We Have to Talk

It’s a well know statement we’ve all heard. In fact, a male friend of years past once told me, in the world of men and women, the four words that most strike terror in the hearts of men are: We have to talk. Maybe this conversation will create discomfort in you or maybe inspire your curiosity. But either way, we have to talk.

Talking is what we humans do. Yes, first we think,…usually, but that is just a form of inner talk, and for some reason, we equate our capacity to express in words with deserving superior station on this earth.  Me, I’m more impressed with the fact that whales can communicate across oceans. But like you, what I have are words. And like you, I can build empires with them or crush spirits, inspire minds or talk trash, baby talk my dog or self-talk to me about my shortcoming or whisper words of love to my suffering heart. But what we need to understand is that those words came with meanings, prepackaged, ready-made interpretations, which we mold into beliefs. And what do we do next?  We believe them. We swear they are true: That bum ruined my life; If I just had enough money, I could be happy too; She’s an idiot; He stole my heart.

  From the insightful Herman Hesse in Klein and Wagner:

Mind invented contradictions, invented names; it called some things beautiful, some ugly, some good, some bad. One part of life was called love, another murder. How young, foolish, comical this mind was. One of its inventions was time. A subtle invention, a refined instrument for torturing the self even more keenly and making the world multiplex and difficult.

Do you ever find yourself envying your cat or dog in their all too sane approach to life? A life where they live and breathe in this very moment? They are not making forays into a mind full of stories about yesteryear or fantasies they wish for tomorrow. What happens to us in the moment where our dog’s tail bangs the floor in welcome or our cat shows us what serendipitous play looks like. What usually happens is we sit there instead talking to ourselves, and doing it so believably that we entangle ourselves in seeming appropriate emotions even though nothing…is…actually….happening to us. And we’re the supposed intelligent ones? Here’s where we shyly laugh at ourselves and thank our dog or cat for not telling on us.

The saddest part of it all, for me, is that we no longer have elders, no longer have insight and wisdom gleaned through the ages that someone protects and brings forward to each new generation. They would have taught us about what’s real versus what we’re making up. Instead, all we have left, outside our ridiculous beliefs, are a few precious books and a smattering of humans who have worked all their lives attempting to remember that we are much more than talking creatures. We are creatures whose perceptions actually create life as we experience it.  We are creators of a startling order who don’t realize that the majority of each day’s experience is a product of our minds, rather than actual interaction with the world around us. I have no idea why this seeming miserable trick has been played on us, but we are not without resources. It’s just that we must get serious about untangling things so we can get straight whose life it is we’re living.

 In my Morning Pages I put it this way:

“We the wordsmiths,

we the lover of language and meanings,

midwives birthing our stories and poems,

sensible enough to know fiction from non-fiction….in our trade,

yet totally bamboozled by our own lives.

Living as if we’d somehow escape

the consequences of made-up names and meanings,

of inventions that exist only in our minds,

while all of Nature chuckles kindly,

its voice, though barely audible, whispering

genre, genre, you’ve mistaken your life’s genre.”

But take heart. For as the great sage Kabir said: “When the Guest (your inner awareness) is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.”

Want it that badly, then let’s see what we talk about then.

  

If you would like to see how we talk about relationship,

pick up Suffer the Little Children.

If you’re curious about a new way to talk about health and well-being,

 read Dying to Know.

If you are doubtful life could be lived any other way,

let Miss Imogene Ware, in the profound love story, Accidents of Birth,

show you what that looks like.

Novels by Christina Carson on Amazon

Falling

One thing you never have to concern yourself with if you subscribe to my blog is the possibility of my filling up your inbox. It’s been awhile since my last blog. If I don’t have something that I suspect is worth your time to read, I don’t write. But last night, an incident presented me with material.

I run at night – because that is when I have time and because I am a night hawk and am most active at night. The downside of this predisposition is that it is dark and every now and then, I toe into a small rise of some sort – broken blacktop, bad seam, or poor paving and meet the road with various parts of my anatomy. Last night was one of those, and though overall not as bad as some, it did leave a long split of skin for which my dear husband matched the edges back together and secured with “butterflies.” The wait for healing begins. I mention this not for sympathy because I played a role in this scenario by not paying attention. Earlier in the run a motorist had been rude and threatening, and I was still, in my mind, back there. Just as I said to myself, “That’s enough Christina, leave it,” I hit the rise in the road and down I went.

My life has been about asking questions, many of which sought to understand the nature of this mind we’ve been endowed with, using the modern idiom—an extraordinary piece of technology—which routinely had us in one location, in our mind, while our physical body is someplace else doing something else, most often without our awareness of this fact. Sure I knew I was on the road. Sure I knew I was running, BUT not in any of those precise moments when I was rendering my irritation over yet another angry, careless driver. We would swear we are aware of both at the same time. The brain fools us because its speed is phenomenal. It jumps back and forth between, in this case, my attention to the road and the conversation in my head that I was having with the driver long gone. Our awareness is generally not developed enough to notice when our minds make the jump from where we are physically to a scenario in our minds. We truly believe we can “multi-task.” It just isn’t so. In that blink of the jump from my attention on the road to the rant in my head, life could have ended, depending on the circumstances. Fortunately, for me, this time I’m merely incapacitated.

I have spent a lifetime studying this phenomenon where we are one place in our mind at the same time as being another place with our bodies. People can go through their entire lives without realizing that their present reactions or emotions in no way reflect their present environment. The best modern day example is people talking on the phone while driving. Their attention can be miles away depending on the conversation, even decades away, and we’ve all noted at one time or another how that effects what they are actually involved with – operating a car.

The growing interest in mindfulness is a heartening indication that more and more people are beginning to realize how much of their actual lives they miss by spending it in endless conversations in their head. We can change this as the practice of mindfulness can show us.  I have spent many years working to silence that otherwise seeming endless conversation that so robs us of lives

that we could have, ones where our awareness is involved with the actual moment we are living. Obviously, I still have work to do, but

I’ve had a taste of that delicious freedom that accrues to us when the mind is still, and that is why I sat this morning feeling a deep sense of rapport with Mary Oliver and her sense of wistfulness when she says in the last half of her poem “Blue Iris”:

“What’s that you’re doing?”        whispers the wind, pausing

in a heap just outside the window. 

Give me a little time, I say back to its staring silver face.

It doesn’t happen all of a sudden you know.

“Doesn’t it?” says the wind, and breaks open, releasing

distillation of blue iris.

And my heart panics not to be, as I long to be,

the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

So You Want To Be in the Moment

In 1975, a concert never to be forgotten by anyone who thrills to piano music and lyrical jazz took place in Köln, Germany. An American pianist sat for 66 minutes and improvised a musical composition. Keith Jarrett, totally part of every note he played invited an audience to meet him in a place where even the spaces between the notes were musical. You can hear him humming to himself at some points, tapping his foot at others and even sighing. He was there in the heart of reality—the moment, and he took those who were willing with him.

The composition he created was complete unto itself, not unconscious rambling. To my writer’s heart it would be akin to creating a novel in one sitting of a quality that smacked of an edited, proofread copy ready for printing. It is the sort of art we can create, life we can live, were we willing to leave our minds behind and instead hand ourselves over to our resident power, that which gives us breath at its most basic level and exquisite creation at yet another.

People refer to Jarrett as a genius. I think it’s much more than that. He is, for whatever reason, a human being who knows how to tap the source of life within himself, to dissolve into the moment—as Pama Rab Sel addresses it: “I mean most particularly the intense, specific moment hidden within the apparent motion of mundane activity both within and without.”

There is much talk these days of being present, living in the moment, being mindful. In most cases such talk is merely an idea we employ to assuage a growing emptiness as life goes on without any lessening of the mundane or increase in the extraordinary. So when another human being comes along who’s willing to step off the edge into the heart of the moment in a manner he can share with others, it behooves us to step off with him. As one reviewer, Jesse Kornbluth, states, “He doesn’t pay rapt attention; he is rapt attention. And so are we when we join Jarrett there.

Jarrett was 30 years old at the time of the Köln Concert. He didn’t sleep for two nights before the concert. The piano was a Bosendorfer, not his favorite. He’d had a bad Italian meal. He was, he felt, so unprepared to play that he almost sent the engineers home. But then he went home instead, gave himself over to the expansiveness of the reality that contains us, is us and sat down at the piano to make the Köln Concert history.

We tend to misconstrue the moment as some sort of heightened experience, something grand, out of the ordinary. It just doesn’t happen to be so. Rather it is life experienced when freed from mind and its constant prattle.

In the words of Pama Rab Sel: “ Whatever has been is gone. Whatever will be does not yet exist. In this space we reside. Don’t give it another thought. Expand this space. Sustain this moment….Remain steady in the Stillness.”