Dreamland

or, on how I didn't know how scary it would be to do this.

One of my favorite songs I’ve ever heard says:

Pulling down backstreets, deep in your head
Slipping through dreamland like a tourist
Pulling down backstreets, deep in your head
Slipping through dreamland like a tourist

That first friend you had, that worst thing you said;
That perfect moment, that last tear you shed.
All you done in bed? All on Memorex.
All 'round, 'round your head, all 'round, 'round your head.

Mila picked me a buttercup and told me it was a special flower for me. I held it in my hands and looked at it. Having no social media right now has definitely made it easier for me to stay present to the gifts life brings me in each moment, and I found myself just sitting and feeling the breeze on my skin, listening to the sounds of children laughing and talking (and crying) and feeling generally pretty connected to myself and the earth and all that was happening around me. There was a little boy talking by himself on the rope climb to seemingly no one, asking ‘how’s everybody doing, world?’ and replying ‘no one’s gonna answer me? really? that’s sad. there’s a lot happening out here, world.’ He looked disapprovingly at all the silent air around him.

I twirled the flower, photographed it, gazed into it, loved it. It’ll get squished, I thought. Or lost. I’ll make a wish. I will let it fly away in the wind.

I held it to my throat. I closed my eyes and I noticed. I observed the fluttering, thin velvet kiss of the buttercup against my neck; the chirping laughter of my four year old misting like a perfume of sound; my son asking another child their name, his ever-changing but still-childish voice open and happy and warm; the sudden sting of saltwater, the feeling that all of nature was vibrating, the sense that I was the eyes and ears and consciousness of the vibration. I noticed the feeling of God noticing God. “I wish for nothing,” I whispered to no one. And it was true. I was the richest woman alive.

I twirled my tiny and very special yellow flower between my fingers, dirty from taking off my daughter’s muddy sneakers when she needed to pee behind the oak tree. The flower said ‘damn straight.’ I cried quietly behind my sunglasses and just kept breathing in and out, noticing my breath, noticing whatever I could about that achingly simple moment of heaven on earth. “I wish for nothing.”

Most of my suffering has been in the depths of my mind. Most my suffering has been had on the hamster wheels of worrying, surmising, projecting, dissecting and rehashing. For me it feels as though peace is always and only found in the act of noticing what is, now. It is my compassionate observation of sensation and feeling and emotion, including fear and rage and anxiety, that heals and soothes and centers, even in those moments when pain burns itself deep into my consciousness.

For several years I have been on the hamster wheel in my mind that says ‘You can’t have a career anymore! You fell from grace, you disappointed your audience, no one wants the real you, you have nothing left to offer, and you should probably just give up.’ Oh, and the one that says ‘If you bring your full self to your art it will crash and burn and you will be sorry.’ And a few weeks ago I decided to notice, truly notice, the thoughts that kept me spinning my wheels instead of making art, from creatively expressing what was in my heart.

In observing the hamster wheels of thought and the emotions underneath them, I found that the path forward was so simple, it had been right in front of my nose and yet completely obscured from view by my worrying.

I noticed that my fear is just afraid, it’s not true. I noticed that my fear is afraid of me winning because it means I might stand to lose something! I noticed that my fear is afraid of me feeling good, because then I might stand to feel not so good. I noticed that my fear is afraid of me coming fully to life in my art, because then I might stand to know the feeling of rejection if others do not love it as much as I do.

I had no idea my fear was so scared to move with me into whatever is Next—in fact, into whatever is Now, because there is no next; there is only now.

And I noticed that my true self does not feel this fear; I never have, and I never will.

I noticed that the noticing provided the relief I was so desperately seeking. No way out but into and through.

So Jeremi and I whittled down 40 songs to 15, and we are getting started in earnest this coming week. I can’t wait to share updates and progress reports with you, as well as hopefully some good video and photo documentation.

I leave you with an excerpt from Alan Watts’ The Way Of Zen (in which he is actually discussing the Tao) that reminded me this week of the truly stone cold bummer that overly linear thinking (and its oft-resulting side effect, worry) can be.

“If the universe were made, there would of course be someone who knows how it is made--who could explain how it was put together bit by bit as a technician can explain in one-at-a-time words how to assemble a machine. But a universe which grows utterly excludes the possibility of knowing how it grows in the clumsy terms of thought and language, so that no Taoist would dream of asking whether the Tao knows how it produces the universe. For it operates according to spontaneity, not according to plan. Lao-tzu says:

The Tao’s principle is spontaneity.

But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a (one-at-a-time) order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly organized bodies. For the Tao does not “know” how it produces the universe just as we do not “know” how we construct our brains. In the words of Lao-tzu’s great successor, Chuang-tzu;

Things are produced around us, but no one knows the whence. They issue forth but no one sees the portal. Men one and all value that part of knowledge which is known. They do not know how to avail themselves of the Unknown in order to reach knowledge. Is not this misguided?”

-Alan Watts, from The Way Of Zen