’t drugs laughing. Some might say I sounded like I was high on drugs. But for various reasons, I can’t take painkillers and don’t do recreational drugs. Maybe this was the high, the delight that naturally inhabits the waters of mind but which we don’t notice often enough. Maybe it was just being absurdly tired or feeling the absurdity of the situation. Maybe we both just needed a great laugh to relieve the great stress….

 

*To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

Let Love Live, Revisited: Will We Act to Strengthen the Caring Relationship We Call a Community and Hope to See Actualized in Our Nation?

I’m sure you, too, are amazed at scenes like this: You’re watching your child at play, or a puppy running around the yard. Or you’re walking in the woods and see a fawn, or a kit, a baby fox, or a butterfly.

Or—I’m sitting in bed, a magazine on my lap. My wife is next to me, doing a puzzle. In between us, near our feet, are two cats, sleeping. I look at them, at all of us, and feel awe. Ok, the cats are simply sleeping, my wife, puzzling. But there is such trust on that bed. These beings want to be here, with me, with each other. They care. Or we care.

One of the cats, Miko, starts shaking, as if dreaming. He wraps his front paws around and over his head, as if to hide. I lean over and touch his back, and the shaking stops. He relaxes, releases his head, and turns over, showing me his belly. There is such vulnerability there, and tenderness. I give myself to you, and you give it back, enhanced.

When life is tough, we need to know such moments are possible, and even better, how to create a situation so they’re probable.

I’m reading an article in Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time. The piece details a wonderful conversation between author and meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, and the educator, scholar and social activist Bell Hooks, about “The Power of Real Love.” Sharon talks of growing up and thinking that love is something given by others, but instead, it is an ability, a capacity, maybe even a responsibility we have in ourselves. Bell Hooks talks of love as residing in our actions, not just in our feelings.

In this day, in this threatening political climate, where fear and hate are so frequently in the news—How do we love? How do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and care when the forces of domination and injustice seem to surround us?

Fear can be a message to wake up and observe more closely, or to turn away and flee. It’s built on opposition and is unstable and lasts only as long as we maintain a threat, an enemy, and a wall. Those outside the wall are rejected; those inside the wall are suspect. Such fear needs our compliance with it to succeed. Sometimes, we must or can’t help but act out of fear, but we pay an awful price when we allow fear to live too dominantly in us.

Love is built on mutuality, on approaching as close as possible to another being. It thrives on moments when there is little or no boundary or wall and, as the philosopher Ken Wilber put it, when our borders are not just points of demarcation but places where touching is possible….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**And thank you to Bell Hooks and Sharon Salzberg (and Lion’s Roar) for the conversation and teachings.

***This is a revisiting of a blog from September, 2017.

 

The Mythology of Politics

I think the act of choosing a representative or President or any political leader is an amazingly interesting and complex psychological act. Think about it. You’re choosing someone “to speak for you” or “represent you” and act in your interest, to be who you can’t be.

 

Back in the birth places of democracy, whether it was native American or Athenian or elsewhere, you represented yourself. Citizens voted directly on policies, although even in the height of Athenian democracy, there were still political leaders and not all residents could vote. Women, for example, had little to no political power. Representative democracy is a compromise between monarchy and direct democracy. A President is partly a King, partly a servant.

 

I am not a scholar of Carl Jung and do not agree with all the elements of his psychological theories, but still find them helpful. He talked about archetypes or psychological predispositions to perceive the world in certain patterns and to represent those patterns in images. These patterns are seen in myths, literature, relationships, even religion. The movie Star Wars, for example, very consciously picks up on archetypal mythical and religious imagery, the “force” as the Tao or spirit, the battle of good against evil.

 

Jung also described how we deal with qualities in ourselves that our culture defines as inappropriate to our gender. These qualities do not just disappear but form a more hidden or unconscious identity or image of ourselves. (Jung called these projections an anima or animus.) When we fall in love, we project onto the loved one this unconscious image fashioned out of all that we have denied in ourselves in relation to gender. This creates a “fascination” or attraction. The person appears to us as our “soul-mate.” But to have a real and lasting relationship, we have to take back the projected qualities and claim them for ourselves. We can’t be who another person expects us to be; we can’t expect our lover to live solely to fulfill our needs.

 

How you perceive any leader is influenced by the light cast by projected archetypal patterns and expectations. The President or Senator you perceive is a projection of you, your yearnings and possibly your denied power and needs, onto the political stage. Because of these projections it is very difficult to understand who any political figure really is.

 

The politician becomes an actor in a play scripted by the unconscious needs of citizens. We talk about political theatre. It really is theatre and, of course, the popular media, other corporate interests and wealthy donors, play this up for their own profit. The mythical or religious dimension just adds to it. Drama itself emerged from religious ritual and maintained a religious meaning for a time even after modern drama began to develop. The early dramas were enacted myths or stories, about death and the afterlife, about gods and goddesses. The Greeks used masks in their early plays, to represent different personalities or genders. Other cultures used masks to represent the power of a god or spirit or to take part in the story of creation. This is not just putting on a costume. It is putting on a different identity, at times an identity of a mythical or spiritual being. This helps explain why followers of a political candidate can be almost as devoted to their candidate as followers of a religious doctrine or leader.

 

Our political leaders put on the mask fashioned out of who they think we citizens want them to be. They get us to act out a drama with them as the star. But this political theatre can be deadly serious. Our environment, our health care, our wages, the possibility of being treated justly, the lives of ourselves and of all living beings on the planet are at stake. It is not just Donald Trump or Ted Cruz who plays a role and seems to think he is the King he portrays. All of the politicians and all of us can get caught up in the drama. We need to own our projections, let go of the “fascination” and not imagine any leader is a savior.  As much as possible, we need to keep for ourselves the power to act, to think critically about any candidate or policy, and we need to remember all humans are our neighbors.

 

*Photo of amphitheater in Ephesus, Turkey.