Weeping with Joy

Recently I read an article published online in the AOL News feed, written by a woman whose circumstances reflect mine almost like a mirror. She is younger than me by twelve years, and was a CEO of a construction company, rather than a successful home improvement sales person but there is where our outer dissimilarities end.

She, like me, was laid off two years and six months ago. She, like me, has applied to every firm in the known universe…and like me…been rejected by them all. The firms that hire teenagers and the aged won’t consider her, because they know that she will leave the moment her field returns to some normalcy, so the Targets, Wall-marts, and K-Marts of the world won’t invest in someone they know will depart, when there are so many to choose from who will more likely stay.

Then there are the vast numbers of employers who require you to have experience in their field, so waiting tables, selling mortgage loans, or working nights as an ER nurse, are of course, out of the question.

She, like me, has calculated that she has sent out somewhere upward of 2,000 resumes. I am sure my number is somewhere near that as well…and like me, she has turned to writing as a way of hearing herself think and keeping her “working”.

She speaks of how she has sold almost all her possessions to keep the lights on one month and the bills paid the next. I understand her experience of extreme financial limitations, the state is keeping me fed with a monthly stipend of $200.00, but even here there are odd limitations. For instance, I can buy raw chicken – but not rotisserie chicken, I can buy the ingredients to make pizza – but not the deli’s already baked ones, I can buy canned goods – but not soap or toilet paper, both as essential, to my mind, as is eating.

She speaks of the loss of all her “friends” with a somewhat bitter tone to her voice. I did not have a large circle of friends, but I do understand her experience. Turns out you need money to have friends. I cannot speak for the Construction CEO, but I know for myself, that working at friendship is difficult when you can’t afford to invite them out to dinner or a movie, or to your own home as the money stipend from the state doesn’t reach to the end of the month much less allow for dinner parties. Going to something as simple as coffee, requires gas and the capacity to buy ridiculously overpriced beverages, to legitimize taking up space in their booths and overstuffed leather chairs. And putting your friends in a position of having to pay your way is both an embarrassing and painful choice that absolutely begs avoidance.

Even chatting on the phone is a less than desirable activity, for without fail, one of two things must come up. Either we talk about the elephant in the room, lack of employment, and that brings up well meaning problem solving which is always potentially painful…or we don’t talk about it, and in a life whose central aspect is lack of employment and the vast array of constraints that places on a person’s life, a conversation about it can easily turn into complaining, something I am committed to not doing…(can’t speak for the CEO…)

We are leaving our regularly scheduled program, at this juncture, to speak a word about extreme life circumstances and the “problem solving” attitude that those on the outside so often feel the need to bring to the event.

I have the perfect example to share with you…

The day before my mother’s death, she was still coherent and conscious, and I had been sitting with her for almost three weeks watching her agonizingly slow departure. My sisters would spend a half an hour or so a couple of times a day visiting, but they were clearly uncomfortable and ill at ease, so the visits were distressing for everyone concerned. My approach was decidedly different… I merely sat. Sometimes I sat across from her on the couch, sometimes I sat near her in a chair…but for three weeks, I just sat.

Once or twice a day, she would marshal her energy, command her prodigious will and raise her head to look at me. Sometimes I spoke to her, often we just exchanged looks…reaffirming for ourselves that, yes…we are here and we will be here, together, to the end.

So, on this day before her death - a cousin by marriage came over - knocked upon the door and offered to “help” by giving me a break from being with my mother by reading a book to her. A break neither of us wanted, but back then I didn’t have the courage for truth telling that I now possess.

So in she came, wanting to do her good works and of course it caused my mother to feel the need to attempt putting on her “companies come over” face, which was a sad and deep loss of energy for her. And I wanted no part in a social experience, cocooned as I had become in the process of her death, so I told my mother I would be in the next room until the visit was concluded. I will never forget the poignant and quiet urgency in her barely audible voice when she said, “You’re not leaving are you?” “No, mom…I’ll be right in here, don’t worry”.

The cousin left ten minutes or so later, and was quite clearly peeved that her “help” had not resulted in the expected welcome or recognition of her heroic efforts at “kindness” that she had been expecting, she was so plainly an intrusion that even she could feel it. The irritation in her voice and the look on her face was very obvious, as she announced her departure by saying…”well, it’s clear I’m not helping, so I guess I’ll just leave.”

To this day I still marvel about someone so unconsciously unaware of how their need to be of importance and to problem solve, robbed a dying woman of energy and a soon to be grieving daughter of precious time.

But problem solving is very often like that…

When someone we know is in the midst of some form of emergency that deep down may scare us, rather than feel the feelings of fear that our association with the dying, sick, poverty stricken, or troubled may bring up for us, it is almost the social norm to turn to platitudes, problem solving, or suggestions for action, that are dressed up to look as though they are meant to ease the other’s suffering…but which, in truth…merely make us more comfortable and less anxious about our own potential for falling victim to life’s troubles.

True help is so much subtler than that. My teacher describes it in this way “helping another… is being attuned enough, (or present enough), to the energy or process that is already underway that you can discover a way to fit yourself seamlessly into that energy rather than running counter to, or disturbing it, by attempting to fix it.”

Another human being, in any form of emotional or spiritual distress, may want…but never truly needs, your solutions.

The only thing that can ever serve another is the amplitude of “The Witness”…and if the person you are attempting to serve is conscious enough, then their attitude, behaviors, energies, time and commitment will be entirely bent upon the amplification of the awakened Witness within themselves, as they continue to sit with the wave of “trouble” that is breaking upon the shore of the “self” that is the vessel they have chosen this lifetime.

Back now, to our regularly scheduled program and the CEO’s article and her final description of the life she is now leading.

She finished her examination of the many troubles and tribulations that poverty has brought into her life in allowing us, the reader, into her inner life by describing how she has begun to feel entirely “invisible” to the outside world. Disappearing down the rabbit hole. Scores upon scores of unanswered resume submissions, the hard rejections from the few interviews she manages to obtain – where competition is steep beyond imagining – and friendships no longer sustainable, she finds herself disappearing and by the sound of her voice, deeply afraid of the potential of ceasing to exist and thus vanishing into thin air.

Here is where our shared circumstantial paths part ways. I have become more visible than I would have ever imagined possible. That visibility is mine and mine alone. No one shares with me the light by which I can now see…I am not, now… nor likely to become, visible to others. I have not found my “greatness,” or my marketable talent, or my place in the world… in-point-of-fact all of that has been lost as I face my life circumstances without reference to a future, and with the willingness to live every breath within the frame of the current moment.

I have, like my CEO friend, quite literally no idea where I am headed or how much more extreme it might get. But unlike her, (based upon her own testimony), I have found an inner place of solitude…so vast, so welcoming, so warm, and so kind that I do not fear the circumstances of my life or what yet might be about to appear on the horizon. Is this quiet place of peace constant? No, not yet.

There are days where I feel almost like I have a raging fever. The “voice” of the self returns and begins to formulate plans for my salvation, it foments trouble like a brew….bubbling in an iron cauldron over a flaming fire. “What will happen? Where will I go? What should I do? How will my sister survive without my mortgage payment?” ….and so on and so forth….

It took hold of me yesterday, while walking up the mountain. It was like suddenly being aboard a run-away train, with no conductor at the helm. Awash in projections of an increasingly troubled “future”, which I now know to be non-existent, I couldn’t locate the breath that has become so competent at extinguishing the voice, and allowing me to bathe in the bliss of Silence.

On and on… the voice rose and pitched, rolling from one side of my mind to the next like a loose cannon aboard a sinking and wind tossed ship, breaking and splintering large timbers necessary for smooth sailing.

By mid morning I was exhausted and lost in what was once the normal patterns of my mind, the surrender that allowed Silence to enter my heart and mind and fill me with the “peace that passeth understanding” was entirely beyond my reach. And I felt cooked by a fire that was once a standard in my life, I lay down upon my bed and slept away the extreme energy loss that had been drained out of me by doing battle with the “self,” I had once imagined me to be.

This morning, calm has returned…the voice is silent once more, and I continue to examine my moment-by-moment breath, the feel of my fingers upon the keyboard, the sound of birds outside my window, the rushing of traffic as it passes by me on its way to somewhere and someplace. In less poetic terms, sanity has reasserted it’s gentle nature and is back in it’s rightful place at the helm of my mysteriously rudderless boat, meandering its’ way into the unknown and unknowable…taking me, it’s passenger, along for the ride.

I attempted to find the CEO, and did in fact locate her face book page, to extend to her an invitation to being seen by someone who shares her outer circumstances, but to no avail. She has not responded, and I understand that her path may not have room in it, for someone who is not in emergency patterns of reaction to the current “crisis”. And so I let her drift away, certain as only personal experience can make you, that her troubles are entirely right for her, that her soul’s guidance is at the helm and that all manner of things are well.

Here is an invitation I extend to you, from the hand of the writer of The Diamond in Your Pocket, Gangji…

“I invite you for just this moment to stop searching for relief from suffering. The invitation is neither to become oblivious to suffering, nor to give up in despair. It is an invitation to stop searching for something to rescue you from yourself.

What is the experience of life when there is no ‘you’ left? What is the experience of problems when they are not ‘your’ problems?”

All of lifes processes can be entirely and completely summed up in the phrase…”stop searching for something to rescue you from yourself.”

Seeking, believing, praying, wanting miracles, hoping for positive change, going to healers and shamans and priests and preachers, all are attempts to rescue you from yourself…and even though it is pointing out the painfully oblivious…when I note that it can’t be done, as you cannot find relief from the self in any other way than by transcending it altogether.

And finally, this… last…and first….and always…

When the answer searches for the answer, what can it ever find?

- Stephen Mitchell

The outer circumstances of your life, are neither a curse nor a gift…they are merely, and always, the life specific choices most necessary and unique to you, that have the potential to liberate you from the limitations and suffering of the personal self, and bring you weeping with joy, into the limitless kindness of the One.

Adayre R. Miller

12/8/10

photo courtesy of Shiya and Flickr photo sharing www.flickr.com/photos/26182292@N08/4582908015/