I had stopped paying attention to the melodious sounds of
–inhale into upward facing dog
–exhale into downward.. etc.
Her voice was great, like lotus butter, but I was simply putting one breath after another in a heroic effort to remain breathing at all–you would have called it gasping if you had been the poor person next to me. We were not in to this Power (!!) Vinyasa Yoga Class far, maybe 10/90 minutes. The temperature in the room was exactly 90°F. The thermometer on the wall, next to the clock with every number replaced with the word “Now”, said so. For a “hot” yoga class, this is apparently on the tepid side. I am pretty sure I just had a fever. I could go on like this, but you probably get the idea. Make funny comments to yourself about a big white guy in pigeon pose.

It was funny, even to me. I was smiling at myself. I grew up being an athletic guy, picked close to first on the playground. I played tennis really well when I was young, was a state qualified swimmer, played varsity basketball by my sophomore year in high school. Now I work long hours with my body held, at the operating table, in poses any yoga teacher would be proud to duplicate (if they were in any way healthy) and my brain is getting all my juice. Meanwhile my hamstrings are winding tighter than the g string…
on a guitar (sorry, couldn’t go there this time). My body has taken a beating in service to my brain. All I can say is this yoga class took me, not vice versa. And, that is ok.

In spite of living in one of the yoga karmic home bases of the world, I can count the yoga classes I have taken on one hand; but even as I found my ridiculous version of each pose, I also found something happening in me. I was showing up, my body was moving, working, sweating. It was thanking me, after many, dammit, years of doing other worthy and less-than-worthy things, I was putting myself through some paces, sweating, breathing.

I couldn’t yet empty my brain and just be and just move. I have so long abused myself with thinking and working that I could not let it go, yet. I will though. As I lay on my back at the end of class (when the instructor’s voice was saying blah blah blah and my mind was hearing: NoMorePosesNoMorePoses), I could feel my spine opened up a little. The cement holding me in was looser, and I was taking deep, long breaths.

It’s morning, nothing…
the light shows up, perfect, low
I open.  to you

I used to dream a horrible dream when I was little. I was walking along a path and along each edge there were very big people screaming at me. I always didn’t know why but I think I believed I deserved it. Or maybe I made that up because that is my natural tendency, to believe that.

_______

Cut to my twenties…something turns off with my conscious mind and I simply inhabit my body. A human at 22 is something great, physically. It is rare to find an aware 22 year old. The reason, I think, is that their bodies are as perfect as a human can be and imposing psychology on a perfect body is a buzz killer. It is the time for the amazing possibility that life is as great as this body functions. For a few that happens, but mostly we live our bodylife during that decade and we wonder about it later when something painful wakes us up. I will speak for myself because some of you may be in the lucky cadre that lives asleep but in your bodies forever. You are few, but I respect your uncanny charm, even if I don’t buy a damn word of it. I digress (not really).

Anyway, so I am not twenty-five and physically perfect. I am 47 and my dreams (even really old ones) teach me things and I am listening and you know, for 47, I am still doing ok in my body. I just have this brain or spirit or psyche that asks tough questions…Who was that screaming at a perfectly good child? Are we everyone in our dreams even when we are 5? How could I have that row of yelling big people in me at five? How do I have myself and awareness and the other side of the coin–unawareness and just being, in my body, in this time and this place. I don’t know. I could not have had this conversation 20 or 10 years ago.…time moves backwards for awareness. Then a crack opens and there is no going back, but what happens then after the crack is good, in the end, after pain and mourning and feeling things that were impossible 20 or 10 years ago. I should mention here that someone close to me recently cursed me and invited my life to play out only in my mirage of shame (see here), and even though I know my dreams will play with this curse, I am saying to you all now and here that I won’t eat that poison pie. If I do it is my ego asking me to be awful so you will tell me I’m not. That is the worst kind of reassurance, don’t you think?

________

And there I am holding my son, one this week, who is only present and who is only feeling and without boundaries and vulnerable and sometimes I am not up to that. I can’t be in the presence of that. My own shame, worthlessness, seeps in. His shining presence is too much for me and I focus on the mundane, the shit he still makes like we all do. I have just barely enough of me to ask for help and I have a partner who sees something of this in me and checks in, and I have the privilege of asking my partner to take over while I go find myself…here, even though it is Mother’s Day and every day she works all day at this, this being in the presence of presence which is, for me, overwhelming.
And I know that I am as good and flawed as you and that it therefore does not matter. By that I mean that if I know my shame or my goodness is just like yours is to you, then we can just agree we are the same, flawed, perfect. My shame is the same as yours and my essential goodness is the same as yours. Even though everything in me wants to tell a story to make me make worthlessness somehow special in its unique worthlessness, it isn’t. It is the same as yours, and so is the goodness and there is my path, back through the crack to the essential me, the part that connects to you and loses myself at times, here for instance, or in Rose’s undying hope in us, or in some crazy, beautiful light glancing off the stud on a punk’s leather jacket or the crack in a log, long dead, that makes remember I am alive…for instance.

Today someone who knows me well sent me an email. I was going to say she outlined my faults and sins, but that would be kind. She delved in to the shame as only someone who has been there herself can know. The net was wide and the hooks were precise. I have turned my back to her. Sounds simple, but it wasn’t and it was the only way to take the next step with integrity, for me. This is hard, because I know her well, like family, in a way. The details don’t matter, but that is what happened.

I have been down some of the dark alleys she painted for me. I lived in them, took people I cared about down them, even. But I have also been back to those alleys, as best as I can, and I have cleaned up where I can. I have not made my past disappear, but I have let go of the shame. I made poor decisions. If she had said that, she would have been right, but she didn’t. She said I was marred and mis-wrought, even though she held me as a baby and said she loved me first and best and she is not my mother. She said she knew I was wrong, in spite of the care she gave me as an infant. She is right about holding me–she did–but she is not right about my fundamental badness. I am like you, fundamentally good. (!) I have made choices and I have repaired what I can and I have healed and I have owned all I can. The more I own the more I can own, and I am not injured in the owning of my impact of the world. It is healing as long as I have first done the important work of letting go of shame. Having someone who held me as a baby tell me that I am fundamentally mis-made would have sent me reeling into dark places before I forgave myself. Now I don’t believe the hype, the story, the lies.

Shame is tricky, sticky, relentless and as close as my skin. How did I let go of the false belief that I was made wrong? I did four things. I told my truth when I came to know it. I set boundaries so that I contained my impact and I contained the world’s impact on me. I asked you for help so that the isolation’s whispers had a counterpoint of love from you–I got connected. I forgave myself. That last word needs definition. Forgiveness means that I stop holding the energy of the thing that hurt me. I let it go and get free. It has nothing to do with absolving responsibility, only tearing down the destructive lies that are the mortar of the house of shame.

Lastly, fifthly, I make art from shame: honest beauty heals.

He’s 5, Chuck Taylor’s on his feet, before they were hip, when they were still just white shoes on a white boy, walking through the hood. He is kicking the can when that was still the name for ‘tag’. He is running his hand along the slats in a white fence, feels the thud thud thud as his fingertips knock the next slat. Time is slowing, the light is becoming slanted, funny, clearer, not in a good way. He can tell before the fence ends, two feet before or three that the gap to the next fence, the alley, holds a disaster. He doesn’t really know it, but now, looking back, he knows he knew. Things wasn’t right around that corner. Right hand on the slats in the fence, Chuck Taylor’s under jeans, his head slowly, on a pivot, turns right, into the alley’s maw, to see the body of a dead man.

It is lying there unnatural, violent. His fingers, the boy’s, slowing now, are just brushing the last white slats silently. He makes a half turn in to the alley and stops. He’s 5. His arms are at his side now and, now today 50 years later, he remembers that his foot, like on automatic, slips forward and kicks a stone that stops between the second and third fingers of the man, and as he remembers it now, that stone is still, in this moment, skidding along the blanched sidewalk–it is alway this moment between the kick and the silent knock of stone on knuckle… Then nothing. Neither of them move and then the boy is turning away, walking, and not feeling and creating an elaborate system to hide that moment and still meet the next line of white slats and his fingers running through them, thudding…all that has to make sense again before the width of the alley is over and he is still walking…home

…and every time he dreams of this moment he is standing in center field (remembering the alley and the man and the white and the fence and the stone), glove under his left arm and he is adjusting his hat to shield his eyes from the sun and he is looking up to the stands, sun breaking through the bleachers like through white slats and in the dream he drops his glove, turns his back to the game and holds his arms out and waits for his father to meet his gaze from the stands and his father was not there.

I am going to try to relate this to you in a way that does not sound contrived. It’s impossible. It is contrived. Contrived means that it was obviously planned. This, what I am telling you about, was, and yet something entered in to the space between the plan and the unknown, the wonderful, if you will allow me that.
I showed up to Cincinnati for my residency in general surgery with every expectation to be working 100 hours + weekly. I was not disappointed. At the same time as that extremely and unyielding schedule, I met Robbo. We met on almost day one at the VA Hospital. The elevator made a sound of two notes that said it was probably meant to be. Those two notes were the first two notes of St. Stephen’s, a song we both knew.
Ok, so this is where it turns in to a story about two guys who know the same Grateful Dead song and they get connected. Etc. But I have to make this mean more, because there are a million stories like that out there. Never mind that Rob and I, like beautiful, innocent children, at age 26, followed mail delivery people around to get our Spring or Summer Grateful Dead tickets, like children, you get that right? Never mind that we abandoned ourselves and found ourselves by finding each other at Grateful Dead shows throughout our 100+ hour/week schedules, more like 120 hours per week–do that math for your current job and then multiply by minimum wage, which was less than $5/ hour. Whatever.. We were given the opportunity to operate on live humans and learn. For all those people who gave me that chance I say: Thank you Ma’a,m, Sir. I have done the best I can each and every day, even when I have made mistakes, with what you taught me, and, thank you.
So we needed the time off, Rob and me. It was hard, I won’t lie. It was the distance between the moon and the earth, the distance between the expectation to be there in the morning at 5am and our desire to be together, Rob and me, and , surgery on humans, and our own human limitations. The struggle was inexplicable. I can’t really explain it here. Take a minute and imagine you go from not cutting people open, to cutting people open and what that means in terms of responsibility and privilege and then the absolute need to decompress from that to be separate from that, to be kids again for a minute, really that is it at the heart of it, to be kids.
In the midst of that, insert the Grateful Dead Spring tour of 1991 and two boymen who know they need to not just work but also to play. You will feel maybe then amazing gulf between the moon and the earth if you understand that. It is different and necessarily different worlds. They connect the way that a gas peddle and the road connect: not exactly directly but not indirectly either.
Anyway, Robbo, it feels like summer and the moon is long in the sky tonight and Jerry is now gone and dead, but every year at this time, I miss you so hard and I love you for sharing surgery training with me. And I love you anyway and always, brother, silly as it sounds.

Tonight I took an old woman back to the operating room because she had a bowel obstruction. Two things here: One: we are built like donuts and our donut hole does not tolerate a twist. Two: she had been to the OR recently for another operation and this obstruction resulted from her bowel–part of the donut “hole” we are made of, twisting. She called me at 6 in the morning. We made it to surgery at precisely 6 pm. Moving one human being through the warrens of a hospital system is a, sometimes, all day affair.

Finally she was in pre-op holding and she looked at me solid and straight-faced and said: Why are we here?

The window we can look through is not the whole picture. It is important, but in the shadows around what we think we see are shadows with whole other worlds, maybe meaningless and maybe really important, mostly dark. She, Madge, was drifting in and out of pain and mortality and trust. She held my hand while I explained again what we were about to do and she only nodded. Consent.

While we were starting the operation a nurse asked Ray, the anesthesiologist, where is your daughter going to college next year. His answer…etc. She said, is that your choice or will you send her wherever will make her happy. Wise Ray: “Not my job to make her happy.” That is a profound truth. What you feel is what you feel, even if your name is My Son. Happy, Sad, Lonely, I don’t make you feel those things. I make you safe as I can so you can feel whatever the next feeling is. Go for it. Feel it all.

My patient did well with surgery today, I hope. I don’t know. I see through a glass, darkly, I know in part, but (maybe) then I shall know, even as I am known. That is a Bible verse I remember. I am always struck by the beauty of so many verses, like this one. How great to know, even as well as I am known by the person/god/entity that made me. So, she, Madge, is in the hospital recovering and my fallibility is as evident as her mortality and I hope there is an inverse correlation between the two. To be clear: get well soon Madge.

I wish for my life to be lived with a soundtrack
that you would know
like Spanish Bombs by the Clash, or
like “water colors in the rain” by Al Stewart
and the excruciating unending perfection of that line
and it’s only Friday afternoon and you, you, are off two days
ok, it’s two and a half technically, two days until the big screen calls and you
are back at it, and we are all
back
at it
and it’s Monday and we looking for our lovers on the far side of the bed
at 6:45 but without resolve, only with the blue understanding of Monday and the
last few minutes before the hundreds of minutes until Friday and all it’s cliches and finally some rest again,
it’s starting again.

I went to Chicago and walked and made some pictures and let myself do nothing too important for a little while. I went to the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College to see an exhibit called “Limits of Photography”. The idea was to show photographs in which the “viewer loses faith in the veracity of photography”. I looked at collages, rephotographed photos, and manipulations involving ink, drawing on photographs and video (more on that in a minute). The whole time I was thinking,where is the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover photo? When I see that cover every winter, I question the veracity of the photograph on every level. I don’t mind developing photographs to be something other than a flat representation of what was in front of the lens. I have written about that before; however, the SI, Vogue, Men’s Health (etc forever) views of the body and beauty and the meaning of a photograph are designed not to pursue beauty or “art” or even cleverness. In the same way that cigarette makers pack cigarettes full of enhancers, accelerants, and chemicals to draw you to the next smoke, these magazines use photography soley to create a myth that has the same attractants for our brains to want more. And more. The create desire and shame (I don’t look like him!) at the same time. I seriously doubt the veracity of those photographs. The museum’s exhibit of technically manipulated frames felt like first grade stuff compared to the experts at SI.

I walked around a corner in the exhibit in to a small room with a grainy film looping all on its onw. I photographed it after watching it. The mini-review on the wall was gushing…see below. The film, apparently a film repeatedly refilmed to become abstract and cartoon-like, was taken with the camera in the center of an idyllic, Oregon-type scene. The camera panned in a circle across a river scene without changing pace or angle. Trees, running water, a teepee, a fire–wisps of smoke over perfect round little logs, a cooking pot, a little waterfall, more river and back to the beginning. I did love it. I loved that it got it’s own little dark room at the exhibit, that no one else was in there with me while I watched it a couple of times, that it felt like a window looking from Chicago back to the rivers and hills under the Cascades in Oregon. I loved that it was not forgotten even though is it was made in 1972. Even though it looked completely unreal, all I can say is that it conveyed truth anyway. It was the best thing I saw at the exhibit.

From the exhibit materials…

J J Murphy
(American, b. 1947)
Sky Blue Water Light Sign, 1972 Video, 8 1⁄2 minutes
Original 16mm film, converted to DVD

Sky Blue Water Light Sign is best seen in total innocence. My guess is that if one knows what he or she is looking at before seeing this little film, half of its excitement and a good deal of its meaning disappear. Seen in total innocence, though, Sky Blue Water is a wonder. With Gottheim’s Blues and Frampton’s Lemon (for Robert Hunt), it is one of the happiest, most uplifting short films I’ve ever seen.
–Scott MacDonald, Idiolects