Where are my People, Get My People

Last summer, my grand baby Amelia and I played in the pool every Monday morning when she came to stay with Pops and GiGi.  One of her favorite games involved throwing plastic toys, a ship’s captain, an octopus armed man with buggy eyes, a buoyant blond, bubble headed girl and a little flat plastic fish, into the pool in just the right spot so the current of the pump would push them into the skimmer.  She would then step carefully out of the pool, waddle over to the skimmer, lift the lid with a plastic spoon and scream, “My people.”  She pulled them out and threw them back in.  When they floated back into the skimmer, she would hold up her arms, elbows bent, palms up and ask, “Where are my people?”

That’s what I’m sayin’.  Where are my people?  One day, I will write a post and not care who reads it.  One of my biggest obstacles, the thing that pulls me down over and over, that leads me to betray and abandon myself, that pushes me to take anti-depressants is my belief that I must act certain way, I must do things in my life, especially in relationship to others, to maintain their love and affection. That means I cannot be sad.  I cannot question authority.  I cannot rail against injustice.  I cannot be a loner, a hermit.  I cannot cry.

If that is true, if I must manipulate the world to meet my needs, which it will never do, I will die never having truly lived.  I want to be truthful to myself, to my dreams, and to what I love.  Negotiating, compromising, creating strategies to make my life easy and fun…these things will never make me happy.  They will not connect me deeply to those whom I love and to the world in which I live.

Studying Ryokan, the 18th Century monk and poet, gave me a new perspective on my need for attention.  He was basically a hermit, a nomad, who spent his life reading and studying Dogen.  He suffered loneliness for a greater goal, his love of the teachings.  His suffering is palpable in his writings.

Empty and fleeting My years are gone
And now, quivering and frail,
I must fade away.

No luck today on my mendicant rounds;
From village to village I dragged myself.
At sunset I find myself with miles of mountains between me and my hut.
The wind tears at my frail body, 

And my little bowl looks so forlorn —
Yes this is my chosen path that guides me
Through disappointment and pain, cold and hunger.

 As Natalie Goldberg said today, (this is loosely translated) “No matter what we do, we cannot escape the suffering that accompanies the human condition. We look at Ryokan and think, he didn’t have children.  If her had children he would not have been so unhappy.  Or we think, he was unhappy because he was poor.  I will make money then I will be happy. Everything is fleeting.  Nothing will ever make up completely happy.  We fool ourselves again and again.  If I read this book, I will find the answer.  If I study with this teacher I will learn the secret. But we are still fucked.  Do what you love.  That is what Ryokan did.  No matter what happened, he did not lose focus.”

I want people to read my posts, my book when I write it, but now, more than anything, I want to touch my sadness.  I want to walk through it every day, to feel it, and touch it.  Roshi Joan says, “Sadness is the pathway to uncommon wisdom.”  I believe I have uncommon wisdom and that pretending to be okay, pretending not to be sad, taking antidepressants is separating me from my uncommon wisdom.  May I give up the need  for approval. May I devote the rest of my life to writing and peeling away the layers of false perception, until I, like Ryokan, can walk my path, lonely as it may be.  May I be willing to suffer sadness if it means I become more transparent.  I long to fall in love with life.

Here is another one of Ryokan’s  poems:

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.

 You are my people. Free yourself from the grindstone.  

A Haiku of my own…..

Bleached blonde hair.

 A case of mistaken identity.

She is sixty two.

 

Unemployment Benefits – It Could Be You

We gathered for the funeral of our youngest brother, Duff.  I have not seen my two half-brothers, who will remain unnamed, for several years.  My family lives in South Bend, Indiana and I in Memphis.  I claim full responsibility for our estrangement.  I left my childhood home at sixteen and never looked back.  My family, the people with whom I had grown up, were an anchor around my neck.  I set an intention. Today I know this as a sankalpa:  I am free, completely free from the past and living a new life.  I made up my mind not to live out my life as the wife of a factory worker or worse yet, an unemployed factory worker.  I went back to visit once when my father, Carl, who had esophageal cancer, was given just a few months to live.  We made our peace.  I did not attend his funeral.  But when I learned that Duff had stage four lung cancer I made my pilgrimage.  I went to support him and my family.  We convened, as a family, one last time for the funeral.

So here we are in the kitchen of what was my father’s last house.

My middle brother is sitting in a recliner across the room from me.  “How long have you been out of work?” I asked.

Looking down at the floor, he mumbles, “For a year now.  It sucks.  I have to check in at the unemployment office every week and prove that I have applied for a job, which I am happy to do. But, everything is done on computer now.  I have never worked on a PC.  To keep my benefits, I had to sign up for a computer class.  I feel like such an idiot.  I just want to go back to building trailers.”  Since he dropped out of high school my brother worked at a factory in Elkhart, Indiana on an assembly line.  He never missed a day, driving all the way from South Bend, even in the heaviest of snows.  Then the big recession hit.  He is in his fifties.  There are no more factory jobs in northern Indiana.  “I got a part time job working for a company that builds UPS trucks.  Contract worker.  No benefits, and they could call any time and tell me not to come in.  I have bills to pay.  I felt like slave, but i stayed with it.  Then they laid me off.  They couldn’t say so but I know they wanted someone younger who could work faster.  So here I am, still looking.”  And he did look for another year.  He complied with the new standards for unemployment benefits.  He even got a rebuilt computer so he could put together a resume and look for work on line while sitting at home waiting.  Eventually he was hired by to be a night janitor.  He loves it.  Kind of a loner anyway, he goes to work, does his job and comes home to his house and two dogs.

I talked to my brother on the phone not long after he found this job.  He sounded like a different person.  He was so grateful. “I love my job.  I go in after everyone else is gone.  I clean.  I have the whole place to myself. No one bothers me. I work at my own pace. It is great.  I love going to work.”  He was miserable when he had nothing to do. He had no purpose.  Like so many others, 1.4 million, he really wanted to work, but it took him two long years to find employment.  What would he have done without unemployment benefits?

Please read this “opinion” and think about what our government is doing to those, who like my brother, want to work, but cannot find a job.  Should they end up homeless?

Last week, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez convened a group of the long-term unemployed to share their stories with members of his department’s staff.  All were over 50 and once held white-collar jobs; some earned six-figure salaries. The session was heartbreaking but also inspiring — and it made me wonder why Democrats aren’t screaming louder, in sheer outrage, about this GOP exercise in gratuitous inhumanity.

There was Carol Scott of Baltimore, who lost her job as a program administrator at Johns Hopkins University medical school in 2010. With a master’s degree in psychology, she keeps getting told that she is overqualified for jobs paying less, which she would happily take. She has been scraping by with help from her mother and sister, in addition to unemployment benefits.

There was Kevin Meyer from New Jersey, who lost his job in corporate communications, accepted another job at a 40 percent pay cut, and then lost that job too. He said that in the last two years he has sent out hundreds of resumes, sat for about two dozen fruitless interviews and endured a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Now, he said, he is “racing the clock to avoid foreclosure.”

There was Johnetta Thurston of Odenton, Md., who lost her position as a human resources executive in May 2011 and continues to apply for job after job. After being turned down, she always calls to ask why; if it was because she lacked a particular skill or professional certification, she goes out and gets it. She managed to win a few short-term consulting contracts, but the last one ended in October.

There was George Meaghan of Paramus, N.J., who in December 2012 was laid off by Citigroup after 33 years. “I thought it would be easy to find a job,” he said, “and it’s shocking to be sitting here a year later.” He was lucky enough to be given a severance package, but he said that money is now exhausted and he has started to cannibalize his retirement savings. Most of the others around the table said they have drained their 401(k) accounts.

And there was Steve Bolton, who lives in the Washington area. Bolton spent 22 years in the Army before retiring and going to work for a defense contractor. He was laid off last June and now finds himself “at the bottom of my barrel,” with no savings left and no job in sight. “Fortunately, we were able to pay our mortgage this month,” he said.

These are people whose lives have been buffeted by forces beyond their control — the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, globalization and outsourcing, irrational federal spending cuts. They have skills and experience; they are willing to reinvent themselves. Isn’t it in society’s interest to give them a chance?

It has been common practice for the federal government to extend unemployment benefits in hard economic times — and to do so on a bipartisan basis, without insisting that the funds be taken out of some other program’s hide. The cost of a full one-year extension would be just $25 billion, little more than a rounding error in a trillion-dollar federal budget.

It would be sound economic policy for the government to finance that extension through borrowing. Interest rates are at historic lows and the deficit has been falling dramatically, making this a good time for capital investments. In this case, rather than building roads or airports, we would be investing in the nation’s human capital.

And spending that money would create about 200,000 jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office — thus putting some of the long-term unemployed back to work.

But while Congress inches forward, probably toward some kind of extension, lives are falling apart. All day, every day, Democrats ought to be making a loud and righteous noise over this disgraceful state of affairs.

Contact columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Surrender

So much going on today.  I just want to say I will not push to get everything done.  My agenda is not more important than my serenity.

I cannot attend a meeting today.  I have Amelia to take care of, a private lesson to teach, food to cook, a class to teach, a call to make this afternoon, dinner with a friend, and more writing to do.  I am stopping now to breath, to relax and to remind myself to surrender to life as it is in this moment.

Day 9.  Still sober

The Alcoholc: Compliance vs. Surrender

The following is loosely excerpted from SURRENDER VERSUS COMPLIANCE IN THERAPY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO ALCOHOLISM by Harry M. Tiebout, M.D., an article a friend shared with me.  I now understand the difference between compliance and surrender.  My childhood trained me to comply.  I learned to say yes even when I knew I needed to say no.  I agreed with anything and everything to avoid punishment. When my father came into my room at night, I laid still.  I never fought.  If my mother screamed at me, I felt guilty.  I knew she must be right.  I must be bad.

Now, I must be authentic.  I want to live a sober life.  Compliance is not enough my enemy.  Alone, compliance is my enemy because it blocks my total surrender.  I am an alcoholic.   I can no longer afford to be half-hearted.

Submission, resignation, yielding, compliance, acknowledgment and concession only work on the conscious mind.  With each of these words there is there a feeling of reservation, a tug in the direction of nonacceptance. Sobriety requires that the unconscious and conscious minds join forces.  

“Unless the unconscious has within it the capacity to accept, the conscious mind can only tell itself that it should accept but by so doing it cannot bring about acceptance in the unconscious which continues with its own non-accepting and resenting attitudes. The result is a house divided against itself: the conscious mind sees all the reasons for acceptance while the unconscious mind says, “But I won’t accept!” Wholehearted acceptance under such conditions is impossible. Experience has proved that in the alcoholic a half-hearted reaction does not maintain sobriety for very long. The inner doubts all too soon take over. The alcoholic who stays “dry” must be wholehearted.

We are thus confronted with the question: What does produce wholehearted acceptance? My answer is, as before, surrender. But surrender is a step not easily taken by human beings.“

“In recent years, because of my special interest in the phenomenon of surrender, I have become aware of another conscious and unconscious phenomenon, namely compliance — which is basically partial acceptance or partial surrender, and which often serves as a block to surrender.”

“Compliance needs careful definition. It means agreeing, going along, but in no way implies enthusiastic, wholehearted assent and approval. There is a willingness not to argue or resist but the cooperation is a bit grudging, a little forced; one is not entirely happy about agreeing. Compliance is, therefore, a word which portrays mixed feelings, divided sentiments. There is a willingness to go along but at the same time there are some inner reservations which make that willingness somewhat thin and watery. It does not take much to overthrow this kind of willingness.”

“One thing must be made absolutely clear: There is a world of difference between’ thinking of compliance in conscious terms and in unconscious terms.  An alcoholic, at the termination of a long and painful spree, decides that he has had enough. This decision is announced loudly and vehemently to all who will listen. His sincerity cannot be questioned. He means every word of it. Yet he knows, and so do those who hear him, that he will be singing another tune before many weeks have elapsed. For the moment he seems to have accepted his alcoholism but it is only with a skin-deep assurance. He will certainly revert to drinking. What we see here is compliance in action. During the time when his memory of the suffering entailed by a spree is acute and painful he agrees to anything and everything. But deep inside, in his unconscious, the best he can do is to comply — which means that, when the reality of his drinking problem becomes undeniable, he no longer argues with incontrovertible facts The fight, so to speak, has been knocked out of him. As time passes and the memory of his suffering weakens, the need for compliance lessens. As the need diminishes, the half of compliance which never really accepted begins to stir once more and soon resumes its way. The need for accepting the illness of alcoholism is ignored because, after all, deep inside he really did not mean it, he had only complied. Of course consciously the victim of all this is completely in the dark. For a while drink was anathema but now he begins to toy with the thought of one drink, and so on, until finally, as the noncooperative element in compliance takes over, he has his first drink. The other half of compliance has won out; the alcoholic is the unwitting victim of his unconscious inclinations.”

“One of the first things to recognize is the fact that the presence of compliance blocks the capacity for true acceptance. Since compliance is a form of acceptance, every time the individual is faced with the need to accept something he falls back on compliance, which serves for the moment.  But since he has no real capacity to accept, he is soon swinging in the other direction, his seeming acceptance a thing of the past.  This unconscious split in the compliance mechanism has deep psychosomatic reverberations.”

“As long as compliance is functioning, there is halfway but never total surrender. But the halfway surrender and acceptance, serving as it does to quell the fighting temporarily, deceives both the individual and the onlooker, neither of whom is able to detect the unconscious compliance in the reaction of apparent yielding. It is only when a real surrender occurs that compliance is knocked out of the picture, freeing the individual for a series of wholehearted responses — including, in the alcoholic, his acceptance of his illness and of his need to do something constructive about it.”

“After an act of surrender, the individual reports a sense of unity, of ended struggles, of no longer divided inner counsel. He knows the meaning of inner wholeness and, what is more, he knows from immediate experience the feeling of being wholehearted about anything. He recognizes for the first time how insincere his previous protestations actually were. If he is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he travels around to meetings proclaiming the need for honesty — usually, at the start of his pilgrimage, with a certain amount of surprise and wonder in his voice. Quite frankly, before he was able to embrace the program, he had no idea he was a liar, dishonest in his thoughts; but now that A.A. is making sense — that is, he is accepting A.A. wholeheartedly and without reservations — he sees that previously he had never truly accepted anything. The A.A. speaker does not follow through to state that, formerly, all he had been doing was complying; but if asked, he nods his head in vigorous assent, saying, “That’s exactly what I was doing.” A more articulate individual, after a little thought, added: “You know, when I think back on it, that was all I knew how to do. I supposed that was the way it was with everybody. I could not conceive of really giving up. The best I could do was comply, which meant I never really wanted to quit drinking, I can see it all now but I certainly couldn’t then.”

I surrender.  Divine Mother, please take away my deep-rooted denial.  Relieve me of the desire to drink not just on a conscious level.  touch my inner most soul with the power of your love and grace.  For it is by your grace that I will have the courage not to drink today.  Protect me, guide me and use me for your highest good.

I will not be able to attend a meeting today, but I will call a friend in AA.  No matter what happens, I will not drink today.