Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. Your life has thrown you too many curves, you’re too stressed out to cope well with anything else, and you’re so exhausted that you can’t think straight. Sounds like you’re ready at last to embark on a wisdom journey.

A wisdom journey is a turning point in your life, a very big one in which you decide that the way you’ve been living just doesn’t work anymore. It’s not just the trappings of your life, or even the important people in it, some of whom you may be in conflict with now, but it’s you. Only you. Your way of looking at your life and the world around you does not serve your best interests, and you need to take a good, unobstructed look at yourself before you can change. The only way to do this is to step out of your comfort zone, as oppressive as it may be, and open up to accountability and transformation. No one else is to blame for your unhappiness, and no one else can fix you. There is no easy way around the work you must do.

A wisdom journey is most effectively taken alone. Your quest may lead you to a volcanic mountaintop in Hawaii or a deserted, littered lot in a rundown section of your hometown. A shaman may guide you, or a story may fill and turn your heart. All that you need to transform is inside you, but it can be a slippery transaction. As you begin, you may take many missteps that feel so right, and you will want to project onto others the character flaws you hope to outgrow in yourself. Again, the work is all about you. As you travel, be careful about what you think you want to burn and destroy. Be humble, and be certain before you take each step. Even your footprint won’t last on the ever-changing earth.

By Robert McDowell

Solstice. The great balancing act of the seasons. The middle. The longest day.

A door closes, a door opens. Long ago in Egypt Isis shed tears for her dead husband, Osiris, and so began the annual nourishing flooding of the Nile. Ancient Greeks suspended slavery and honored Cronos, god of agriculture, while the Chinese celebrated Yin, the feminine power of the earth. Romans paid tribute to Vesta, the hearth goddess. Viking summer solstice celebrations continue in Iceland to this day. Celts built huge bonfires, Native Americans performed a sun dance around a tree, and though we do not really know how the Aztecs and Mayans celebrated, we do know that their buildings were precisely aligned astronomically with the summer and winter solstices.

Sacred wells all over the world open, connecting us to the world next to this one. On the longest day, through the marathon hours, we open our hearts to magic, calling down and soaking in the chemistry-jumpstarting, life-giving, life-sustaining power of the sun.

And as we sleep at last, our prayers and dances done, we dream of bountiful harvest and perfect reaping to come. Today we participate in the equanimity of earth and sky. Long-legged, long-looking, we glance back to our building and we gaze ahead to our rest in the longer nights to come.

Solstice. Summer. May your celebration be reverent and merry. May your dreams be sweet. Easeful. Golden.

What Do Men and Women Want? Is There Romance Without Finance? provided a forum in which women and men in our community could meet to share insights into romantic relationships.

All who attended were impressive in their honesty and earnestness. And yet, it was apparent just what a hot button the topic really is, whether it be in a long-term relationship or on a first date. I sensed and heard an adversarial current just under the surface of everyone’s journey. It surfaced occasionally in language (throw down–used to describe putting money on the table at a date, but of course it’s a physical fight term), body language, and attitude.

I kept asking myself if and when money hadn’t been an issue in a relationship. I kept thinking, when we’re younger. My sixteen-year marriage (plus two years together before that), was a pretty swell partnership in terms of finance. We were in it together, made and spent money together. Finance didn’t become an issue until we were divorcing. Even then, though we both took it on the chin financially, the recriminations were minimal.

Since then, I have only known (my own, others) relationships in which finance is a huge issue. It’s often a deal breaker.

I heard the expression of a lot of defended, fear-based positions that night. When we come from there–my heart was broken and that’s not happening again…..I was in an abusive relationship, never again….I didn’t make out so well financially in my last relationship…….Fear becomes a powerful gatekeeper that makes it very hard to break through, to step onto a clean and clear playing field. Isn’t it true that we tote around a lot of baggage, and we expect (often unrealistically) potential mates to surmount obstacles and clear the field for us? The moment I say “I don’t want to be obligated so I’ll pay this check,” or “my last sexual relationship was painful so I’m leery here,” or “I had real trouble communicating with my last partner,” I’m piling on in a sense. I suppose this is why we often get the very thing we run from. Honestly? If I feel or say these things, then I know I’m not ready to be in a relationship. I’ve got other work to do. When that bleeds in to a relationship, there’s more trouble (being your partner’s shrink–a mistake).

As we navigate the currents of late middle age, are we willing to attempt risk/reward? By this I mean surrender to an Other. Are we willing or able to leave the battered Samsonites stuffed with bleeding albatrosses for the sunrise of something different, something new? It takes trust, and that’s remote when Fear is my Gatekeeper.

The paradigm is shifting, yes. After two thousand years of brutal repression, the Feminine is surely reclaiming the earth. A lot of men have also signed on for the ride. In the process, both women and men are spiritually adrift and searching. We’re living in an experimental spiritual age (less sexual, more spiritual–appropriate for our age, perhaps?). Often I think we’ve reached a stage where we know what’s right, but the magic in our medicine bags is inadequate. But it’s not the magic that’s inadequate, we are. We’ve forgotten how to make use of so much of it.

A harmonious relationship that integrates matters financial and sexual requires a kind of alchemical transformation that frees the poetry of our souls. The only conditions that make love happy and enduring are joy, trust, and deep spiritual/physical connection. There’s great humility and sweetness in this. It looks a lot like the soft eyes and hands of a centered rider.

Will the Republicans take control of the House? The Senate? Can the Democrats stage a stirring, eleventh hour rally? Will results be an indictment of President Obama or an encouragement to soldier on? Will hysterical anger on the right and deep disillusionment on the left consume us? Will they eventually meet somewhere on a middle ground where a hybrid, revolutionary movement is born?

Historically, citizens will only take so much. With ninety-five percent of the wealth in five percent of the populace’s pocket, we’re reaching a boiling point, a transformative moment that will redefine us whether we like it or not. I’m up for the transformative moment, but I fear its birth coming from a massive failure to woman-and-man up to the painful responsibilities we’re somehow shirking.

What do I mean? Well, how about giving in to a let history take its course attitude? How about giving in to cynicism, then just giving up?

My friend, Gary, said to me today that in spite of the way things look (and he thinks they look pretty bad), he’s trying to apply a lesson he’d learned from a Holocaust survivor he met. I asked what he meant, and he explained that survivors had something in common—their ability to be positive no matter the terrible circumstances they faced, and their sense of humor. Ah, the healing power of good intention and laughter.

Yes, I need a lot of this medicine. How about you?

Hitler Wrote in chapter 10: “In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Hitler’s primary rules were: 1. Never allow the public to cool off 2.never admit a fault or wrong 3. never concede that there may be some good in your enemy 4.never leave room for alternatives 5. never accept blame 6. Concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong. People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat the lie frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sound familiar? Listen to Limbaugh and others like him. Listen to what passes for the news on Fox. Listen to your own thoughts as you try to make sense of what is going on all around you. Be careful. Be grounded and not so quick to leap around. Do this well. It’s important.

In the wake of these events, these are some of the questions that have come up for me. Who am I? What am I capable of? What responsibilities do I have for my fellow human beings? Who is ok in my world, and who is not? What do I really own?

These are some of the answers. Who am I? I’m many things, but I’m surely a middle-aged American male with his fair share of blessings, issues, and problems.

What am I capable of? Heroic deeds and shameful acts. Mostly I show up every day determined to do my best, to write poetry and deepen my spiritual practice.

What responsibilities do I have for my fellows? It’s on me to act appropriately with compassion and forgiveness, and I need to find balance in this carnival-ride-of-a-world.

Who is ok in my world, and who is not? Everyone belongs by being here. I’m no lord of this realm, and I’m no reliable judge.

What do I really own? Nothing but my actions, my conduct. My thoughts and feelings are ever-changing and not always my own. Nothing material truly belongs to me, for I’ll leave it all behind when I go, if not sooner.

These are my answers. What are yours? Do they help me, or you, cope with what happened to a man who died because he tried to help a woman in trouble? Do they help us to make sense of a racist law?

Maybe not, in the short term. But inquiry is part of the process, and there’s no end to it. Though it may not feel like it, that’s good news.

Today, for instance, a big majority of Californians would like to figure out how to repeal or deeply modify proposition 13, the infamous property tax bill that the late Howard Jarvis successfully championed decades ago. Back then, a majority of Californians gleefully signed away the state’s healthy fiscal future for the promise of immediate financial gain. A generation got richer, schools and roads and social services declined. Today the state is bankrupt and legislatively gridlocked.

Arizonans, motivated by fear, essentially did what Californians did in passing prop 13—opt for a short-term “fix” that has disastrous consequences. Their new law is an incremental step towards that dream America of the tea baggers in which they’ll judge while controlling the money and the guns.

People who voted for these measures acted in much the same way as the seven New Yorkers who walked by the fallen man in Queens as he bled to death, and they acted as you or I might have if we were frightened enough and angry enough and utterly beaten down by our circumstances. “Is anybody human anymore? asked Raechelle Groce, and it’s another really good question.

All I can say in this moment, right now, is wake up, and be human! I’ll look in the mirror and ask, what must I do now? What can I do?

Follow Robert McDowell at www.threeintentions.com and www.robertmcdowell.net

Today is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, the mother of fierce eccentrics and American poetry. I met her in the winter of 1866 in my past life as a clergyman from the neighboring town of Deerfield. Emily always had a soft spot for men of the cloth, a habit she called “dancing with my shadow.” She far exceeded the dance floor abilities of any woman I ever knew.

The first time I saw her she was enacting an iconic image—lowering a basket of baked goodies to children in the garden from a second story window. On the path I paused, interrupting my conversation with an acquaintance, Deacon Hazlip, to ask the identity of the exquisite benefactress of those clamorous, fortunate children.

“Oh, the myth! That’s mad Emily, Austin’s sister.” He walked on a few paces, paused, and returned to my side with a quizzical look. “What are you staring at?”

“She!” I surprised myself, almost shouting. I was amazed that my companion apparently missed the intense, divine energy and light that emanated from that astonishing creature. Unfortunately, she must have heard my outburst because she glanced once our way and swiftly disappeared inside. I felt my heart constrict, causing me to wince. Meanwhile, my companion observed me with disbelief and mild irritation. Reluctantly, when I was convinced she would not likely appear soon at the window again, I walked slowly on, aware that my carefree, animated gait before my vision had now become a gallows walk. The conversation we were having before had also gone completely out of my head.

“Why did you call her mad Emily?”

“Because she is,” my companion snapped.

“In what way?” I pressed him.

He gave a great sigh, tagged me with a glance of weary aggravation, and explained that she stayed in her home for months at a time. She was known to hide on the landing and speak to visitors out of sight around the corner. Rather than come out to the garden to greet children with her sweets, she lowered them in a basket, just as we’d observed.

“Everything you list is eccentric, perhaps, but mad? That seems extreme.”

“She writes poetry, but have it your way,” my companion said dismissively, as if I could not possibly offer anything relevant in discussing her.

Not many months before this encounter, I lay alone on a green summer hillside above Amherst. With calm heart and empty mind, I stared into a disheveled expanse of blue and fast-riding, fleecy clouds. Suddenly I felt my spirit, my own essence, pouring out of my body in a great pillar of light and energy. It raced into the clouds, joining their own boundless life energy that was suddenly visible to me. It was so liberating I wept. Happily I lay there, weeping softly, my arms outstretched, one with the clouds and the sky and all the life force energy that envelopes us every moment that we’re alive. I was timeless, one with myself and the sky and all the world. That’s how it felt to be in Emily’s presence from the first time I saw her at her window till our last goodbye at her deathbed.

In between I enjoyed the most glorious hours of my life—of that life. When I could get away to visit her, or she me, we plunged into conversation or the woods, into baking or bed, and achieved an elevation of being that no language but her own, perhaps, can contain. To love Emily was to Go with her. She never wandered into anything but rushed ever onward, Urgent! Hearing her speak on any subject was like listening to God (this pleases her even now, I see her smiling). No one ever revered The Divine or fought “God” with more ferocity and courage. Certainly she was transformed, but in the end I believe she actually succeeded in transforming God.

“In other lives,” she told me once between bites of a chicken sandwich, “I’ve been a butterfly, a hummingbird, and Joan of Arc. “ She was fearless always, even of fire. Though the deaths of so many loved ones weighed heavily on her in her last years, especially, nothing ever broke her spirit or humbled her headlong quest to know. If there were a word at her core, just one, I believe it would be Freedom. She was all natural essences. Like her peers the greatest poets, she empathized with and became every human being who ever walked this planet.

So, today, perhaps you can sit for a few moments with her poems. Savor them. Allow them to enter you. Meet the moment.

*

Here is a poem I wrote after visiting Emily’s grave in this time of year in 1975. It was then that the veil parted and I reconnected with my—with our—earlier life. In celebration, I wrote this poem:

Emily’s Courtship

The visitor stands at the grave in knee-high snow.

He’s been calling your house sine 1962

Asking for you.

Is he a distant or close relation to

That man in Baltimore who annually visits Poe?

Certainly you would know.

And if this man who calls you should break through,

What loneliness, time, and pain must he endure

At your father’s door?

Brushing aside that meddling sister of yours,

He calls upstairs, “Emily, my darling, my dear,

There is nothing to fear!”

Don’t greet him in the frills and curls you acquired late,

Long after the Romantics claimed you,

But come down as you

Always were, your hair tucked in a tight bun,

Your limbs loose in  drab, light summer dress

The color of afternoon sun,

The armpits and a flare up the back darkened with sweat

(for you have been sweeping all morning), your shoes

Dusty, impossibly small.

Come down to the parlor, dear, and rest.

Don’t talk around the corner like a ghost,

Or too sly a host;

That ploy worked well enough on disabled Higginson,

And on ancient Wadsworth, so stiff with God

He couldn’t bed you or bend.

Do not descend in a cloud of impossible cadences

And punctuation like slaps to the face-this one is yours,

All man and boy, your poetry toy

Who loves your jokes, and your laughter

Like water lapping in Heaven,

Who would take you as you are.

Still you test his devotion, serving the heavy cake

You made from scratch the night (or half-century?) before;

Your sister returns, the bore.

Sipping bitter tea she claims each word you say,

Or worse, presumes to say them for you.

That just won’t do!

Your caller whispers in her ear, “Get lost! Your Sis and I

Need time alone, comprendé?” With your taste

For the exotic, the far away you’ll never see,

That single, foreign word rings like a wedding bell.

You shoo your flesh and blood away,

If only for a day.

*

Here’s a prompt. Write a poem or journal entry about a past life relationship you had with a writer.

And another: write about a writer you would have liked knowing.

*

May your holidays be blessed, happy and healthy and present, and may you journey safe home to the new year.

Robert McDowell

www.robertmcdowell.net

Three weeks ago, I had a heart scare that plunked me down in the ER of a Kaiser hospital in San Rafael for nine hours.

I was working in my office at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It was late morning. I bent down to pick up some papers I’d dropped and suddenly felt as if a 90 mph fastball had crashed into my chest. After a couple of what the? minutes I was able to stand, but I was wobbly, and I felt a numbing, tingling sensation the length of my left arm. I had to take the papers across our campus to the Earthrise Retreat Center office, but all the time I was there I was thinking, should I say something? Should I go to the hospital? I had a can’t miss meeting in two hours.

Still woozy, I stopped by my colleague’s office to let her know I might not be able to make our meeting. Her back was to me as I entered, but she responded to my voice with “how are you today?” Then she wheeled around and saw me. “You don’t look so good,” she said.

I sat down and began sweating. I turned very pale. Deborah called Kaiser, described my symptoms, and soon we were in her car and on our way to the ER in San Rafael.

Once there I was quickly stripped, gowned, and laid out on a table. A nurse apologized for jabbing me as she inserted an IV in my right arm. Another nurse took blood, while a third attached metallic stickums all over me. An attentive and reassuring Dr. Bateman asked me a series of questions.

In no time at all we discovered that I was in a-fib (rapid, irregular heartbeat). Something to slow that down and smooth it out was poured into the IV. It worked quickly, and I lay back for the rest of the day, awaiting test results.

Every hour or so, one of two doctors would check in on me for a few moments. Yes, I’d had an episode. Early blood tests looked ok, but there appeared to be something they needed more time with.

That was a relaxing hook to dangle from for another two hours.

Six hours in I was informed that the upper left chamber of my heart was enlarged and that I should be admitted for the night for additional tests the next day. One doctor had already told me that the hospital had no cable, and I’d already discovered it offered no wireless access. “We want people to relax while they’re here,” a smiling nurse told me.

An hour later Alfonso came in on a gurney. I caught a glimpse of him before a blue curtain was drawn to separate us. He was in his 40s, I believe, and he screamed for the next hour like a brutally injured soldier on a battlefield. His suffering was horrific. I heard enough to know that his lungs were hemorrhaging; He’d been discharging blood all day; his gut was killing him; he had open sores on his back and legs. He really did not like being catheterized, a procedure that took fifteen excruciating minutes. He pleaded over and over to die.

Dr. Bateman’s voice throughout the ordeal was rock-steady and compassionate, as were three other voices. But two voices became ever more agitated until they were screaming almost as loud as Alfonso. They were aggravated, angry voices.

“We want people to relax while they’re here.”

I lay on my cot meditating, praying for Alfonso, and for patients throughout the hospital lying on gurneys in lonely rooms, or waiting long minutes in halls for someone to come, someone to wheel them somewhere, and I thought of the millions of us in this country who have no health insurance at all.

For more than two years, I was one of them. Recently, after all my tests were in, my new cardiologist told me I have a wounded heart. Yes, I do. It’s wounded by the realization that I live in and love a country that is so deeply conflicted about providing health care for every citizen. Bill Moyers recently said that we need to decide what kind of country we want to be, one of compassion, or one of self-interest and greed.

Compassion is not always easy or affordable. It’s just essential. If you’re conflicted about this, so be it. But all you need to do is think of someone you know without insurance. Lie down beside Alfonso for an hour. What does your spirit, your higher power, and your God require of you? That is all you need to know.

Inspiration

This weekend I taught two workshops at the 20^th anniversary Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. The first was about sacred partnering through journaling and poetry; the second was called Poetry as Play. Serious Play.

As I always do, I enjoyed myself immensely, connecting with more than 40 practitioners and fellow travelers. Each had a special story to share, a unique a ha! moment of awakening to this or that truth. Time and again, I woke up to myself realizing how each exchange with someone made a bridge between us, a moment of sacred partnering. I delighted in the originality and energy of each person, and I marveled at the gift of inspiration. Where does it come from? Where does it go at night? Does it have a name? How many times have you met your own inspiration?

When I wasn’t communing and working at the Mendocino campus, I stayed at a lovely guest house on six acres overlooking the ocean. “This was Chuck Jones’s house,” my host said, “you know, the guy who invented Bugs Bunny.”

Wow! That was fun to think about. Every time I walked out the front door I felt myself a channel for Porky’s signature Eeebadeebadeeb That’s all, Folks! I wondered what it must have been like. Darn! Chuck Jones lived in this house.

There was a beautiful little emerald lawn surrounded by flowers and green shrubs right outside the back glass doors, and at dusk I detected movement. I watched closely, observing dozens of small bunnies hopping out of the shrubbery to munch on that delicious lawn. Of course. Bunnies. Lots of them. All at once, Bugs made a deeper connection with me than ever before. I was privileged to glimpse Jones’s source of inspiration, and I laughed till my sides ached.

I also felt humbled by the experience, and by the realization that inspiration is everywhere in this big, beautiful, imperiled world. Walk out in it paying close attention, or just look up from reading this. See? There! At the edge of sight, or perhaps just beyond. Isn’t it beautiful?