The Direction of Intention

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We hold our workshops in Hastings on the top floor of the police department – a building that used to be a school so on the third floor it sports a small multi-use room with a stage – it is perfect for the experiences and messes that we create. This morning, dense with fog, we sent the teachers out of the building looking for edges.

Fifteen minutes later they proclaimed, “There are edges everywhere!” We live in a world that knows itself by the lines that it draws and the rules that it makes. They translated their edge discoveries into art installations and then taught us what they learned about edges.

First, we learned that it’s at the edges where the real learning happens. Edges are uncomfortable. Edges are to be played with, feared, challenged, leapt over and run from. Edges are where differences come together. Edges are necessary and not necessary. Judgments are edges. Edges are useful in making distinction and it is through our edges that we come to know ourselves. Edges can be sharp, broken, smooth, clean, rough, precise, unknown, limits, boundaries and horizons. Playpens are defined by there edges and so are prisons. Stories have edges just as pictures have frames. There are edges to perception. Doubt is an edge just as choice designates an edge. Opportunities are found on edges. Your edge is different than my edge. We seek our edges and redefine them. Yesterday’s edges look small and today’s edges look intimidating.

That’s just a snapshot of what they found. Who knew there was so much to be found on an edge! What do you find on your edges?

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349.
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Tayna and I were talking about trust. Not just any brand of trust but the kind that becomes necessary when that still small voice inside prompts you to leave the nest, to step to the edge of your comfort zone and jump. It’s the voice that comes at the start of a new chapter in your story. It is the voice that knocks you off balance.

We’ve all been there. We all have that voice. We generally avoid the voice, deny it, question it, shout it down, talk over it, and debate it to a draw even as we sit in the nest knowing that the jump is inevitable. Deep down we know the caterpillar time is over and something unimaginable beckons. We don’t know what it is. We DO know that the nest is comfortable and the voice is asking the impossible. Who in their right mind would jump?

That is precisely the point. If you listened to your right mind all the time you’d stay in the nest forever. The intellect is great at explaining “why” but has no facility for asking “why not.” Growth never makes sense. Ask Frodo. Better yet, ask Bilbo. At the end of life he, like the rest of us, talks about the jumps, the senseless choices that at the time looked like “risk.” At the end of the day we come to realize that the risk was never in the jumping, but in the vital life missed by ignoring the voice’s call.

The voice comes when you are on the right path. The outward actions might seem terrifying, destructive, counter productive, and downright stupid. And, it’s the right path. Learning to trust that intuitive voice – stepping to edge of the nest and looking over BECAUSE it makes no sense – is what makes us human. That’s where the growth happens. We come alive when we entertain the “What if…?”

In a fit of metaphor Tayna chortled, “I mean, think about it: the ugly bulb I planted in the ground doesn’t know what it’s doing, it just does it. It trusts and reaches for something absolutely unknowable and this amazing flower emerges.” It’s not difficult to imagine being the ugly bulb. In this metaphor, reaching for the unknowable is simply what we do and I think that is apt. We must reach for the unknowable just as we must wrap a story of destruction around the impulse to reach. Safety is a big deal for us ugly bulbs. The story of destruction is good for piquing curiosity and curiosity trumps safety almost every time. Also, the flower remembers the story of ugly-bulb-doubt, in fact, the flower is made possible and all the more sweet by the doubt that propelled it forward. That’s how we ugly bulbs learn to trust that nagging still-small-voice: we take the scary step certain that we will not survive, have an adventure, and come out better for it.

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314.
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It is 1993 and I alone in my studio. It is night in Los Angeles. I am exhausted and tired of being afraid. My life is fueled by anger and fear and I can see no alternatives. I have made a mess of it all. I am convinced that my paintings are worthless – which means that I am convinced that I am worthless.

My studio has a 20-foot ceiling and great exposed beams that support a mini-loft area. I find an orange extension cord and throw it over the beam, securing one end and loop a noose in the other. I place my rickety old wooden chair beneath the noose, climb up and put the noose around my neck. And then, I play with the balance of the chair, slowly rocking the chair back onto two legs. Only then do I realize what I am doing. I am blessed with good balance and I hover on that edge, my life teetering on the back two legs of a rickety old wooden chair, uncertain which way I want to go. It is on this edge that I recognize, perhaps for the first moment in my life, that I have choice; that I am always making choices. Always. This revelation blows a hole through the center of my victim story and it collapses. I am disoriented and see that I am depending upon others to tell me that I am worthy. I wonder why I have given the measure of my worth into the opinions of others. I wonder why I am choosing so much pain.

I hear in my head the voice of my friend Roger. A few years before he told me that he’d never really understood why people commit suicide. He asked, “Why wouldn’t you just do something else? Why wouldn’t you just do anything else?”

“Yes.” I say to myself, “Do anything else.”

I make my choice and softly let the chair down onto all four legs. I take off the noose, I take off the victim story, and as I pull the orange cord off the beam I suddenly I see my life as precious, sacred, and wonder how I could have lived so long and not known it. I wonder what I was running away from. The revelation stuns me and I sit on the chair and laugh. I know the answer the moment I ask the question: the victim story dulls us; it is a murky lens that leeches the vitality of life and feeds on itself. It is an addiction. I was running from myself so afraid of making and owning my choices, terrified of being seen, of saying, “look, this is who I am.” For the rest of the night I sit in the chair letting my eyes grow accustom to brilliant colors of life without the lens.

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224.
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Tamara wrote to me today a meditation about edges. She is a brilliant songwriter and has learned to stand in the fullness of life (instead of running through it or away from it). She inspires me.

She had an experience on the coast of Oregon that stirred the birth of a new song and for her a new process in music making. A potent experience generating a potent creative process, unknown and vital and necessary, a texture of living and artistry that is only available if you feel life and feel it deeply; all of it.

She must have known that I was on an edge in my life (she somehow knows these things), because her amazing words came to me at just the right moment, just as I was facing what will be yet looking over my shoulder at what once was. Here is just a bit of the timely meditation that she shared:

“That’s the thing about edges, isn’t it?? We are balanced there, right in the moment between either offering up the white flag and retreating back to where we feel more ‘safe’, or just leaping out into the waves. And sometimes we leap out to another amazing unexplored place where we create and become and breathe, and sometimes we back up to the grassy area, where the ocean looks like a lake instead of crashing waves, and we see a different kind of beauty from there.”
There is beauty and new perspective either way. And with her wise words I know that mine to do this time is to leap, the beauty I seek is in the “amazing unexplored place.”

Mostly, I can’t wait to hear her new song and to share my new creation. What could be better than that?!

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182.
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The image is vivid. I am perhaps 12 years old. I am running through a mountain meadow with my cousin. We are like puppies in a game of chase, laughing, tagging, and changing in an instant the pursuer and the pursued. The grass is waste high and wet with morning dew.

Suddenly my cousin screams, “STOP!” and I freeze in my tracks. He is not given to dramatics and I can hear the fear in his voice. He back-pedals and sits in the grass, shaking. I step toward him and then I see the mineshaft; this used to be gold country and there are shafts everywhere. We thought we knew where they all were but this was a surprise. “I almost went in,” he says, “I wasn’t looking and then there it was.” We pick up a stone and drop it in. Several seconds pass before we hear a distant splash; there is a bottom.

The fear is gone with the splash. We are young and fear is easily translated into curiosity. We throw many stones into the shaft. A game evolves – first throwing a stone so that it bounces against the walls of the shaft: who can get the most bounces. Then, dropping a rock so that it falls all the way to the bottom without touching the sides – this task is harder to do and we become experts. We mark the spot of this new discovery with broken limb thrust into the ground. We build a makeshift barrier to protect other frolicking travellers. We pull the grass around our barrier so it can be more easily seen and then throw handfuls of grass into the sky.

We do not carry a story of fear home with us; we carry a story of discovery. We carry a story of play. We are not afraid to run through the grass after our discovery of the shaft. We do not assume there are dangers lurking in every field; in fact, the discovery of the shaft unleashes our inner Indiana Jones. We carry a curiosity, a love of the unknown, a spirit of adventure. We do not assume we know what is coming down the road; the point is to run down the road.

We are powerful because we do not invest in our fear. We are powerful and alive because we still know how to dance with uncertainty.

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178.
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Today I cleaned my studio. I made space for the new. There are few rituals I enjoy more and few rituals that I take as seriously. It has been months since I painted. I have been empty, in winter. The first time I experienced this emptiness I panicked! I wondered if my artist had left me. I wondered if the well of my gift had run dry.

The answer to both questions was, of course, yes. I’m not sure if other artists experience what I do, but I have seasons. I go fallow, dark, underground. The first cycle I panicked and pushed and became more empty and dark. It was the magic Karola who told me that my cup could not refill unless I allowed it to drain completely. So I stopped chasing. I sat still, lost in the woods of my self-pity and without faith. One day, months later, I felt a stirring; the seeds buried deep within me began to crack open, tender shoots (impulses to draw) reached the surface and I found myself again with a pencil in my hand.

Now, I know enough to sit still, to be quiet and enjoy being alive without purpose or direction. I’ve even learned to rest (my inner puritan always grouses but I’ve learned to love that voice, too – like a cranky old neighbor who wants attention I listen to the unforgiving work ethic and smile. “More lemonade?” I ask). When I feel the seeds stirring, I set a full day aside. I go into the studio, close out the world, put on some “welcome home” music, and do some spring-cleaning.

Faith is no longer an issue. I’ve learned that faith, like trust, follows experience, not the other way around.

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