Dazed and Confused

What is this street light thinking about?

I'm having a hard time thinking this morning. If there was a thought balloon floating above my head, it would be thick, yet vague, with blurry writing that's not possible to read, not unlike the cloud above the streetlight in this picture.

Thinking takes time, something I haven't had a lot of in the past few days. The weekend was lots of fun, including plenty of social interaction as well as a full schedule of work. It was a satisfying, vivifying, fabulous weekend I wouldn't trade for anything.

But, because of my busy weekend and the resulting sleep deprivation, my brain is stalled out, flooded, unresponsive. When I knock on the side of my head, all I hear is a hollow echo. Helloooo?? Is anybody home??

Reading about the "logic" that fueled this country's involvement in the Vietnam War, I wonder if Dean Rusk and John Kennedy and all the rest of them might have benefitted from some down time before they made their tragic decisions. Maintaining American prestige as a reason to go to war? Whoa. By 1960, presidents were no longer taking long walks around the city. What a shame. I mean that literally.

Today and tomorrow I'll have time to, as Gertrude Stein explained it, "sit around ... doing nothing, really doing nothing." That sitting around (or most likely for me, walking around) will give me time to sort through my scrambled neural network. Maybe then I'll be able to think clearly.

Maybe.

Sometimes it rains

Sometimes It Rains

The ready perfumes of summer's middle days,
Creosote, creosote after rain, rain

Bringing up the last of the orange-blossom smell,
The droplets of water rousing the fallen leaves

Enough to make a moment come back to life in them,
A second once more of something, a moment from when

They were white and waxy and alive with themselves.
But night comes, too, to gather this moment,

Even as we want it to stay, even as we will not go inside.
The creosote, the orange blossoms, the hot honeysuckle

Flowers in the desert moonlight, the shadows of yucca,
Those sharp fronds, they make a full burst of daggers

Black on the gray-colored ground of the early evening.
The ocher and pink colors of this place in daytime

Are parts of one color at night, so that to see them
One has to breathe in. And breathing in:

This has the curious effect of rain itself in that moment—
The smell rousing us to what we know inside ourselves.

But that is not the end of it, a rainy day turning itself
Into a moist evening full of crickets.

This place is no different from any other, and rain is rain
Here as much as anywhere. But something happens

In the desert after rain has come. We sleep a good sleep
That night. In the morning, we get up and find ourselves

Standing on the shore of the new world. In the desert,
We watch, if we're careful, and when we point at everything

We are complicit in the great magician's trick of the rain:
Rain falls down wet and gets up green.

--Alberto Ríos

Walkabout

John Adams loved to walk. According to David McCullough's biography, Mr. Adams sometimes took ten or fifteen mile walks around Washington, to "clear his head." Can you imagine? In those funny white hose? The shoes from the late 18th century could not have been ergonomically correct. But he did it anyway. Those founding fathers were tough.

Lincoln, too, liked walking. While he was president, he often walked from the White House to the Capitol, perhaps passing (and tipping his tall hat to) Walt Whitman, a guy who also loved to walk.

Whenever I take a big walk, I love thinking about how my feet are tracing the same paths as our early presidents, that I'm stepping into the footprints of great poets like Whitman.

I love the spaciousness of walking. Just like everything else in my life, I like the fact that walking takes time. It's a slow way (comparatively) to travel from point A to point B, emphasizing to me, over and over, that it's the journey, not the destination, that matters.

Yesterday I walked for hours through the gorgeous day, stopping here and there, of course, for a glass of iced tea, or a quick visit to the National Gallery. (I highly recommend the Luis Melendez show. Imagine a very realistic painting of artichokes set in front of a wild, stormy landscape, or a painting of a milk tin artfully arranged next to garlic cloves and beef. Yes, beef. Completely cool, if you ask me.)

I do my best thinking while walking. I breathe, gaze around, take pictures, of course. Walking is a big part of my spiritual practice. My only regret from yesterday is that I forgot to put on sunscreen. Oops. I'll remember next time.


Prince Charming's stylish foot.

Charmed

Every now and then my friend Prince Charming takes me to dinner. The experience is magical, just like a fairy tale. It really is. He's a food and drink writer so when he comes to DC, the chefs and restaurant owners do all they can to impress him. He - and I by default since I'm his guest - are treated like royalty. The chefs and restaurant owners come over and shake our hands. They want to know if we're enjoying the dinner. They are so sincere!

It's always a lot of fun - also slightly overwhelming - to taste so many delicious things, perfectly prepared and presented. But I'm not there for the food. Oh no. By far the best thing about these fairy tale dinners is the chance to connect with my old friend.

I met Prince Charming almost thirty years ago when we dated briefly. Since then we've been fast friends, even during periods of time when we haven't been in touch. I joke about the title "Prince Charming" because of the way the restaurant people suck up to him, but the truth is, he is genuinely charming. Also: smart, witty, handsome, stylish, thoughtful - and tender, too. And he smells good.

OK I'll admit I will always have a crush on Prince Charming. Who wouldn't??

Where there's fear, there's power

The Pourhouse Bar, on Pennsylvania SE at 3rd, has - for unknown reasons - two scary masks glued to the front of the building. Actually they're kind of adorable, at least this one, isn't it?

I agree with Dr. Antonio D'Amasio and other scientists who are interested in the neurology of emotion, that all emotions, even the so-called "negative" emotions, serve us well and should be treated with respect.

Fear, for instance, an emotion that is reviled in our culture (maybe because American society is based on the pursuit of happiness?) is a part of our survival instinct. As Dr. D'Amasio explains it, emotion is the result of changes in our body chemistry that prepare us to most effectively meet the external world. Fear enables us to run away from danger, or turn and face danger with a lot of extra energy (also known as courage). Without fear, we are unable to intuit danger and then decide how to deal with it. Fear is good!

He says that by the time we become conscious of emotions, they are already well underway. At the point that we know we're afraid (for instance), we can acknowledge it and then make decisions about what to do next, or we can repress the feeling, something we are encouraged to do in American society. He says we are only able to partially disguise the facial expressions that accompany emotion. We might be in denial, but the emotion is there.

Super heroes use fear in such an admirable way. It's like an emotional martial art for them, the way they acknowledge it and use the information in order to triumph. I love Indiana Jones in the first movie, using his fear of snakes to get himself and his girlfriend out of that Egyptian tomb.

The problem with fear (or any "negative" or "positive" emotion) is when we get addicted to it, or so accustomed to the feeling that we can't access other emotional states. The ideal behavior is to acknowledge fear, make decisions on what to do next, and then LET GO. That's the hard part, at least for me.

I could go on and on, for instance I could speak of anxiety (excitement without breath, as one of my great teachers used to say) or anger (a piercing energy that reveals the truth, but will "burn" you if you don't let it go, as Pema Chodron says). I could talk about people who say they're "always happy" and how bizarre that is to me.

I'll spare you the long lecture. Yadda yadda yadda. For heaven's sake, I am so officious sometimes.

The Neurology of Shopping

Far more intimidating than talking to ghosts, according to the cosmology of Reya, is shopping for clothing. I have never been good at it, not ever. Not only am I completely overwhelmed by all the choices, but also by the dressing room experience, during which there is no way I can ignore my appearance. I have no choice but to stare at myself in ill fitting clothes, my skin green from the fluorescent light, completely exposed by the three way mirrors.

I'm built for styles from the 1950's. Everything designed since then looks terrible on me. Even at places like Lucy, where the salespeople say they make clothing that "looks good on everyone," the clothes do not fit. I refuse to blame my body type for the way I look in clothes. It's not my fault, really it isn't.

I'm thinking about clothes shopping this morning because, after a thorough examination of my sparse wardrobe, I realize I literally have nothing to wear tomorrow night when I have dinner with Prince Charming, an old friend who always dresses to the nines. He LOVES to shop and looks good in everything. How I wish his talent and enthusiasm would rub off on me. Or that someone would nominate me to be on What Not to Wear.

Over the years I've begged friends who are Master Shoppers to show me how it's done. Recently one of these friends said, "The truth is, Reya, you have to LIKE it." She's right of course. I do not like it at all. In fact, the experience is always slightly traumatic for me. Is that sad or funny?

I'm certain that there must be a strange neurological quirk that could be blamed for my problems with shopping, something beyond the overwhelm, the ill fitting clothes, even beyond the humiliation of the dressing room experience. Where is Oliver Sacks when you really need him?

for Ronda and Dani, mostly ... and anyone else who is curious.

Pythagorean perfections: the east facade of the National Gallery, the cool dome over the center of the National Gallery, and the huge, elongated pyramid of the Washington Monument in the distance.

I was never that interested in American history until I landed in Washington DC. But once I was here, I became fascinated with it. The history of the Civil War is particularly alive in DC, surrounded as the city is by battlefields. If I'd moved to Massachusetts or even Philadelphia, I might have become entranced by the Revolutionary War. Who knows?

As is my habit once I become interested in something, I dove head-first into a study of the war, reading as much as I could and visiting the photo archives at the Library of Congress. Believe me, there are a LOT of books about the American Civil War. And Matthew Brady took a LOT of pictures. Wow. I even read Shelby Footes' three volume history, literally thousands of pages long. If I had to recommend just one great book for those not as inspired to read As Much As Humanly Possible, it would be Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.

In the meantime I began visiting battlefields and that's where my shamanic work with dead soldiers began in earnest. I'm not the only person who believes that the battlefields are haunted. In fact, it's hard to find anyone, even the most rational person, who will say they aren't. It felt to me like the battles were ongoing in a never-ending loop. I tried so many different tactics to unwind those ghostly battle loops, including interpretive dance, chanting while wearing gigantic raven wings (seriously - I did that on the battlefield at Antietam), blasting music from a handheld boombox, forming shapes with postures and poses, crying like a baby and letting my tears fall on the ground and doing "automatic writing."

Back then, I was interested in finding areas of disturbed energy to work with shamanically. It was not good for me, and had absolutely no impact on the landscapes I visited. Also I was frustrated because most of my shaman pals had no desire to place themselves in the middle of Civil War battlefields. At the time I didn't understand, but now I do, I really do!

Flash forward to the 21st century. These days my shamanica is almost always about finding areas in which I feel a healing or harmonizing energy, then dancing in support of that healing. You see, I have gotten smarter, and more humble, as I've aged. Thank God.

My recent work with the Vietnam Memorial is all about the change in the energy there. I used to avoid that place like the plague, it felt so heavy and wounded. But something has happened and it doesn't feel creepy to me anymore. It feels potent in a healing way, as if the stuck souls are now able to move on, right through the wall to locations of healing and renewal. It feels happy down there these days. Wow.

You can't imagine how wonderful it is to know I had nothing to do with the change. Ahhhh. Free at last from my grandiose delusions. That's why I told those dead soldiers in my dream to get their astral asses down to the memorials, because I finally understand that it's not up to me to be the big healer of the damage of war. That's God's job, or something that can only unwind over time, or who knows? But I CAN dance in solidarity with the healing. I can go down to the Vietnam Memorial and smile in happiness and wonder that something has changed.

I do, and likely always will, have such a soft spot in my heart for those ghosts. I don't regret my follies on the battlefields, I don't regret my earnest desire to be of help. Embarrassing to think of my hubris, but oh well. That was then. It's all over now.

OK this is more than enough on this topic. Onwards & upwards to other subjects tomorrow. Enough is enough. Apologies if this was boring or completely impossible to understand. I'm like that sometimes.