Susan Boyle's Great Reminder

I still have Susan Boyle's performance of "I Dreamed" from Les Miserables saved in my Inspiration folder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY). Her performance reminded me of what creating is really about, and why I love the process.

There is something particularly thrilling in her rendition, despite some technical flaws.  The sense of authenticity in that first performance -- how could it have been anything else?  She was living her dream.  She'd fought for the chance to sing in front of a huge audience all her adult life, and now she had the chance.  But I think the authenticity was about more than that.  Susan Boyle sang as the "I don’t care” girl.

I don’t care what you think of me.
I don’t care that I’m not supposed to have a bloody chance in hell.
I don’t care.

The freedom, the exhilaration -- that is what we feel, why it brings tears when she pulls it off. Why girls in the audience threw their arms in the air, laughing, why Piers threw back his head and laughed -- at himself, it seemed, at our presumptions and prejudices and automatic desire to limit ourselves and others so we can excuse our own self-imposed limits. Isn’t that really why these shows are so phenomenally successful -- and soften so incredibly cruel? At least I’m not THAT, we can smirk. At least I’m not that plain, that talentless, I didn’t muff that note, cry in front of millions. I didn’t try, either, but -- certainly better not to try than to be humiliated, right? And leave feeling superior and oh so comfortable with our familiar limitations. He/she couldn’t do it, so I don’t have to worry that I never tried; it’s clear it can’t be done by most of us.

But one of the questions Susan’s success raises is, is it true that most of us can’t? Or just that most of us don’t try, don’t commit? After all, she had no silver spoon in life. She has a gift, true, but she could have ignored it. She could have blamed the fates for giving her less than the whole package, and decided she had no right to believe in her gift....

It’s so much easier to be distracted by the instant gratification of television and food, by worries and old sorrows -- by anything, anything, but what we want most. Why is it so very hard? To commit to what we most want requires commitment, a conscious consciousness, consciousness of the fact that it’s worth it; conscious winnowing out of what is less important, conscious rejection of endless distraction. How do you know if you have enough talent? Did Susan know? Did she achieve it because she had it to begin with, or because she worked so hard and refused not to believe?

I wonder how society would be different if humans were raised to believe that going beyond limits is natural and that settling for minutia, for limitation, is unnatural. What if we were all taught from childhood that soaring beyond limits is what we’re all meant to do with our lives? We'd have a different world, I think, and a different trajectory for humanity....

But in the meantime, we have to do it in spite of an indifferent or hostile culture that would just as soon the great mass of people failed. We have to do it for ourselves, learn to say, "I don’t care if you don’t believe in me or my dream -- I do, and I will."

Susan's voice is a reminder. That’s why the thrill -- that reminder of what is meant to be and can be for all of us. And we throw back our heads and laugh to remember it, like Saint-Exupery’s little prince.

October day, cat, Andrea Bocelli on the stereo

And re-reading essays I wrote about the meeting place of opposites in the universe--the meeting of conscious and unconscious, Self and Other, nature and man.... that writing
gave me the opportunity to read so many wonderful things written by artists, Jungian psychologists, and even quantum physicists. All of it for me boiled down to the realization that we are so far from being alone. The voices of all these Others can be heard - in dreams, in listening to nature, in meditation. They are heard, paradoxically, in silence. In the middle of the night, awakened by a dream in which I asked, "how can we better hear them?" I had written:

"The silence doesn't require goodness/morality. But it does require--truth? Truth to it, being true to it, to the silence--what it asks is our renewed truth. Whatever it asks we must give."

for the mothers of our soldiers

and the children in Iraq

in Afghanistan

in our inner cities

they all hope and pray

their children will thrive

will be joyful

and healthy

and most of all, come home to them.

may you find peace

Scenes from the January 27 march in D.C.

It was so crowded it was literally hard to walk. We inched along shoulder to shoulder. Parents with children in strollers, baby boomers, teens with body piercings, and the majority just mainstream Americans. It was an enormous relief to see that, despite the size of the crowd (possibly 500,000), the police presence was low-key. Unlike a march I participated in a few years ago, when the sidewalks were lined with a black-helmeted force that looked straight out of any totalitarian nation's playbook.

It was a powerful experience--entirely peaceful but passionate. At the very end, as I was leaving the Mall, I saw Jesse Jackson walking ahead of me. A young man caught up with him to shake his hand. Then, across the road, I saw a woman walking alone with a large poster. The side facing me said "President Bush, you killed my son." As she turned slightly, I saw an image of a young, fresh-faced man on the other side of the poster. I hoped she had been surrounded by friends as she made the long walk. But there's no way to be anything but alone with that pain. That's what this war means, but the human heart is rarely, if ever, mentioned in all the arguments. As if love were not an essential part of the human condition.

Eternity is not later

I stumbled last night upon a Mary Oliver poem (in her collection Blue Iris) I didn't recall reading before, or maybe it was just that it is about something my friend Barb and I had been discussing earlier. In the poem, "Count the Roses," Mary Oliver moves from instructions, to questions, to conclusions about the mind and about roses. Then she says:

"Yes, the mind takes a long time, is otherwise occupied
than by happiness, and deep breathing."

And the focus of the poem changes, moves from the mind's words to "now":

"Now, in the distance, some bird is singing.
And now I have gathered....
and now I have put....
and now I am moving....."

With each "now," especially when reading the poem out loud, as I was, the breath drops and the mind stills, moves from past and future to the present moment. Eventually, Oliver concludes, "finally even the mind comes running, like a wild thing, and lies down in the sand."

"Eternity is not later, or in any unfindable place.
Roses, roses, roses, roses."

We had been talking, Barb and I, about our experience of eternity in the moment: Barb in her long-time practice of Tibetan Buddhism, I in the all-knowing silence of a tree, or more recently in my cat's gracious bending to caress my cheek with his when I was feeling sad living in a moment already gone -- recalling me to the present. It had made me wonder about the relationship between such moments and all the pain. Mary Oliver addressed that question, too:

"Does it bother you, that mercy is so difficult to understand?"

That question was in the first part of the poem, the mind's part. By the end of the poem, Oliver has moved the reader, through the breath, beyond the question "that can't be answered." I'd had the same experience that night with my cat. There is breathing, in this moment, breathing in roses, or incense, or purring, or the hum of a Tibetan bowl. And there is, just on the other side of some membrane's thickness, all the pain out there that is always changing but equally eternal.

And there is some relationship, but I don't know what it is. It seemed very clear that night, though, that the breathing moment is eternal, and is more real than what eternally moves on the other side of the membrane.

Annie Morrissey's post today on her thoughtful, spiritual blog soundingbalance is about "speaking the Truth: genocide in Iraq." She said some things that have needed to be said for a good long while now. Since the powerful aren't saying them, it's up to those of us with "eyes to see and ears to hear" to speak our truth, so I'm going to follow her lead and try to speak mine now.

The men, women and children of Iraq are now in a living hell. We have created this hell for them, or rather George W. Bush and his coterie of blind hawks did and we failed to stop him. We did not care enough. And here is the worst of it: there was absolutely no need for the invasion, no need for this hell to be unleashed. I think of our own Civil War. As Americans then suffered physical pain, loss of loved ones, fear, economic deprivation, it was at least their own war. The Iraqi people had this hell forced on them when they were doing no harm to anyone. Nothing at all. Then came American bombs, and occupiers with armor and powerful weapons speaking a foreign language taking over their cities, in many cases ridiculing them, abusing them....men, and even women and children, were thrown into foul prisons where atrocities were committed. And that was just the beginning. And now the experts say it will only get worse, and no one can fix this, and all these people can do is despair. Despair on top of despair on top of despair: children blown up, women raped, husbands and fathers and sons kidnapped, or arrested, or tortured, and killed by the thousands upon thousands upon thousands....

We started this atrocity. For no reason. For reasons that were lies. The blood and pain of these people is on our hands and should be on our minds day in and day out.

We can speak. We can pray for them and their children.

Speak. Pray. And join forces with any of the many individuals and groups who are working to impeach Bush and Cheney. No positive change can happen until they are gone.

BuzzFlash is linking to a song by Steve Conn called "How Does It Feel?" -- "How does it feel to know you're the one who started the fire that ended the world?" Conn asks George W. Bush. The question is repeated several times in the song (it's a very good song, not just a throw-away protest, and Conn is a talented singer). The question becomes more and more haunting as you listen. Has Bush started the fire that ends the world? It's possible. The more directly you look at what he's done and force yourself to contemplate likely reactions and consequences by the part of the world that is not George W. Bush or his cronies and friends, the more dread grows.

The song especially speaks to me because of a dream I had during the Kosovo crisis. I dreamed I was entering a church; the spirit of my deceased father was to my left in the wings, he had brought me there to see something important. I opened the door to the nave and saw pews filled with congregants and candles lining the aisles and altar. A white-robed minister was administering communion rites to congregants kneeling at the altar. From somewhere behind me, I hear a Dan Rather-like voice blandly say, "and now he will self-immolate." The alter bursts into flames around the minister. He begins to sweat, his eyes grow wide with fear, he stuffs communion wafers into his mouth so he won't scream. I do scream, throwing my arm over my eyes in horror, running from the room. The minister has led the congregation to this ceremony of self-sacrifice. But it is not until the flames begin licking at his own robes that he understands the fire will consume him, too, and feels the terror. And the guilt, perhaps?

If Bush has started the fire that ends the world, I wonder if he will ever feel guilt or fear about it. Conn sings that "some say you're evil, but I'd like to think you're just hungry for love." Maybe. But Bush is also a grown man with a soul to guide him just like all the rest of us. The idea that he might be doing so many horrific things as desperately misguided attempts to belong or be loved would only indicate a level of narcissism that would surely be the same thing as conscious evil.