New York, New York

Yes, I made it. I am in the city, for a short two days of seeing old friends and hearing several choral evensongs at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue. My family roots in this place go back to the 1600s and 1700s, and it is literally in my bones. After my year at Royal Holloway in 1980-81, I needed to pay back my student loans and was here through most of the 1980s, living on the Upper West Side, working at Rockefeller Center, singing and studying art in the Village, and volunteering at the South Street Seaport. Several times, I walked all the way from W. 104 Street to the Seaport, and subway travel never fazed me either. I never made enough money to take part in the cultural offerings of "city living" the way I should have (I attended few shows, concerts or operas), and it was a very rough transition from England, but I was reasonably happy here and had a surprisingly low key life.

Six years ago I came down to sing in the Choir of St.John the Divine, and I had a hard time re-acclimating to the city. Within the cathedral close, I felt at home, but life in New York overall had a very different energy than it had thirty years before, and I had lived in much smaller communities in the interim. I was overwhelmed, to be honest. In the end, I was glad that a changing choir didn't bring me with it, and I chose to leave again when the experience ended.

So this return visit has given me the chance to just observe. It can still be such a magical place. Yesterday, in one day, I observed more funny, poignant, fascinating snapshots of humanity than I have in a year. People are kind, from bus drivers to sales clerks to random people on the elevator. I saw John Singer Sargents at the Metropolitan, flowering trees in Central Park, and dozens of broken umbrellas in trash bins after the rain. Bicycle messengers careen through traffic, and extremely elderly people navigate the same sidewalks as the fast-moving young.

There are two factors that make it an ever-harder place for me to be, however. The first is the midtown building boom. I experience claustrophobia, and that sense of being closed in, in the 40's and 50's, is really almost unbearable. Sidewalks that didn't seem cavernous in 2011, are lost in the shadows now. Streets are gridlocked. And then there is that feeling of disconnect I always feel trying to interact with our economic paradigm; it is clearly quite alive in New York and fueling all this growth. I just "don't get it" and feel more lost in the shuffle here than elsewhere. Ah well...that part of my journey is always a challenge.

The key to 48 hours of enjoyment is seeing old friends, seeing the art I love, and hearing the music I love. Everything is easier to navigate from the heart.

Journeying

I wasn't originally going to write today. But darned if I didn't magnetize some powerful stuff before eight AM!

Getting ready for an eight-day trip around New York State (which has turned into a rather fascinating episode of "This is your Life"), I emptied out my travel handbag, a messenger bag. There was nothing in it except for an old printout about "The Hero's Journey" published by Maricopa Community College (a more comprehensive and updated version of this is at http://www.dommy.com/az2nzau/docs/qoln_paper.pdf). I used to use this in my teaching. Why was it the only thing in the bag? I don't think it's coincidence. Something in me must have known I'd need to look at it the next time I traveled, and bring it with me.

It's kind of a reminder both of how valuable such a model is (am I in the "departure" phase of my life, the "initiation," or the "return"?) and how fluid. Everything I have written recently suggests that I'm near the end of the initiation, or well into the return (when, exactly, does the caterpillar's skin come off?), but life also presents micro-journeys, like this upcoming one or simply the journey of any individual day or hour or minute. There's also the theory, posited in Maureen Murdock's The Heroine's Journey, that we women may be more likely to head inward to face our dragons and demons than to outward solutions like careers and conflict, which has has certainly been my experience. And yet physical movement into the world, onto a bus or train, into familiar or unfamiliar territory, catalyzes growth. We are all on a hero's journey, every single day. I feel a great deal of anticipation for this upcoming week, even though I frustratingly seem to have chosen to make another adventure on a ridiculously short shoestring. Liz Lavish, who I was trying to resonate with many months ago in a blog post, has yet to really emerge (!) But every tiny step recently has fallen into place because of love, and I am reluctant to break the momentum of that paradigm.

The morning's second striking thing was encountering a short video of Julia Roberts, speaking as "Mother Earth" from an organization called "BUnited." (I'm not providing the link because it came out so long that I think I wasn't doing it properly, so I hope maybe the video will either make its way to you, or you can find it yourself.) Anyway, Roberts basically addresses humanity from above, saying that the planet will go on and evolve, no matter what we humans do. I just loved hearing "Mother Earth" speak powerfully. It puts everything that's happening in the world into perspective.

When I started this blog over a year-and-a-half ago, I was sure that eventually it would gain huge popularity. Except for a few blips, it hasn't yet. Sometimes the list of what I don't have overwhelms me (I had one of those tearful moments last night), and being a writer with few readers is in that hard category. If I have never fully despaired, it is in part because I've always been aware of the ever-moving nature of the life journey. You set your foot in front of you and suddenly you are on the highway, or in the boat, or on the moving escalator, or whatever metaphor appeals. Something is going to happen this week. Something unexpected or beautiful or compelling or challenging. For me, it will be looking at the my birth State with new eyes; for you, it could be an unexpected phone call or invitation or windfall. With this new metaphor of the caterpillar in mind, I'm taking heart that after many weeks of stasis, holding my breath in the face of jaw-dropping world change, the wings seem to be unfolding.

Week's end

This week, which in the context of our new world reality was depressingly "normal," was actually a turning point. OK, turning points are constantly happening, but I suspect this week will stand out for a long time to come. The process?

Easter's "hymnody" realization hit me hard. It didn't surprise me, but it had a finality to it. It doesn't change my passion for English church music or choral evensong (indeed I'm travelling next week to attend a few services in New York) and I even had the opportunity to play some Easter hymns on the organ, which was surprisingly thrilling once I literally pulled out all the stops. But spiritually, I've moved well on from traditional Christianity, and probably did decades ago. It was crucial for me to run back and pick up this lost thread of my life, and I will not drop it again. But my 60's, 70's and 80's simply will not find me playing the kind of church musician (or related scholarly) role that I guess I thought I might eventually be able to reclaim. Period. Monday and Tuesday, I felt like Sisyphus, back at the bottom of the hill staring with complete discouragement at the boulder.

So it was a relief to watch a great Martha Beck video referencing an Eckhart Tolle story about caterpillars and butterflies. Basically, it was a reminder that caterpillars don't just suddenly fly into the sky -- their life as a caterpillar first comes to a screeching halt. Caterpillar-ness absolutely no longer works. They hang upside down, lose the use of their feet, and slough off the caterpillar skin. Within minutes, they have ceased being a caterpillar. The butterfly is simply revealed. I looked up what I think must be the Tolle quote, and it's great: "What a caterpillar calls the end of the world we call a butterfly."

Around the same time, I got stuck on another much smaller decision, and seemed to be faced with an impossibility. Fortunately, I remembered a great piece of advice in Mike Dooley's Manifesting Change (chapter six, "Opening the Floodgates"). I've used this advice many times: when you are faced with a handful of options, and you are unenthused by all of them, choose the "least unattractive" one. In this instance, I also tried to bring love into the picture. Where was there even an iota of love for a place, person or situation? Once I couched my dilemma that way, "way opened up" to paraphrase the Quakers.

Things often happen in threes, and my final epiphany of the week came quite unexpectedly, essentially out of the blue. Basically, my "mission statement" (which I've been agonizing over for decades and which has been the behind-the-scenes topic of most of my blog posts) wrote itself. It was kind of like, "Duh!" Obvious. It is what 60 years of being this particular caterpillar has to have been leading to. It's going to sound like I'm creating false suspense if I don't write about it yet, but there is still a little processing to do -- over the next week or so on the train and on the bus, I'm going to look out the window with pen and journal in hand, and make sure I'm right. As soon as I can, I'll share it with you, I promise.

At the beginning of the week, this caterpillar had ground to a halt and was hanging upside down. At week's end, the skin is splitting, revealing what had been under the surface all along. In the end, Easter was the catalyst, and I am thankful for it.

Intelligence

You never know what might attract my attention, and today it was an article in the April Vanity Fair. Entitled "Elon Musk's Future Shock" and written by Maureen Dowd, it is essentially a presentation of the pros and cons of artificial intelligence and its potential to change the nature of what it means to be human. It is a serious issue. Strangely, although I'm sure I fall on the conservative "go slow" end of the spectrum, I don't disrespect all the work being done in this area; creativity is part of what we are here for.

But at the risk of being a broken record, I do have to comment on the fact that if Dowd's reporting (or the magazine's illustration of the fifteen figures most actively involved in the debate) accurately portrays the world of artificial intelligence, it is an all-male endeavor. Talk about "life out of balance." Goodness. What if, before leap-frogging into this potentially terrifying future, institutions were to fully engage the intelligence and sensibilities of women? What if our insights (in this and other areas) were actively, open-heartedly sought after? Just asking.

And slightly off topic, may I just say how heartbreaking it is to hear the nickname "Mother of All Bombs." I'm sorry. The essential role of a mother is to give life, not to take it.

That's all for today, I guess!

Hymnody

Back in my teens and early twenties, I think that I must have been able to sing between fifty and one hundred hymns from the Episcopal 1940 Hymnal by heart. And I mean, all the verses. This was especially true of the magnificent Easter hymns, like "Jesus Christ is Risen Today," "The Strife is O'er," and "He is Risen." I never needed the hymnal. Many of them I can still play by heart on the organ as well. When I left church and church music in my late twenties, those words apparently never left me because 28 years later, when I sang about a dozen Holy Week and Easter services in the choir at St. John the Divine in New York, I still didn't need the hymnal. (From time to time that got me into trouble. There are a few minor, but noticeable word changes in the "new" 1980 hymnal!)

The intervening years had taken me on a spiritual journey that was, like me, independent and very internal. My Aquarian side wanted something substantial enough for my intellect to grab onto, but I never took an interest in other major religious traditions. Law of attraction certainly makes the most sense intellectually, but there's not a lot there for the heart to gravitate to. And on the rare occasions when I have connected to the stream of love that conforms most to my sense of "Source," I don't "hear" hymns, only what Simon and Garfunkel called "the sound of silence." I have felt quite "out there," beyond spiritual form or ritual or hymnody.

I believe in my heart of hearts that there is a place where hymns and no-hymns, music and no-music, religion and no-religion overlap; trying to articulate this has been crucial to my (so far unsuccessful) effort to write a new mission statement and move forward bringing my original passion for church music with me. Yet this was the first year in the last seven that I did not attend even one Holy Week or Easter service. I just couldn't do it. It was too painful, given what is happening in the world, to relive the ancient Maundy Thursday betrayal or the Good Friday violence. And while I craved something to reinforce Easter's metaphor of rebirth, I woke up Sunday knowing that I'm just simply done singing those hymns. Isn't that strange? I couldn't do it again. I need new songs, somehow; to bring forward the musical and spiritual passion but few of the old forms. Even though I think of life as more of a spiral than a straight line, it's getting rather freaky how many "doors" seem to be closing behind me in this seventh decade. New ones must be opening, but I just don't see them yet. Maybe I need to sing a new song, to sing them into view.

Transformation

OK. So, I wasn't originally going to post again so soon, and then I changed my  mind but it was to be about something different. Then I encountered the most amazing video. I hope you will find it. It's a short presentation by sociologist and life coach Martha Beck called "The Pyramid and the Pool: why things are better than they seem."

All I can say is, "yes." Yes. That's me, in the pool of water down below the pyramid of sugar cubes (our current paradigm), just trying like crazy to be authentic and let my little light shine, and I'm sure that's many of you too. In her metaphor, the sugar cubes of structure will simply melt gently into a new pool of consciousness. That's the transformation right now.

Definitely watch this and see if it speaks to you. Part of me is tempted to say, thank you, Martha, with this video, my work here is done. But you know me too well. I'm sure I will find more to say!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz9IJMMWP4M

Instant Summer

It seems like there is no such thing as spring anymore. Not in any extended, "classic" sense anyway. Monday morning was chilly, but expected to get up to about 70. If you looked out the window until late afternoon, it might as well have been 20 degrees outside; the ground and grass were brown, the tree trunks and branches were brown, and there were still some piles of dingy snow. Late in the afternoon, it actually got up to nearly 80, and tiny tips of green grass and crocuses were beginning to peep out of the soil. Overall, though, what a strange disconnect between temperature and visual reality. This morning, after a warm night, green was everywhere (except not yet in the trees.) Grass that was brown yesterday was Masters Golf Tournament green today. Some flowers had come out by 9 AM, and with more 70's expected, the transformation will rapidly continue. Traditional spring highs of 50 and 60 are expected to return over the weekend -- I could live with that year round, honestly.

Have you ever seen the film, "Koyaanisqatsi"?  It came out in 1982, and I must have seen it in 1983. I remember watching it on video with my Upper West Side roommates, in our dated futon-and-shag-rug-decorated living room. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it for its continued relevance. However, it was, for me anyway, a hard movie to watch. There is no dialogue or voice-over. Basically, the filmmaker starts with images of an unpopulated American landscape, slowly bringing in evidence of human interaction with the land through farming, industry, crowded cities, pollution and traffic. The music, by Philip Glass, is brilliant but edgy -- rhythmic, discordant, insistent. The music and the images meshed perfectly, but in a way almost guaranteed to disturb and force you to think.

In the Hopi language, "Koyaanisqatsi" means "life out of balance." Even having had about the lightest footprint on the planet of anyone I know, I judge myself harshly for contributing to global warming and pollution. If I slip just a little, I start to judge us all quite harshly, and enter a place of immense fear for the future. If there is a return to balance, I doubt it will come mainly from changing how we live, what resources we use, and fighting the corporate and political entities that seem to have more power than we do. My hunch is that the biggest thing out of balance is that hatred, of ourselves, of others, of the land. Today, I cannot tweak the high temperatures or the rapidity with which flowers are coming out, or contribute much more to the solution than the blue box of recycling just taken out to the curb. But I can tweak how I feel about myself, and hear the words of Love saying, bravo brave human for choosing this important time to live and grow. Bravo for your efforts to make the world a better, more just and beautiful place. Be kind to yourself, Liz. Today, just do what you can. And enjoy the sunlight, the grass and the flowers. For heaven's sake, that's what they are here for.

The calm before...

In the hindsight of about 6:30 AM on April 7, 2017, and not really knowing exactly what is going on, I feel led to chronicle a few hours of my yesterday before going off to my job today.

Yesterday afternoon, I had the house to myself for a few hours. My idea of heaven is just that, a house to myself, but recently that has rarely been my reality. I decided not to work on my mission statement or my resume (some young 20-somethings are helping me with "rebranding", which kind of says it all doesn't it, but I'm grateful for their help). I decided not to go into a panic about anything. Instead, I just basked happily in the freedom and the solitude. I finished my romance novel. I watched some junk TV. And I sat for at least an hour just watching people with umbrellas walk by on a very rainy sidewalk. As dinnertime approached, I made an old 60's standby, chicken baked with cream of mushroom soup. (Yes, kids, back in pre-history, the only time we ever had "Indian" food was when my mom mixed a half-teaspoon of curry in with that mushroom soup.)

Fortunately, what with all the backing and forthing to the kitchen, I managed to catch PBS NewsHour's "Brief but Spectacular" segment, featuring a photographer named Photon. He told stories about some of his photo sessions with famous men, from Bill Clinton to our current president (before he became president). Evidently in the latter instance, in order to break the ice, Photon had said words to this effect: "Gosh, Mr. T, it seems like there is always kind of a frenzy of activity around here. How do you keep calm in the midst of the storm?" To which D.T. replied, "I am the storm."

A shiver went down my spine. The truth of it was too stunning.

To recover my equilibrium, I watched an episode of Time Team. Nothing like watching eccentric British archaeologists dig through the layers of long-gone civilizations to bring one's spirits back to normal.

A little before 9, I got ready to watch Rachel Maddow. She is just so brilliant, and I honor her. As Chris Hayes was handing the mike over to her (as it were) he looked unusually pale and "deer-in-the-headlights." And Rachel was rather off as well. About ten minutes in, she announced that there was some breaking news, the network did its little graphic flourish, and Brian Williams came on to announce that U.S. missiles were attacking Syria. I turned off the TV.

...the storm.

Options

This has been an extremely hard week to be human.

It's made even harder when you don't even understand, on any level, the impulse to fight, maim, or kill other people. If I genuinely understood or personally grappled with these impulses, perhaps the scenario in front of us, the struggle of civilizations and peoples, would at least make intellectual sense. Aquarians like me need to understand what's going on in order to take part in the game of life. But since I don't understand, and really never have, I am even finding it hard to cry. I know one thing; the Goddess/Mother Earth/Gaia must be in tears. Too many of her children are choosing appalling options.

So the following would seem to be a strange thing to focus on today, but here goes. In much of the reporting of the Supreme Court hearings in Congress, there has been reference to an option that one side will use later this week. Yes, that option, the "nuclear" option. Why is that provocative term being bandied about at all, much less in this situation? Clearly, most of these lawmakers don't espouse the law of attraction, because if they did, they would know that they must watch their words (and even more, the feelings behind those words). What goes out will eventually boomerang back, either literally or metaphorically. This is the worst possible moment for such bluster.

I've tried to figure out what is to be gained by using this terminology. Who is impressed? Millions of us are not. These lawmakers took oaths to follow certain laws and rules, to follow precedent, and to work together to effect change. All this is, is a certain side threatening to change the rules when it looks like they might lose, and wanting to be seen as heroic in doing so. We have all had the experience being the wise adult when a toddler melts down over losing a game. The tantrum? "That wasn't fair! I should have won! I'm going to change the rules!" Do wise adults say, "Good on you for going nuclear!!!! Good on you for screaming and yelling and losing your temper! You're right, dear, you should always win! The other child should always lose!"? No, wise adults patiently explain that in games like this, sometimes one person wins, and sometimes the other person wins, and that's life. New paradigm parents might even say, "You know, you're right. Let's find a game where everyone wins." But rewarding hysterics with the notion of one permanent winner, no.

In all the scenarios this week, it just seems remarkably simple. There's an easy option. Do no harm. Do not hurt others or glorify hurting others. Do not use the terminology of war. In politics, economics, medicine, entertainment. Anywhere. Ever. Period.

Melting...

The heavy, wet snow that fell Friday into Saturday almost immediately compacted from 7 inches or so down to three or four, and has been melting ever since. The landscape is still primarily white, grey and brown, but at least this morning there were many birds singing, and in the middle of the night I could hear geese flying north. There's hope.

The other day, I mentioned mission statements. Back when I taught at community college, my students were fixated on, "OMG, I have to get this degree so I can get out and get a job and pay back my student loans." Good child of the 50's and 60's that I am, I wanted to challenge this circular logic and at least give them a chance to consider the bigger picture, and we did a class exercise on creating personal mission statements. After a class discussion and work in small groups, they would write one clause for their "mission" vis a vis changing the world (ie: "I want to help people improve their health...") and then a second clause where they would pinpoint more specifically how they wished to do this ("...by teaching yoga and nutrition classes"). This seemed to be a good model for getting them out of personal panic mode and encouraging them to do a small measure of universal thinking. I hope that it helped at least a few of my students.

For months, I've been feeling that despite a sense of having entered a new "stretch of river," I'm stalled from having lost sight of my own goals. So over the weekend, I worked on a new mission statement. I was pleased with it at first. It seemed weighty and earnest. I sensed that people looking at it would be impressed with my gravitas. I walked away from it for 24 hours, and then came back to it again.

And darned if I didn't immediately see that, for all intents and purposes, it was my old mission statement. Indeed, I suspect I "wrote" this one before birth: to advocate for the rights and values of girls and women, by taking steps to enter a previously all-male musical field; and by living independently with as much integrity as possible in a place of love, sharing, learning, freedom, non-competitiveness, non-consumer-focused beauty and peace. Tilting against windmills has been challenging, extremely uncertain and lonely, but overall, I feel that I've fulfilled this mission as best I could. I can't imagine anything I would have done differently, at least.

But I think without my realizing it, I've literally reached "retirement" and the winding-down of this mission, which would be fine if my lifetime were at an end, but hey, some people in my family sail well into their nineties. If I potentially have thirty years ahead of me, my new mission statement absolutely needs to be just that, new, otherwise I may literally die of boredom!

Many spiritual teachers say that, in effect, our only "mission" is to be happy, joyful, loving and passionate, and to share those qualities with the people around us. With every new daily outrage in the news, it has been hard to access these beautiful qualities at all, much less focus on them or see them as enough. And yet, maybe 60-something is a perfect time to start melting, to cast aside the serious black-and-white "me-against-the-world/change-the-world/fix-the-world" mentality, and simply ask, what is fun for me? Where am I happy? What pastures are now turning spring-like green? What kinds of people do I love? What piques my interest these days? What in me has changed in the last thirty or forty years? What has remained the same? My boat has started to move fast, but I'm still kind of hanging off the stern, so this week, I am going to try to write another mission statement, and see if it gets me caught up with me. I'll keep you posted, as always(!) You are seriously the most patient, wonderful people in the world.

April Fools' Day

So this is a genuine, old-fashioned April Fools' Day. First of all, in the Northeastern U.S., we have been blanketed with another five or six inches of heavy, wet snow, and it is still coming down. This is a winter that started late and is lasting long. Too long. The temperatures next week are supposed to get into the 40's, even the 50's, so it won't last, but to think that there are parts of the world where it is green in April and I have consistently chosen white, icy, muddy Aprils is somewhat funny in itself.

Last week, I was told by a bookseller that my favorite author had died. OK, this is where I get to reveal my closely guarded secret -- that I love the romance novels of Mary Balogh, the Welsh-Canadian author of dozens of Regency era books. A dear friend introduced me to Balogh years ago, and I just eat up the lives and romances of the Bedwyn family, the strong, spinster teachers at Miss Martin's school, the survivors of the Napoleonic Wars, and other fictional inhabitants of England in the 18-teens. Yes, it describes a world that seems like a million years ago. Yes, it is pure diversion. Yes, I am every single intelligent female character who after a life of challenge and hardship finds love and security with an impossibly handsome and respectful man. I. Love. These. Books. Several times over the years, I have sent my copies to a rummage sale, only to begin to collect them again, and here I am now, still without my own roof but with about eight of her books and counting.

This morning, before writing this, I did some internet searching, and while it is clear that a few women with this unusual name have passed away, there is no indication that the author has, and I hope that's true. Kind of an April Fools' joke in reverse. I know one thing; before the weekend is out, I am going to write her some fan mail and make sure she knows how valued she is. I've tried other romance authors, and get about ten pages before throwing them aside. They just do not measure up.

As things come in threes, I suspect there will be another April Fools' Day "event" before the day is out. But as getting around on foot will be nearly impossible today, I think I'll stay inside, make a cup of tea, and finish (for I'm sure at least the third time) Slightly Scandalous. I need it.