“When darkness is at its darkest, that is the beginning of all light.” Lao-Tzu
“We fear the dark and death because the ego has demonized them and prevented us from exploring their depths. The ego always wants to swim in the shallow end of the pool. In truth, we need as much diving practice as we can get in this lifetime so we’re not afraid of the next. Death is just another dance, another dive.” Gabrielle Roth
It comes in many forms, - the dreaded call in the middle of the night from a nearby hospital where your just yesterday healthy and vibrant cousin has passed away from a brain aneurism; the sobering effect of realizing that the promiscuous behavior you had been wantonly participating in has produced not the liberation you were seeking but, rather, the confinement of a life long, re-occurring disease; the teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to the high end clothes, car, and home, that take up space in your immediate surroundings while detracting zeros from your monthly income and years from your life; the philanthropic visit to a refugee camp in the Sudan where people, just like you, are missing legs, arms, and other body parts, due to an unchecked human ego. Or, perhaps, it comes in more opaque ways: the uncomfortable proximity of a thirty-fifth birthday; the regrettable loss of a relationship; an irresponsible regard for citizenship; or even say, the expiration of a passport.
However received, a wake up call has emerged from deep inside the bottomless pit of my gut, from the liquid hollows of the earth’s core, and from the vast, dark space of the cosmos, to shake me out of the stupor I have spent the past five plus years moving around within. As Gabrielle Roth so eloquently writes in her book, Connections: The Five Threads of Intuitive Wisdom,
“Burdened by our ego, our shadow partner, we move like tired old toads on a salt-parched desert. It weighs us down. Our ego prevents us from surrendering to the flow of chaos, from trusting our intuition and using it imaginatively. It wants us numb and anesthetized. Basically, the ego is a necrophiliac.”
Subconsciously, I have been courting my ego for years now. Casually referring to a blatant cliché “We recreate that which we know,” I recently openly wondered about how many of my peers, who married young unlike me, will be divorced by the time I get around to marriage. After making this statement, the old friend I was chatting with minutely retracted his strong body. His simple, easy-to-miss action got me thinking about my words, and myself. I started wondering, “Am I simply referring to myself? Am I a byproduct of my own environment and upbringing?”
There is a lot to be said about the home from which I come, and the two primary caregivers that are my father and my mother. Like everything in life, the human emotions and traits within our household ran the gamut. From one opposite extreme of the continuum, joy, to the other, pain, and all of the anger, sadness, elation, fear, antipathy, anxiety, and homogeneity in between, our household was not short in the feeling department. It was not all bad, but it surely wasn’t all good, either.
As for my parents, though they have their shortcomings, they also have their individual strengths and character. I am honored to carry on their traditions, such as my father’s enjoyment for the small things in life, like finding golf balls out on the course, and his penchant for reading good books while curled up in his brown, leather Ottoman chair, and for my mother’s passion for her work, she has been a diligent and caring registered nurse for forty years now, and for the stories that she weaves from both fact and fiction.
They are two good people. They just aren’t two good people together.
What creates these conditions in which we find ourselves constantly complaining about and criticizing another while the other stupefies their self within the deep resonance of a beer bottle, the hazy plume of smoke, or the deafening call of an empty plate? How do we fall into this behavior, and why do we remain caught within its firm, life-demolishing grasp?
For years, I ran from intimacy. I cowered in the shadows of casual sex and unrequited crushes. I was deeply afraid of the storm that I knew was brewing, and laying in wait just underneath my demure composure. Free from the confinement of my parent’s home and from the small town that I had grown up within, I was emboldened to try on different identities. Like hats, I would haphazardly trade one in for the other, on the slightest of whims and without the faintest regard for what anyone else thought. Shaved head? Check. Exploring sexuality? Check. Not wearing deodorant? Check. Pissing on city street corners? Check. Defecating in public? Check. I was adventurous and raw, willing to discover life underneath every nook and cranny of existence.
As independent and righteous as I felt, I also understood that there were still hidden layers within my own being that I had yet to peel back. I knew then that the only to way to access these subcutaneous undercurrents was to dive in, backwards and upside down just as I always have done, into this thing called love. I just hadn’t quite come to understand that my subliminal understanding of love was based on my most primary of experiences.
Love between a man and a woman was not gentle, kind, or even remotely sensual. The woman bitched and complained, focusing solely on the negative, such as the household duties that were not taken care of. She roiled at the smallest of infractions, from spilled milk to a smart attitude, and she lashed out in physical and emotional abuse, expletives of “you lazy bitch” could be heard from down the hall. And the man just plodded along, working forty years at a job he was not necessarily passionate about but it allowed him frequent travels, conventions, and nights spent drowning his sorrow in alcohol. He held it all in, and let very little out. He was short on words, and his lack of communication was the distance the size of a football field between he and his three children.
To this day, my parent’s relationship still primarily entails her yelling at him, - verbally informing him of why he isn’t good enough and why he doesn’t have any friends. As for him, his drinking has hit an all-time rock bottom. Upon numerous instances now, he has fallen while drunk, hit his head, and caused it to bleed. This last time, after having driven himself home, he managed to pull himself up the staircase and into their bedroom where he shit and bled all over their matrimony bed. They still hardly touch, except on the rare occasion when something drastic has happened, such as a trip to the hospital, and a hug is called upon as the order of the day.
Don’t you ever wonder where I, this small, relatively young being, can put all of this heaviness? What do I do with it? Where do I stick the misery? How do I not carry this baggage around in this world and take it on as my own? Well, part of that wake up call is that I have been doing exactly this, - taking this horrible tragedy that can be this life and emulating it within my own meager terrain. I have simply been repeating the pattern.
I have consciously chosen, for over two years now, to be in a relationship with someone who has a very severe addiction. And, for almost as long, I have whined and moaned about him and his actions. I have been choosing to focus on the negative. Only days ago, I showed a really ugly side of myself that I had not seen in years. Frustrated over his lack of motivation, and the “laziness” that I felt I was picking up the slack for, I found myself ranting in a trance while verbally abusing him. I stopped dead in my tracks. “Holy fuck!” Right in that very moment, I knew that I was channeling memories of my mother and that I was subconsciously recreating life between woman and man as I had previously seen it, up close and personal. This is my understanding of what love is and what it looks like. How fucked up is that?
As for my partner, you may be wondering what love looks like to him. As far as I can tell, for he does not really divulge his innermost thoughts and his heartfelt feelings, he was abandoned by his biological mother, and then physically and emotionally abused by his stepmother. His first partner, like mine, was emotionally abusive and down right bitchy. Unfortunately, during our first year spent together, I allowed him to walk all over me. I didn’t stand up for myself, - I played the doormat just as my father has spent a lifetime doing. Eventually, it dawned on me that I was repeating a pattern. I knew then that I had to start taking a stand for myself by shoving all of his crap right back on to him. Only now, the pendulum has swung in the extreme, opposite direction. In a way, he has forced my back against a wall and he has pushed me into a corner. He, too, is subconsciously creating love in the only way that he knows it.
Last night, after somewhat talking and somewhat arguing, an anguished sob shook my lithe frame. In all honesty, images of me, alone and careening down mountain slopes on a snowboard, turned on that flowing faucet. It isn’t that I am afraid to be alone. For I have spent years in solitude, and I know that I am quite good at it.
Rather, it was the thought that these issues are mine and that, until I have created a new vision of what love is, what it looks like, and how it acts, nothing will change. Until I start celebrating all of the amazing little miracles of the here and now, such as: the way he grabs me and swings me around, both on a dance floor and in the privacy of our own kitchen; the way I can truly be who I am, - in all of the glory of torn, fading shorts that are a few sizes too big and the wretched stench of my noxious gas; to the way we share movement as a medium, and intuition as a guiding force, then no matter who the partner is, I will still be choosing to writhe in the stench of my ego.
As for him, he obviously has his own issues to deal with. Hopefully, someday, he will stop hiding behind his addiction and start looking at his own darkness and grief. The best I can do now is to support him in his own process of becoming. The best I can do now is to try to love and accept him. To give him attention and affection, and to hold his inner child who was never gently rocked and told, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.” The way I see it is it is a little like his literacy. He has a fear of anything school related, he hates reading, and he is a horrible speller. My ”education” intimidated him. Although I initially allowed that to hinder my own actions, I would plant a small seed, here and there, while supporting him and simultaneously wishing that he would come to see the value in the written word. That day has come, and he now credits me with having taught him how to read, for he says, “You simply modeled the behavior.”
Perhaps, that is where and how I can begin again. I still don’t know what love looks like, how it talks, or how it moves, but I surely know what it doesn’t look like. And, for the most part, it doesn’t look like much of what I have written above. I do not know what is going to happen between he and I, for I do not know what the future holds. I just know that, for now, we are trying to move into forgiveness and, some kind of, understanding.
As Alice Walker put it in her The Temple of My Familiar,
“Keep in mind always the present you are constructing, for it should be the future you want.”
For five years now, if not longer, I have held on to fixed notions of who the person is that grew up at 3586 Ridge Road, just north of my current dwellings here in San Diego, California. I have been hooked on a fixed outcome, by subconsciously recreating my parent’s story, I have fated myself to that which I know yet do not want. I have clung to fixed identities, - among many are the traveler, the countercultural college student, and the beautiful girl, and I have desperately cradled memories created with old friends, rarely making space for new acquaintances and comrades. I have even clung to fixed fantasies of earning a graduate degree, creating a non-profit, finding a life partner, and being stable by the time I am thirty-five.
That wake up call, has me throwing my arms up in the air, and saying, “Alright. I surrender. I do not know where I am going, or how I am going to get there. But, finally, I am going to stop fighting. Finally, I am going to take off the mask and step out of the shadows. Finally, I am ready to lay the girl to rest, and let the woman take over.”
For, really folks, that is what this is all about, more than anything else - the painful process of growing up. I could turn away in embarrassment and say, “Yeah, I’m a thirty-one year old child.” Or, I could commend myself for not being married or having children, and thus not exposing innocent others to my instability. I could cheer myself on and, with a pat on the back, recognize that maybe after all, I am on that path. Maybe, I am headed in the direction that I ultimately envision. Maybe, now that I know that I am lost, well perhaps I am found after all.
My dance with death is not coming to a close. Really, it is just beginning. Instead of grabbing hold tightly to past experiences and to future daydreams and “becoming something rigid in a universe that is moving” (Roth, p. 88), I can instead try to let go of everything that I think I am and that I think I am supposed to be or do. I can finally embrace chaos. I can fall backwards with my arms spread wide and a grin on my face. I can move past my fears, and take to the stage again. I can take new risks, like following up on a business opportunity and rediscovering my love for film as a medium for celebrating dance, life, and community. Sure, I am still afraid, for I do not know how I am going to land, on what path, or where, but I am again going to start trusting my intuition. I am again going to allow it to lead, while the little girl goes down for a long nap, and the woman in the driver’s seat kicks her feet up and coasts in cruise control.
