I don’t usually say things like this but here goes: I am very glad to see this year end. It’s not that I am not grateful for all the learnings, for all the hard times, for all the illnesses and losses; I am. But I am still glad to see 2008 come to an end. Year-ends remind me of mornings: every day I am amazed that the sun comes up and the birds trill and we have the chance to start over. So, it is with relief and gladness that I welcome the delicious chance to begin another year.

I used to make resolutions but I don’t any longer. Now I just ask that whatever the year brings I welcome it (after possibly thrashing around a bit) and allow it to shape me in whatever way is necessary. Mostly I ask that I don’t resist the particular shapes. Not that I won’t feel grief or sadness or anger; only that I allow it to pass on through like clouds, like wind, like stormy weather.

So let me take this opportunity to wish you all the same. May 2009 be a year of abundance and blessings in whatever forms you need (often, darn, without knowing you need them). May you walk in beauty. May you drench yourself in kindness. May you know that everything you need is right here, right now. That in this moment (almost always), nothing is wrong.

End of November and almost Thanksgiving. My mother told me that Oprah recently had a show about her beloved dog Sophie who recently died. Which brought back thoughts of Blanche, my male cat, my familiar, who died seven years ago on Thanksgiving. In gratitude for all animal beings, and for what Blanche taught me—that what is real never dies–I am posting a piece from my book, The Craggy Hole in My Heart and The Cat Who Fixed It.

“After Blanche’s death, a friend sent me The last Will and Testament that Silverdene Emblem O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill’s dalmation, wrote before he died. The very thought of being outclassed by a canine, especially in death, offended Blanche, and so he channeled the following words to me on the day before his memorial service:

“You cannot see me splayed in the sun room looking as if I am surfing on a wave of light, you cannot see me lapping up the dripping water in the bathtub, curled on the couch in the TV room or snoring in the laundry basket and that deceives you into believing I am not here. But you are only looking with your physical eyes. Look again. Look with the eyes beneath your eyes, the quivering life beneath what you call your life. As you are beginning to discover, it is what you cannot see with those eyes that is most compelling. It’s time to begin living the shimmery glimmery sunlit life you gave me, but haven’t let yourself fully inhabit.

“Everyone knows I had a better life–and death–than most people on the planet. Between the acupuncturists and the psychics, being hand-fed and carried everywhere, having mice heads to eat, dogs to chase, fences to jump, and corn on the cob to nibble on, there was nothing the physical world didn’t offer for my pleasure. And who wouldn’t want a death like mine–carried around in a cashmere snuggly, touched sweetly until my last breath, with a Zen priest and a pearly godmother chanting softly beside me.

“All that was good, but the pleasures of the physical world–jeweled collars and sparkly necklaces, white downy blankets and dried salmon yum-yum’s–are not the real treasure. It was the love, it was always the love. It was the fact that you delighted every time you saw me. Every time for seventeen and a half years, I knew that just by walking into a room, your heart would fling out streamers of joy, so I kept walking so that your heart could keep flinging, and I kept putting my paws on your face so that your body could keep relaxing, and I kept purring so you would know there was safety in this world, but it wasn’t me anymore than it was the jeweled collars.

“It was you.

“It was always you.

“You keep mistaking the symbol of the treasure for the treasure, the marker for the thing itself, the gift from God for God. As if all you could possibly hope for was a thing you could touch, a token, rather than all of shining existence. You haven’t let yourself know that shimmering fully, so you keep turning to what reminded you of it–crystals and pearls, glitter and sparkly clothes. As if having those things was having the real thing. As if that was the best you could do.

“It was time for me to go. I told you I would stay until you were strong enough to live without me, and I did, and you are. Until your heart spread like dragon-fly wings, until you didn’t need me to know you had a heart. As long as I was in physical body, you relied on me. You believed I was the locus of that love. Now you can find out for yourself what is true.

“Do not grieve for me. I am in a place where tuna fish juice flows like water, where I can jump like the wind and every place is soft and sunny. If you must, grieve for what you won’t allow yourself to have. Grieve for all the ways you separate yourself from this radiance: from laying down in a patch of sun at two o’ clock on any old day, from knowing you are beloved on the earth.”

I always thought I was more interested in hoop earrings and big hair than in world affairs. When I fell in love with the vice-president of the student council at Tulane, it wasn’t because of his eloquent speeches about burning down the student union and going on strike. I hated what was going on in Vietnam, but the thick black hair that fell in curls over the vice-president’s collar made me instantly forget about wars and injustice.

People–close friends–I won’t mention names–have married for worse reasons than great hair.

My family wasn’t exactly the picture of public service and conscience. My father, for instance, was a white-collar criminal who got thrown in jail (but only for twelve hours) because he borrowed (but only for the teeniest bit of time) poor people’s mortgage money to start his own company. He had forgotten to tell his clients that they might lose their houses, might lose every dime they had, if his company failed.

Now, sure, these things happen. But because there was an implicit understanding that messing with the truth was acceptable, it was difficult for me to develop a conscience and moral compass. For instance, if a store clerk forgot to charge me for an item I bought, I was warned not to correct the mistake, because the stores were gouging the little people and thus they deserved any retribution we-the-powerless could muster. So instead of being interested in someone else’s pain and the grinding poverty of most of the world, I was taught to feel victimized and to get away with stealing. And it was definitely more mood altering to steal. Besides, grieving for the world’s poor and trying to do something about it took time away from other mood altering pleasures, like shopping, lying, overeating, and taking illegal drugs, all of which I’d perfected by the time I met my lustrous-haired boyfriend. On the other hand, taking illegal drugs and then staying up all night to talk about injustice and corruption—well, now you were talking.

Still, my father’s tiny truth issues aside, he did take me to see JFK—and shake his hand–when he was running for president. And he took me to meet Shirley Chisholm at a small party in Brooklyn. JFK’s passion, Chisholm’s luminosity—and the fact that both of them were dedicated to civil rights and public service–affected me deeply.

In my twenties and thirties, I moved from New York to Santa Cruz, hotbed of New Age groove and political leftness. I walked on the beach, took writing classes and went to anti-nuclear rallies. On the one hand, I cared deeply about the earth: I spent a weekend with Helen Caldicott, absorbing her passion for change. Yet on the other, I was probably the only one in the crowd who wore sweaters to match my posters.

I went to marches in San Francisco protesting our involvement in Nicaragua. I wrote letters to raise money to alleviate the suffering in Africa, but every time I’d leave a march or a meeting, I’d feel as if the speakers were doing the same thing the other side was doing: Creating an us and a them. Trafficking in hate and arrogance and generalizations. Making more war and pollution, not less. I didn’t understand how we could stop a war by creating another war, even if it was between the people in power and the rest of us. Usually, after three or four meetings, the leaders’ stridency would start to feel toxic and I’d drop out of the group. Then, I’d tell myself that at least, with my genetic propensities, I wasn’t ripping off the poor.

Mostly I struggled to stay open and to find my own way without feeling defeated by anyone’s shrill insistence that they were right and everyone else was wrong. Or, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, that God was on their side as opposed to being on everyone’s side, as, in fact, I’d come to believe. The books I was writing, the workshops I was teaching were always about the personal and the nondenominational spiritual; the relationship to food, suffering, love. And when I began to brush shoulders with people like Joanna Macy, John Robbins, Jane Goodall, I paid close attention to how they maintained a passion for political change without losing their humanity and humility. I wanted to be one of them when I grew up. I wanted to be more noble and selfless and actively caring. I wanted to be the sort of person who would hold hands with a frightened child who had been contaminated by radiation after the reactor in Chernobyl blew up. But I wasn’t. Joanna flew to be with the people living in that small Russian village, and I did my workshops with women who suffered with emotional eating. Sometimes it seemed outrageously self-indulgent, and I constantly felt guilty for not being on the front lines of racism, poverty, and war.

But I loved my work with its emphasis on the inner life. Whenever I wrote or talked about hunger and joy and abundance, about nourishment and deprivation and satisfaction, I felt as if I was doing what I came here to do. I had an inexplicable sense I’d accepted a job here on earth before I was born—and now I was doing it. Sometimes it bothered me that I was not working to stop the violence and injustice in the bigger world. But I made my peace with this: I seemed to be best at helping to save the world, one sad, scared woman at a time.

Then George W. Bush came along and each time someone said “ten years from now…” you had to ask yourself what you were doing to insure that we would even be here ten years from now. If the glaciers didn’t disappear. If a nuclear bomb didn’t destroy us all. If there would be enough trees and honeybees and insects still left to sustain life.

The crisis of his administration challenged me to get more involved as an activist, but at the same time, to be truthful about what I can and cannot do. Since my temperament has always been a little high-strung, perhaps a bit more alert than has been absolutely necessary, I am prone to getting lost in fear. I can’t be useful to others or to the earth when I am hyperventilating, breathing into a brown bag or having to put my head down between my knees, as I did in the months leading up to Y2K. When I get lost in fear, I become hypochondriacal: When I have a sore throat, I am certain I have throat cancer, when my husband is two hours late, I am certain he is lying dead on the side of a road. We are living through such an extreme and terrifying time now that anyone who is high strung or prone to anxiety can overload her nervous system with panic daily.

So, the question is: How do we live, love, stay open without putting on armor to protect ourselves from the sheer onslaught of horrible news? Or has the world situation become so dire that we all need to throw down our lives and become part of a Resistance movement, the way countless courageous Jews and Christians did in Germany during the Third Reich?

I don’t know, but I do know that any time I have tried to do what I thought was correct based on guilt or someone’s else’s passion, my actions have been hollow and hollow doesn’t really feed anyone for very long. And I do know from experience that when I act from inner guidance and from love, the way I see the world looks completely different than when I don’t, and that this perception offers hope and a second wind to people who may be flailing or about to go down. When my spiritual health is good, and I am helping one woman find her way back to the light, the big, solid, clunky, fearful world becomes transparent, limitless, kind. It’s not that war doesn’t exist, it’s that when I stop warring inside myself—when I stop wanting things and people to be different than they are, when I stop believing that I should be different than what I am–there is clarity and objectivity and fearlessness about what to do and how to proceed.

I even stop blaming George Bush. Mostly. I stop worrying that the world will blow up because I see that death is not the worse thing that can happen. (To be honest, this last part–the one about the D word–is always a little tricky, since my default position is that death is horrible and painful and must be avoided at all costs). Also, in case there is a hell and stealing from Bloomingdales and sleeping with married men count as punishable crimes, I seriously need more time to prepare my brief to the celestial committee on moral rehabilitation. But then I remember the deaths I’ve already experienced and survived, and, in fact, been transformed by. The deaths of people and animals with whom I could not live without, and then, somehow did. The death of my beliefs that I can control what happens to me and the people I love or much of anything at all.

I have learned that the very opposite is true: that when things fall apart on a personal level —when I am at the edge of what I think I can tolerate–it is almost always a harbinger of unimaginable expansion and ultimate benevolence if I am willing to be with the pain of it and not tell myself horrible stories, whether it is individual or global. If I am willing to pay close attention and keep breathing quietly, rather than spiraling into fear and blame, there will be a blessing, a hard-fought peace.

It looks as if we are now witnessing the necessary falling apart of religions, of government, and of cherished ways of life that precede unimaginable change. But I know that if we take care of our deepest selves, and then stick together, that we will come through whatever suffering awaits. When the great Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps said “what is to give light must endure burning,” he really meant it.

The burning, it seems, has begun. Now, more than ever, we need to help other people remain calm, and to keep our senses of humor so that decisions and actions are not made from fear. We need to do the work each of us was put here to do, which is both to manifest our own gifts and talents, and to quote Mother Teresa, do small things with great love. So, today, I sent some money to CAI, an organization that builds schools for girls in Afghanistan, I gave something away to a friend that she has loved for fifteen years and I got a few hours of my own writing done. Now, I am going to The Scoop where they make ice cream from the Strauss Creamery in Point Reyes. Every night at The Scoop, the line coils around the block where parents with their kids and teenagers with pierced lips and people using walkers and lovers with their arms and lips locked all wait patiently for the homemade waffle cones topped with the flavors of the day–Honey Lavender, Blackberry Swirl, Lemon Dream. Sometimes I go by myself and read a book as the line inches along, but this time, I will talk to the kids, play with the dogs, watch the thin crisp of moon. My favorite flavor is Love Parade—vanilla with coconut and chocolate. I hope they have it tonight.

I’ve been waking up these days in a kind of saturated gladness. An unadorned loveliness. My mind will be doing its usual mind-things: telling me what’s wrong, who did it, how to fix it. (A friend of mind once told me that when he wakes up every morning, he thinks: “Something’s wrong and who is to blame?”). If I don’t get caught up in the story then something else occurs. An awareness of spaciousness, of openness. Like the sky after clouds have passed through. It always makes me realize that in this moment, when I don’t get caught in the fantasy of a better moment, life is always good.

From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: (thank-you, Kim, for keeping me in poems)

Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every

one is immortal,

I know it is wonderful…but my eyesight is equally

wonderful…and how I was conceived in my

mother’s womb is equally wonderful,

And how I was not palpable once, but am now…and

was born on the last day of May 1819…

And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we

affect each other without ever seeing each other,

and never perhaps to see each other is every bit

as wonderful…

We’ve been dealing with fires and the prospect of fires these days…two friends of mine have houses that are in the line of the Big Basin fire near Big Sur. Another friend’s house already burned down. Fires don’t always happen to people in the newspaper. They are close. Like floods and food shortages and high gas prices. It seems as if we really are witnessing and living through an extraordinary time of change and dramatic reversals. Always a good time to take a breath, a few breaths. And remind ourselves how temporary everything is. Houses, pets, bodies.

This morning I thought that Mary Oliver’s poetry was a good anchor, a good touchstone for these days. Here are some random lines:
…and what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
…and when it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.
…Instructions for living life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Being Alive

Last Saturday night was dazzling. I couldn’t sleep so instead of tossing and sighing and waking Matt, my husband, I decided to walk outside. We live in the country with no street lamps and big skies. I looked up at the moon and it was as if it was just me out there in the cool night. Me and thousands of stars. Me and the haunting sound of a night bird. Me and the soft rustle of oak trees. Then I went inside and, filled with the glitter of stars, fell asleep immediately.

Later the next day, I heard that a neighbor of mine had taken a shotgun to his heart and killed himself that same night, at the same time that I was outside. He’d been depressed and according to the person who told me about his death, was worn out. So many thoughts went through my mind when I heard: sorrow, compassion, grief, concern. But then I thought, he didn’t see the stars that night. They didn’t comfort him. He won’t see the spring this year. He won’t see the acacia bloom. He won’t hear the wind anymore. Won’t see his wife’s face when he wakes up in the morning. Won’t wake up on any morning.

I remembered the times when I was convinced that dying was better than living. That I just wanted to die to stop the pain. I remembered reading about people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them who survived said: I realized in the seconds after I jumped off the bridge that everything in my life I thought was unworkable was really workable—except for the fact that I’d just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sometimes it really does seem as if it’s all too much. Too much trouble, too much suffering, too much heartache. But as I tell my students (and often remind myself), if we can drop into the feelings instead of reacting to them, we can make it to the other side. We can let our hearts break. And somehow, miraculously, feel what’s between the broken pieces. The space, the light, the stillness. The sheer miracle of being alive and being able to touch smell feel hear. The fact that we have this body that has served us so well. The fact that we can taste an apple. Or hear the unearthly silence in a redwood forest. The fact that in an instant, everything can change. Does change. Will change.

One of the assignments my friend Natalie Goldberg gives people is to write down ten things they will miss when they die. My list: Matt’s face, the smell of daphne flowers at the break of spring, the way my dog Celeste runs around in crazy circles when we come home, watching the wind in the oak trees, the sound of rain on the metal roof, 77% bittersweet chocolate, peonies, hot baths, stars on a dark night, Erica’s outfits on All My Children, ruby-throated hummingbirds (I know that’s eleven but I couldn’t help myself). Just writing the list made me realize I could write ten more things, twenty. Fifty more. A thousand.

Above Everything
I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air — a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
   ~ David Ignatow ~

Today was quite a day. A good friend called to tell me she was dying of cancer. Another friend called to tell me her mother just died. Yet another friend’s father fell down the steps and broke his neck. Then, there was the rain that never stopped. The rain that split a few trees in our backyard, broke my favorite outdoor planter with the sunflowers and then decided to come pouring through our living room. Oh, and there was the small matter of the fifteen stitches on my face (from having a cancerous mole removed) and the fact that I now look like a rainbow colored Scarface. My eyes are black and blue, my cheeks are yellow and the wound is bright red.

So all in all, it was an eventful 24 hours. And yet, life is calm. There is a sense that everything is as it should be; there is no resistance to any particular event. Not that I am not sad. I am. I don’t want my friend to die. I feel deeply for my other friends. And I wish I would have known to move that sunflower pot out of the way of the wind. (My face? Well, I have a really cool cobalt-blue band-aid with stars and galaxies covering the wound. It’s not exactly my color—I like yellow and golds—but still.) When I don’t argue with what is already happening or has happened, when I don’t want anything to be different than it is, there is calm. There is sadness or grief or disappointment but it is all happening on the surface. Underneath, there is a sense of stillness. Of rightness. Of no problem.

My friend Kim sent me this poem today by Galway Kinnell.
It’s called Prayer:

“Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.”

I love it because it describes a different kind of happiness than most of us ever imagined. True happiness: Wanting only what is. May you find yourself wanting just that. Only that. But that.

I haven’t written recently because I have had to spend most of my time taking care of my health. But it is the season of twinkling lights—and I wanted to take the opportunity to say a few words and wish you all a blessed holiday and new year.

Just seeing the way people go to elaborate lengths to decorate their houses makes me feel that all is well. I remember a teacher of mine once saying that it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sitting in the darkness; the second you turn on the light, the darkness disappears. So, when you notice the blinking reindeer on someone’s lawn or the lighted carrot on the end of a huge snowman’s nose, let yourself be affected by the spirit of light itself. By the joy of it. By its ability to dispel the darkness.

And take care of yourself. Which means that when you are physically hungry, eat with gusto and pleasure. But when you are hungry for a touch, a word, a moment of contact, some time alone, be willing to ask for and receive those pleasures. Turn on the lights of the spirit. Illuminate yourself.

Here are my suggestions of ways to care for yourself during the season of darkness and light:

• Set aside some time for yourself every day. In the rush of the holidays, we often forget to do the quiet things that nourish us. We spend our time thinking about others (which, is, admittedly, a lovely thing to do) and have the tendency to forget to pay attention to our own needs. When we feel depleted, and food is as available as it is during the holidays, we use it to fill ourselves. Make an appointment for a massage, take a walk, sit in a chair and do nothing. When you take time for yourself, you remind yourself that you are worth taking time for.
• Make a list of the things you like most about the holidays. Incorporate at least one of them into each day. Give yourself something to look forward to, give yourself some power in creating a holiday that is joyful to you.
• When you go to a party at which there is a buffet, take a sampling of three dishes that look wonderful to you. Take your time eating them. Enjoy them. If you want more, take more but do it slowly, savoring each bite so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of food.
• Remember that you do not have to go to a party simply because you are invited to it. Be aware that you have choice about what you do with your time.

The holidays are the time when the sun begins to return to us, when the days become lighter and longer. They are the time when people are willing to put their ordinary concerns aside and spend their time giving, wishing for the best, thinking about peace. When I see, even for a moment, that people are capable of giving and making peace, it makes me believe it is possible for another moment and another. For a whole string of moments, for a year. For the rest of our lives. And our childrens’ lives.

I just finished teaching our Inbetween weekend—the two-day twenty-five person intensive for our Reflections and Revelations retreat students that takes place at the midpoint between the bi-annual retreats at Mount Madonna. Many of the students who come to the Inbetween have been coming to the retreats for years; some of them have attended only one or two retreats. At the end of these weekends, I am always knocked out—breathless—by the change I see in the people who come.

Some of the students came to the retreat loathing themselves. Some came a hundred pounds overweight. Some came eating only cinnamon buns for breakfast and not knowing it was possible for their bodies to feel alive and well and vital. As I watch them work with their patterns, I see again and again that if we are dedicated to our own freedom, and if we are willing to stay with ourselves when we are in pain, the most intractable behaviors loosen, open up, transform.

Most of the time we just want it to be easy. We are tired of the suffering, tired of trying so hard, tired of this weight problem that has been plaguing us for what seems like forever. We just want it go away.

It takes a long time to realize that quick fixes have quick endings.

Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run. Ask yourself if it’s only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a doorway to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter—if you are willing to use what you do with food as a doorway, as a path—then there is no end to what you can learn. No end to what you will understand about yourself. And that can only be good.

For the past two days, the newspapers have been filled with stories about how your friends can make you fat. Based on an article in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, which was based on a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, the story goes that after 12,067 people in Framingham, Massachusetts were tracked over a period of thirty-two years, the scientists deduced that there is a 171% chance that having a fat friend will make you fat. The doctor and professor who conducted this study hypothesize that seeing your friend gain weight changes your perceptions of what’s acceptable; when you see your friend gain weight, you don’t feel so bad about your own expanding girth Another way of saying this is that if she’s doing it, then you figure, what the hell, it’s fine for you to do it. Fine to eat rice pudding for breakfast. Fine to be uncomfortable in your body. Fine to be spaced out or lethargic most of the time from not eating what your body actually needs. (The study didn’t mention cats, but it makes a girl wonder: some of us are as close to our cats, closer, than to our friends. So, if your cat is fat, do you feel better about your thighs?)

I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. And I can’t refute a study that’s been painstakingly conducted for thirty-two years. But what I can say is that relying on how your friend looks for how you feel about yourself, deciding what and when to eat based on the size of your friend’s butt is probably not the best way to get to know yourself or to live a life you can call your own.

Your hunger is your own. Your appetites, your longings are yours only. When you get sick, it’s not your friend’s body that needs tending. When you are lonely or sad or grieving, looking at the size of your friend’s body will not help you. If your friend likes sweet potatoes and you don’t, if your friend is not hungry but you are, do you put yourself aside and act like she does?

I have a friend who says that we spend most of our lives looking at ourselves with “bank-camera eyes”–as if we are looking at our bodies from the outside in, instead of inhabiting them, instead of taking up the space in our arms and legs. We usually hover around and not in our bodies. When was the last time you actually felt the earth beneath you, your hands in soapy water, the crunch of the food in your mouth? If this study says anything to me, it reinforces the degree to which we are living disembodied lives, relying on external cues–the size of our friend’s body–for internal states like hunger, fullness, value, acceptance. If the food you put in your body is determined by the size of your friend’s thighs, you are disowning the power that comes from listening to your needs and satisfying them. You no longer are living the life you were given.

I just finished reading the new Harry Potter book. Amongst its many dazzling virtues–yup, been a die-hard Harry fan since the first mention of messenger owls and talking portraits–I loved this quote near the end of the book from one of the characters who thought he was dying: “…he felt more alive and more aware of his own living body than ever before. Why had he never appreciated what a miracle it was, brain and nerve and bounding heart?”

Your body–not your friend’s body–is the piece of the universe you’ve been given. Your body–”brain and nerve and bounding heart”–not your friend’s body–is the only place you can know love, truth, joy, contentment, peace. Come home to it. Come back. It’s never too late.