Living the Questions

“I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, from Letters to a Young Poet

Have Patience With Everything Unresolved

What’s most perplexing about life these days, is this overwhelming sense of limbo that most of the people I talk with feel.  Everything is raw, ragged, confusing.  There’s no sense to be made or found anywhere. It seems there aren’t answers to any of our burning questions.  It is as though we are forever in flux, walking a dead landscape of uprooted trees, smashed cars, swollen rivers spilling their banks.  We wander in neighborhoods of broken houses full of random (and often useless) belongings.  An egg beater.  A wheel.  One lonely shoe.

Love the Questions Like Locked Rooms or Books Written in A Foreign Tongue

We want to feel some sort of solace, but there is none.  There’s just a sense that everything in this wide world is shifting, but nothing has shifted, yet.

Live the Questions

And, perhaps, as Rilke wrote a hundred and ten years ago, we cannot live the answers. Yet.

So we must live the questions.

To me, this is what this particular time is all about.   Living with this sense of foreboding.  Living with the acid burn of negative potentials. Catastrophic climate change. The rapacious over-use of our natural world. The senseless killing of our own wildness, simply for the sake of killing.

We must live inside these terrible questions.  These questions that make us ache, so we will become larger, more pliable, and more open.

Finding Our Way Into the Answers

We cannot solve the problems we face with the same sort of thinking that created them. We cannot be so certain of which path to take. We must all become beginners.

We are slowly cracking and breaking the outer shell  (ego) in order to reveal the true.  We have never been here before.  We are brand new.

So, as I sit shaking in my boots and shitting my pants at the mere thought of all this change — of these paradigm shifts that are unseen in any lifetime before ours — I keep reminding myself, always be a beginner, always realize there is something to learn, always remember that you know far less than you think.  Be a novice.  Be a blank page.  Be embryonic in your sense of yourself.  You are just learning the steps.  You are just starting out.  It is OK to be stupid or blind or to not have the answers.  It is OK to be wrong, to make mistakes, to muck it all up.  This is all part of the process of becoming.  Of enlightenment.  Of living.

Love it all.  The confusion.  The mess.  The raw, red rims of your eyes.  Love the experience of being born.  Love the experience of watching the old way of life, die.  Watch everything burn.  Watch everything go.  Don’t be afraid.  This.  This is how you find your way.  You don’t notice the changes as they come.  You just wake up, one bright morning — sky the color of robin’s eggs — and you realize that you are there.  And you open the door and smell the restless air and say a prayer of profound thanks.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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This is Water

In Memory of David Foster Wallace

“But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars— compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.” ~ David Foster Wallace, This is Water

It’s your mind that creates the world. ~ Buddha

What I value about my liberal arts education is the way in which it helped me learn to think.  It made me conscious of the world around me.  It made me question my assumptions. (Buddhism helped with that as well!)

This morning a friend from high school posted a link to this great little film called This is Water, based upon a commencement speech of the same name, given at Kenyon University in 2005 by the late writer, David Foster Wallace.  In it, Foster Wallace explores the frustration and pettiness of much of daily life, and his realization that we must make a conscious decision to choose what the inane realities we experience, mean.  We can choose to see them through the lens of self — as in I am the center of the universe and all I survey is about me — or we can choose to alter the lens and see different possibilities in the reality in which we find ourselves.  The thing is, it is a choice.  It is always a choice.

It is what it is.

Foster Wallace talks about our tendency as human beings to live on “default-setting” choosing to see every indignity, frustration, impediment, or road block as other peoples’ attempts to torture us. Alternatively, he encourages us to see the banal reality in which we live through a sense that everyone is basically doing the best he or she can, given the difficulties and vagaries of his or her particular circumstances.  The line at the bank or the grocery store or the toll bridge truly isn’t there to make us want to scream and run wild through traffic, as though our hair has caught fire.

It just is.

His point is, can we develop the eyes to see life this way?  Can we imbue even the smallest, slightest, or most annoying encounter with grace and meaning?  It is up to us.

***

I often talk to my students — particularly my business writing students — about the importance of passion, empathy, and meaning in the workplace.  We read Daniel Pink’s books, Drive and A Whole New Mind, as well as Dev Patnaik’s book, Wired to Care.  I encourage them to take Carl Jung’s human metrics personality test (Myers-Briggs) and Glen Rowe’s empathy quotient test to discover things about themselves that they may not consciously know.  We talk about all the years they will spend working, and the role that passion will play in terms of their happiness in life.  Some students are more receptive to this information than others are, but I share it anyway.  Mostly because I wish that some adult had been brutally honest with me and encouraged me to follow my passions earlier in life.  As it is, I didn’t discover teaching & writing — which I consider my calling — until I had waded through a decade and a half of misery, working jobs that paid well, but did little for me in terms of inspiring me or making me feel that what I did mattered.  In the end, that sense of meaning was much more important than the dollar value of my paycheck.  If our work and our lives have meaning, we can deal with what Foster Wallace calls, “the day in and day out” of adult life.

The meaning of life.

Life is not easy.  It is certainly not the glamorized, air-brushed perfection that many associate with ‘reality television’ (not real, by the way) or with the fairy tales we loved as children.  Life is a series of mishaps and messes and beautiful ruins and heartbreaking joy.  It is brutal.  It is tender.  It can make you want to go to bed for a year.  But the water — Foster Wallace’s metaphor for human reality — is always there, whether we are aware of it or not.  We are swimming in a sea of moments.  If we choose to see this world’s madness as a wonderland, we have done ourselves a tremendous favor. We’ve also made the world a better place for everyone else, as we scurry through our days.

Kindness.  A smile.  The patience to deal with disappointment and loss and frustration with gratitude and grace. These mundane acts are the stuff of enlightenment.  They offer proof that we are riding these waves, not swallowing them.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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It’s the Small Stuff

In memory of Maricela Ochoa Henderson

“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” ~ Robert Brault

Small moments of transformation.

Last night my nephew called me.  He’s three.  He told me he had macaroni and cheese for dinner.  He told me he was going to the beach on Sunday.  ”I’m going to fly at kite at the ocean,” he said breathlessly.  His twin brother chimed in, “I’m filling my pockets with food!” I told them I’d see them in August. I could hear them clapping their hands and shouting with delight.

The conversation was bookended by a short introduction and close by my mother.  Then we hung up.

I saw the boys in Hawaii about eight weeks ago.  My mom told me this morning that they’d called me because when T found out I wouldn’t be joining them, he started to cry. Those precious little boys.  They break my heart open.

***

Today my mom and I talked about the week — like we always do on Saturday — and she told me that T felt better after our chat.  We exchanged reports on all we’d done this past week, discussed movies and television, ROKU, streaming videos, music, and a play she’d scored a ticket to.  I told her about the release of the poetry anthology my work is featured in (The Cancer Poetry Project 2) and how one of my students won first prize in the department writing contest.  We talked about the grading I did and the quilting she did. We talked about comfort food (tater tots!) and the pie the twins baked with their mom. In other words, we talked about life.  The small detritus that constitutes our lives.

The older I get, the more important these conversations and moments and revelations are.  I no longer take them for granted or assume they are limitless.  I know they should be treasured.  I stand in a river of such moments and constantly remind myself to cherish them because there is no guarantee how many more I will have.  Especially with my mom.

Not to sound maudlin; I’m just being honest.  My mother’s 78.  Her health is not what it once was. She’s outlived both her parents, her older sister, and my father.  Every Saturday our conversations are a blessing.  Another blessing in my very blessed life.

***

“I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” ~ Leo Buscaglia

Everyday is a celebration.

So, I am celebrating today because it is Saturday and the sun is shining and I am alive.  I am alive and loved by two little boys who live 1,500 miles away.  I woke up today with a darling doglet snoring peacefully beside me. I do work that I love, surrounded by quality people who share my commitment to teaching.

It is the small stuff that matters.  A good bagel.  A pot of French Roast coffee.  A handful of cashews. A new book of poems (with one of my poems in it).

Grateful. Grateful. Grateful.

Everyday, I remind myself:  I am lucky.  I am blessed.  I am loved.  I am seen and appreciated.  I am constantly protected and held and watched over — by my family, by my glorious friends, by my animals (little people in fuzzy suits), by my students and colleagues, by my peers, by my angels and guides.

Today I have another opportunity to make a difference.

So do you.

Let’s make it count.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Shadowlands

“Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk

This week the collective shadow was in full feather due to the full moon and the lunar eclipse on Thursday April 25.  As I made my way home from work I felt as though I was traveling through some sort of cataclysmic disaster movie.  Police and fire, car accidents, break downs.  It was all in full view.  Whatever we need to face right now, is indeed, in our faces.  Big time. In fact, these days the darkness of everything we’ve hidden and pretended wasn’t true about us, is showing up either through the horrifying actions of sick individuals or through the lens of our own collaborative dances with the devilish functions of our lives.  You cannot have light without shadow,  and therefore, you cannot have a human life without acknowledging your own part in the collective dream (and nightmare) of our world.

The day to day world we see is malleable.  Reality is a reflection of the individual lives of its inhabitants.  It’s not a separate thing.  It’s not outside of our sphere of influence.  Many among us have forgotten just how powerful we are.  That’s why integrating the shadow side of humanity is so crucial as the world shifts to a new and kinder paradigm.

The birthing process of that paradigm is not going to be kind.  It is going to be brutal.  But that’s OK.  We can do it.  I know we can.

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.” ~ Sylvia Plath

I initially got interested in shadow work when I was reading Debbie Ford’s first book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.  At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, working a job I hated, and scrambling to finish graduate school.  Overwhelmed, sad, tired — I desperately wanted to understand the profound sense of hopelessness I felt.  All the light seemed to seep out of the world.  As I read that book, something in me stirred.  Something sad and angry and beautiful and repressed.  I not only sat on the things that I judged as “bad” or “beneath me.”  I also blocked my own light.  I couldn’t acknowledge many of my gifts.

The shadow is not just the negative aspects of ourselves that we want to gloss over.  It is also, often, the aspects of our lives that we most need to nurture.  Many of us suffer from incorrigible disbelief in our own inherent potential.  We think we’ve been singled out as the only person at the party who forgot to wear clothes.  No.  We are all naked.  And we are all vessels of light and dark stars.  It is never just one or the other.  It’s an all inclusive deal.

Right now, the world is in chaos because it must be.  

We’ve been sick for a long time and we must drain the wounds we’ve sustained.  We must lance and clean them.  We must nourish ourselves and acknowledge the rights of all beings on this planet to survive.

Rapacious greed is born out of hunger that wasn’t sated by a healthy sort of sustenance.  It is the result of great swaths of the populace truly believing that money and power are more important than compassion and mercy.  It comes from the idea that taking and taking and taking will fill the emptiness you feel.  It won’t.

Only giving will do that.  Giving to others.  Giving to yourself.

Giving time and attention.  Giving tenderness.  Giving righteous anger to stop slaughter and stop the repression of women and girls. Giving acknowledgement to the rage over bride burnings and rapes.

We must stop the murder of dozens of school children by the criminally insane and their minions in the gun lobby. We must prevent sexual abuse and stop genital mutilation. We must curtail animal experimentation and the killing of shelter animals. We must stop rendering those dead animals into pet food (!), and prevent the poaching of elephants and rhinos for their tusks and horns.

All these things are the result of a repressed and volatile shadow side.  A side that believes it has never gotten ‘enough’ so it takes more than it needs. It takes more food than it can eat, and more things than its house can hold.  A side that blows things up because it has no healthy outlet for the rage and darkness and spite it feels.  (Like chopping wood, digging ditches, kneading bread, or scrubbing floors until they shine.)  We need solace and prayer and play and rest.  Yet our lives are compressed and flattened into a pervasive sense that we must push all the time.  Make more money.  Go more places. See more things.

There is no silence.  There is no recognition that life must be both ebb and flow.

As a Buddhist for the past twenty-eight years, personal responsibility is at the heart of my faith. You cannot embrace your power if you believe that others are to blame for your situation.  You cannot change your life if you think that others are victimizing you.  Life is full of both shadow and light. Society mirrors the way we think and feel about ourselves.  The shadow does not exist separate from the body that casts it.  It cannot.

“Let go or be dragged.” ~ Zen proverb

So, think about it.  What are the areas of your life that you need to do some internal work on?  What garbage needs to be bagged up and thrown out?  Unless and until we eagerly embrace the work of healing our woundedness and acknowledging both our greatness and our flaws, we will continue to experience explosive hatred, war, strife, hunger and pain.  Violence erupts anywhere there are secrets and unacknowledged wounds.

It’s time to scrub ourselves clean.

***

To help, consider joining forces with some of the organizations who are working on these problems world wide:

For issues affecting women and girls: http://www.halftheskymovement.org/

To save the elephants and rhinos: http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphans.asp

To enhance public safety for our children: http://momsdemandaction.org/

To stop the slaughter of shelter animals: http://www.nathanwinograd.com/

To work for the establishment of peace on this planet and in this country: http://www.thepeacealliance.org/

To explore Buddhism and its tenets: http://www.sgi.org/

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Nostalgia for the Criminal Past: Poet Kathleen Winter Looks Back

Nostalgia for the Criminal Past is poet Kathleen Winter’s first book.  I contacted her and asked if she’d be willing to discuss the ways in which she shaped and developed the themes and ideas of her book into an award-winning volume, especially in terms of  memory, connection, separation, and time.

Kat lives in Northern California with her husband. She is currently what those of us in the teaching profession call, ‘a road’s scholar’ meaning she teaches at two or more institutions and spends a good deal of time in her car. (Two hours in traffic to get to her gig in San Francisco.)  Right now, she teaches literature and composition at the University of San Francisco and Napa Valley College.

When I open our conversation, she reveals that she worked on the individual poems in Nostalgia for a number of years prior to starting her MFA at Arizona State in 2008.  She actually had about two-thirds of the manuscript drafted by the time she arrived.

“Putting it together, the whole time, I re-read and re-wrote the poems.  Constantly.  I sent it out steadily prior to its acceptance for publication. I can’t even remember how many contests I paid for, or how many rejections I got.  I kept track at the time, and when I’d get it back, I’d cross that place off the list, swap out a few of the weaker poems for newer stuff, and then send it out again.” This went on for two years.

When she received word the book had been chosen as the winner of the 2011 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Prize, she was understandably, “surprised and excited.”

“Getting the call was really joyful.  I remember imagining what it would be like to get the book accepted.  When it finally happened, it was wonderful.  The editor, Dana Curtis called, and told me I’d won.  It was morning.  I’d been back home for a couple of weeks after finishing my master’s degree. The editor told me Deborah Bogen selected it as the winning manuscript.  I remember I called my husband to tell him.”

Although many writers think that getting a book published assists one in terms of landing a coveted teaching gig, Winter found that wasn’t the case. For six months after she finished her MFA, she worked part-time in a bookstore as well as in a café as a coffee barista while she tried to find teaching work.  Her current job “fell into [her] lap” through a friend, just prior to the fall semester in 2011.  Nostalgia came out a few  months later,  in March 2012.

In the book, Winter focuses on “silos of time,” and our sense of memory.  Still, she felt wary of her choice of theme.  “When I wrote the book, I was just writing poem by poem.  The challenge for me was to turn the poems into a more cohesive manuscript.  So I tried to find a way in, tinkering and looking for patterns.”  She read her work and noticed to what sorts of things tended to draw her in.  “I am a poem by poem poet.  I tend to write based on an image, phrase, or a snatch of something that occurs to me.  As I read my work, I saw interests I didn’t know I had.  My concern for my environment, not necessarily in an eco-political way, but instead in a most basic, what’s around me kind of way.  I noticed my surroundings affected me.  Interiors (physical or natural surroundings) were important.  As far as nostalgia as a theme, I was a bit skeptical of it because I was afraid it might be dismissed as clichéd.  Other poets might not like it.”  She paused and laughed, thinking back on it. “[Poets are] smart, impatient critters.” However, she found herself circling back to the idea.  She saw another collection, built around a sense of ‘anti-nostalgia,’ focusing on the negative side of the notion.  “I think I stood up for nostalgia in the title poem as a reaction to that. When I ended up wanting to start the book with that poem, I realized that its title worked as a title to the manuscript as a whole.  To me, nostalgia and déjà vu are connected, I don’t know why.  I find both compelling and appealing.”

Knowing that she lived in Arizona to complete her graduate degree while her husband and dog returned home (to Northern California) in 2009, I asked if that separation influenced the book.

“That’s a really good question.  I’ve never thought about it, but I’d have to say looking back, that being away from both my beloveds (my husband, and Finnegan, her 14-year-old-dog) definitely influenced me.”  She noted that in the 20+ years she’s known her husband, she’d never lived apart from him, other than for one year when she was working in LA and he wasn’t.  “Certainly being estranged from him [in terms of distance] infused the ideas and themes and issues, particularly in the final section of the book.”

Winter’s favorite poet is Sylvia Plath.  Her favorite collection?  “Ariel.  She’s just so powerful to me.  The forcefulness of her voice.  Her incredible technical skill. The sounds and rhythms she uses.  Her elegant, memorable phrases and surprising images. Her wit, her humor. She blows me away.”

Other collections on her ‘must read’ list? Selected Poems by Thomas Lux.  She admires his technical skill and use of form, calling him, “a bitingly sarcastic virtuoso.” She also mentions The End of Beauty by Jorie Graham. “I love her confident tone and seriousness.”  She notes that her own work is “more playful” and she learns from seasoned poets whose approach is different from hers.  She mentions Louise Glück’s collection, Meadowlands. “The book looks back at a marriage; at its failings, and also wondrous times of closeness.” She laughs and says, “I suppose I should mention someone contemporary. Alexandra Teague.  Her book, Mortal Geography, came out in 2009.  Winter says she admires its “emotional power and seamless use of form. The first poem is the best poem about teaching, ever.”

I ask her what advice or encouragement she has for young poets. “I would say, for me, the best thing to do is read. That’s what I tell my students. Read more. That’s what inspires me.  And always carry paper so you can write that word or phrase down.”  We discuss the frustration of forgetting that elusive, yet perfect line or phrase.

She continues, “And don’t give up.  If you’ve been [writing] for a while and feel frustrated, remind yourself to keep at it.  You’ll get better.  Slow, imperceptible improvement is happening.”

Winter’s second manuscript is written and already circulating in much the same way that she handled Nostalgia.  Besides teaching, that is what she most wants to see happen in the next year or so. “I’d like to get another book out.”

***

Kathleen Winter’s poems have appeared in AGNI, The New Republic, Field, The Cincinnati Review and other journals. Her awards include the 2011 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Virginia G. Piper Center, and the Prague Summer Program. She is a graduate of the University of Texas, Austin; Boston College; the University of California, Davis, School of Law; and the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

Nostalgia for the Criminal Past is for sale on Amazon, Small Press Distribution, and the Elixir Press website .

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Finding the State of Wonder

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” ~ Albert Einstein

I spent much of yesterday writing.  Poems. Patching little phrases and images together. Nesting words into patterns. Arranging and rearranging pieces of language. When I do this, I lose track of time. The clouds can shift from morning brightness to a late afternoon lull, and I don’t notice. I forget to eat. I forget where I am because, in fact, I am immersed in a world of language. It’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.”

What happens in flow?

Csikszentmihalyi describes it as seven conditions or states of life. 

1. You are completely involved in what you are doing – totally focused and concentrated on the task at hand.
2. You experience a sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality.
3. You feel a great sense of inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well you are doing.
4. You know that the activity is doable – that your skills are adequate to the task.
5. You feel a sense of serenity – no worries about yourself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
6. You experience timelessness because you are thoroughly focused on the present, so hours seem to pass by in minutes.
7. You are intrinsically motivated to complete the task because whatever produces flow becomes its own reward (Flow: The Secret of Happiness).

As a child, it was easier to find this state of wonder and awe. I rode my bike for hours soaking up the simple pleasure of being outdoors, taking in the scent of lilacs and lavender.  I learned to sew, to paint, to draw, to sing. All of these things were things I did purely for the pleasure of doing them.There was enough time. Stress and overwhelm were not part of my life.  In fact, I routinely visited our backyard — in rural Eastern Washington state — and danced in circles, leaping and spinning and falling into the wet grass. That child — the child I was — loved to dance. She hadn’t yet been told that anything was impossible or unlikely.  She still believed in miracles and possessed a hardy sense of wonder.

Grace. Wonder. Play.

And the thing is, forty years later, she’s still a big part of me. The magical child. The wounded child. The inner child. She’s still here.

And when I craft poems (or blog or write articles or edit or revise writing) she emerges from someplace deep inside me.  She appears without guile or agenda. And we play. We play for hours and hours. She makes life good.

What got me thinking about this, this morning, was an image I saw on Facebook.

My heart caught in my throat when I saw it. I wanted to weep. In it, a young child’s parents are clipping their son’s wings. I thought about my nephews — who just turned three — the most wondrous creatures I know.  My whole being ached thinking of them. I wanted to know in my very bones that this would not happen to them. That no one would clip their wings, strip away their sense of absolute wonder, and make them be realistic — which seems to be the code word for half dead.

We need wonder and awe. We need to realize that it is part of our birthright to wear our wings proudly.  We each have a mission in this life. We have gifts and wisdom to share. If this were not true, we would not be here.

Fill Yourself with Wonder

So, in this troubled world in which we find ourselves, we must inhabit not only the state of grace, but also the state of wonder necessary to keep our spirits intact and moving forward.  For me, poems do that.  I invest in tiny symphonies of words. I browse and sort snippets of joy and wonder and sorrow.

I do it for the part of me that still dances at twilight, even if she’s not as limber or lithe as she used to be.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Falling In Love Again

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”~ Buddha

Last week I watched a documentary called, May I Be Frank?  It is about a man named Frank Ferrante, who at 54 found himself battling numerous illnesses (Hep C, obesity, depression).  In passing he told a young man he was chatting with at a restaurant called Cafe Gratitude (what a great name!) that he was pretty miserable, and the young man asked him, “If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?”  Frank responded, “I’d like to get my health back and I’d like to fall in love again.”  That young man — and two others working at Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco — got the idea of helping Mr. Ferrante do just that. They decided to not only help him, but to document/film what occurred.  Frank was put on a strict, raw vegan diet, examined by (and monitored by) a holistic physician, and required to check in with the three young men assisting him on a daily basis.  In 42 days, Ferrante goes through the wringer emotionally and psychologically and physically.  He loses 40 pounds. Along the way he confronts much of what he’s been keeping at bay: the carnage from his drug problems, the breakup of his marriage, his estrangement from his children — particularly his daughter.  He goes on a spiritual journey.  As the pounds melt away, so do his defenses against the emotional baggage he’s been hauling around for decades.  In the end, he is transformed.  [Over the following eighteen months, he lost another 100+ pounds, and he completely changed his relationship with his ex-wife and his kids.]

At the start of the process he claimed he wanted to “fall in love” again.  In the end, he admitted that he didn’t realize that, “the person I would fall in love with would be me.”

“Something inside you emerges….an innate, indwelling peace, stillness, aliveness. It is the unconditioned, who you are in your essence. It is what you had been looking for in the love object. It is yourself.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

So, Frank’s journey got me thinking. A lot.

Sometimes I feel terribly alone.   And sometimes that is not so great.

I tend to be a solitary person by nature, but I admit that during the two years that I actually had a spiritual sidekick (my ex boyfriend) life was better in a myriad of ways.  Mostly it felt good to know that someone had my back.  That someone thought of me during the day and wanted me to know that I’d crossed his mind, made him smile, or reminded him of something good. I liked having someone to snuggle up to and someone to whom I could recount the events of my day. I also enjoyed stupid, trivial things – like having his photo on desk at work or playing word games with him in the car.

I guess when we broke up I thought I would mend more quickly than I have. I guess I thought that I would bind up that wound and move on, but I didn’t. Instead, I got afraid. I got afraid of loving someone that much and then losing that person. I got terrified that if I opened the door to that kind of love again, I would only end up devastated.

Shutting the door on life isn’t the answer.

As a result, I shut down.  I let my life mummify.  I built a nice little nest of dogs and cats and friends and writing and teaching — and I imagined that I would eventually either move on, or decide that life was just fine as it was. And for the most part, it is.  My life is astonishingly good.  I just daydream that what would be doubly amazing is to have the opportunity to share that with some other like-minded soul.

And it would.  But I also realize that I must become the person I want to meet. Otherwise, I will attract another man who is, on the surface, ready to meet someone like me, but who is, in fact, not ready at all.

Must We Learn Everything the Hard Way?

“The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.” ~ Sonya Friedman

My last boyfriend was not any more ready to love me, than I was to love myself. (By the way, he’s a wonderful human being. I wish him well.  He taught me so much about the raw marrow of my life that I seriously bow to him in profound gratitude.  I just wish I didn’t have to learn everything through the slash and burn harshness that it apparently takes to get through to me.)

“Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

So, I learned from my ex that we cannot solicit what we do not possess.  The world simply mirrors our own life condition.  When we change, the reflection changes. It is incredibly simple and incredibly profound at the same time.  Such a tough lesson to learn, but one I am finally willing to tackle.  Self love.  It’s the foundation of everything.  How can we ever step up and manifest anything else, if we do not even feel worthy of our own love and affection?

As I watched May I Be Frank?  I watched my own life.  I saw all the ways in which I am my own worst enemy. I saw my abuse toward myself. And I saw that I could change everything quickly. It wouldn’t necessarily be easy, but I could do it.

All it takes is a moment of grace. All it takes is a willingness to be gentle and kind and compassionate with the wounded child I harbor.  I do love her, but I don’t need to bury her in sweets or hide her inside a fortress of flesh.  I am strong enough to risk deep love.

Starting with the woman I see in the mirror every day.  Yeah, her.

Time to fall in love with her.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Thank You, Universe

“Let gratitude be the pillow on which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” ~ Maya Angelou

I write this week in memory of my friend, Nancy Smith-Watson’s mother, the lovely, cheerful, kind, and luminous, Dorothy Smith.  She died on March 19.  She was in her nineties. My gratitude for the impact that she had on my life as a young person is immense.  She gave me rides everywhere and made much of the fun of high school possible for me, especially the Drama Club.  She and her son, Ted, also were the first people on the planet to encourage my work as a poet.  I owe her such a great debt of gratitude.

***

This past week I’ve been thinking about abundance and manifestation, and the connection between a grateful heart and our ability to see what we want and need come into our lives.

I realized that I am definitely my parents’ daughter when it comes to my concepts about abundance (and how it shows up for me).  So, I am unpacking that history and making cause to choose differently moving forward.  I am going to stop saying things like, “I can’t afford _____________________.”  Because you know what, when I say that, the universe hears me.  And suddenly, all avenues of plenty close, and true to my word, I can’t afford it.

Now that doesn’t mean, I can (like many of us) instead rack up a bunch of credit card debt to purchase things simply because I want or need them.  I live a cash existence.  I have for the past three years because my relationship with credit cards is an unhealthy one.  I lose control when I carry plastic.  So, I no longer carry it.  I use a Debit card.  I buy gift cards if I need something that is safer than cash when I travel.  But I don’t buy things today that I cannot pay for.  Period.  (It’s called delayed gratification and more of us should try it.)

In January I set up a Gratitude Jar in the home office where I write and work.  As the days and weeks pass, I add slips of paper to the jar every time someone does something nice for me, or every time something unexpectedly good (or just good) shows up.  What I’ve noticed is, the more I note my reasons to be thankful, the more I have to be thankful for.  For instance, I needed some travel money for my recent out of town trips (one business, one pleasure).  About three weeks prior to both trips (they fell back to back) I was stone cold broke, despite needing money to eat, grab a coffee, pay for cabs, wireless service, etc., for the trip.  I was praying that morning and simply said, “Universe.  I need some money for these trips.”  I finished my morning prayers and went to work.

When I got home that afternoon, I found an email from the coordinator at the publishing company setting up my trip to Austin.  She told me that once I arrived at the hotel, I’d be given $200 to help cover incidentals for the trip.  Cha-ching!  I got another email the next day from a different publisher confirming my attendance at a local conference.  It provided me with a $300 stipend to help with expenses for attendance.  Then, the first publisher wrote and asked if I would like to participate in a focus group while in Texas.  I said sure. I would receive $100 for participation in the one hour meeting.

Abundance is everywhere.

And, this continued.  Within days of simply putting out my request, money appeared to cover everything.  The day before I left my friend, J, gave me a Starbucks gift card for $25 to use for traveling.  When I got to Maui, my mom gave me more money.  What was different?  I wasn’t worrying or blocking my access to abundance by trying to figure out how things would show up.  (And I was conscious about acknowledging my gratitude as each wonderful surprise appeared.)

“We think we have to do something to be grateful, or something has to be done in order for us to be grateful, when gratitude is a state of being.” ~ Iyanla Vanzant

I told you last week that when I got home, J had purchased and put away a number of brand new items I needed, as well as re-stocked me with pet food, toner, and laundry soap.

My friend, Lisa and I were talking about this, this past week, and she said, “In the past, you would have been embarrassed to accept those gifts.”  Her point was, I’ve changed much of my negative tendency regarding abundance.  I am just grateful now. I let the powers that be (whatever you conceive them to be: God, Universe, guardian angels, guides) know what I need, and I let the universe figure it out.

Remaining Stumbling Blocks.

However, there are two areas of my life where I still have a strong tendency to starve myself.  In my personal relationships — with negative self-talk about lack and hopelessness — and in my ability to freely get around in life by having access to a car.  I’ve never believed — until now — that I deserve the freedom and comfort of a car.

I learned to drive when I was sixteen — like every other American teen — but my parents’ separated that year (and later divorced) and my dad left with the family car, so I never got a license.  I tried to learn when I was nineteen, but found no one wanted to teach me.  J took me driving a few years ago and was surprised that I remembered how to drive despite the thirty year break in my training.

My mom never learned to drive and relied on public transportation.  I learned on my recent trip to see her that she’d tried to get my father to teach her to drive early in their marriage, but he wouldn’t do it.  (He also blocked her efforts to go to college, mostly out of irrational fear that if she got her education she’d leave him.  Turns out, even without that incentive, she did just that.)  As a result, I grew up in a household where the women simply didn’t drive.  My Nana didn’t learn until her late forties.  My aunt also learned in her forties.  And my mom never learned.  For reasons that truly escape me, I followed suit.  I simply didn’t believe that I could “afford” to own and maintain a car.

“Showing gratitude is one of the simplest and most powerful things humans can do for each other.” ~ Randy Pausch

Change My Thoughts, Change My Life

Well, all these recent experiences with abundance/gratitude have reminded me that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift.  Truly, anything is possible.  (That has always been true, but we didn’t know it.)

Of course, I can learn to drive.  Of course, I can manifest a car and the means to take care of running and maintaining it.  Of course, I can allow a truly wonderful man (with a wicked sense of humor and a love for books, music, animals, and me) into my life.

I have the fortune (as Buddhists say) to do so.

I’ve always had the fortune, if I would just stop limiting my own abundance through negativity and disbelief.

So, I am opening the door even more widely, to usher in all that I want and need.  I can no longer afford not to.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Discovery on the Road to Hana

Three Generations – Momma, K, and M, at Hana Beach, Maui, HI
Photo by Shavawn M. Berry, Copyright 2013, All Rights Reserved.

“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.” ~ Marianne Williamson

I spent last week in Maui with my mother, my younger brother, my sister-in-law, and their twin boys. From the comfort of our lanai, we whale watched over breakfast. The beach was 25 feet away. We saw whole pods of whales swimming along the edge of the horizon, and midway between Maui and Molokai.  Steam from their blow holes blasted above the edge of the surf.  Sometimes, a tail would smack the water and the sea would plume around it.  Other times, they tossed their whole bodies up out of the water and then fell back into the sea.  The inlet between Maui and Molokai is their yearly breeding ground.  They are protected there and come every year to give birth to their young. Some mornings small groups of tourists were out on the water in canoes,  sitting still, waiting for the whales to approach.  It is illegal to approach them, but many are apparently curious about human beings and will come up right next to the boats on the water.

Spirit Keepers

On one particularly stormy day, a huge sea turtle swam in the tides not ten feet from shore.  We could see his flipper rise about the rough surf, and occasionally his head would pop up,  drink in the wet air, and then return to the sea to search for the small fish he was feeding on.  It thrilled my mom, in particular, to see a turtle close up.  According to Native American lore, turtles are the spirit keepers of the earth.  They signal both death and rebirth.

Twenty-nine years ago when I last visited Maui, it was more desolate than it is now.  There are still great swaths of it that are undeveloped or covered in sugarcane fields, but the intervening decades have brought strip malls and grocery stores and an endless supply of goods that a tourist economy requires.  Churches, resorts, hotels, condos, and golf courses dot the landscape.  It is only when one drives into the heart of the island that you get a sense of the solitary beauty that I remember.

On Monday — the twins’ third birthday — we drove the  Hāna Highway from Kahului to Hana. Although only about 50 miles long, it is full of  curves and switchbacks, and it narrows to one lane repeatedly, so it is imperative that drivers exercise not only caution, but also integrity and good manners.  There is no cell service for much of the area.  There are also no gas stations, and food is available only from roadside stands along the route. The scenery, however, is astonishingly lovely: African Flame/Tulip trees (or “squirt trees,” as they are called by the locals), bamboo, banyans, palms, rainbow eucalyptus, and many more.  The steep ravines conceal waterfalls. Many stream beds have black lava stones lining their banks.  There’s birdsong mixed with the distant sound of the ocean far below the road. We stopped once at an overlook where feral cats live, and then later at an ocean side state park. While there, we had coffee and ate warm pork sandwiches and banana bread. As we headed into the final leg of the trip up, one driver decided he was in a hurry and ran through a yield sign at a place where the road narrows to one lane.  My brother had to hit the brakes hard.  It startled one of the twins, and just a few minutes later he got motion sickness and vomited all over the car.

His mother was right beside him as it happened and she flew into fierce-Momma-mode, wiping him down, cleaning off his car seat, changing his clothes and diaper, and handing him back to his grandmother, wrapped in a towel.  My brother shook out the mess onto the roadside, and bagged up the dirty towels, throwing them into the back of the mini-van.  Within minutes, we were back on the road, his tears dried, laughing over his statement, “Mommy, I want my hot dog back!”  (He’d had a hot dog for lunch.) His mother stroked his face with such tenderness, “Oh, baby.  Your hot dog is gone.  Remember?   You threw up.  We left it at the side of the road.”

The Wild Little Men
Photo by Shavawn M. Berry
Copyright 2013, All Rights Reserved.

We got to Hana and spent an hour or so watching the boys play in the surf.  Then we reloaded the car and made the return trip.  (The road up and back takes five hours if you don’t stop.)  By the time we got back to the hotel, it was nearly 8 PM.  We had dinner and then a beautiful red velvet birthday cake with a candle shaped like a “3″ on top.

“Whose birthday is it?”

“It’s my birthday!” T said bursting into gales of laughter.

“Mine!” M said, giggling.

We sang “Happy Birthday” to them, their faces glowing in the candlelight.  Both scraped all the frosting off and ate it first. Then they munched on cake.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with my nephews since I live and work 1,500 miles away from them. This was only the second time we’ve met. It delights me to see how curious and bright and hilarious they are. I found myself in tears, watching them giggle and play with their parents.  The twins arrived late in my brother and his wife’s life. That night I saw the fierce, beautiful joy they felt in each others’ presence.

Love

Despite the fact that I don’t really know my younger brother, I do love him. I admire his tenacity and his devotion to this family he built from scratch. I left home when he was 16 and I was 18. For most of the past thirty-five years, I’ve lived in cities far away from him. He’s successful and caustically funny. He’s married to a woman who loves him deeply.

But essentially, we’re strangers. We don’t talk. He doesn’t share his “inner life” with me.

He spent a week with me and never asked me about my life. Nothing. He doesn’t know how hard I work. He has no idea that I routinely work 60 hours a week, that I grade thousands of papers, teach my classes, present at conferences, and write and edit on the side. He’s never even read anything I’ve published. His knowledge of my life is minimal, at best. I’ve always felt judged by him, as though I needed his approval or I had to measure up to his standards.  And, admittedly, I have judged him for falling short in my eyes.

But I realized on this trip, that’s OK. I realized that we do the best we can. I realized how imperfect our family’s life has been, but how right it has been, too.

The Tenderness of Home

I came home to a house full of ecstatic pets, a riot of weeds in my backyard, and the deep blessing of my friendship with J, who took care of the furlets while I was gone.  She also bought me several things while I was away: cat and dog food, toilet paper, laundry soap, a good knife, and ink for my printer. I’ve been treasure hunting ever since I got home.  I open a drawer and there’s another surprise.  Lids for the canned dog food.  A meat tenderizer.  A bath mat.

It is one of the nicest things that anyone’s ever done for me. I feel so grateful and blessed and loved.

She even enlisted her husband to weed my front yard.  (Yes.  She is a rockstar!)

I woke up this morning with a little black cat purring furiously in my ear, kneading my hair, needling my scalp with his claws.  My dog was stretched out next to me.  Three other cats perched on various pieces of furniture, waiting for me to awaken.  I’ve built a life I am proud of, a life that is full of love and tenderness, too.

Home. It’s good to be home.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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Austin Bound

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ~ St. Augustine

TRAVELING GIRL

This week promises another flurry of activity.  I am packing my bags and hitting the road.

First, I head to Austin, Texas for an educational conference.  Then at the end of the week, I fly out to Hawaii to see my twin nephews, my mother, and my brother and sister-in-law.  The boys will turn three on the trip.

Somehow that old Johnny Cash song, Everywhere, comes to mind.  Reality is, I have not been everywhere (not by a long shot) but I do want to keep ticking items off my bucket list.  This week I get to check Austin off that list, as well as check off my desired chance to revisit Maui (for the first time in 29 years).  The last time I was there, I went to spend six weeks with my father and his third wife, the summer after my first year at New York University.  Cyndi Lauper played constantly on the radio.  She Bop and Time After Time and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.  We ate too many cheese burgers. We visited desolate beaches and drove up to Haleakala at dawn.  On my Buddhist altar I keep a picture of my father from that trip.  He’s sitting under a palm tree, surrounded by sea grass and yellow flowers. He wasn’t much older than I am now.  I can’t believe he’s been gone for a decade.

Time to unwind

This time I don’t care what I do, as long as I get to spend time with my mom, and two of the most delightful little boys on the planet.

Austin has been on my list of places I’d like to visit for many years.  Mostly for the music scene.  I wonder sometimes if it would not have been a better move for me to go to Nashville or Austin all those years ago, instead of New York.  Both places seem more like hubs for singer songwriters, although I had my moments in New York playing the Speakeasy and Sun Cafe and the Ultra Violet. In any case, I will get a taste of the Austin scene this week. We’re having dinner at a place near the hotel downtown that has live music.  A friend suggested that I go down to Congress Avenue Bridge at dusk and watch the bats take flight (see above photo).  My sense about this trip is that I will be busy at the Austin Convention Center for most of it, but I may see if anyone wants to take a stroll at twilight on either Monday or Tuesday.

Time to renew

I may check in while in Hawaii, or I may wait until I get back.  My friend, J, is watching the doglet and cats while I am away.  So, I will be able to relax.  After the past couple of weeks, that sounds so delicious and decadent.  This is the first spring break in twelve years of teaching that I am actually taking a break.

It’s time.

So, I’ll send a postcard if I have time.  Otherwise, I will let you know what I discover when I get home.  Until then, take care.

© 2013  Shavawn M. Berry All rights reserved

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