Curiouser and Curiouser

Fern Canyon, Boulder CO

"Life is meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive.  One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life." - Eleanor Roosevelt

For those of us still curious about life, the Internet is one fine invention because its hyperlink structure allows you to wander from one related (or not so related) idea to the next so very easily.  It's like taking a hike in a vast forest and being presented with many twisty passages, all different. Exciting to explore, easy to get lost and follow a path that seems to dwindle to nothing.  But even at that point of nothingness, new rabbit holes pop up along with new ideas if you have enough curiosity to take the plunge.  To me, curiosity is essential to joy in my life; however, I also want to be someone who can provide some guideposts along the path.

Recently, a group of people I worked closely with for many years before my retirement in February were laid off, after two decades or more of faithful service to the company throughout its various transformations, iterations and new-old strategies.  This latest development was described by the company's leaders in Orwellian newspeak as "simplification."

I've only been laid off once several years ago, but the experience is still vivid in my memory:  the initial feeling of being jettisoned out of the spacecraft with limited oxygen in the tank, the processing of the various stages of grief, the questioning of self worth, the terror at the unknown.  So my heart has been with these friends as they each travel their new paths--some elated, some scared, some elated and scared, some just thinking they'll take the summer off and then decide what to do, some kicking into courageous high gear to finally fulfill that beautiful writing project or Caribbean dream they've been envisioning these many years.

After talking to some of them, I'm not heartbroken any longer.  I'm thrilled for them.  Yes, yes, yes, as always there are practical considerations.  If they asked me, I would tell them there are many paths in the forest, and curiosity is the best gift.  Don't deny those urges to explore the less traveled side paths. As has just been revealed once again, you never know what you'll encounter on the next steps in the journey and that's what keeps it interesting.

Innisfree, Part II

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

William Butler Yeats 

On a cool, sunny Tuesday morning I peer through the window of the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Café. The windows are no longer papered over with fine poetry and are now clear and newly washed. There are people inside; the place has finally opened. I hesitate, but then a man stands up, opens the door and says, “Lynn?”

He’s recognized me from my blog picture. I’ve actually found a bookstore and café where everybody (or at least somebody) knows my name. I walk into a small but beautiful space with long narrow counters along the front windows and down the center of the cafe where a person can sit and sip coffee while perusing fine poetry. A shiny new barista’s station sits at the back with a chalkboard listing espresso options. The wooden bookcases are filled with a mouthwatering variety of poetry: Jack Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, an extensive selection of Charles Bukowski, and much, much more. I know I’ll be back again for a more in depth perusal.

The owner’s name is Brian. He’s Irish and has the Irish love of good poetry. He and his wife Kate met and fell in love at a poetry workshop and have had the dream ever since of opening a small poetry bookstore and café. The circuitous route toward this dream included a stint in the Peace Corp, working with Navajo tribes in Arizona and teaching language arts. Now he and Kate have settled in Boulder among friends to raise their two young children. And I find myself standing inside their dream.

Care has been taken with every aspect of the space: sun streams in through tall windows, all manner of good poetry is arranged invitingly on the warm wooden shelves, and they have chosen to serve fair trade coffee roasted by the local company Conscious Coffees, who have their own dream of sustainability and simplicity, delivering their coffee by bicycle in reusable steel cans.

Standing inside this Boulder dream feels good and right. I highly recommend that my vast blog readership check out this fine place on the Hill across the street from the Sink. Sample the good coffee and find some poetry that speaks to your heart—tell 'em Lynn sent you.

Been There, Shrunk That

At M’s recommendation I read an article in the NYT Sunday magazine called “My Life in Therapy” by Daphne Merkin, about one woman’s 40-year epic with psychotherapy—all her hopes for how it would fill the terrible holes in her psyche and finally give her the love and attention she never got enough of from parents and lovers. She describes a sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing sampling of a wide range of therapies from age 10, including classic Freudian psychoanalysis which I frankly have no earthly use for since I’ve always believed it was demeaning and disrespectful to women (and probably men as well) and seemed more likely to keep people stuck in the past focusing on the inevitable imperfections of their childhoods.

My own experiences with therapy have been numerous. I too was taken to see a woman who was probably a psychiatrist when I was around 10 years old and had suddenly decided I hated school when previously I had loved it. The root cause for this was that I was having difficulties with arithmetic, and this was the first time in my brief school career that I had found anything in the classroom remotely difficult. However, I didn’t talk about this during my session. Instead, I told the attentive white-haired lady about the recurring dream I was having in which I was arguing with a talking skull, and how I had eventually learned in the dream to wake myself up by pushing the skull away with my hand and uttering a “bad word.”

“What was this bad word?” asked the psychiatrist.

“I can’t say it out loud.”

“You can say anything in here.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she responded with surprise, since up to this point I had been a very good little girl in the session.

“Shut up was the bad word—we’re not allowed to say ‘shut up’ at our house.” And indeed we weren’t—it was literally considered an unacceptable word in our household.

Later in my 20s and 30s I struggled with shifting moods and depression, and a few severe cases of a broken heart along with a profound fear of failing at school and later at work. I drifted from one therapist to another with little or no progress in my estimation. It was only the year after my mother died, in 1999, that I was forced by a vicious darkness of the soul to do real work in therapy in order to survive that grief and the several more that followed. My therapist then told me that there was no way out but through…and introduced me to the cognitive behavioral therapy. And from that point, I did find a few good therapists who helped me make some progress; I also began reading a large number of books on my own, centered around letting go of rumination about past and worry about future and focusing on living more in the present. And also paying more attention to that blathering negative voice in my head and how to step outside its influence and talk back to it (even telling it to “shut up” on occasion).

Can therapy be an addiction? This is suggested in Merkin’s article and it likely can be, but for me it was more like a journey that simply took a long time and that in the end was productive. It just takes time and experience to finally wake up and see through the fog to notice what’s really going on and how much power you hold in the search for serenity.

Daphne concludes the article with: “Therapy gave me a place to say things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world—and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.” I agree—in other words, it helped me find my voice.

She also says therapy “provided a space for interior examination, an education in disillusioned realism that existed nowhere else in this cacophonous, frantic planet.” Agreed again—in other words, it helped me wake up.

What about your experiences with therapy good or bad?

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a Dream

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?                    

                        Lewis Carroll

I’m plowing through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series this summer and just finished book four, “Wizards and Glass.”  A key theme and phrase in these books is “there are other worlds than these,” and there are many instances in the series where characters move in and out of worlds and times in a dreamlike fashion where death is not an absolute and people are never quite who they at first appear to be.  Also, I recently saw Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who can move in and out of his own and others’ dreams—but when can he be absolutely sure he’s not dreaming?

In both of the worlds created by these fantasies a person to some degree is able to choose his dream.  In the Dark Tower, Roland the Gunslinger seizes  opportunities to move between worlds (or are they dreams after all?) in his obsessive search for the Tower.  In “Inception,” DiCaprio’s Cobb character moves between dream worlds as easily as pressing a floor button in an elevator, choosing to invade the dreams of others and even plant ideas in those dreams with dangerous and tragic results.  In the end he must choose to return from a dream he’s having trouble letting go of but which he knows is destroying him.  And in the end, is his chosen world just another dream, albeit a happier one?

It seems our experience of life is defined by our perception of it, so we can choose our dream—but it’s so damn hard to keep that in mind (as is the case when you are actually dreaming, especially during a nightmare).  It’s difficult to be mindful that we have far more space and choice than we perceive, and that we can choose to swim up through the murky water toward the surface and the light rather than succumb to the illusion we’re drowning. 

The other thing it’s hard to keep in mind is that everybody else is in their own dream, in various states of unconsciousness or wakefulness, and that their dreams are not yours, or vice versa. 

Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface.  If we’re not awake enough, we box ourselves and other people in with assumptions, “truths,” “limitations” that are not real.  If only we could have a way to jog the memory like Cobb does in “Inception”--to spin the little top to help us see what is real.  On the other hand, if we’re happy and at peace, isn’t that all the real we need?