by

Through Your Eyes

What’s on your mind.

That’s kind of the fun thing about Facebook. It encourages you to blurt. Okay, sometimes that might not be so good. But last night, here’s what I blurted, “I say to myself, it’s a wonderful life.”

I like that song, “It’s a Wonderful World.” I liked it when Louis Armstrong sang it and I think I liked it even more when I heard the Hawaiian singer Kamakawiwo’ole sing it in a medley with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I first heard his version at the end of “Meet Joe Black,” a movie most critics hated, but I cried through anyway.

When I googled (uh oh, I’m verbalizing again) to find Kamakawiwo’ole’s name, the first line in the first entry that came up was “Death did not silence his music.” For that I am grateful.

In 1980 I began a four-year volunteer job as a hospice volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital. The hospice program at SFGH was an unusual one. Volunteers worked hands on with patients, most of whom had nowhere else to go. They were the ones who had become estranged from family living on the edges of society.

It was also an interesting time and place to begin that particular job given that SFGH was pretty much ground zero for the AIDS epidemic. It also was ground zero for how an institution can react with compassion to an epidemic. The institution rallied to the task, creating an AIDS ward that was a sanctuary rather than a nightmarish deathtrap where people died in isolation and shame.

I wanted to become a hospice volunteer so I could learn to accept death.

Yesterday, a friend of mine, who I met as a fellow hospice volunteer back in 1980, wrote with eloquence about his recognition that his life would likely end soon. He was diagnosed last year with a devastating cancer. He wrote that driving north through wine country, he simultaneously felt alive and about to depart life. He looked out on the landscape through eyes that might be seeing it for the last time.

Seeing the landscape as if it were the last time he would see it.

It’s hard for me to conceive of him departing life. We sometimes joked that we would probably end up in the same old age home together, rocking our chairs in unison to a setting sun. For reasons I can’t articulate, it seems particularly strange that someone with whom I shared the experience of working with the dying is going through the experience we saw so many times.

For reasons I don’t comprehend, he has kept me at arms length (or more) during his illness. I’m hoping that the arm will come down before he departs, but that is out of my control. I have to respect it. That’s a hard one for me. I want answers, resolution, things to make sense.

What we got told in our hospice training was that our job was to be a witness. I came to learn the compassion in that. My job wasn’t to fix, change, or try to help—the most I could do was work to remove institutional obstacles or at least keep them at bay, for those were the impediments to a graceful, gentle death.

I did not learn to accept death in the way I thought I would. Mostly I learned that it’s easy to accept it as long as it’s not someone I know and love. When it’s up close and personal, it’s sort of unfathomable.

Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I learned in working with dying, was that just because death is imminent, it doesn’t mean that you stop living. Life is in us until it isn’t anymore.

So, today, look at the landscape as if seeing it for the last time. Not because you won’t see it again, but so that you take the time to appreciate that you, and only you, are seeing that landscape through your eyes.

by

Dragons Never Fear to Tread

I was quite pleased with my post yesterday, where I waxed poetic about slaying my dragon. Then my friend Jim pointed out that dragons have a different meaning in Eastern mythologies. They represent raw power.

I was annoyed with him for disturbing my moment of satisfaction with having slain my dragon. Jim often annoys me because he forces me (okay no one forces anyone to do anything) to dig deeper with his well-maybe-not style of questioning.

I want to dismiss these questions by assigning them to the cynicism bin – where they are sent to be disposed of with no regard for what they might mean to me. I think cynicism is the flip side of a coin that has cynicism on one side and sentimentality on the other. Cynicism annoys me because it, in my opinion, dismisses things by assigning them to bins where they are sent to be disposed of with no regard for what they might mean to the cynic.

I hate when I impale myself on my own prejudices.

So, today I did a bit more googling about dragons and found this interesting link to a site called Dragon Tango. It’s about a sound sculpture that depicts Eastern and Western dragons meeting. Here’s from the Website:

During a trip to Asia in 1994 Amanta and David were in Hong Kong gazing out over the mountains of Kowloon. Kowloon means “nine dragons”. Their thoughts came to rest upon the contradictory and mysterious nature of dragons worldwide. Amanta and David wondered: what does the dragon mean in today’s world? What would happen if an eastern dragon met a western dragon? The dragon quest began.

Dragon Tango

Check out the link. It’s very interesting.

Then I remembered the movie “Dragonheart.” The story tells the tale of the last dragon joining with a disillusioned dragon-slaying knight to stop an evil king who was granted the potential to be immortal. I love this movie. For one thing, Sean Connery is the voice of the dragon and, of course, a dragon would sound like Sean Connery. That is embedded deep in our DNA, probably from the time we lived in caves.

And, I loved it because of how sympathetic the dragon was.

So, I still trust what I wrote yesterday. But maybe there is more.

I think what I was trying to get to is change and how we deal with it. I’ve heard people laugh that horses are so stupid they run into a burning barn. But they do that because that has been their home—what is familiar to them.

And, oh my, if we humans don’t go running into the burning barn time after time. We seek the familiar, even when the familiar is not good for us (think bad relationship number four), because it is comfortable. We know what to expect. We know that story. We suck it up and ignore whatever pain that story might be causing us because it no longer fits—like a pair of shoes we have outgrown.

I think we rarely move easily into change. I think we are usually catapulted into it by life events and for me, it usually means facing the dragon’s breath and letting its fire burn away what is no longer useful. I don’t go willingly into change.

I think that the point of facing the dragon is to show a willingness to be transformed by change. And that slaying the dragon with compassion (if that is the mythic image one is using at the moment) means understanding that the dragon is sacrificing itself so change can happen, much as we die because—well, there just isn’t enough room on the planet for us to be immortal.

I just became the dramaturge for the play “Metamorphoses” at Los Positas. It is a wonderful play. It includes this line of dialogue:

“Transform me entirely, let me step out of my own heart.”

So I must thank my friend Jim for annoying me—making me feel discomfort. I suspect he will annoy me again.

I have known Jim for close to fifty years. His mother was my mother’s best friend. I know she misses my mother. The downside of living a long time is you live long enough to miss your loved ones.

by

Thar’ be Dragons

I wrote to a friend recently about the difficulty of moving back to my hometown after a 34-years absence. I was afraid, I said, that there would be dragons lurking there. And there were.

One could say that I entered the dragon’s cage.

So this morning I googled “Joseph Campbell dragons” and found a transcript from the “Power of Myth” and an excerpt from “The Heroic Journey.”

I learned that slaying the dragon is a part of the journey Campbell refers to as “the soul’s high adventure,” the journey each of us has to make if we are, I concluded, to live and not just survive.

We are called to make the journey perhaps when we have “ . . . a realization that the story we are living no longer matches the story that we are;. . .,” Campbell says. “Psychologically,the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage.. . . The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”

Oh.

Captured in my own dragon cage.

Then there was this exchange between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell:

Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

Campbell: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

Moyers: Is it my work or my life?

Campbell: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”

Moyers: When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone?

Campbell: If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself.

So I came back to my hometown so I could follow my bliss. Not what I expected. For one thing I thought bliss was — well blissful. Filled with fluffy clouds and maybe even bare-assed angels playing hand held harps following me throughout the day, whispering “No pain,” in my ear.

Now I think that bliss is finding your authentic story and living it. And while that surely will include pain as well as joy, it is much less painful than living the story that no longer matches you. There is certainly no joy in living a story that doesn’t fit.

But to follow your bliss you must first free yourself from the dragon cage; embrace the story that you are, which might not be the one you’ve been living. To do that you have to be willing to let the fire of the dragon’s breath burn away what isn’t you, then slay the dragon — with compassion.

And here’s the thing. My writing took on a new depth after moving here. Perhaps because when the story isn’t working, you have to go deeper to find the real story.

by

What I Want to Say

The first assignment in my Literary Hybrid class at last year’s Iowa Summer Writing Festival was to write a list that responds to the question, “What do you want to say?”

I wrote down favorite product instructions (and, yes, they really are product instructions):

For best results use joy.

Let go before you think you should.

And then Isabelle Allende’s comment that experience is what you get right after you need it.

Which led to . . .

I’m approaching 60—the age, not the speed limit—and it’s making me think. More like churn. About my life. And what it means to be alive. And what it means to be authentic.

Even if I live to 106, like my great grandfather.

Or 99, like my grandmother.

Or 83, like my mother.

For best results use joy.

Let go before you think you should.

Experience is something you get right after you need it.

That’s what I want to say today.

What do you want to say today?

by

Why I Write

There be wolves out there — dangerous creatures beyond the boundaries created by the should-bes: what a good girl should be what a woman should be what a person should be what a good girl would write. Or so the story I heard growing up was told.

Then there was the summer, over twenty years ago, when I first started freelancing. “I just want to keep the wolf from the door, I just want to keep the wolf from the door, I just want to keep the wolf from the door,” I would shout as job after job fell through, until finally someone asked, “Why don’t you invite him in?”

And so I did. He had dark brown eyes–wolfeyes–wore a very elegant tuxedo and sat down at my dining table without so much as a by-your-leave and began sipping espresso from a demi-tasse.

I was outraged. “How,” I very nearly shouted at him, “can you sit there sipping espresso without a care in the world when I worry about how to pay the rent, put food on my table, keep clothes on my back?!!”

His tail lightly brushed across the floor as he poured a spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred slowly and replied, “Don’t you know everyone worries about those things?”

Well, that had never occurred to me. And sure enough, I got a job the next week.

Two months later, a dog who was part wolf wandered into my life. With just a bit of negotiation, we agreed that I would be his human and he would be my wolfdog. And so it was for five years.

Until a tumor appeared on his vena cava. All I could think was that I wanted to keep my wolf from the door. I did not want him to leave. Not now. Not so soon.

But he died two days later anyway. Because that was as it should be.

There be wolves out there. And there be wolves in here. And the should-bes have nothing to do with being a good girl good woman keeping the world safe for what we would like it to be. Rather it is about being. And being willing to embrace life as it is and letting love transform us as it passes through us.

We are spirits learning to be human. And so I write.

To new stories
~Karen Hogan