There Will Always Be More Music

Way back in 2007, I wrote a post about being lovestruck. I waxed poetical about a place that is near and dear to my heart. It was one of my favorite pieces, and I think it's funny that one of my favorite love letters is not to a person, but to a place. That place is New Orleans.

I went back to New Orleans last month for a week to celebrate my 40th birthday with my best friend, my mom, and my aunt and uncle. I think I've traveled to NOLA about 11 times or so over the last 8 or 9 years, and each time, like each meeting with a soul mate, it gets better.

This time, we went to places that we'd never been before, and revisited old haunts. We drove to Chalmette, in St. Bernard's Parish, where my friend and I had volunteered for Habitat for Humanity a year or so after Katrina, and, miraculously, we even found one of the houses we had worked on. We drove through the famous Ninth Ward, a former urban residential center that now looks like the corn fields of Iowa, with grass up to my shoulders in some spots, covering all the foundations from bulldozed houses. There, Brad Pitt's Make it Right organization is building a series of funky,  modern houses for returning residents. We drove to Slidell and found a crazy good roadside restaurant that we would never have found if we hadn't taken a wrong turn. We took a swamp tour with a critter-phobic psychiatrist, and later hung out with four spanish psychiatrists(The American Psychiatric Association was in town for a conference) as they waited for it to be time to go to the airport - at 5 am. I saw the sun rise over the Mississippi. We wandered through Audubon Park and City Park. We had wonderful food, heard amazing music, walked for miles and miles, and laughed a lot.

In a recent workshop on finding safety within oneself, the attendees were asked to think of a situation or place where we felt totally in rapport with ourselves. Confident, strong, and centered. My first thought was of walking through New Orleans. When I walk the streets there, I feel comfortable in my body. I walk confidently and my strides are longer. I don't obsess as much about whether I look OK or not. I think it has to do with the warm weather, although I have been there in February and shivered as I strode the familiar streets, so that's not completely it. But the feel of the warm breeze on my skin, wearing flip flops and tank tops and skirts and never fearing the cold, there's heaven in that. There's something about the overarching shade trees, the lazy, dirty river, the slow awakening each morning after yet another music-saturated 3 am night, the boats moving past, and the ding-dong of the churchbells that makes me feel so at home. It's not the drinking, because after a few days of that, it gets old. It's something else about the place.

I was reflecting on my former letter about New Orleans, and the way I experienced the city this time. In my earlier letter, I was In Love. I wrote about arriving on the streets of the Quarter and feeling, literally, in love. My heart pounding, my feet not even touching the ground. This time it was different. We were old familiar friends, the city and I. I didn't feel those butterflies and that elation that you feel when you're in love. It felt just like the way you feel when, with a real human lover, the high of infatuation wears off, and you now get down to the business of really getting to know the person - the real person. Let's face it, New Orleans is a mixed bag. It's dirty, its claim to fame is rivers of booze and flashing co-ed breasts, and it has a sordid and cruel history. If it were a human being, our mothers would have warned us about New Orleans. Hmmmm. Sounds good to me!

But in thinking about how my reaction to this town has changed over time, I can't help but relate that to how our relationship with everything changes over time. I remember visiting New Orleans once and feeling horrified the first time I actually got bored there. Or leaving a music venue at midnight, worried that it meant I was getting old, since I used to stay out until 3 am pretty regularly. But then telling myself that it was my experience and I could do whatever I wanted. That there were no rules here, and that there would always be more music.  We tend to forget that all things change and shift, and no matter how much we try to hold on to how we want things to be, we will never be able to. In my relationship with New Orleans, I see things shifting, and maybe because my emotions aren't as painfully triggered as in my relationship with humans, I can see the change and I can accept it. The town and I love one another, but love, as well all know, is a many-splendored thing. Never the same thing twice.

Let's Talk About Jealousy

Along with anger, jealousy is probably the most misunderstood human emotion. We're simply not "supposed" to be jealous. Ever. If we are, we're considered crazy and bad dating material. But, of course, it's never that simple, and jealousy exists as an emotion because it's trying to tell us something. As someone who has always struggled with jealousy, I know firsthand how damaging it can be, so I'm not advocating just letting our jealous streaks run roughshod over our relationships, but I think jealousy deserves a better, deeper understanding.

At its core, jealousy is fear of loss. The common wisdom is that it's about insecurity, which may be true in some cases, but deeper than that, jealousy is about the fear of losing something you value.  If you think about it, jealousy is never even that unfounded, because, given the rate of divorce, and the fact that in non-marriage relationships, breakups are even more common than in marriages, at some point, we will most likely lose our partner. So jealousy is about fear of something that is almost inevitable. Whether we will lose our partner to that person he's talking to at the party or not, eventually, we know, we will lose him, even if only to death.

In a letter I once wrote to an ex-lover, I explained how my feelings of jealousy, deep, deep down, were rooted in a fear of death, a fear if being obliterated, of winking out like a quenched candle flame, to be replaced by someone else. The fear of literally not existing anymore, at least in the mind and imagination of my beloved. This might seem overwrought and dramatic, but if you're someone who's felt intense jealousy, remember how it feels in your mind and your body. It feels like terror, like looking down into an abyss.

Humans are meant to connect, we, quite literally cannot live without one another. When we're adults, we can survive without others, but we can't  live. People in solitary confinement, if they're not careful to engage their minds, go crazy. Even if they do manage to come out of it with their sanity intact, it was never a pleasant experience. We need each other. Period. In jealousy, our deep fear of being obliterated in the mind of someone we love is about the fear of losing our connections to others, about being unimportant, rejected, banished by our tribe to wander the desolate wastelands, alone. Jealousy taps directly into the well of the most intense, uncomfortable, difficult-to-sit-with emotions that humans can experience. It's no wonder it's so hard to deal with and makes us so crazy.

In a jealous moment, can we feel what's under our reaction to that one person, that one situation, and come in contact with this seething mixture of terror, fear of abandonment and rejection, fear of loss? Can we open our hearts to it, a little bit more each time, and feel compassion for it, knowing that we share these deep fears with every other human being? Once, in the midst of a terrible, anxiety- and jealousy-ridden night when I knew someone I loved deeply was with another, I had a sudden, split-second opening where I felt love for this person, a love and care for his well-being that knew no possession or boundaries. It was like I was hovering over the bed with them and my heart was open, blessing them. I knew that who he was with wasn't important, because the love that was there would not be changed or lessened by any other bond he might form. I wanted, in that moment, nothing but good for him, and hoped he was happy. It didn't last long, but it gave me some hope that somehow, with attention and openness, I might make room in my heart for all the textures of love, including welcoming the messages that jealousy sends me without doing damage to the relationships I form.

Please Help

I just read about SETI Institute's Earth Speaks, where people are invited to write a freeform message to beings from places other than Earth. A researcher analyzed over 900 messages from 68 nations, and found that the second most common sentiment, after "we are all humans of Earth" was "Please Help."

For some reason, this really touched me. Life is hard. We all feel it. And in our hearts, we all want to feel better, to not hurt so much, and to live on a planet that is - and be surrounded by people who are - vibrant and bountiful and full of life. But we can't - most of us, anyway - figure out how to do that. Yet in our hearts, despite whatever nationalism and jingoism we might cling to in order to feel part of a tribe, we really all - deep down -  understand that we are in this together.

This morning, I was getting salad from a salad bar for a week's worth of lunches, and an older woman pushed her cart past me, proclaiming "This salad bar is AWFUL!! It gets worse every day! They don't even have salad dressing!" When I tried to show her where the salad dressing is usually kept, I found that she was right: there was no salad dressing. I asked a store worker to get some, but by then, the woman had rolled on past and was haranguing another customer with her salad bar complaints ("I wish the salad bar was like it used to be!") By the time I got my salad and dressing, she was gone.

I was irritated by her, irritated to be confronted with someone else's discontent so early in the morning, as my first human interaction. I felt myself start to feel her angst, to take it on to myself. At the same time, I felt self-righteous, as I asked the guy to get me some salad dressing and he placed it in the container where it normally goes, I felt like finding the lady and telling her that she only had to ask, she needn't just complain to complete strangers about how terrible her life was. Why not look on the bright side? But of course, my self-righteousness was another way to feel superior to her, as her discontent was a way to feel self-righteous and in control. We were both in the same boat, or in the same shopping cart, anyway.

I never did find her, and the interaction soon faded in my mind. But when I read about the SETI messages, it came back. The woman was saying "Please help," as are all of us when we lash out in any way, whether in anger, jealousy, disappointment,fear, or hurt. We're just trying to feel better. We can have compassion for ourselves and for others in these situations of hurt, even if we don't understand what is at the root of their - or our own - pain. We can practice opening in compassion and love rather than shrinking back in fear or anger, or lashing back.

A technique from Nonviolent Communication is this: when someone is angry or complaining, rather than arguing or lashing back or withdrawing or walking away in discomfort, ask them "What do you need from me right now?"   This can short-circuit the hurt and get to the root of the problem, which is most often that the person needs comforting. And when we are the ones doing the lashing out, we can use the discomfort of our emotions as a signal to look deeper within ourselves and ask ourselves: "What do I need right now?"

Be well-

A Vindication of Love

And then, my eyes opened and love became less about the object of love and more about the Love itself. It was not whom I loved, but that I loved that became important.

I was sitting in an airplane on my way to a conference in Cancun, Mexico, of all places, when this revelation occurred to me. I planned to stay there for a couple of extra days, and I was meeting very good friend there who would help me while away my time on the beaches, in the bars, and in the bedroom. Our relationship was very complicated and had had a lot of twists and turns. I felt excited to meet him in Mexico, but also a little bit nervous. Should I be doing this? Was it a bad idea? Would it just make things more complicated and painful?

My plane reading was a book that I'd had on my shelf for awhile, but that I'd never been able to get to. Eight plus hours of plane and airport time finally gave me the window of opportunity, and I eagerly cracked the book. I don't think I put it down for the whole trip . The book is called A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring, and she uses characters from literature and real life to illustrate the fact that love is rarely as simplistic, safe, and consistent as we are told it should be in our culture. Using the examples of the most famous lovers of history and literature - from Romeo and Juliet to Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera - the author points out that love has nothing to do with contracts or social rules, and everything to do with emotion, difference, and tension.

The book, for all of its intellectual flaws, was fun to read and made it OK for me to be flying towards yet another adventure with someone whose relationship to me not many people in my life - including myself -  seemed to understand. It gave permission for me to explore the idea of loving without limits, of dropping my expectations (even if only temporarily) for the safe, simple, and quietly happy one man-one woman relationship that I had always assumed - and been told - was the norm and my birthright.

And then, in the midst of relaxing my judgments around the consistently supreme weirdness of my romantic life, the veil dropped from my eyes, and the love I felt for this man became not something he did for me, but something that I always held, something that I created out of my own heart. It wasn't about him; it was about me. It was a gift that I carried with me always, something I could give away endlessly and never lack. It's the first time I've felt that in any relationship, always assuming as I have that any love I felt was directly linked to a particular person, and always feeling that that person, somehow, had control over me because he had the power to create or destroy that feeling within me.

Love is not something that someone else does for us; love is something that's always around us, in us.  The person we're in love with acts as a mirror, a prism, for the love that already exists. When we feel love for another, we can absorb that love, sit in it, feel it, embody it, and use it to remind ourselves of the love that surrounds us like air.  And when the love we have with another doesn't look the way we're told it's supposed to look, or if it goes awry, we can still feel the love itself, and make the decisions that are right for us, but know that the love itself is still there, no matter what happens. It's in our heart, and not dependent on what anyone else feels for us, or what happens to the relationship.

 Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I have a cynical edge to me; I don't buy all this "happy, happy, joy, joy" business, this almost mandatory (these days)push to find bliss, enlightenment, and eternal happiness, this implication that if we feel a difficult thing, that we're simply not trying hard enough to be happy, not practicing enough gratitude, or just need to do more yoga or watch less TV. That little tweety birds and butterflies will flit around our heads and beautiful flowers pop up wherever we step, if only we could find the answer to the mystery of How to be Happy. Happiness, to me, though a wonderful emotion, is a fleeting experience, as are all emotions.

Let's just say that, though I am actually a died-in-the-wool hardcore romantic, I am very, very, painfully, intimately aware of my Shadow.

In the last few days I've felt a relief from what had seemed a relentless blanket of dread, sorrow, and grief that was attached to a particular situation in my life, or seemed to be anyway. For some reason it lifted. I could speculate as to what about the situation has changed for me to feel this way, but that's not important. I feel stronger these days, more confident, less obsessive. I don't ruminate as much. I don't cry as much. I enjoy things. I sleep better. I've even, for the most part, managed not to get obsessed and terrified over wondering when the crippling darkness will come back, as I know it will.

In thinking about this state of affairs, I realized that there's something at the root of it that feels like an emotion we're told is bad or negative. Something that self-help books tell us to control, something that Buddhists tell us is part of suffering. Something that positive psychologists and happiness researchers measure to gauge whether their subjects are happy or not. But for me, this is an emotion that has energy and movement in it. When I feel it, if I don't let the story behind it take over my brain, I get more done. I feel stronger and stand straighter. Are you ready?

That emotion is Anger.

Yes, I feel, at the root of this strength, something that feels a lot like anger. In this anger is an acknowledgment that I am important, that my needs are important, and that the messages I get that something is wrong with me are more about the person who judges me than they are about me.There's righteousness there; a sense of having the right outlook. There's self-protection there, as if I'm a self that deserves protection. There's no aggression or need to hurt or lash out at anyone, but there's a cynical long view, a squinting of the eyes and a lack of trust in anyone but myself. There's an understanding that people do shitty things, although not much judgment there. People do shitty things for their own reasons. There's a sense of being alone, but not lonely. Alone like the Lone Ranger, alone like a Clint Eastwood cowboy, and not like the sad and scared little girl that I experience so often.

Is that bad?

Last night, I went to a talk by a woman* who spoke of the importance of emotions, of acknowledging ourselves and other humans as emotional beings first. She talked about being a spiritual seeker for years, but of continually getting the message that she was too emotional and that it was the reason she resisted Enlightenment. Later, she decided that her emotions were there for a reason, and were not something to be ashamed of or to try to "bliss" away. They were there for a reason, they were giving her important messages, and it wasn't wrong or immature or unenlightened to feel them.

This is something I've thought for years, and one reason why I've never committed to studying any particular spiritual path. I've always felt like most spiritual paths ask us to think of emotions as diseases or afflictions that we just need to bear or breathe away. That our goal is to live in an absolute, peaceful, blissed-out, serene fog.  But to me, emotions, by their very existence, are real and true, messages from our soul and subconscious no less than our dreams. They are important. Even the difficult ones. Perhaps especially the difficult ones.

This isn't to say that we should let our emotions control our actions, but only that they are there to feel, to tell us things, and with practice, we can begin to feel them without acting in ways that cause harm. 

And Anger, to me, is a strong emotion, is a vitalizing and vibrant emotion. If I use it correctly, it gives me energy and stops me from devolving into a crying, blubbering mess every time someone does something I don't like. It inspires me to protect myself, it tells me stand up for myself. The righteousness is a relief from the grief and despair, which told me that I was not OK, that I was lacking. And so I welcome this hardness, this anger, this righteousness, as a way to move into my life in strength and with a realistic view of the world and what can happen in it.

*The woman I saw ended up being somehow connected to a shady, cult-like organization. I never could get the full scoop on her. But I still liked what she had to say :-)