Dive Down

From The Heron Dance book of Love and Gratitude, edited by Ann O'Shaugnessy

Achieving an integrity between what we believe andhow we live is a challenge worthy of the gift of life. A thousand obstacles stand between ourselves and the honoring of our truth. A thousand distractions. A thousand ego-generated delusions. To dive down, find the beauty, nurture it and offer it to the world is magnificent. Staying with your beauty, your truth, your integrity is difficult, but out of these things comes meaning and meaning is all-transcendent.

The Tyrannical Ten Cent Pieces

In our back yard we have a broken gas grill. All during last summer's yard renovation, workers dragged it, jammed it, and stowed it in various dusty locations on our property and, as a result one of its legs fell off. This left the grill precariously tilted against a brick wall, an unused eyesore in our new backyard.

I thought now and again of starting fresh, with a shiny new Weber, but decided not to after a depressing trip to the dump with my kids.

We went to get rid of a broken patio umbrella, a garbage can lid and a bag of, well, garbage. We drove along a dirt road leading to the pit of garbage. The dump looked like a brown moonscape with piles of dirt on either side of the car, and it smelled like piney mulch, which was a surprisingly fresh smell for a dump. Gwendolyn, my two and half year old, said "Mom, this place is dirty." By which she meant, this place has a lot of dirt.

For a dump, the Palo Alto dump is pretty good looking. Mostly, it's just brown dirt, good, fresh, rich looking dirt, at that. Every time I go, the place you get rid of your stuff moves. It appears that they fill a section to a certain point, then cover it up with dirt, redirect the road, and, viola, a nice, neat, somewhat attractive dump. The nasty secret of course, is that under all the fresh brown earth is a pile of dirty garbage.

We didn't see the actual garbage pit until we turned a bend. From far away it looked like the earth had a big cut in her gut and her insides were coming out. I saw an old pullout couch with the springs popping out, gigantic wooden spools that looked like they had been used for rope or cable, tinfoil, used paper plates, and once I heaved it out of the mini van...our broken patio umbrella.

Seeing all that stuff in the rich, brown dirt, while my kids were in the back of my car refreshed my sad and worried feelings about the earth. I don't want to keep cutting her open to get rid of my broken stuff. I want my kids to grow up knowing that their kids will be able to grow up, that there will be enough air, that the polar icecaps wont melt, that we won't be flooded, that none of us will end up environmental refugees, like Al Gore says we might.

And so, I went back to my broken grill with new vigor and determination to fix the damn thing. I took the girls to the place where we bought it and we brought the broken leg with us. It's black and has a wheel at one end. I gave it to Gwendolyn, who was wearing a pink tutu and I told her she could be the boss of it--she likes to be the boss of things these days. And that kept her busy while we waited.

It took awhile, but I felt encouraged, because as the salesman was selling a $1,000 grill to a middle aged couple he explained how important it is to buy a grill built by a company that's been around for a long time, so that if they ever needed extra parts in the future, they would be able to get them no problem.

I've come to the right place, I thought to myself.

When my turn came up I showed him the leg.

Oh, the P frame grill, he said. Yeah, we sold that a couple years ago. You need the bolts and the spacers.

Then he disappeared into the stockroom for a long time.

When he came back, he had the bolts, but told me they no longer had the spacers. But, he said, you can make your own spacers with a stack of washers.

At home, I had a bunch of washers from various Pottery Barn Kids projects I had apparently incorrectly assembled (left over parts are never very good, right?). I measured the spacers that were still on the grill by tearing a piece of paper to match them. Then I stacked my washers. Perfect.

That's all I could do while the kids were up. Once I got them down for their naps I went back outside. It was ninety degrees out and I was looking forward to a sweaty fight with the grill...mano a mano, girl against grill.

I pulled the grill from the wall and felt its weight lurch away from me. It was heavier than I expected, maybe a little more than the weight of my two girls combined, which is about 60 pounds. I grabbed onto it and jammed it back against the wall.

More prepared for its heft I pulled it away again, dragged it to a more open space and laid it down on its back so that I could work on it. I carefully let the weight transfer to the ground and then let go. When I did, the lid flew open backwards. The grates and brickets came flying out like I had hit the jackpot on some paleolithic slot machine. There were grill parts and black bits of charcol everywhere. But at least the grill was stable, not threatening to throw its weight on me again.

I soldiered on.

I put some logs underneath the body of the grill, a set up which afforded me good access to the set of holes I had to put the bolts through and had the bonus effect of giving me a very smug MacGuiverish feeling. Each bolt needed to go through five parallel holes. The jury-rigged stack of washers I had assembled needed to sit between the last two holes to keep the leg of the grill stable.

I had never taken such a close look at my grill before, and when I did, I realized that the main body of the grill, which heated up to 15,000 BTUs, stayed upright thanks to twelve 1/4 inch bolts, tightened in against twelve 1/2 inch plastic spacers. This project did not seem like a good one to solve with a do it yourself solution, like my inaccurately measured stacks of washers.

But by now I was curious to see if I could do it, and plus, the heat made me feel a little more stubborn that usual.

I ran a test on my first bolt. I threaded it through the first couple of holes and had to wiggle it a bit to get it through the last one, but it went through easily enough. I pulled it out, put it through the first three holes, stacked my washers on between hole four and five, and jammed it on through the last one. I screwed the nut on loosely onto the end of the bolt and stood back to admire my work.

I felt a rush of hopefulness. I was actually going to be able to do this.

I could already feel myself starting to fix other things that I wouldn't take to the dump. The applause of my fellow man was starting to ring in my ears, congratulating my good work at keeping this vulgar piece of refuse from landing in the Palo Alto dump.

Only two other bolts stood between me and doing my part to save the planet.

I started with the second bolt and immediately saw that there was a problem. With one bolt in, none of the other holes lined up properly. I took a different perspective and looked through the holes from inside the grill out, and indeed they were not lining up. In addition, the last hole I would have to thread the bolt through was difficult to see. A metal groove came up over the hole, and it seemed like I'd actually have to disassemble the grill some more, just to twist the nut on. The third set of holes looked similarly awkward.

Buoyed by my hopeful feeling, I tried to thread the bolt through anyway. It didn't work. The zig zag the quarter inch bolt would have to travel might have doable if the bolt was, say, made of playdough. Even if I could get it through, I was stymied by the way the last hole was hooded by steel. I had no idea how I would screw the nut on to the bolt.

I looked at the mess in front of me, the brickets, the grates, the charcol spew, and mouth of the grill which looked a lot like a dinosaur's jaw that had come unhinged, and felt angry.

The grill had cost me over $500. Three bolts and three spacers, representing in cost probably less than a dollar, had rendered it unusable. Was I really going to have to buy a new grill to enjoy a grilled hotdog this summer?

While I found the idea of spending more money on an equally shoddy piece of equipment irritating, I was really crushed by the fact that now I had this steel carcass on my hands. Sixty plus pounds of garbage.

Sure I'd look for some organization that recycles steel and gives new life to old crap like my grill, but really, that wouldn't solve the problem.

I wanted to abandon my broken grill in the driveway of the store where I bought it. If they made such a flimsy product, they could figure out how to get rid of it. But again, that didn't really solve the problem. If I took it to the dump or someone else took it to the dump, it ended up at the dump all the same, polluting my kids' future.

I was caught in a cycle of consumerism, and there was no easy way out. Over time, and with enough money, I had become accustomed to the practice of buying something new when the old one breaks. But the trip to the dump with my kids had woken me up to the absurdity of it. I saw how the old stuff clutters my house, how much work it is for me to clean it up, and then how once the clutter is out of my house, it just ends up in the ground. In one rotation of the cycle my house might end up functioning a little better and looking a little cleaner but, then the the Palo Alto dump would be that much more full.

And while I felt guilty for having participated in the cycle, working on the grill made me realize, it wasn't just me. So often, the products we buy are built with a short life span. Computers, cell phones, toaster ovens, and it turns out, some gas grills just aren't designed to go the distance. It's sad to say, but I had gotten used to my stuff having a short life span. Not only that, before going to the dump, I was actually looking forward to possibly buying a new grill. The companies I bought from and I had a nice symbiotic relationship going. They would build stuff that broke in about two years, send me a catalog, and then I would get something shiny and new for my house.

In the end, what was more depressing than the realizations about myself as a consumer, was the view into the fact that that there was a whole world out there designed to keep me in the cycle of wanting and buying.

Well, not this time. Our family is going to hop off the consumer gerbil wheel. We're just not going to have a grill. Instead of hotdogs we'll be having sandwiches. We'll enjoy our new grass and the satisfied feeling that at least this once we have stopped they cycle. We still have one grill headed to the dump, but we won't have another.

It's Unanimous!

From The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong

"We are meaning seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we cannot find significance and value in our lives."

"In our current predicament, I believe that we can find inspiration in the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. From about 900 to 200 BCE, in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece."

"The consensus of the Axial Age is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race. The Axial peoples all found that the compassionate ethic worked. All the great traditions that were created at this time are in agreement about the supreme importance of charity and benevolence, and this tells us something important about our humanity. To find that our own faith is so deeply in accord with others is an affirming experience. Without departing from our own tradition, therefore, we can learn from others how to enhance our particular pursuit of the empathic life."

What a Marriage Needs

From The Color of Water by James McBride

Quoting his mother, a white Jewish woman who married a black man in 1942 and went on to raise twelve children.

"See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with."

The Rescue Team

from Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher

"Today our senses are amplified by technology. We receive detailed information from all over the globe....Daily, we see buildings collapsing, children starving, and whole villages dying of AIDS. Our brains and our adrenal systems have electrical and chemical responses to world events, yet our bodies, which are far from these troubles, can do little to help. many of us become anxious and despair from this poisonous brew of overstimulation and powerlessness."

"I am not interested in weapons, whether words or guns. I want to be part of the rescue team for our tired, overcrowded planet. The rescuers will be those people who help other people to think clearly, and to be honest and open-minded. They will be an antidote to those people who disconnect us. They will de-objectify, rehumanize, and make others more understandable and sympathetic. They will create what philosopher Martin Buber called I-thou relationships for the human race."

Soul in the Middle

April 24 2007
From Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

"It is obvious that the soul, seat of the deepest emotions, can benefit greatly from the gifts of a vivid spiritual life and can suffer when it is deprived of them. The soul, for example, needs an articulated worldview, a carefully worked out scheme of values, and a sense of relatedness to the whole. It needs a myth of immortality and an attitude toward death. It also thrives on spirituality that is not so transcendent, such as the spirit of the family, arising from traditions and values that have been part of the family for generations."

"Ritual maintains the world's holiness. Knowing that everything we do, no matter how simple, has a halo of imagination around it and can serve the soul enriches life and makes the things around us more precious, more worthy of our protection and care."

"Perhaps our madly consumerist society is showing signs of runaway spirituality in its tendencies toward an abstract and intellectualized approach to life. Fincino's recommendation for healing such a split is to establish soul in the middle, that is between spirit and body, as a way to prevent the two from becoming extreme caricatures of themselves. The cure for materialism, then, would be to find concrete ways of getting soul back into our spiritual practices, our intellectual life and our emotional and physical engagements with the world."

Rubrics

April 22 2007
From Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

" Rubrics cannot arise out of some superficial place. They may be closely tied to the individual's taste and background, but the must also well up from a solid source deep in the person's psyche. Jung's love for his stone carvings was neither sentimental nor experimental. They had an honesty for him and for us who behold them now much later. But that particular form of ritualizing would not be appropriate for everyone.

How interesting it would be if we could turn to priests, ministers, and rabbis in order to get help in finding our own ritual materials. These spiritual professionals might be better of becoming deeply schooled in such things rather than trained in sociology, business, and psychology, which seem to be the modern preferences. The soul might be cared for better through our developing a deep life of ritual rather than through many years of counseling for personal behavior and relationships. We might even have a better time of it in such soul matters as love and emotion if we had more ritual in our lives and less psychological adjustment.

Our culture is in need of theological reflection that does not advocate a particular tradition, but tends the soul's need for spiritual direction. In order to accomplish this goal, we must gradually bring soul back to religion...."

Unawareness

From Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn

"We routinely and unknowingly waste enormous amounts of energy in reacting automatically and unconsciously to the outside world and to our own inner experiences. Cultivating mindfulness means learning to tap and focus our own wasted energies. In doing so, we learn to calm down enough to enter and dwell in states of deep relaxation. This nourishes and restores body and mind. At the same time it makes it easier for us to see with greater clarity the way we actually live and therefore how to make changes to enhance our health and quality of life."

Get Your Grandmother

From the article entitled "We live in the best of all times" an interview with Alice Walker about her new book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

"If you try to do something, you're not actually accomplishing anything. But if you resove to do it, you accept that it is there for you to do and that you're perfectly capable of whatever it is. And of course there's no point in trying to do something you're incapable of. Then you use every conceivable atom, sinew, and instinct available to move whatever it is that you're trying to move."

On her grandmother

"As time went on, though I saw the damage to the feminine that patriarchy imposes, and I understood that it's often the old woman--the grandmother, with all that accumulated wisdom and compassion--who is depressed. She is depressed because she sees things so clearly, and she's lost her fear of speaking. We need her. We are not going to get anywhere without her, so we might as well go and start liberating all those nursing homes, and calling home, and getting our grandmothers back with us, and asking them to leave the sitcoms, and get them to come out from in front of the TV and give us some guidance, some of the understanding that they ave gained over all these decades."