Siren Song

Hola Everybody,
I'm pissed because when I got home last night, I meant to post a blog -- keeping with my commitment to post one bog per day for the year. I fell asleep and didn't wake up until 3:00 AM... 

Gentlemen, consider the following: Imagine for a moment that through some random evolutionary adaptation, our penises grew from our foreheads instead of between our legs (after all, it makes more sense from a woman's perspective LOL). Now, imagine how it would feel if every time you went out in public women would make untoward remarks about the size (or lack thereof), shape, attractiveness, or unattractiveness of your penis. Complete strangers commenting on something highly personal, something you have mixed feelings about (because it’s either too small or too big, or bent at the head, etc.). Imagine that as soon as you reached puberty (or even before) women would make cruel, oftentimes publicly humiliating remarks about your penis. If you can imagine how this would feel (and let's be real: most of you would die if a woman so much as pointed at your penis and laughed), then you have a very small idea of what it feels like to be a woman and do something as mundane as take a walk.

Listening to the Songs of the Sirens

Excerpted from Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
By Pema Chodron

Ulysses, the hero of ancient Greek mythology, exemplifies the courage it takes to consciously choose staying receptive and present when the temptation to get swept away is intense. 

When he was making the sea voyage home to Greece after the Trojan War, Ulysses knew that his ship would have to pass through a very dangerous area that was inhabited by beautiful maidens known as the sirens. He had been warned that the call of these women was irresistible, and that sailors couldn’t help but steer towards the sirens, crash their boats onto the rocks, and drown. 

Nevertheless, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens. He knew the prophecy that if anyone could hear their voices and not go towards them, the sirens would lose their power forever and wither away. This was the challenge that compelled him.

As his ship neared the sirens’ homeland, Ulysses told his men to put wax plugs in their ears and to tie him tightly to the mast, instructing them that no matter how hard he struggled and gestured, no matter how wrathfully he appeared to be ordering them to cut his ropes, they were not to untie him until the ship reached a familiar point of land well out of earshot of the sirens’ song. This story, as you might expect, has a happy ending. The men followed his instructions and Ulysses made it though. 

To a greater or lesser degree we will all have to go through similar discomfort in order not to follow the call of our own personal sirens, in order to step through the open doorway to awakening.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Bird Lady of Union Square Park

Hola mi Gente,

A consequence of my mediation practice has been a tendency to move away from “autopilot” living. In other words, I pay attention in ways I never did before I started my daily sitting meditation practice. In some ways, this attentional shift brings gifts in ways I never imagined. The following is an example.

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The Offering/ La Ofrenda

What you think you are is a belief to be undone.

What is the real New York? It’s all real, actually. But the core question here is: where does one get the genuine stink of authenticity, where does one find the essential essence of The City? Of course, the answer depends on who you are. Perhaps the real New York is the attractive alcoholic woman, obviously going downhill fast, who stands by the entrance to my subway stop some mornings asking for spare change -- and who flirts with me (“Damn, you look hawt today, papi!”) whether or not I give her a dollar. Sometimes weeks roll by and she’s nowhere to be seen and I wonder. Then one morning, she’s there again, asking for change, that undeniable intelligence in her eyes, her fading beauty still there, a tattered paperback peering out of the plastic Chanel bag that serves as her purse.

Or perhaps it's the bird lady of Union Square Park... 

One day, a couple of years ago, I played hookie from work. It was one of those early spring days and though it started with rain, a recalcitrant sun eventually vied with obstinate clouds for control of the day. It was lunchtime in one of my favorite reading spots in The City in Union Square Park. There’s a life-sized statue of Gandhi there and people sometimes put fresh cut flowers in its hands.

I have done this many times. I have several “power spots” throughout the city where I go read, observe, and contemplate, alone yet surrounded -- I like the feeling of stillness surrounded by frantic activity. On that day, no sooner than I had settled on a bench, a woman with long white, wiry, wild hair came shuffling toward me. I was hoping she wouldn’t sit next to me; I didn’t want to smell yet another homeless person (such is the way people become invisible). Perhaps reading me, she sat down rigidly across from me. I wanted to get back to my reading. But she stared at me intensely. Then slowly, reflectively, as if following some unknown anointment ritual, she emptied a bag of birdseed on her shoulders. It was a strange sight even for La Gran Manzana -- the capital of weirdness. I noticed how the seeds clung to her hair and clothes, pooled onto her lap, into the folds of her worn clothes, and scattered over her soiled sneakers. Then she leaned back and, after fixing me once more with that intense gaze, she stretched her arms and closed her eyes.

A brief moment passed and first one pigeon flew to her and then several more, and then a dozen or more. They congregated on her arms, pecking at the seeds and one another as they fed greedily. Soon the edges of her body were blurred in a flutter of wings. I sat there transfixed thinking this was an act of madness -- clearly this woman was crazy; it seemed as if the birds were devouring her. But paradoxically, the act took on an aura of magic. All the while she was disappearing into this chaotic mass of feathers, she was whispering an incantation in a language I couldn’t make out. I sat there hypnotized, my open book now forgotten.

I noticed that others were staring also. People glanced up from their paper bag lunches or from reading their tabloid newspapers and gasped. Young mothers pushing strollers stopped and gawked. It was a gesture of such tremendous force that it took us out of our little protective shells, the cocoons of fearful lives, and we forgot ourselves for that brief moment. We were her audience -- witnesses to what was clearly her offering -- and we came together for that brief moment and we were connected somehow. It was as if her act served to break down the walls between us.

In a few minutes, the birds had their fill and one by one, flew away, and the woman calmly grabbed her bag and shuffled away.

Such was the power of her act that for hours afterward I felt as if in a dream and the streets of The City seemed to me new again. 

And such is life in The City -- if we stay here long enough, we become immune and lose our sense of awe and forget even that we once possessed it. Then something happens to shatter the routine: a blizzard, or a blackout, even a terrorist act and for a few miraculous hours, we come together as our lives are upended and we notice each other’s presence and come into the awareness of the possibilities of human connection. Strangers reach out to one another; aid is offered without condition, hearts are opened. In a sense, this awareness, this presence, is, at least for me, a form of meditation-in-action.

I guess part of the reason I live here because the challenge of The City is to figure if this experience of openness can be cultivated and made to last.

My Name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

Bearing Witness

Hola mi Gente,

Man! It was cold this morning. Looking for work is harder than actually working. SMDH… I committed to posting at least once everyday, and I usually prepare the post the night before, but I wasn’t able last night. So here goes, my blog for today.

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The Heart in a Heartless world

I retreated during the 80s, for the most part, from active participation in terms of politics. I viewed Reagan’s rise and the neoconservative onslaught in the same way as Gil Scott-Heron did -- as the coming of Winter in America. A new America was coming, I saw, and it was an America heartless to its core. The 80s saw a rollback on civil rights gains, the decimation of the middle class and labor, and meaner, angrier, and less effective government. The 80s, ironically, were also a time of my personal passage through the heart of darness. I barely made it through the 80s alive.

My journey back to the living was sparked by a response to suffering. First, it was my own personal suffering, but having been granted another go at it, I realized that I could never be truly alive if I forgot I am connected to everything. I also believed a collective mindset geared to advantage the advantaged didn’t make sense (mink coats don’t “trickle down”), and I watched, horrified, as science and works of art were savaged by ideologues of a vengeful and jealous God.

Fast forward to today and I sometimes find myself fighting against burnout, or struggling against the feeling that it doesn’t make any sense to fight at all. After all, people don’t get it, I think too often. Or, there is too much apathy and people are more interested in the “reality” of TV shows than their own reality. And I sense I am not too far off the mark.

Sometimes -- not too often -- an issue arises so overtly reprehensible cannot be successfully spun by a corporate-owned media surfaces and people awaken a little. They become inspired or angered by needless poverty, the arrogance of unchecked power, the brutality of a justice system predicated solely on punishment, or at how there are so many who have been forgotten. Whenever something egregious happens, great inspirational speeches are offered at huge events, and we speak out, we protest, we rage and we rally.

And... nothing happens.

Nothing changes; we deflate, feeling powerless, impotent, weak, and sickened by it all. Sometimes it gets so that I can’t stand to read another study, write another opinion or report, attend another conference, or participate in another panel. I despair... I despair of losing my heart in a heartless world. Last night, listening to Obama's State of the Union speech, I thought back to the elation that accompanied the his first election. For once many people in this country saw one of the marginalized rise above systemic inequality to the most powerful office in the world and many were heartened. Though I for the most part never agreed with Obama’s politics, I too was heartened. I was able to go to a poll and cast my vote for a fuckin black man! Okay, he’s too centrist -- at best, he and other centrist democrats are Eisenhower conservatives -- but still: damn that felt good!

We do not need more strategy sessions, we know what we need to do. The solutions we need are already here. The world we want is within our grasp. All that is needed is the courage to stop destroying so many for the sake of ideology. Too often I find myself on the brink of burnout and I find myself back where I started, pulsating with anger and frustration.

I recently left a job I really loved because I needed to get myself together. I did not know it at the time, but my mind/ body was asking for a time out. These past five months have given me the time and psychological space I needed to step back, to reflect, and clarify my vision. I needed to lick my wounds. I was joking with a friend and former colleague last night that I had taken a poor man’s sabbatical. I was not out there somewhere studying a lost tribe or doing some research with the security of knowing I had a gig when I was finished, but I feel so much stronger because of this precious time. Now I need to find work, or end up in some debtor's prison. LOL (I am only half-joking. If you have an opening for a good strategic thinker, hit me up. :) )

I have learned some valuables lessons in recent years. For one, I have learned that burnout can help me keep my fires burning. How? Well, that’s another blog, but it’s all about feeding the demons rather than banishing them to the darkness. Burnout now feeds me instead of the other way around. In my experience, burnout happens when I forget that I am only part of a larger process of change. I am not the wave, but I am part of it.

Burnout happens when I forget to take care of myself. Secondly, and more importantly, I have learned to bear witness, to stand alongside those enduring great suffering. Sometimes “the work” is to be simply present, listening with an open heart. Listening with the same care a child gives when holding a live and precious egg in its hands. It is through this witnessing that we can heed the voices of the suffering and shed a light on unchecked power. I miss that… I miss going into prisons and talking with my brothers and sisters and trying to amplify their voices in order to uncover racism and inhumanity

Most importantly, and counter intuitively, I have given up hope for saving the world, or even attempting to change it.

I had to give up that notion. I had to surrender that in order to discover what I’m really supposed to be doing: how best to be a part of healing force. I had to go beyond hope and fear and break from the shackles of success or failure. Today I am still learning what right action feels like. Its clarity, its energy. I still get angry, enraged, and frustrated. I try not to be driven by these emotions but, rather, use their energy to propel me toward compassionate action. I do know that I cannot be an interface for this compassion until I transcend hope and fear and bear witness and then act judiciously... at least that’s my intention.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…