Seaweed: Lunatic

Some thoughts about meditation for hard cases like me:                                                                            It's not a religion.

It doesn't require a lot of time.

No special skills are needed.

It's not about stopping your thinking or changing unwanted thoughts into pleasant ones.

It won't eliminate sadness or difficulties in your life.

You don't have to give up your passions or stop having fun in your life. 

I'm increasingly intrigued to think that all I am is one tiny flicker in the midst of a vast awareness.  I'm a wisp of cloud drifting across a limitless sky.  I'm a drop of water flowing down the middle of the Nile or the Mississippi or the Amazon.  I'm here, I'm gone, the river is still present, the sky is still there.  Here's a minute, now it's gone, that minute is just part of the flow of time.

"Notice the aware presence that exists behind your thoughts, behind your mind.  The real you is this aware presence, the space in which your mind operates."

The Toltecsd4

And then "I'll see you in the gap" makes more sense.  The inbetween-ness of everything.  

"Perhaps some of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us.  We no longer live in a completely hostile world.  We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless."

The Big Book P 105

"Without prayer I should have been a lunatic a long time ago."

Mahatma Ghandi

This moment, just as it is, without judgement.                         

Clueless Seaweed

I am repeating myself again and again.  This is because I have maybe four good things to say and two of them aren't that good so I have to go to the well with the ones I like.  The guiding force for how I should act today is a reflection of my understanding my Higher Power.  Calm and slow.  Understanding.  Compassion without pity.  Listening more and talking less.  Friendly.  Funny.  Happy.  Seeking to love rather than be loved; to understand rather than be understood; comfort rather than be comforted.

Here's a story I shared with three friends who don't have substance abuse problems and aren't familiar with the dynamics of recovery, meditation particularly: A newspaper commissioned a study where they paid a violinist to busk in a local subway station.  In the time he was playing about 2,000 people passed by, many of them busy with work and families.  Cameras showed 6 people paused to listen for a while.  6/2,000 = .003 or three tenths of one percent.  A rounding error.  Here's the catch: the violinist was world famous and he was playing one of the most difficult Beethoven violin concertos written by that musical genius on a violin worth $3,500,000.

I shared this story as an example of how so many of us are so trapped in the endless loops of rushing from task to task and following whatever thoughts pop randomly in our minds that we look right through all of the beauty and majesty of life.  Instead, I got criticism of the mechanics of the study or posturing about who knew more about the specific details of the incident.  I'm not sure who's more clueless - the people who responded or me for expecting something different.

I should have left well enough alone but I felt the need to put together a cutting and incisive response.  It sort of made me feel better for a minute but it also fell on deaf ears.  

Does it need to be said?

Does it need to be said right now?

Does it need to be said right now by me?

See You in the Gap

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."                                                                                Gandhi

I have a friend in The Fellowship who attends a lot of 12 Step meetings in different 12 Step programs.  It makes me nervous, all of these programs.  While I don't dispute she needs to recover from these different diseases and compulsions I fret that she may have too many balls in the air.  I return again and again in my mind to the different studies that show that when we multi-task what we're usually doing is half-assing everything.  We're doing many things but not doing any of them well or thoroughly.  

The counterpoint is that I am an individual who likes to have a lot of balls in the air.  I'm curious and I'm relentless and I'm competitive and I want to do it all, everywhere, all of the time.  And the thing is . . . this is me.  This is part of my essential nature.  If I sit quietly and toss one ball up and down I'm not being true to my nature, to my Seaweed-ness.  If I'm not me then I'm not genuine and I lose myself in trying to be something that I'm not.  People would worry about me if they didn't see me with an absurd number of balls in the air. 

I'm going to repost this poem because it has really resonated with me - the idea that I'm looking and I'm lost and I don't know who I am but it's all okay, I "give myself" to the effort, to the curious search.  

I live my life in widening circles that reach out over the world.  I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.  I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

One of my favorite meditation guides ends each of his session with this phrase: "I'll see you  in the gap."  I like the idea of being not here, not there, somewhere in between, going to the next place from this place but not being in either.

In the Kitchen . . . Washing Dishes

In my Quiet Time every morning I ask that I be shown how I can be of service to someone.  I leave this open deliberately.  I don't trust myself to be of service in a way that I want to be of service.  I'm too selfish for that.  Money would trade hands.  So I'm back from a long trip and I go to Keep It Complicated and run into a good friend in The Fellowship who asks me about the trip in a perfunctory manner and then told me the details of his upcoming vacation in great detail.  At the next meeting I stop to talk to a young guy who has some pretty obvious ADHD issues and he talked about himself for ten minutes without coming up for a single breath, I swear.  So there you go.  There I go.  Of service and not in a way that I would have specified.  I think my Higher Power knows me better than I know myself.

Right here - Right now.  I have this moment and this is the only moment I have.  I can live in this moment or I can miss it completely.  I try to live in this moment right here with no judgment. 

I sent this note recently to a close friend who I don't get to see regularly any more: 

I am blessed to have a wide circle of friends.  What a gift!  We're lucky, lucky men.  Anyway, I feel tethered to people even when I no longer see them regularly - long, strong tethers.

Case in point . . . many years ago I was bitching to you for the millionth time about some family gathering that was going to involve a lot of drinking with a bunch of relatives I didn't like and you probably were getting tired of listening to the complaining so you said - kindly, I must add - something like "Maybe you could go into the kitchen and wash the dishes.  Take the garbage out.  Etc etc etc."  I tell that story a lot.  I'm sure it annoyed the shit out of me at the time.  I often think about it at the end of my regular morning meeting when I go into the kitchen and start swabbing out coffee pots.  Me!  Almost forty years of sobriety and I'm still washing out the fucking coffee pots!  (Actually I like meeting kitchens - great conversations there that often surpass anything I hear in the meeting itself.)

I'm too important for that.

Another one . . .  I was seething that my sister responded to my thanks for hosting so many of the family dinners (I couldn't get anyone to come to Linwood with the no alcohol thing) by saying something like: "You want to help?  Write me a check for $25."  I was explaining that she was going to get $25 from me when hell freezes over and you said "You know what you're going to do?  You're going to go home and write out a $25 check and mail it to her tomorrow."  OK, OK, I did it and you know what?  I didn't hear jack-shit from her at my lavishly generous contribution.

Patrick, wherever I am in the world today we are in some measure together, and that is special to me.

Widening Circles

I live my life in widening circles that reach out over the world.  I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.  I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

Rilke - "Widening Circles"

I go about  feeling sorry for myself when all the while I am being carried by Great Winds across the sky.

Ojibwe Proverb

Helping Someone Else!? Outrageous!

"Then we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help."

Big Book P. 84

Taken directly from a story in The Grapevine: "I used to joke that when I came into AA I had no principles but multiple personalities.  The greater truth is that I had grown up knowing the difference between right and wrong, kind and unkind, selfish and generous.  I don't remember much about my first few months in AA but I did sense the unvarnished authenticity of people struggling to be free and it made no difference who brought that message to The Rooms."

Back At It

 "There are three things that only God knows: the beginning of things, the cause of things, and the end of things."                                                                                                                                               Welsh Proverb

"When we have self-respect, we do not take what other people say and do personally.  We need to remember that every person we meet is a representation of the Divine and can teach you something.   Some teach us what to do; others teach us what not to do."                                                                       The Toltecs