Time Passages

Many may be familiar with Al Stewart's 1978 version of Time Passages whose haunting melody and enigmatic prose took many of us out of childhood and into a new time signature of life. These are the words.
It was late in December
The sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind
Go drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Well, I'm not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on
Are the things that don't last
Well, it's just now
And then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There's something back here that you left behind
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don't know why you should feel
That there's something to learn
It's just a game that you play

Well, the picture is changing
Now you're part of a crowd
They're laughing at something
And the music's loud
A gal comes towards you
You once used to know
You reach out your hand
But you're all alone
In these time passages
I know you're in there
You're just out of sight
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

The haunting message that I took from this work was that my own time was not only finite, but largely fictional. The stories that we believe to be true, the ones we tell ourselves, have an awesome power to change our behavior, to literally shape our brains (some say sculpt) and to influence both perception and reality in profound ways.

I once met a woman who had a uniquely overpowered drive to "make something of herself". She had passed the bar, attained mulitple degrees, including doctorates in both psychology and economics. She had pushed herself so hard into a rarefied social and intellectual strata that she was nearly out of touch with virtually everyone she came in contact with. The string of letters after her name was sickeningly similar to the rest of our materialistic world, just a hodge-podge of gluttony and excess.

In her brain, she had sculpted a masterpiece of "I am not worthy of love", based solely on her father not being there for her. When we sat with that feeling and took the time to go through the process of discovery with her about where the feelings of inadequacy that controlled her for nearly her entire life, it came down to a single event. At six years old, she had come home with a piece of artwork (in adulthood she told herself that she was neither creative or artistic) that she made with all of her love and affection for her father. She knew that he would be at home when she got there, so she had verily flown to his side to show him her work, running single-mindedly to show him her labor of love. In her excitement, all she could think was how proud he would be of her. Instead, he had gotten a call just as she got in the door and he dismissed her, saying he was busy with an important call.

It was not that she was unstable or had a pathological condition, but in her own mind, she had gone through a portal into a created universe. Her world from that moment on was based on the fact that whatever she attempted would never be good enough for her father and as desperately as she desired his love and affection, she always felt that she either did not deserve it or that she needed to prove herself worthy of the love that she felt went missing that day. This example sounds like fiction until we look a little harder into our own lives and our own experiences. Inside each of our brains there is a six year old child (in some, even younger) telling us a version of reality that served us decades or lifetimes ago that is completely made up.
In the terms of the EST (Erhardt Seminar Training) people, who now call themselves Landmark Forum, each one of us is a racket running machine, incapable of being anything but. The lies we tell ourselves are designed to placate the ego, mediate our internal conflicts and prove to ourselves that even our most outlandish actions are defensible.

Really, who needs a half dozen degrees after all? Well, if you have to ask, this six year old child-lady for one. as she began to liberate her thinking about what was true about her life, she saw for the fist time that the endless arguments and heartfelt disagreements that she had with her father during the course of her life were not because of any fault or crisis of thought that she was having, but because her father had a deep respect for her. From her new perspective, she was able to understand that the main reason her father debated nearly every issue with such fury was because she was the one person who he felt was his intellectual equal. Anyone else would have been unable to hold up their end of the debate. In his actions, he was actually giving her the love that the six year old inside had craved, but in an even deeper and more meaningful way.

Needless to say, when this breakthrough in her own mind was made, a floodgate broke that released a lifetime of tears and frustration and her hardened and cynical shell that she had constructed to protect herself from hurt was ripped away, exposing the character of the child she had so perfectly denied existed inside her for so long. She had created myriad ways of ignoring the desire to bond with her father, instead focusing on pleasing and proving herself to the world. Ironically, none of it had worked. She came to her Landmark forum neurotic, unhappy and longing for satisfaction that had always eluded her.

I was in poverty when I experienced my own Landmark Forum. for the better part of two decades I had worked harder and harder to pull myself out of poverty, but each time my earnings crept up to that imaginary line, they would raise the earnings needed to break out. I had experienced homelessness, squatting (living in a home that did not belong to me) and dumpster diving to keep my body alive. I had raised one child to school age and another was still in diapers, but we (our family of four) lived on less than five hundred dollars a month. The story I told myself is that I was not worthy of more. When I look back on those years of strife and financial turmoil, they were part of the rackets I ran on my own self.

Somehow, I had created a reality in my own brain that was doubly vexing. not only did I not feel worthy of success, but I also told myself that breaking out of poverty would require a relinquishing of my deeply held values. My plight was living proof that to succeed in this world, one has to knuckle under to the oligarchy, sell out to the man and adopt the abusive principles of capitalism. The irony here is that when I did sell organic shirts that I silk screened with my own original art, they flew off the shelves. That business went under because my source for organic cotton shirts was dealt a crippling blow by the Republic of Texas that passed a law saying that organic cotton could not be grown in their state. This was more proof to me that doing the right thing carried penalties that were out of my control.

I also sold protest pins and buttons that made a profit of many thousands of dollars over the course of twenty years, but a dollar here and a dollar there never leaves enough to invest or build a business. After all, how many "Kill Your Television", "No Nukes"  and "Wearing Buttons Is Not Enough" buttons do we really need? Much like my used clothing store, that I had in my dorm room in college, making money always seemed easy. I never gouged my customers and the product seemed to sell itself, because I concentrated on quality at fair prices. I'm the same person that I was back then, but I have sculpted my brain in new ways that allow me to focus on making a better living without sacrificing my deeply held beliefs.

Often the stories that guide our lives have been made up by a child and we have to ask ourselves the serious question, "How long do we want to let the hurt child inside make all of our decisions for us?"

Living in the now involves not only bidding adieu to past and future, but vanquishing the limits placed upon our lives by prior experiences. Not an easy task, I admit, but nothing valuable comes easy. Letting go is far more complex than the words imply, but rest assured it can be done. Our inner world determines what we are capable of seeing around us and how we perceive the world can be changed over time. Investing in clarity of thought pays incalculable dividends. Along your path, try to always remember that the universe is unfolding as it should.

Personality Calesthenics

When we say, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, or still waters run deep, we are trying to shed light on the inexorable part of living that we often overlook or outright ignore completely. Like spoiled brats, we run the risk of get lost (from creating ourselves) in the shuffle, thinking we are the center of the universe and that all things, even personality should "come to us". Understand, coming from a child of certain privilege, I have also faced privation. I have been the minority, the bitch, the street person, but never forever and never for too long. I have learned that the world is most often a mirror, reflecting all that we are beholden too. Frequently, the reflection can be disturbing, but realizing that you are what you think has been driven home to me in many powerful ways recently that I will try to share.
I have just come from a place that is idyllic in ways that are hard to get a handle on. One local described "her people" as proud, of whatever they do, and in a most basic way, always willing to share, their time their talent and the many blessings they receive daily as residents of their unique environment. Those who know me know of where I speak. There is always a real risk of over popularizing fabulous areas, lest they become cesspools of exploitation and deceit and because of that I would not want to focus on where the place actually is. Instead, I want to focus on what qualities make it unique so that the unchained abandon with which life is lived can be experienced everywhere on Earth in the same way, or at least a similar one.
First off, I noticed that artists are taken seriously. They are a reflection of a culture's essence, a bonding of each individual to place, to human effort, to beauty, or at least the quest for it. On a related topic, I recently heard that the Japanese spend about 17% of their GDP on the arts. In my country, (USA) it is abysmally low, barely seven percent. Quizzically, that includes such big ticket items as the 24-hour news cycle and the movie and television industry, some aspects of which could be considered anti-cultural. Has anyone heard of a recent top story about the power of loving one's neighbor recently? The art of storytelling is appreciated. Virtually everyone seems not only entitled, but expected to occasionally engage in cogent use of story-telling, as a tool to enhance understanding and demonstrate lucid contemplation about whatever topic may be at hand. Food also is at the heart of creatively interfacing with the local environment. In many real ways, the art of cookery and the esoteric realms of herbs and their use are commonplace. Raising even the ditch-diggers labor to the level of art, through limber metabolism allowed only through the consumption of top tier veggies and local artisanal cookery.
When I was a youthful and opinionated art student, I spent countless hours degrading the very idea of craft as a blatant step into "commercial art" which was also snobbishly discounted, relegating it to the scrap heap of mechanism and rote practice of production. This idyllic place, more than any other single factor, has taught me the need for art to be practiced in both the commercial realm and what we refer to as craft. Recognizable and utilitarian objects need to be art-laden and as such, adjuncts to our making meaning in the world. Touchstones to humanity can accompany us on our journey at each moment, in fact without them, life can lose a sense of connection, to the land, her people, and our essential needs, wants and desires. For a place and a people to have the capacity to transform and old curmudgeon like myself deserves special mention, only because it is my trip and reflects a deep need we have in areas all across the planet.
When we are raised in and environment of adversity, there are two probable outcomes that seem mutually exclusive and polar opposites. Scientific research has proved, beyond the shadow of doubt, that humans are kind, helpful and compassionate, innately. Only through abuse or neglect can  they be turned into psychopaths, sociopaths and greedy, hostile organisms. On the other hand, the ability to persevere, trust and attain true greatness can come about through these same traumatic experiences. Who are we to deem such an amazing growth opportunity inherently "bad". Now the grist for our mill. If I had not suffered subjugation, sexual humiliation at the hand of a pedophile, been malnourished or worse, beaten with a dowel rod, would I be the "same person" I have become today? I can truly say "No!" Everyone has got to play Jesus from time to time, that is why his myth is so powerful for us. The moment when "he" has been attributed the saying "God Bless them for they know not what they do." Who has not had to bear that cross? The growth is not in experiencing the personality building events, but the grappling that takes place between who we think we are and who we are always in the act of becoming.
I am an unabashed theatre geek. Obsession with the idea that all life is indeed a stage lies at the heart of why so many give so thoroughly to our discipline. When I was growing up backstage, everyone we knew did theatre, we all believed that society's ills could be healed through the concerted efforts that we put to the art and science, as well as the rudimentary technologies at our disposal. By practicing the art of musicals and plays, we were consummate storytellers. Bending and stretching the stories allowed us to bend and flex the mirrors we had at our disposal to focus attention on who we are as a people, and as individuals engaged in a larger society. Without the constrains of having to live each and every mistake, we as story-tellers as well as our audiences, might learn better ways of being that would further the culture as a whole.
The passel of lighthearted comedies that has "gotten us through" the recent economic downturn notwithstanding, several of our recent long lived plays dealt with topical social issues, such as exploitation, class warfare, power and control and the tragedy of war. Sadly, too many still wink, wink, nudge, nudge their way through misogyny and patriarchy. Out-dated religious icons are in complete disproportion to their incidence in the lives of people I know. In most theater, perhaps because the only shows that bring in enough money to be produced, themes that somehow support the status quo will always carry the season.
I believe that we grow more, in both more robust and adaptive ways, when we stretch into realms that are not fully explored. Just as with our individual development, the same growth can occur in cultures, or societies. If I didn't see the discipline of theater from the inside, I could not fathom how to achieve beneficial social change. When I was young, I sat tables and handed out literature for dozens of causes and groups. During my canvassing days, I spoke to over one million individuals. During my 80 Day, Great Lakes Bicycle Trip , I sent a direct message to over 8 million folks. We can all live better and more lightly on the planet. Being a stand (as the Erhart Seminar Training, EST folks call it) for something grows the personality in unique ways. The growth that ensues when something other than yourself is the main focus of your every waking moment transforms even the most mundane acts into enlightening experiences.
Don't do these exercises as novel events, like a three-times per week exercise regimen. Take this approach to heart, seek constant betterment of all that you deem important and don't sweat the little things. Remember that everything you touch should have the hand of humans in it somehow, these people have their own creative expression to share. As we explore and define who we are, shaping ourselves into ever better folks, our truest natures can be ever more closely approximated. When we grow beyond our own fears and expectations, there are those who clamor to attribute our growth to a "higher power" or other miracle. This sort of mumbo-jumbo is superstitious nonsense exempting the speaker from realizing the truest potential of their own existence. Ultimately, we cannot be judged in "heaven" but by our actions while earth bound. Each and every one of them.
Blessings on your path and may you realize the depth of love I have for y'all, that is why I have attempted to express this. May your growth be uninhibited by dogma or expectations. The true you may shock, and occasionally misunderstood but without you, the world would be a bit more inhospitable and a little less balanced. If we all do our parts to change things, we lead by example and invite reciprocation.