Trapped Between...

Faith & Numbers

Tracking my shaman's command to me, "Good, keep painting, make ten more and I'll sell them. Make ten more. You are meant to do art now --dwell in the fire"

Then plucking out the bright coins of my financial adviser, " Every day add ten clients to your pipeline. Call them cold --you can do this, it's hard, but I believe in you."

I AM NOT WORTHY OF THIS LOVE.

How can I live with the weight of it?

I float in the tub, muscles clenched and submerged.
A desperate staving off of,
"What's next?"
But then my tomorrow will flood my sleep tonight.

I took pictures of what I wrote while I wore a velvet smoking jacket.
I can't find pieces to construct an altar, only images to download to the feet of the monitor.
But I need THINGS, GOD I hate that. I HATE things.
Food, money, clothes, shelter.
I want to strip my heart from them, take that with me, those
Flavors and colors and sweet memories attached to stuff
Decouple them from the grimy substance of mass.
FUCK things! They burden my eye's desperate
Desire to shuffle off the weight of my spine.

Fury

...it hounds me. every step, all my moments of weakness, even wine pulls it on rather than dismissing it. Only now there is comfort in the fury.

I rest into it, or attempt to. No patience, a sense of loss. I have had this process, a series of peaks and valleys between grace without comfort and awkward stabs at ease that evoke furious self doubt and brash lunges into darkness. I express my fury alone, drunk and miserable. But at least fully expressed.

Chipping Away Into Me

...once more is present in me
In my choice dismissed

By a clipped purse
of the lips --askance.

A hot ball in my belly where
My emotion roils oblique

Left with decision to tighten
Out to the right but inside
---------------
When I write this stuff it only grinds away, I'm stuck with this tightness inside, no outlet, I'm only staring at what's wrong but doing nothing. Nothing. The fear and anger part. Fear. Anger.

I hate it when I write this stuff, trying to describe myself using poetic tropes that I never fit into. That the status of my being can't fit into.

I'm feeling the broken of my record but I can't jump the grooves...only skip staccato. It hurts but not enough. And what is the payoff here? What do I win by sticking to my story?

Alcohol's Apologist

A glass of wine has always been welcome at my table, loosening my fingers on the page. One beer, plus a few, has resulted in conversation so clear -when otherwise muddled smiles would have loomed between some stranger and myself. Alcohol kept me at it, pushing the limits of work and frustration. With Alcohol, I've screamed into the night and barked at the moon, gnawed at and sobbed into ruddy fingers. These are not things sober people do, to their loss, I suppose. When I needed to stop smoking, Alcohol was there to pinch hit. When my job, for the five-hundredth day in a row, was to scrub another toilet... Alcohol swept me off to greener pastures. Why does Mother Russia endure her winters? How does an amputee stare at that space where she once bent her knee? My God, all those lonely grandmothers waiting only for next Christmas, then Easter, then? Then, for tonight, like last night, there's a plastic jug to fill her weeping cup. For all these lonely souls, this is a jug of good friends. That fat congressman, eyes screwed up and red fist clenched against change, Alcohol loosens his tongue to Mercy or Peace. When he's caught in that cherry glow, heart pushing up past his throat and strangles his greedy mind. Was Roosevelt sober? Was Churchill? God no! It was George Bush who lacked a glass, and Jimmy Carter, mere placeholders between Nixon and Clinton. Now THEY were drinkers! Destined for hell, no doubt, but real leaders to cheer and curse upon. It's time to move on I suppose, some tee-totaller's lock against Demon Rum, Christ but I can't face that white sheet of abstinence. But Spirits can no longer be my friend and solace. But Booze is my only comfort at parties insisting a drink in hand. I must decline I suppose, be willing to have just none, but graciously? And then again?? Me??? Decline the next???? A good drunk (quoting another) said that when he was sober, "The days stretched out like a gray paste. Occasionally, to break the madness, there'd be a good day", and this kept him going, waiting for good days. It fell apart finally; he got tired of waiting. In that light, it truly seems like madness, but there's no right day for it — because good days are not my aim. So, despite the inevitable paste and placeholder status, I'm aiming towards the back of the wagon, at least after this next...

With My Heart On Duty

Heidegger: On Silence

"In talking to one another, the person who keeps silent can 'make one understood' (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something covers it up and brings what is understood to sham clarity - the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to 'speak'. Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence, indeed he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by nature to speak is no better able is able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the kind of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing.... In that sense one reticence makes something manifest , and does away with idle talk. As a mode of reticence makes articulates the intelligibility of Dasien (human being) in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-of-hearing which is genuine, and to a being-with-one-another which is transparent."

Query: "What is the coach providing/being/doing that allows a person to be open in this way?"

We are animals first, and I suspect that's a key point here. Before we had words we communicated through gesture, expression and eye contact. These feelings of ours live in us beneath the words. I cry alone pretty regularly these days, and it has a different flavor than crying in front of others. The pain stops and starts when I'm alone --fully open and ragged, then it's gone and I'm back to what I was doing before or moving on. It's different than the rising roll of tears I experience with other people. That may not always be true for me and not at all be how other people experience their pain, but the communication of pain is different than simply the expressing of it. The coach is providing a framework to the expression through exchange, and that framework holds the feelings aloft --it is then clarified and refracted back to the person expressing. They can remember it more clearly and they can see the impact.

When I am alone my expression of feeling is powerful and valuable but it can be lost from the thin context of being alone, like talking to myself --it's just not as sticky as exchanging words with another person and hearing them back through another's lens. And note that reflection happens even in silence, because of what the coach is doing: connecting through gesture, expression and eye contact with the person expressing their feelings.

So what is happening when a coach is present to receive another person's feelings in silence? And how is that silence more powerful than speaking it? The silence allows emotion itself to be the primary subject at hand. Existing at the precognitive level yet written large by virtue of having a witness.

Our minds (where language exists) twist and deflect our emotions to suit the moment, they are not consistent. Deep emotion needs only a place to hang in the air to become a resonating bell. The silence is half of it, the other half is being there. The coach is being present.

Getting love in there

Have I been too busy trying to be happy to love myself? I look at the rush of relief and warmth that's opened up in me as I start to accept my actions, and it's clear to me I've been holding my heart under water for years. Warm hot breaths, panting in the sweet air. Yeah, I been hard on myself for a while now.

I look back on the promises I've been making to myself for years and each one had the goal of making myself a better person, but I wasn't looking at why I needed to make those promises. I mean, I didn't need to promise myself to read more often, or get more connected to the people I loved. That all just came to me. One hell of a promise would be to let my next move be loving myself for who I am.

John's List o' sticks he uses to beat on hisself

-I never get any work done-
It feels this way, and I've been fired because of it. At the same time I can look back at a great portfolio of writing, presentations, and milestones I've nailed. One thing that I never give myself credit for is the work I do that's not on paper or part of release materials. People who work on projects with me appreciate the context I set, my commitment to establishing clear goals, and the fun I bring to projects. I'm a leader, which gives me the slippery task of supporting others and making sure connections are made. Those connections aren't listed or explicit components of the project, they're the glue which brought it together and the nimbus of excellence that makes it shine. It ain't listed in the specs, but it's damn fine work none the less.

-I'm a slave to distraction: my chat, my hobbies, and the World-Wide-Data-Hose-
At my heart I'm a communicator and a researcher. I absorb information, process it internally, and pass it along to others. It's a valuable skill for professionals, but I'm so often obsessed with my product. It takes time to reach positions where abstract skills are needed. Hell, I wouldn't lean on the opinions of my 19 year old self either. Now I'm at a point where I've got an actual store of knowledge that's valuable. I love listening to other people, and I love brainstorming on how to approach a project from a strategic perspective. I never wanted to be a carpenter or a coder, but I demand only my tangible work gets counted. Well that is useful stuff, but communication and abstract reasoning skills always get top billing on the jobs I'm most excited by...nobody is asking me to make widgets anyway, so how about I stop trying to pretend I should?

-I'm not in shape-
Well it turns out this stings because it puts me face to face with my humanity. It's not that nobody is in shape, but LOTS of people want to be in shape and aren't. My impulse is to call myself a norm and walk away disgruntled. It's HARD to work out. It hurts the body and the resistance is internal. Bodies and minds resist exercise, and I've got both. When I drop other things in my life: lovers, travel, work, and my bandoleer of friends I manage to get into shape. It feels good when I do that, but I also miss out on those other priorities in life... more on this later.

-I don't follow my schedule-
It's hard to do the same thing over and over for me, and it's hard to stick to a plan and remain a creative and adaptive absorber of life. I feel like there's something deeper, some avoidance rooted in my attitude from childhood, but there's also a slew of rich and exciting and damned useful experiences I've garnered from being distractable. I just ain't a Legume Comptroler, and I don't want to be one neither.

-I do drugs even when I don't want to-
Booze, cigarettes, and other exotics have been a part of my life since I was 14. I've got a LOT of pain buried in there, and I've been committed to being open and vulnerable most of my life in the face of that. Intoxicants have been a place for me to stretch out and touch both deeply wounded and actively engaged at the same time. The result is not perfect, but it's a full and valid way of being.

-I'm not a superhero-
This last is the hardest pill to swallow. I've always expected myself to contain every great trait of the people I see around me. My father works hard, so I must be a hard worker even if I won't take on his limited social life and lack of creative passions. My brother is able to focus on work, but his one-dimensional work doesn't interest me at all. My wife works out all the time, but she has no idea where Uganda is and she envies both my knowledge base and my ability to communicate it to others ~well it took time to do and learn those things, time that wasn't spent in the gym.

It's been a blind spot in my perspective, my lack of compassion for myself for not being everything at all times. So often, my coaches ask me what it would mean to me if I was normal and it throws me, "I'd be a failure" I think to myself. And so fine, I'm an eccentric fellah, just like I planned. But I never signed on for superhero status, so why do I beat on myself for being merely human? It's a good thing, shooting for greatness, but that's a full time task too. I suppose I know some superheroes, but honestly, they're not whimsical eccentrics with cozy hearts, it just ain't in the job description.