Confessions of an ex-blogger
So I was hanging out with abstract_truth a couple weekends ago. The conversation turned to LJ. She said that she missed my postings.
I thought about it and realized why I haven't blogged here or anywhere else. It's not only because I've been busy with other things. People make time for the things that they really want to do. I have missed the people I used to interact with here who aren't on Facebook, which I love and do check a few times a week. (The thing I like most about Facebook is the use of real details. I've found old friends from elementary school there!)
For the past couple of years, I've been learning to listen for a living. And the more I listen to others, the more context I have for my opinions. I blogged quite a bit when I was teaching because I felt powerless and voiceless during that time in my life. It was a time when I felt the need to share, commune, and release my frustrations. This LJ was my place for that.
Things have changed.
My outlet these days is through meditation, prayer, and inner healing. Learning to listen and learning to meditate have gone hand in hand. It has changed my life. I'm just not as mercurial as I once was. You can't be as a field instructor and researcher. Listening and observing is a large part of the job description. I've learned to put what others share with me in a different perspective. As I tell my undergrads, everything is not for everyone.
I don't post because I don't have very much to say anymore. I spent most of the first 30 years of my life talking. I wanted people to listen to me, but I didn't do much listening. I didn't know how.
So I listen. Not here on LJ, but elsewhere on the 'net, and out in the world. In doing so, I'm learning quite a bit. And I'm not as concerned as I was with destinations. That the journey is the most interesting part is more than a cliche. It's been the mantra that people at U-M, at the Vineyard, and in my personal life have surrounded me with. Their mentorship, care, and love has transformed my life.
There was a time where I felt as if I needed to prove something, for people to believe I was a certain kind of person in order to be accepted, to be "in". I wanted to list the details of my life to show that I was being productive, an excellent teacher and a model citizen.
My life now is different. At U-M, at the Vineyard, and within my circle of family and friends, I have nothing to prove. They accept me just as I am. In turn, through their example, I've learned to accept... and just be.
"Just be" is a miracle for this child of a restless man. Next month, it will be 10 years since my dad's death. I am thinking a lot of him these days, and his unfinished business. These days, I wonder what he would have made of page 449 in the Big Book:
"And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation -- some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
"Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes."
I've spoken before about the fact that my dad had been an alcoholic since his Vietnam days. It was alcoholism that led to his death. I believe that Daddy led me to this passage. Toward people and groups who are in line with this simple, timeworn wisdom, and away from being unhealthy. I meditate on it a lot -- it's a key strand of the Serenity Prayer. Senselessness and unfairness not only disturbed me, it enraged me. I was always on a crusade. It was a lot of what I used to post about.
Now that my focus is inward, there's less to say that would make sense to others. Ken, my pastor, teaches us in the words of Publishers Weekly religion writer Phyllis Tickle that prayer and meditation is not something you do. It's a place where you go. And when you begin to go to that place, it's difficult to describe it to those who have never gone, or don't believe it exists.
Let me give you an example of the kind of madness I'm up to these days.
I'm starting to believe that love is a place, just like prayer is. That's why I can always find Daddy... he's always in the music, just like my dear friend Clare is. Clare's also Dublin, though, just like Dad is at Tigers games, and hovering over chess boards. Now my great-uncle... he's in the stories about my people that make me lift up my head with pride. My grandma is in every garden I ever step into. My ever-optimistic friend Josh is in the timeless speeches of Senator Barack Obama... "yes we can heal this nation, yes we can repair this world." And abstract_truth is the spirit of Detroit, the best of who we are, sparkling in a thousand of my favorite hangouts in and around my beloved city.
My grad school buddies are in a dozen restaurants and dives around Ann Arbor. Fifty years from now, and I'll see the sparkle of blue eyes and a ready smile on the eve of my prelims, or catch a sniff of the incense from another's dreadlocks, and the click of champagne glasses after the fact. My Harry Potter fandom friends are on London streets and stateside hotel rooms and too many mornings with no sleep. My Kindreds temporarily reside at high tea at the Grand Floridian Hotel in Florida, until I make my pilgrimage to the Island. (There is no other island for Anne fans.) My sorors are on the dance floor, and in my Sunday School class, too. And I could go on and on.
The longer you live, the more love-places you have. It doesn't matter if the people are living or dead. It doesn't matter if the people are still in your life, or you've lost touch. It doesn't matter if they still love you, can't stand you, or you'd rather not deal with them. It doesn't matter if you're physically in the place where they always are, or if the place is only in your mind and memory and heart. Love is eternal. Short or long, casual or deep, it doesn't disappear. We can ignore it, push it to the back of our minds, refuse to visit it. But that's not love's fault. It is ours.
In this realm, it often seems that love is temporary. This is why the grand claims that religions and spiritual teachers make about eternal love seem ludicrous to some. But when people who loved you very much have been gone for a long time, and they still somehow hold you, you don't worry very much about what other people have to say about it. You know that you know that love is eternal. You get a glimpse of what Paul was getting at in that famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13. Not just that we see through a glass darkly, but about the permanence of love when everything else is burned away.
Love is that place you can always go to. It helps you accept, and understand, and (ultimately, I hope) heal.
That's a tiny glimpse of where I am, two years' pilgrim into the quiet, mysterious ocean of spiritual experience and meditation. I am only still at the doorway. I still have a very long way to go, in this life, and into the next. But I have excellent guides, secular and spiritual, on the path ahead of me. They have the kind of peace and wisdom that few people I have ever met will ever know. And to be honest? I want to go where they're going. And in order to do that, I need to be in safe space. Safety is very important to me these days. In my personal life, I've learned to avoid people and circumstances that I don't perceive as safe or healthy. I am trying to make wiser choices that will help me grow.
So abstract_truth, when I think about it, I guess that's why I don't blog any longer. I just haven't had much to say.
(Note to passersby -- probably best to reach me at my U-M or AOL addresses, if anything's up. I'm not on LJ enough to keep up with comments. I check Yahoo! maybe twice a year, and now there's 3000 spam messages in my inbox. Oy.)
I thought about it and realized why I haven't blogged here or anywhere else. It's not only because I've been busy with other things. People make time for the things that they really want to do. I have missed the people I used to interact with here who aren't on Facebook, which I love and do check a few times a week. (The thing I like most about Facebook is the use of real details. I've found old friends from elementary school there!)
For the past couple of years, I've been learning to listen for a living. And the more I listen to others, the more context I have for my opinions. I blogged quite a bit when I was teaching because I felt powerless and voiceless during that time in my life. It was a time when I felt the need to share, commune, and release my frustrations. This LJ was my place for that.
Things have changed.
My outlet these days is through meditation, prayer, and inner healing. Learning to listen and learning to meditate have gone hand in hand. It has changed my life. I'm just not as mercurial as I once was. You can't be as a field instructor and researcher. Listening and observing is a large part of the job description. I've learned to put what others share with me in a different perspective. As I tell my undergrads, everything is not for everyone.
I don't post because I don't have very much to say anymore. I spent most of the first 30 years of my life talking. I wanted people to listen to me, but I didn't do much listening. I didn't know how.
So I listen. Not here on LJ, but elsewhere on the 'net, and out in the world. In doing so, I'm learning quite a bit. And I'm not as concerned as I was with destinations. That the journey is the most interesting part is more than a cliche. It's been the mantra that people at U-M, at the Vineyard, and in my personal life have surrounded me with. Their mentorship, care, and love has transformed my life.
There was a time where I felt as if I needed to prove something, for people to believe I was a certain kind of person in order to be accepted, to be "in". I wanted to list the details of my life to show that I was being productive, an excellent teacher and a model citizen.
My life now is different. At U-M, at the Vineyard, and within my circle of family and friends, I have nothing to prove. They accept me just as I am. In turn, through their example, I've learned to accept... and just be.
"Just be" is a miracle for this child of a restless man. Next month, it will be 10 years since my dad's death. I am thinking a lot of him these days, and his unfinished business. These days, I wonder what he would have made of page 449 in the Big Book:
"And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation -- some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
"Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes."
I've spoken before about the fact that my dad had been an alcoholic since his Vietnam days. It was alcoholism that led to his death. I believe that Daddy led me to this passage. Toward people and groups who are in line with this simple, timeworn wisdom, and away from being unhealthy. I meditate on it a lot -- it's a key strand of the Serenity Prayer. Senselessness and unfairness not only disturbed me, it enraged me. I was always on a crusade. It was a lot of what I used to post about.
Now that my focus is inward, there's less to say that would make sense to others. Ken, my pastor, teaches us in the words of Publishers Weekly religion writer Phyllis Tickle that prayer and meditation is not something you do. It's a place where you go. And when you begin to go to that place, it's difficult to describe it to those who have never gone, or don't believe it exists.
Let me give you an example of the kind of madness I'm up to these days.
I'm starting to believe that love is a place, just like prayer is. That's why I can always find Daddy... he's always in the music, just like my dear friend Clare is. Clare's also Dublin, though, just like Dad is at Tigers games, and hovering over chess boards. Now my great-uncle... he's in the stories about my people that make me lift up my head with pride. My grandma is in every garden I ever step into. My ever-optimistic friend Josh is in the timeless speeches of Senator Barack Obama... "yes we can heal this nation, yes we can repair this world." And abstract_truth is the spirit of Detroit, the best of who we are, sparkling in a thousand of my favorite hangouts in and around my beloved city.
My grad school buddies are in a dozen restaurants and dives around Ann Arbor. Fifty years from now, and I'll see the sparkle of blue eyes and a ready smile on the eve of my prelims, or catch a sniff of the incense from another's dreadlocks, and the click of champagne glasses after the fact. My Harry Potter fandom friends are on London streets and stateside hotel rooms and too many mornings with no sleep. My Kindreds temporarily reside at high tea at the Grand Floridian Hotel in Florida, until I make my pilgrimage to the Island. (There is no other island for Anne fans.) My sorors are on the dance floor, and in my Sunday School class, too. And I could go on and on.
The longer you live, the more love-places you have. It doesn't matter if the people are living or dead. It doesn't matter if the people are still in your life, or you've lost touch. It doesn't matter if they still love you, can't stand you, or you'd rather not deal with them. It doesn't matter if you're physically in the place where they always are, or if the place is only in your mind and memory and heart. Love is eternal. Short or long, casual or deep, it doesn't disappear. We can ignore it, push it to the back of our minds, refuse to visit it. But that's not love's fault. It is ours.
In this realm, it often seems that love is temporary. This is why the grand claims that religions and spiritual teachers make about eternal love seem ludicrous to some. But when people who loved you very much have been gone for a long time, and they still somehow hold you, you don't worry very much about what other people have to say about it. You know that you know that love is eternal. You get a glimpse of what Paul was getting at in that famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13. Not just that we see through a glass darkly, but about the permanence of love when everything else is burned away.
Love is that place you can always go to. It helps you accept, and understand, and (ultimately, I hope) heal.
That's a tiny glimpse of where I am, two years' pilgrim into the quiet, mysterious ocean of spiritual experience and meditation. I am only still at the doorway. I still have a very long way to go, in this life, and into the next. But I have excellent guides, secular and spiritual, on the path ahead of me. They have the kind of peace and wisdom that few people I have ever met will ever know. And to be honest? I want to go where they're going. And in order to do that, I need to be in safe space. Safety is very important to me these days. In my personal life, I've learned to avoid people and circumstances that I don't perceive as safe or healthy. I am trying to make wiser choices that will help me grow.
So abstract_truth, when I think about it, I guess that's why I don't blog any longer. I just haven't had much to say.
(Note to passersby -- probably best to reach me at my U-M or AOL addresses, if anything's up. I'm not on LJ enough to keep up with comments. I check Yahoo! maybe twice a year, and now there's 3000 spam messages in my inbox. Oy.)