The Tyranny of DNA

So I sort of dropped out of the world for a bit.

And an unavoidable consequence of such behavior is that I now tend to regularly run into people I haven't seen in awhile. Because, you know, I was out of the world and my mind and control and etc.

And they all tell me how good I look.

And I've pretty much been ignoring them. I mean, sure, I'll bet I look better than anyone expects me to. Given the epic scope and public nature of my divorce, I'm sure that people would say I look good if I just show up without a palsy. And I did lose a lot of weight. The heartbreak diet is not a method I recommend, but there is no arguing with its effectiveness. But I'm pretty sure I don't look good - like the way you notice that a total stranger is good-looking - just smaller than before and surprisingly less visibly traumatized than expected.

Then, a few days ago, I ran into another friend I hadn't seen in awhile, who told me how good I look, and since she's going through a divorce of her own, I made free with my opinions about that looking-good bit (see above paragraph). And she said no, that's not it. There's this glowy thing, That she's seen in other newly-single friends, regardless of how they felt about their single status.

And I think glowy?

And then I think oh shit. Because now I have a suspicion that this is the tyranny of DNA.

Let's face it. On a cellular level, we're just replication machines. The DNA that makes and shapes us just wants us to reproduce. There is a biological blind, bullying, life-must-go-on imperative and we (well, at least our genitalia, and, unfortunately, our hearts because, dammit, we confuse the two) are molecular hostages to that imperative. Life doesn't care how we feel about making life. It just wants us to want to. So that we will.

The hidden agenda, the holy grail of bodies... the fertilized egg. (Kudos, yes, for this timely Easter-y post?). No matter how it came to be.

So I think glowy? and then I think oh shit because I am still technically fertile. AKA someone whose machinery DNA is interested in making use of. And newly single. And is there some sort of stealthy chemical attractant thing going on? That would be just like DNA... to give some hormones or pheromones or something a little nudge and say deploy!. There's still time to wrest an egg out of these ovaries. But the incubator is not cooperative. She is not actively seeking fertilization opportunities. Scramble Operation Glow!

Because, by all means, let's ignore my feelings about any of this. Let's ignore the fact that I don't want to be a mother, nor to engage in the sorts of activities that would make me one. Not even casually. In the parlance of my friend Dino, I am not looking for either dinner or a snack. I am broken. I am healing. I am deeply untrustworthy to myself in terms of the choices I make. I am confused and needy and an emotional mess and no good for anyone and not in the market. Or on the market. Not marketing at all.

I'll even go so far as to say that, given the amount and duration of infidelity that was a part of my divorce dynamic, sex is actually a kind of toxic topic for me right now. Many sections of my self-esteem have survived intact, but not that one. I feel like a complete sexual (and romantic) failure. Somewhat famously so, in fact, in the small pond in which I am a medium-largish-sized fish. Feel like it's been made quite clear to me that the coping strategy for the rest of my life is simply to shut up the south wing and pretend I just don't like it there. Don't pity me, I love being free of all those complications, it's the best choice I ever made, hell, I pity you, having to deal with all those emotions and needs and negotiations and compromises. My new life at the north pole is so blessedly clean. Yay independence!

I don't want to be a loser. In the most literal sense. I don't want to lose anything ever again. I don't want to want things in case I can't have them. I don't want to be on the market and find out that there's no market for me.

Are you saying yeah, well, good luck with that?. I am too. And still, it is sincere, this want not to want. And it feels necessary. Even urgent.

And. And and and... people tell me I'm glowy.

And there's the skin-hunger.

I am suddenly touching people a lot more than I used to. The other day, I even hugged my therapist. And I am not a huggy person. I don't recognize this behavior. Or its motivation. Another way in which the sheer volume of loss is re-shaping me. I don't always know who I am, anymore. Or what I think I know is contradictory, and confusing.

For example, I know I don't want to have sex... but I do seem to want someone to stretch out behind me and slowly trace patterns on my bare back with their fingertips for about a day and a half. I think the on my back part is particularly interesting. Contact without connection. Definitely not procreative. Just skin. Warmth and movement. Just touch. Not even eye-contact. Safe enough, if a bit weird and unlikely to happen, right? Safe enough to want?

Except. Oh shit. Is this the thin edge of the wedge? Another tricky, slippery slope engineered by the tyrant DNA? Does that damn molecule actually think it can force a fertilized egg out of loneliness and skin-hunger and low self-esteem? And what if it could? Would it even care about the consequences? No adoption agency would be irresponsible enough to send a baby into my life, or into the kind of fucked-up relationship I'd be likely to trip and fall into, under DNA's influence. What kind of life would that child have? DNA doesn't care. As long as the kid has working gonads.

What impossible cruelty, this biochemical manipulation. To trick me into thinking I want something that I actually don't want, and would very likely kill me in all the ways that matter, so that you can get one more notch on your replication belt?

You fucker, DNA.

No, really.

This glowy thing needs to stop. The light shouldn't be on if there's no one home.

May the Universe spare me the urge, or the opportunity, to surrender to your sadistic seduction.

Maybe.

Oh shit!

The Art of Graceful Response

So yeah. Even in the darkness, there are light days.

I spent the weekend reconnecting with one of my two spiritual communities. The local meditation center, of which I am a member - a place I have been missing from (and have missed) for about six months now. Which is also just about how long it's been since my life, as I knew it, imploded. And of course that is no coincidence.

It would be easy, and fair, to say that I haven't practiced at all in that time. Certainly not in any formal way. I have not attended public sits at the center. I took a break (with nothing but loving, understanding support) from my service tasks there. I have not met with my Meditation Instructor. I have not been sitting at home. It's less easy, but also fair, to see and admit that I have been doing nothing BUT practice, these past six months. My life has been a living, moment-by-moment immersion in some very advanced practice indeed - presence, mindfulness, holding space for what is to simply be what it is... There is a teaching, written and framed, hanging on the wall in our post-meditation hall that includes the phrase (well, the paraphrase) "the everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance of whatever arises".

My life of late has been an unrelenting, ruthless, necessary and exhausting application of that everyday practice. Every single day.

But this weekend, I went back. Not to practice, but to serve. Our center presents a series of sequential trainings in meditation and its applications and revelations, offered in the format of weekend-long intensives, and I participated this weekend as part of the staff team supporting the event. On the one hand, this is a very nuts-and-bolts gig. Keeping track of time. Making sure food is prepared and clean-up gets accomplished. Do we have enough ice? Monitoring the temperature in the shrine room. Is there fresh coffee brewed? Is there someone available to greet people as they arrive? Taking out the trash.

Stuff like that.

And of course, on the other hand, that's not the gig at all. What we're really there to do is to model the teachings, and to create and maintain a container of gentleness, ease and acceptance. A space in which people can feel safe enough to look within, face themselves, share what they see. We are there to take care of the details, so that those who are doing the work are free from those concerns, and to do that in a way (ideally) that offers a living, breathing example of accepting whatever arises. Someone is late? There are food sensitivities we didn't plan for? Unexpected visitors arrive? Someone is crying? Or angry? Or confused? A staff member is sick and so duties need to be reassigned? Something has come up and the schedule needs to shift? Suddenly a meal needs to be ready earlier? Or later? Something goes hinky with the plumbing?

Things arise. Intensives are... well... intense. Things arise. We don't hide them, we simply work with them. We adapt. We explain. We accept.

No big deal.

The job is, in reality, all about the art of graceful response. Simply responding to what arises, in integrity with intention, in a way that is gracious and open-hearted and skillful and kind. In a way that leaves space for everyone to be who they are, where they are, in the moment. In a way that respects and grows from the understanding that we are all in this together.

I see my own heart, looking out through your eyes.

Whoever you are.

I'll digress for a moment here and suggest that one of the joys of mid-life may just be the opportunity to finally stop arguing with who we are. Growth is good. Change is good. And. Not everything needs to change. I couldn't get myself down to the center during this grinding, blinded, achingly empty time to sit. To be with myself. FOR myself. To refill. But I could get there in order to serve. And that service IS practice. And it does fill me. I can do for others what I often can't do for myself. And do it joyously. Not always. Not endlessly, I am no Mother Theresa. But this is work I can do, and the doing of it serves me. Makes me lighter, and stronger. Fills me up.

I will own some of this as ego. I enjoy doing things that I do well. And this, I am good at. I owe it all, of course. There is some natural inclination, but truly, whatever I know about the art of graceful response can be attributed to the generosity of my teachers. I have been fortunate enough to be able to reflect some of their excellence, and I honestly find that glorious. The way, I imagine, a horse bred to run glories in running, or a finely-tuned machine dreams light-shot memories of efficient, effortless operation.

My ego loves the skill with which I manifest egolessness. Which is, of course, hilarious. And a sign reading "Road Work Ahead". And simply what is. And perfectly OK. And sometimes even quite useful. And this paragraph, I realize upon writing it, is in fact a graceful response to myself.

I find myself thinking about two things, right now. One is a definition (originally of a "true calling", as it comes from a theologian) of "true service" that goes thusly: The place where my deep joy meets the world's deep need.

The other is from a ritual I took part in, recently, in which a piece of wisdom was revealed couched in the form of a challenge: "What you feel empty of - pour it out." What you feel bereft of - fill the world with. Let it pour through you, and fill you. The well is, in fact, bottomless. It is the emptiness that is the illusion.

These days I feel very loveless, and lonely. I spent the weekend (somewhat thoughtlessly, in fact, at least on any level of which I was aware, because all I was aware of doing was simply choosing, over and over again, the appropriate - the graceful - response to each situation I found myself in) pouring out love, and connection.

And some of it stuck.

Who knows for how long, The well is bottomless, but the illusion of emptiness is also deep, and old, and powerful. For this moment, I feel filled. I imagine the emptiness will arise again, Hopefully, when it does, I can accept it. Sit with it. Make space for it to be what it is, without judgement. Without waiting to be filled again, but with an understanding, nevertheless, that the cycle will continue. The nature of things is to arise, and fall, and arise again. All things. The good and the bad (to use some admittedly unskillful language). The fullness and the emptiness. The light and the dark.

Perhaps even with the understanding that both are the same. My heart in your eyes. Your heart in mine. Whoever we are. No separation. No emptiness, so no need for fullness. No alone so no need for together. Nothing but what is, which is everything.

Utterly deal-breaking, life-changing, mind-blowing and, really... no big deal.

Now that would be a graceful response to life.

Where I Stand

My friend Ella, who baits a mean hook, recently reminded me of a past bit of arrogance. A public acknowledgement (in sacred space no less) that my gift is to stand in the dark places, to shine some light there, so that no one has to be alone in the dark. What darkness is calling you now? She asked. And can you bear to share it?

Well shit.

When I said that thing (and I make no assumptions, gentle reader, about your thoughts on words like sacred or phrases like sacred space or the import of things that happen there, but I know what I know, and I should not be one whit surprised that I'm being called to account for it)... when I said that I was referring to what I call deathwork. Work I do with hospice patients and their families, and work I do out in the community, with the rest of us - who are dying just as surely but hopefully a bit more slowly - about developing a healthier relationship with that surety.

Work I love. Work that honors and feeds and affects me. But not exactly personal work.

And work I haven't done in six months now.

Because...

Let me just say that when you find yourself sitting with a woman who is about to be a widow, sitting vigil with her as her husband of 60-some years struggles to take his last breaths, and what is running through your mind is the somewhat petulant-toned "well at least your husband didn't leave you"...

Hopefully, if you're a deathworker with any integrity and self-awareness, this is the point where you decide to take a hiatus. And work on your own stuff.

What darkness is calling me now? So un-sexy. So un-glamorous. So un-noble. This is the selfish-seeming, all-too-common (like death isn't common? and yet this is a commonality my ego didn't want to share) gloaming of mid-life divorce. I stand these days in the shadow of betrayal and shame, guilt and fear and loss and loneliness and it's all my own. No one to "help" but myself.

Why is that so much harder?

There is light in this darkness. A lot of it. New opportunities. A certain freedom, and peace. The possibility of a whole new life. But like any form of grief, it is an experience with many complex flavors. Oh, for the purity of one emotion! Oh, for the ability to feel just what we are supposed to feel. And really, who does this supposing? And why are they always so wrong?

I've had a lot of conversations about this. With people living through some of the worst days of their lives. Who are shocked to find that, mixed in with the culturally-approved sadness, there are things like relief and anger and even moments of a sort of giddy, exhausted joy. I tell them this is normal. All of this is what happens when the world cracks open and anything seems possible, because the impossible has already happened. The form is so fundamentally, overwhelmingly changed. We are in blue skies. Which is glorious. And terrifying. And yes, we can feel both at the same time. Yes, we can hold that.

Yes, we can.

Fascinating to need, now, to apply this knowing to myself. In this way. Talk about past arrogance! To stand with Death, over and over, and think She wouldn't touch me. Or that her touch would come only in expected, acceptable ways. We have this history, She and I. So you can stand there, she says to me. Good. And... can you stand here? And how about here?. Moving always backwards, farther into the dark.

What happens to the one who says I'm not afraid to die? How does she learn about loss? Maybe like this. Ah, arrogance. Death laughs. (Although it's a loving laugh, really it is, She's a compassionate lady). And... can I stand here?

We'll see.

Thanks, Ella. :-)