It’s as if I must continually prove my own self-worth, my own right to be here and take up space, my own life, as in: if I don’t have a day full of pieces I can point to, can weave into a cohesive quilt of value, then I am not worthy of the space I take up. I don’t feel like this every day, and I don’t think I am alone. I wonder if men ever feel this way. I wonder if it is a result of being a child of an alcoholic. Such children as we never know where boundaries and markers are. We are continually guessing at correct behavior, never managing to get it exactly right simply because “exactly right” is a concept for which we have no reference.
This could be on its way to a rant but I will not rave today. It will have to revisit another day, or like energy with good ideas in twilight waking, realize I am simply not going to write it down and so it can range off to visit the next woman who is open to a full on rage, probably getting her kudos, getting her on some show for telling it like it is for women of a certain age, getting noticed – something that never happens anymore. It’s pheromones. We no longer have them. I think of the feral cat outside who has 3 males trailing her everywhere and how those males, as soon as her phermonal heat has passed, will ignore her, she who bears the kittens and the care.
This is not a prose poem. Or maybe it is since that type of writing has no pointed rules. So it will be today’s prose poem whether or not it actually is. In the meantime, I will continue.
Michael Singer says, “By watching your mind, you will notice that it is engaged in the process of trying to make everything okay.” As in, you will notice that if you can conceive of a story that makes sense of the day, the way you traded the time allotted in this twenty-four hours, everything will be okay because you will have proven that you are a treasure.
Further, Michael Singer notes *that* is *not* what you *really* want to do (what does he know, yes it is), that one must disengage from the innocent mind merely trying to help by finding a solution (be worthy – which I may never be because I consistently listen to my mind). Stop it he says. Sort of like Pema Chodron advises to lean into whatever problem you are having (wait – is that contrary advice? If you lean into it, you consciously acknowledge some “it” and Michael Singer is saying that’s simply the mind and we are not our mind).
In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion says, “This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable if only for myself.”
I don’t know what that means but I think it means we must figure out for ourself what we think and believe. I would suggest that has to do with listening to the mind since how else are you going to be able to pick and choose among the hundreds of thousands of visuals (if you think in pictures, which I do) that float through during any given day. Maybe it has nothing to do with picking and choosing and more to do with a walk in the woods, or watching cloud, or howling at the moon. Or maybe just some really good Chardonnay.
“The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.” (Annie Dillard) Which sort of takes us back to the opening and the need to make the day worth *something**somehow**somewhere*. Gregg Levoy says that the way we spend our lives well (an accumulation of days) depends on what questions we decide to ask. Someone please tell me: How are we to get the proper question,s and how are we to know when we have?
