January Blue Heron

In among my various and assorted fruit, there is the loosely-held belief that the Universe speaks to me in blue herons.  Big decision days are often accompanied by a proliferation of heron sightings.  I saw 5 in one day after a particularly heart-wrenching break up that was, nevertheless, the right course of action.  As winter approaches, however, even the Universe struggles to produce a blue heron smack dab in the middle of my path.

Today, however, is proof that it can be done.

It’s bleak here, full of low grey clouds and spitting, spiteful rain.  There is no particular crisis, no big decision to be made, nothing more on my plate than a phone interview and the hopes that one of the options that have been teasing me turns into something I can call a start date.  Nevertheless, there it was…  A heron in the most unexpected of places.  And with it, a rush of gratitude…  for everything, even the parts that suck.  Because the suck is how you get smart, it’s how you develop compassion.  But also for a reminder that there will be time after this.  There always is.

And it’s going to be okay.  Whatever it is, it is going to be okay.

The God Question

Am I the only one uncomfortable with God?  The God I grew up with was a discrete entity with an implausible digression into Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He (always He) knew everything, saw everything, and was everywhere, all the time.

I stopped calling myself a Christian at 17.  First, because the definition of  Christian is believing that Jesus was the son of God.  If you don’t believe Jesus was divine, you aren’t a Christian.  The second reason was that I didn’t like the company I found myself in: small minded, gossipy people that didn’t seem to remember the part where Jesus yelled at the Pharisees for being cups with sparkly outsides and filthy insides.  Also, I’m a big believer in the “he who is without sin, cast the first stone” rule.  Dealing with my own failures is a full time job that doesn’t leave me much time for trying to pick other people apart.

That left the question of God.  Does He (She?) exist?  How can S/He be good if bad things happen?  My 20’s answer to this question was Deism.  There’s a God, S/He just set it all in motion and then stepped away to watch the clock unwind as it would.  Existentialism was a favorite construct at that point.  No inherent meaning, meaning is what you make of it.  Nietzsche was a favorite author.  All sorts of things fell into a weird kind of place through the lens of  Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Yes, i’m pretty sure that makes me weird.

Anyway, I was pretty content with this answer, all until I got divorced and hit rock bottom with a velocity that stole my breath.  I got foxhole religion in a hurry, which looked like waking up in the middle of the night howling out a prayer that was so visceral, no language could even begin to hold it.

As the urgency of my crisis subsided, I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I’d started praying again, not just in the guttural 2 AM pleadings, but in conversations with Neal.  Theories and proposals that I am well aware are fruitcake in nature started making sense to me.  I found an energy-lady/empath.  I pulled out my Tarot cards again.  I read The Four Agreements.  I read The Secret.  I had extensive conversations with a man who believed in past lives and karma and meditation, and he was the least fruit-cake person I’ve ever met.  God slipped out of my vocabulary, only to be replaced by the Universe.  I re-read Neal’s letters.  And this all eventually coalesced into a synthesis of everything that will probably evolve again, and isn’t even original to me (though the original philosopher’s name escapes me right now).

For God to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, then God must be everything and everything must be God.  God must be the entire system, the interactions, the material world, the butterfly effect, the ups and the downs, the music, the transcendental nature of listening to Robert Glasper play Smells Like Teen Spirit live, the uncertainty.  Good and bad, dark and light, the way that nothing is ever taken from you without the left-behind void being filled with something else…  Time.  It’s all God.

And beyond that, I don’t know.  The Nobel Prize is going to a Department of Commerce employee who showed that a particle can be beside itself.  I’m open to the possibility that all kinds of things that previously have gone unproven are going to shake out to be verifiable.  I’ve seen things I can’t explain, had prayers answered, known friends who have experienced things that don’t fit into what’s possible.  Fallen for someone who answered questions I hadn’t asked…  it’s a mysterious, funny thing, my new everything is everything God.

But it’s a better answer than any other that I’ve come up with thus far.

Emotional Investment

I don’t pray much.  Alternately, I pray all the time.  Just not in the “Dear Jesus” format I learned at church.

Unless I lose my keys, or a piece of jewelry, and then I’ll catch myself praying like I did when I was six.

Other than that, it is an ongoing conversation with Neal.  Sometimes I write him letters; mostly I thank him for three things that I’m incredibly grateful for.  And then I beg him to expand my neutrality.  Please, please my darling, deeply missed Neal, please expand my neutrality.

Because your emotional energy is a gift.  It is an investment.  It’s a resource that you spend and you can’t get back.  And I find myself constantly getting worked up about things that are temporary, situations that I won’t remember the details of next month, people that I don’t know enough about to make a reasonable assessment about whether or not *this* person is the one I want to give the gift of my caring, my concern, my fundamental give a shit.  You get a limited supply of give-a-shit.  There is only so much allocated to one lifetime.  I know this because my father spent it all a long time ago and now he doesn’t care who he pisses off when giving his best professional advice.  Generals, Executives, the people that sign his check…  Nope.  He spent his give-a-shit elsewhere, years ago.

I’d like to conserve mine.  Hence, the begging for neutrality.

So that’s today’s conversation with myself.  Take your own advice.  Operate from a place of neutrality.  Be as careful with your emotional investment as you are with your money.  More careful.  Because wherever you invest your emotions, that’s what you’ll see grow.

Please Neal, please.  The glass isn’t half full or half empty.  It’s just a glass with some water in it.  There’s more water to be had, somewhere.  Another glass if you break that one.  There are optimists and pessimists, can I be a neutralist?

I Miss God

Today kind of sucked.  On my way home, I was listening to Jill Scott, who was singing something about God’s plan for her and I thought…  damn.  I miss the feeling that someone else is going to figure it out for me.

Once upon a time, I read that people who are depressed have the most realistic sense of how much control they have over their lives.  Happy people think they have everything under control and can impact outcomes through various means both impractical and practical.  Profoundly depressed people know there is a fine line between them and utter ruin.

Having been to rock bottom (see: divorce), I’m in some unmentioned group between.  I am no longer profoundly depressed, but I also haven’t lost my awareness of that membrane that once seemed like a fortress and has turned out to be about as sturdy as one of my soft contacts (and equally likely to distort my natural vision, which happens to be terrible.)  So I flirt at the edges of a nebulous spiritualism that may have settled on defining God as the interconnected system, where a sneeze in Seattle turns into a blizzard on the Seine.  Interconnected, yes.  Looking out for me specifically?  Still seems unlikely.

On the other hand, you have The Robert Glasper Experiment tearing apart Smells Like Teen Spirit and, I promise you, if you can walk away from that performed live and not believe that there is something larger and wonderful and whatever is behind you happened exactly like that so you would be in the right place to go swimming in that specific experience… I got nothing.

So, I miss God.  This is a good and a bad thing.  On the up side, absolute responsibility and therefore absolute ownership.  On the down side, it really sucks to be stuck figuring it out for yourself with only the occasional signpost in the general direction of joy to rely on.