This moment—now this one—and this
Steps toward soulful awareness in Middletown
April 27, 2018 • By “Lafe”
Ain’t easy bein’ soulful—aware there is more going on than meets the eye, catchin’ a glimpse of the inside of things.
Carl Jung calls me to soulful awareness this morning. Well, okay, Horatius first sounds the call first but I don’t catch it. In a poem by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, Horatius leads two other men on a brave if foolish venture to hold the bridge into the Eternal City against a massive horde threatening to cross it and so sack Rome. He slays two of the generals who come against him: Picus of Umbria and Lausulus of Urgo. He helps fell the great lord of Luna, Astur. Altogether, the three defenders slay seven mighty warriors. Their deaths give the enemy pause—and time for frantic work crews to cut the bridge free of its moorings. Timbers crack. The bridge shudders, totters, tumbles into the raging river below. Horatius’ companions leap to safety just in time. Their captain remains standing on the opposite bank. A great shout goes up from the onlookers. Horatius will now be killed or captured by his opponents—but no. He looks at them, turns away, utters a prayer, sheathes his sword and plunges headlong into the roiling waters.
The poem goes on but I close the book. I will resume it tomorrow.
I turn to Carl Jung, read a portion from The Red Book in which Jung says much as he values science, there are times the logical workings of science leaves him empty and sick. In such moments he needs books written from the soul.
Books written from the soul, eh? Soulful writing. Full of soul. Soul-full. Full soul.
How do I fill my soul? With what will I fill it today? What does a full soul look like, anyway? What does it write like? What are soulful choices? Horatius refuses the logical, expected route, opts for passion, panache, glory and dash. Is his a soulful choice?
No screaming enemy hordes await me across the river, so far as I know. What do soulful choices look like on an ordinary run-of-the-mill day? What would today look like were I to be soulfully aware? I know the answer to that. For me, it would start with being mindful, aware, observant in the moment—and would branch out from there. I decide to take this as my challenge, plunge into it. But first I have to go to work.
Where straightway I forget all promises made to myself.
Who needs screaming hordes to go unaware?
My eye hurts and I want to rub it. A sty is developing in the lower righthand corner of my right eye and I know rubbing it will only make it worse. Still.
Coworker Her5 shows me a picture of dolphin bananas…stem end slit open to form a mouth, holding a red cherry ball, black dot drawn for the eye, the banana cut in half, stuffed in a glass filled with sea foam green grapes. “So cute,” she says, and I agree.
Next it’s a picture of toast smeared with something green. “Guacamole toast is the new thing,” she tells me. “A millennial thing. For ‘snowflakes.’ That’s what my honey calls millennials—‘snowflakes.’ Punk kids who think everything should be handed to them on a plate. I’m not a snowflake but I like guacamole toast.”
I confess I’ve never tried guacamole on toast. Never heard of it. Didn’t know it was a thing.
At 9:05 my right heel flashes hot. It only lasts a few seconds. Feels like someone’s holding a blow torch a short distance from my heel. This has been going on for six days now. Never lasts long. No set pattern. Nonetheless I’ve been jotting the time and duration against the day I finally see a doctor. Google calls it “hot heel syndrome” and suggests it may be neuropathy.
“Nice legs,” I hear one male coworker say to another.
“Thanks,” comes the reply. The voice is that of the sexy male coworker whose good looks regularly capture my attention. In private I refer to him as “Humbert Clotet,” after the fashion model he resembles.
Ah, Humbert must be wearing shorts today.
I stand up to better witness his entry. He’s wearing long—ridiculously long—cut-offs that do little but conceal his legs. Dang. I envy my coworkers their easy freedom to joke about subjects I dare not admit aloud. For me to joke about Humbert’s legs would hit too close to home, might hint at the role he plays in my sexual fantasy life. I think of my friend Jim in Indianapolis who jokes about his attraction to his (straight) male coworker, chides him for wearing tight t-shirts to work as this makes it impossible for him to concentrate. They laugh about it.
I don’t so much laugh as drool.
I amend my appraisal of Humbert’s cut-offs when he stands and faces the job board. I roll my chair over, pretend to sort thru papers while looking past them to him. I like the way his jean shorts tighten around his buttocks when he shifts his weight just so. He wears an ecru sweatshirt. This pairing of sweatshirt and shorts, jet black hair, warm beige skin and soft denim gets me.
From her seat near the window, She3 notes the arrival of an older temp worker. “She’s so funny,” says She3. “She’s inching her way into the parking spot, going really slow like she’s driving a tank.”
I think of aging, and how others see us. How we see ourselves. Last night Husband and I went out to eat with a 90-year-old friend who groused about people not recognizing his obvious talents and abilities. Husband and I commented on this later—perhaps none of us realize the effect time and aging have on us. We tend to see ourselves as virtually unchanged, may not realize how our capacities diminish with years.
I’m not being mindful of anything at the moment—except for the way Humbert’s long hair flops down over his face. He is forever running his fingers through it, smoothing it back out of his eyes.
At 10:35 my heel flashes hot again. And again at 11:01. A few seconds each time.
All ye need to know
Work has been nonstop of late. This morning is no different. I’m feeling the strain. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” saith the sage. I’ve been emitting cries of quiet desperation all morning. Am tempted to bang my head on the dividing wall between our work cubicles. Confess this to Her5. Then go outside for a break.
I sit on a wooden pallet I set against the building for this purpose. A picnic table once served as the employee’s break table; it’s still stands in the yard, if barely. It now functions as the idea of a picnic table. We used to have an ash tree to sit under, but emerald ash borer beetles took care of that. It’s not even an idea anymore. Nowadays the only morning shade is to be found is in the lee of the building: I’m in it.
I look out over a green lawn spangled with yellow dandelions, think of Horatius, the bridge, soulful writings. How shall I see the soul of things today?
The world offers itself in bright greens and sunbursts of intense yellow. I focus on one dandelion, note the dark orange-yellow center, bright sunshine yellow spiking around the rim, set against the green of new spring grass. How gorgeous the world; it presents itself to us in beauty. And if that’s not soulful….
Keats says “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” What if I were armed with only this knowledge? I would conclude:
• Dandelions against green grass are so truthful.
• There is such truth here: beauty spreads.
• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
• Truth is free.
• Truth is glorious.
• Truth is individual and unique whilst sharing commonality with others.
• Beauty springs up, points sunward.
• Truth will up and out.
• Truth spreads.
• Truth remains undaunted in the face of attempts to eradicate it.
• Truth is the natural order of things.
Not all is gold
Maybe sexual desire is the natural order of things, as well? I’ll soon be back inside. Bet I’ll find opportunity to ogle Humbert again. How can I look at him in a soulful way?
I can see him as more than his body. I can see him as more than an object of lust and affection and desire. I know it’s not even him I want—it’s youth and youthful energy and sex and the idea of it and so on. If I look at him with soulful awareness, I may see a young man starting his journey, still in college, learning, struggling, partying, making friends, worrying, self-focused, looking outside himself, struggling with petty annoyances, pretty sure he knows it all. I can think back to my college years and where the wave was tossing me then, where it’s tossing me now, where it may be tossing him.
Doesn’t this constitute a soulful approach? Is it not soulful to see another as a whole person?
Couple days ago I was struck by an image Jung had painted—the soul filled with color: red, black, gold, white. A surprising amount of black. Not all is gold. Not all is passion. Not all is purity. Much is hidden, chthonic, shrouded.
Heel hot at 11:16.
Back inside, and trying to think soulfully. About Humbert, the gold and black in him, in me, in everything. About truth spreading like dandelions, reaching to the light, undeterred by eradication attempts. The wind blowing them and the grass, how we are touched by currents eternal and eternal and ever-changing. How soon we fall like the grass, get blown away, go to seed. How silence is perhaps most soulful of all.
He3 hands out jelly beans. “None for me,” says Humbert. “I don’t do sweets.”
News to me.
Office chatter. Her5 talks about her son’s friend joining the family for a visit to the downtown YMCA.
“‘You watch your mouth,’ I told him. ‘Don’t be a dick.’ He was surprisingly chilled, but he was pushing back at me on the way in the car on the way there. He is a racist little shit. At least he didn’t get me kicked out of the Y.”
“But he needed that,” says She3. “Too often kids don’t get instruction on how they’re supposed to act, so they go their own way and follow other kids.”
Gold in him, in her, in them. Gold and black. Truth and beauty.
I do okay with the soulful stuff until Humbert returns from lunch and lust flares (why should those be incompatible in my mind?). My heel flames, too, 1:18 p.m.
Of fate and salt
Home for my noon hour. Dinner consists of scrambled eggs topped with spinach topped with Aldi’s clam chowder. Interesting culinary adventure, these last two weeks, no weeklong soup or casserole to see us through. We’ve been making it on eggs, plus whatever we find to add to them.
Husband and I commiserate about being tired. He took a 20 minute nap after he returned from a morning meeting. We have been going to bed late, rising up early and eating the bread of sorrows when what we much prefer are the donuts of happiness.
What is the soul of eating, except that anything that is alive feeds on some other living thing. Life eats life. I make little leafy fern patterns in the bottom of my soup bowl as I scrape out the egg and chowder.
We finish a crossword puzzle from Friday, April 20, Star Press, putting in “eti” as A TOURS SEASON. I assume this is the French for ‘spring’ or ‘summer;’ and that KISMET is “fite,” whatever that means. Days later I will discover we had it wrong: kismet is another word for fate. We put “erde” as the answer to DAS LIED VON DER ____; we don’t know what this means either.
Is this what it is to live soulfully, to fill in blanks with one’s best guess? Or is it A WASTE OF TIME (#26 Across), “dally”?
I think of my husband’s Aunt J. as I open her oaken washstand—it now sits in our entryway. I don’t know much about her save that she was raped, devoted herself to the wild child born of that encounter in a time when having a child born out of wedlock was frowned upon. Said child later ran afoul of the law and spent a lot of time in prison.
Sheesh. How I sum up a life in a few sentences. How often and how glibly we do this. If I were asked to sum up my own life in a few sentences, I would be hard pressed to do so. But I bet others can and will do so.
I hope a moment of mindfulness is like a little salt that seasons the whole pot, or a pinch of yeast that leavens the entire loaf. Because I cannot stay mindful for a long stretch of time. Just now I’m finishing tea at dinner. I sip it, mindful of where the tea came from, what the taste is, how it slides down the cup, into my mouth, down my throat, what it feels like as I swallow. The warmth, the sensation, the position of my body as I drink it. I can do this for a moment, and then it slips away. But how else to be soulful except as one can and in the moments one can?
Try soulful ogling
So then. I soulfully ogle Humbert. The way his black bangs fall across his forehead, the tangles and zangles they make, the idiosyncratic way some of them angle out on trajectories all their own. I aim to embrace the whole of me: the mournful self, thoughtful pondering, ravenous hunger for sexual fantasy, longing for a place of my own in the world, wanting to find grace to love and embrace myself as I am.
Hang all that. That’s me over-intellectualizing. I let it go the instant Humbert gets to his feet, stands in front of his desk and stretches, flexing his muscles and offering those who are watching an eyeful of youthful beauty, energy and nonchalance.
Woof.
Mid-afternoon I pause in front of the restroom mirror and ask myself again, “how do I live the day soulfully? What does this look like for me?”
A fuzz-faced, wrinkled worn man looks back at m. I admonish him, “Look at you there tucking in your shirt, trying to look presentable, putting your hair back in line, smiling. Look at that sore red eye. I feel sad for that little boy in you who has always had trouble seeing clearly. Can you love all you see, altogether? Can I love you?
“And how does this translate into action? If I love myself, am I kinder to my coworkers? More apt to lend a helping hand? Put in a cheerful word? Offer support?”
I take my afternoon break in the conference room. Long room, long table. Vaulted ceiling with windows along the ridge line that let in light that far outshines the electric lightbulbs burning over the conference table. Green plants. One fern barely holding onto life. Another going at it for all it’s worth. A striped spider plant. A still-blooming white and pink poinsettia. Potted bamboo undecided if it will live or die. A thriving asparagus fern—ugh.
I once lived with two asparagus ferns. They were prickly and huge and messy—constantly shedding sharp little leaves. Not my favorites.
I concentrate on my breathing. Air in, out; lungs filled, emptied, ocean tide of my breath, in, out, in out, endless cycle, repetition. Taking in, letting go; the cycle of life. The not getting stuck, give and take, yin and yang, up and down. The involuntary unconscious movement that keeps me alive that someday will be replaced by the death rattle I heard in my grandmother’s roommate at the nursing home.
Thoughts of Brent, former student of mine, who at age 48 had a massive heart attack, told me he was dead for two minutes. Has two stents in his arteries now, is on disability, and by his Facebook posts has a soft heart, soft soul, celebrates connection, relationship, nature, beauty, wonder and the world. I’m pleased to see him making this kind of footprint in the world.
The clock on the wall. Its pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth like my breath. Reminder that time is fleeting, our lives short.
In my body. Cool air. Warm tea. My eye hurts. I feel tired. I feel relaxed. I feel pressured. I enjoy sunshine. I’m concerned someone will wonder what I’m doing in here by myself. I have unfinished tasks. I will always have unfinished tasks. I have done good work. I will do good work. I am alive. I am in the moment. I am happy. I am learning. I am always learning.
Everything’s alright
“You should be a stand-up comedian,” I often tell Him2. He is witty and thinks fast on his feet. Often has us in stitches. Just now he lets out a mouselike squeak from across the room. I snort in amusement. My female coworkers respond with laughter.
“I made it, don’t be concerned. Everything’s alright,” Him2 says.
“Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to live inside your head for a little while,” I say.
“You say that now,” he says.
“That’s why I included a caveat—‘for a little while,’” I reply.
Our workday winds down.
She3 watches the temp worker leave. “Funny, when she comes in she’s like a little tank—rrrrrrrr—rolling on in like she doesn’t want to bump anything. And when she leaves, she tears out of here like nobody’s business.”
Her5: “Well, she’s got the power to do that.
Him2: “Yeah, she drives some kind of old sports car.”
She3: “It’s a Camaro.”
I listen to my coworkers’ plans for the weekend, try to connect with them, hear what they want out of the next two days, express my best wishes—“Good luck car shopping—if I hear of something I’ll let you know;” “Glad you’ll get your cast off.” In little ways I try to be present.
Time for me to go, too. I stop by the restroom on the way out. Pee. And fart as I pee. And wonder how to be soulfully present to these bodily functions, this part of being human. I’ve found as I age my pee doesn’t stop when I want it to, but keeps dribbling. I keep learning what it is to be in a body—I who for so long denied that I am embodied.
As I leave the parking lot I leave the car radio off. Hmph. When I want to be soulful, whole, I turn off the radio. Avoid the steady drumbeat of news—panic, alarm, shock, hardship, tragedy, concern, uproar, gossip, style, fashion, all the rest. Instead I look inward and wonder how that inwardness goes outward.
I was on retreat recently with a local Catholic priest soon to turn 88. He talked about his strategies for living in the present moment. He stays aware of breath and tastes and smells, the play of light and shadow. I thought, “if that’s not as good a lesson in how to stay aware, then I don’t know what is.”
Lick it up
Supper, then off to downtown Muncie.
I need new batteries for the voice recorder I’m using today. We stop to buy them at a small shop. Time is short and the line long. Two clerks in the store, but only one at the cash register. The other cleans up after a customer who dropped a bottle of spaghetti sauce in the checkout aisle. She uses a broom and dustpan to sweep up the broken glass and spattered sauce. “This is getting the broom all messy,” she says. She lifts the green handle. The line of customers watches thick chunky sauce drip from the bristles. Next she uses paper towels. At last she gets a wet mop.
“Lick it up, I dare you,” calls her coworker.
“That would be a ‘no,’” comes the reply. “Not gonna happen.”
I am eight cents short, so I hold up the line while I run out to the car and get a dime from my husband. End of adventure. I could wish something uproariously funny would happen to me on Diary Days.
We pass three magnolia trees in glorious bloom, redbud trees, some trees in white blossom that don’t look like flowering crabs. People are out mowing or recently have mown their lawns. People walk dogs. Afternoon sun slants in long shadows across the ground. We’re on our way to a volunteer commitment, then plan to attend Muncie Civic Theatre’s presentation of Peter and the Star Catcher. I know nothing, really, about the show, other than it’s a prequel to Peter Pan. I presume it’s a musical. And I look forward to seeing it.
We’ve waited until the last minute to get seats. To get as close as we can, my husband and I take seats in separate rows. I am sandwiched between two (very) straight men—friends—each here with a woman and child or children. I wouldn’t know we’re seeing a comedy from the their reactions. The one on my right stares at his mobile device through much of the first act.
The whole show is irreverently funny. And no wonder—it’s satire, co-written by humorist Dave Barry. Snide, funny—transgressive, too. We’re cued in that this will be the case at the opening curtain when we see the nursemaid is played by a man.
I laugh at some lines—how can I not?—but I temper my reactions given my seatmates’ deafening silence. I jot down lines that catch my attention.
Molly talks to The Boy (later be named Peter), tells him, “Sorry.”
He replies, “You say ‘sorry,’ like it smooths everything over and makes it all right. It doesn’t. There’s a mass of darkness in the world and it doesn’t go away.”
Oooooh. I’ve touched that darkness.
Later, “Why should I help anybody? Nobody’s ever helped me.”
Right before the intermission, The Boy is cast into the ocean, climbs atop a sea chest. Ere long he removes his two shirts, hoists them as sails. The audience gets to see his well-defined chest, flushed red with exertion, red and beige, swell and contract as he breathes. Swell. Very swell. I get an eyeful.
Lines of thought
After the intermission my husband and I claim two empty seats on the front row; I enjoy Act II much more for being seated next to him. I guffaw with abandon.
Act II opens with a bang—a dozen pirate men appear in drag as mermaids, and camp it up. They each wear a bra festooned with a matched set of (mostly) kitchen-related items, one pinned to each false breast. One mermaid has whisks, another eggbeaters, another two plastic bananas. The mermaid-in-chief (played by local cancer doctor Michael Williamson) sports a closed vegetable strainer on each breast. The mermaid band strums their instruments and sings. At a given crescendo the mermaid-in-chief strums her breasts and both vegetable strainers flash/flare open—a hilarious piece of showmanship that in itself is worth the entire cost of admission.
I am surprised at how many seldom-discussed and/or taboo elements the play incorporates: cross-dressing, same-sex relationships, a sexy bare-chested male, obscene gestures, child abuse; bondage and discipline; child labor; human trafficking, sadism, amputation, cannibalism, gratuitous violence, revenge. The show uses humor to gain admittance to otherwise closed doors.
– = –
The natives of Mollusk Island double over in laughter: “You called her ‘Molly!’ In our language, ‘molly’ means ‘squid poop.’”
– = –
“This is all your fault, Molly,” Peter says. “You made me feel like some great big man. I’m not a great big man.”
Comes a time when we all come to this realization. My heel flashes hot.
– = –
Peter: “They’re trying to kill us.”
The Teacher (a mermaid): “Yeah, life is complicated.”
You can say that again.
– = –
Teacher (to Peter): “The star stuff will change you into what you want to be.”
What do I want to be?
– = –
I have to fart again. Hitherto I’ve been able to fart under cover of laughter. But suddenly, it grows quiet. I’m afraid this will be a rip snorter. I let it go and hope for the best. It aborts before making any noise.
– = –
Molly says that if she doesn’t get married, she “will love words for their own sake, like ‘hyacinth’ and ‘Piccadilly’ and ‘honesty.’”
Another word lover!
– = –
Molly to her father: “Things are only worth what you’re willing to give up for them.”
– = –
The maid Nana to the pirate captain Black Stache: “You are ruffians!”
“We are no ruffians, madam,” he replies.
To which one of the pirates adds, “We’ve never even been to Ruffia.”
– = –
Black Stache (to Peter): “And so we arrive in the belly of the beast.”
We are on holy ground indeed, then.
– = –
Black Stache (to Peter): “Genuine heroic sacrifice. . . . You are my hero.”
The tables turn: the adult becomes the boy, the boy, the adult.
– = –
Molly: “The boy deserves a home.”
Peter: “Grown ups lie. They lie and then they leave.”
Is this what I did to my children in the divorce?
– = –
The Teacher (to Peter): Pan means “wild”. . . .
Molly (to Peter): “‘Pan’ means ‘all,’ ‘everywhere.’ Everywhere is your home.
Blessed are they who find their heart’s home. My heel flashes hot.
– = –
Father: “How do you feel, Peter?”
Peter: “Like I’m finally out of the dark.”
Father: “There’s a name for that.”
Peter: “Home.”
– = –
Father: “The thing you did against impossible odds, that’s what you’ll always have.”
– = –
Peter (translating what Tinkerbell says): “To have faith is to have wings.”
The takehome
9:51 pm. Show’s over.
On the way home, my husband and I discuss the play. We both agree the play is very funny, and wish the mics had been working at full capacity and we could have heard more of the lines. We discuss which male actors (they were all men, except for one woman) remind us of people we know. One actor looks like my dentist; the man who plays Smee looks like T., a good friend of ours. We note which actors we find especially attractive.
“I’d like to take that one guy home with us,” I say. “Long-hair, lithe little body, very cute, talented.”
Pause.
“Sometimes I think I have a one-track mind,” I say. “I feel like I have to mention these things. Act One ends with Peter on the raft, shirtless and sexy. During intermission we were stand back there together and I say, ‘Peter is so sexy without his shirt on.’ ‘Yeah,’ you say, and kind of brush it off. And I think, “You don’t bring these things up—why must I? Why do I feel the need to claim it or say it aloud?”
My husband surprises me with his response. “You’re more free than I am. I’m very rigid. I don’t allow myself to express that stuff. I’m glad you do.”
Silence.
“Well, I don’t want to be obnoxious, play a one-note song—as if that’s all I can appreciate about someone. On the other hand, I try to embrace it, too, say it’s a part of me and it’s there. I tried not to embrace it for so long that it’s….” I trail off.
– = –
“You were one row behind me, right? Because the woman behind me and to my right—you must have been sitting pretty close to her—kept saying, ‘Oh, I love that,’ and “Awwww.’ She was very connected to what was happening and very responsive, as opposed to the two men I was sandwiched between.”
“Yeah,” says Husband. “Both she and the young man she was sitting beside, they were right with it, clapping and laughing.”
“Safer for me to laugh and enjoy and respond and laugh when I’m sitting next to you. I noted I felt constrained. It took me longer to respond when I was between those two men. And they knew each other. When I went to sit down they were leaning over, talking to each other. Then I come in and sit down and stop their conversation. And they were both unresponsive through the play. Cut from the same cloth. I’m glad they came to see it, anyway, and brought their wives and child or children. And I wish they could have enjoyed it more.”
We arrive home. I whistle, “Roll On You Little Dogies” as I walk out to gather eggs. I change from whistling to singing as I approach the barn. The geese hear me and start honking in reply. We exchange greetings, they in their language, me in my approximation of goose with some English thrown in. The guineas have displaced the six hens that were accustomed to roosting atop the flat-topped nest box. Reepicheep is setting in the nest box. I reach under her and take the eggs she’s keeping warm, wanting to hatch. I keep up a steady stream of conversation with geese, chickens, geese again. I throw shelled corn to the geese as a midnight snack, then lock the barn door and make my way back to the house, singing.
My husband stands near the refrigerator eating from a nearly-empty ice cream container. I feign dismay: “How can I record in a blog post for posterity that I sat around eating ice cream at 10:45 at night? I should be saying, ‘I took my vitamins, ran a mile and a half on the elliptical trainer, made good choices for health….’ Instead, ‘I came home and ate ice cream.’”
“After a long day’s work,” says my husband.
“So I’ll record that, ‘while my husband was eating ice cream out of the container, I sat down to table and dined on muskmelon.”
“While your husband was hiding in the kitchen eating ice cream…and failing to write anything in his diary.”
“History is the story of omission,” I say. “Sometimes the real story is what gets left out.”
We make our way to bed. I forget to be mindful, to be present to the moment, to be anything other than happy to be where I am and with whom I am. ?