Envisioning a Future

The lights went on for me while I was reading a book review that described its main character as unable to envision a future. Envision a future! Is that what people do?

 I have barely been able to envision a present, to figure out what I want to do now, and act on it. That's what I've been working on. Now, almost finished with my seventh decade, I feel ready to envision a future, but I don't feel capable of creating one.

It's true I have done a little visioning. Over the years I have become more capable of making plans and following them through. I suppose that's what has led to me finally being ready to envision a future. I think it started when I was a young mother. First I realized that the notion that we, the nuclear generation, despite the popular notion, were actually living past age thirty. I began to get inklings there would be life after laundry, and I tried to plan for it. I wanted to learn to work, make a paycheck, even have a career.

Previously all my inquiries into what I could be doing had been met with answers that indicated they were preparation for something else: high school for college, college for grad school, but the bridge to a life was never visible. I knew very few professionals. They were men. What they did was invisible. The fact that everything in the human world was created intentionally by humans was not clear to me.

So, the professions I knew of from direct contact were limited: pediatricians, psychiatrists, nurses, schoolteachers. Lawyers and architects were abstractions. I didn't know there was such a thing as business. Of course beggarman, thief, Indian chief as well as receptionist, secretary, bus driver, airline stewardess were off limits. Don't learn to type; you will end up a secretary. No, you don't want to be a nurse, you want to be a doctor.

How could I know whether I wanted to be a doctor? Having been told so, how was I to evaluate for myself? I had no experience of a contrasting possibility.

Being a housewife and mother was the state that being a doctor was in contrast to. Yet, realistically, whatever else I might strive for or achieve I would still be keeping house. And I never doubted that I would have children. Even though other roles were presented as alternatives, they were really only alternative in status. I would have a profession and be a real person, not an "only". No alternative ways of accomplishing that necessary work were conceivable. The knowledge that I would be doing it was deeply rooted.

But since being a mother is not a profession, and was not to be thought about as an adult role, I could not plan for it. It was something to be taken on after the plans had been implemented, the establishment of a profession accomplished.

And when I got older and began seeing a larger world, there still was no bridge to a future. Any envisioning of a future I have done has been as a flailing version of get me out of here! It is a panicked state with great need for immediate action and no breadth of vision, and no follow through.

The first step was acknowledging myself as an adult, ceasing to see adult humans as a separate species.

Working

Sometimes I forget that I work. That what I do counts as work and has value. I don't have an external office with a schedule and colleagues. How can my life have value?
I keep the kitchen stocked and make sure there is dinner on the table and food and snacks to take myself and my husband through the upcoming days. It sometimes seems worthless until I notice it's easy to spend a hundred bucks on a meal for two I enjoy less than what I get at home.
I manage the rental of two flats. That sometimes really feels like non-work, the money arrives detached from effort on my part. Maybe I'm just a parasite. But then the tenants with the new baby suddenly need their washing machine replaced and I am working late at night tracking down a washer, someone to transport it, someone to install it, meeting them, coordinating their efforts. Keeping track of folks who have the skills and tools and strength I don't have that can be needed at a moment's notice. And not everyone is in a position to own their home. Not everyone wants to. The college kids who will only be here a few years don't need the headache and expense. I make it easy for them to belong here for a while, provide them with a nice place at a fair price.

the holy

The Holy

The sacred. It sounds like a thing. It’s not a thing, it’s a relationship. Sacredness is real, but the sacred may not be. What is sacred?

That which sustains us can be sacred. We can make it holy by honoring it and enacting its holiness.

As humans we are embedded in many realm which sustain us. We are sustained by the sun, source of all energy. We are sustained by the earth, the literal ground of being, the earth beneath our feet. We are sustained by water, without which there is no life. We are sustained by the living earth, the biosphere. We are sustained by the primary producers, the plants, who make the air breathable, who bind sunlight into food, whom we ear, whose bodies we use for clothing and shelter. We are sustained by the animals, our companions, who feed the plants, whom many of us eat, whose fur and skin we wear. We are sustained by our families of birth who bear us and feed us and teach us and protect us while we grow. We are sustained by our families of choice with whom we make our home and raise our children. We are sustained by our children, who give us love and a sense of the future. We are sustained by our communities which give us purpose and context, companionship and assistance. We are sustained by our own bodies, our own unconscious functioning, which we cannot control but constantly rely on. We are sustained by art, giving us new ways to see the world. All these contexts, nested, overlapping, sustain us, but we may not see that. We may see ourselves as separable, as independent. We may not realize that separating ourselves from these worlds pulls the ground out from under our feet, and will, in the end, kill us. We may think we can prosper at the expense of our community. We may think we can pollute the water as it flows away and not eat and breathe our own toxic waste. We may think that honoring life is saving the ‘life” of the fetus without honoring the woman in whom it is embedded.  All of these are mistakes of context. Thinking that an individual is the increment of life and can live independent of context creates fallacies. It creates heresies. It creates profanities. The sacred is known in honoring the greater wholes of which we are a part. Since those contexts are greater than our conscious mind, we cannot know them fully. We cannot shape them to our own ends, as their components and their feedback loops are not within our grasp.

As long as one posits no deities

If I consider myself an agnostic, and posit no deities, then why do I refer to Earth as Her?

Several reasons.

The first is semantic. We English speakers divide our world of perception into people and things. Things seldom command respect. They are usually seen as either inert and impossible to interact with or as suitable for use with no concern for our effect on the thing. Usually a thing is considered more valuable for our use of it, our shaping of it. A rock becomes a sculpture or a gem or a paving stone, a tree becomes board feet or carbon offsets.

The second is structural. Any dissipative or self-organizing structure is unpredictable in its transformations between stable states. This makes it somewhat unknowable in our experience. At the scale of the earth, the unpredictability is akin to our experience of a sentient self-directed being.

We don't worry about how an inanimate thing will react, even less, respond, when we interfere with it. Things don't respond, that's a characteristic of individuals.

I may not want to have a conversation with Her, certainly not beseech Her, but I do want to make and honor an intricate and personal relationship, and understand our effects on each other.

Some thoughts about depression and the body

The other night I couldn't sleep. My neck was hecka sore. I was deep into the trance of what might be called a movement meditation I was slowly writhing on my bed finding positions that felt OK and positions in which I could feel connections between the sore places and the rest of my body.

I do this sometimes when I'm still awake at an indecent hour but don't want to get up. I know the sleep experts say to get up, but it's cold at three AM. And being vertical is such an effort. For what? No one sends me emails at that hour, and I'm not fond of solitaire. I usually have a pain somewhere and if I'm lucky enough to remember to work with it and really settle into the process it becomes quite engaging.

The point of this pursuit is to find the muscle tensions I don't know I have and relax them. Then I feel what is occurring when those are out of the way. Sometimes autonomous movements occur. Not usually. But sometimes if I'm fortunate and really focused in an odd sort of way, I can feel deep muscles engage that I can't usually access by themselves, either by sensation or by intention. And this feels right, like I'm letting my body show me something, give me something, that I can't predict or define.

So as I watched myself squirm and observed correlations between the positions I found myself in and my breathing, my feelings, my thoughts, I stitched my impressions together into something of a narrative. That's what we humans do, no? Make story? Might even be what life does - create meaning from intercepted data.  Even if my conclusions are wrong I'm in good company.

Anyway, the neck and upper back. The thoracic inlet. Places I have chronic constriction and pain. Working to relieve the pain in my neck I noticed that when I found a position of diminished discomfort, my in breath rose higher in my chest. I wasn't trying to push the air into the top of my lungs. I wasn't thinking about my lungs or my breath. It simply happened. My upper back uncurled a little bit. Hmmm, how did that occur? As a singer, I am always looking at what postural shifts or other tricks might allow me access to greater quantities of air and more relaxed steady effective use of the air I have. And this felt significant.

So while I continued to track discomfort, I put some of my focus on the unforced movement of the top third of my ribcage, the ebb and flow of air in my upper chest.

Now comes the part that is going to sound like new age hoohah and overly prescriptive standardized interpretations of bodily symptoms.

My breath slowed way down. I fell into a pattern I have noticed before in which my exhale gets hugely attenuated, as if I am holding a stillness and waiting for something to happen. On the odd occasion this has happened over the years it has seldom if ever felt like I have become still enough to find out why I'm doing this - I keep feeling like I haven't gone deep enough.

When I'm with a bodyworker and this happens, I imagine that they think I'm refusing to breathe so that they can't see whether their work is affecting me. But the respiratory stasis 's not volitional. I'm usually in deep trance, and the experience of this stillness is deeply compelling; there's something for me to find if I go into it far enough. Some tension I am holding that I cannot let go of until I find it, and I need to be profoundly still to find it. And every inhale breaks this stillness and I need to start over.

Now, translating that paranoia (they see me, and they see bad things about me) into a daytime and verbal state, I don't see the stillness and my compulsion to go into it as hiding from my therapist. In fact it's the safety I occasionally feel with my therapist that allows me to explore it. There's a fear that I'm going to see bad things if I go there. In daylight consciousness it seems more a view into a possible restraint on my own experience.  That's what chronic bodily immobility is. It hurts when I move there, I'm not going to move there. It hurts when I'm visible, I damn well am going to be as invisible as I can manage. If in some nonverbal state (Infancy? Injury? Severe pain?) I experienced a constraint on my breathing, it becomes habitual. And these immobilities are created through the muscles. Now I am working to find these habituated immobilities and relax them enough to let my neck stop hurting. But often that seems to involved relaxing enough to find out what they are protecting.

So there I was, at the far extent of the exhale, letting myself not inhale until the impulse comes from somewhere unfamiliar, sinking as far as I can into the relaxation of all the muscles I engage when I take in air. And suddenly a feeling of disgust rose up in me. And a bitter taste in my mouth as if I had been taking in something noxious and it wouldn't go away. That's interesting. Disgust that resides in my patterning, my stance, whose object can't be noticed because it's always there rather than coming and going in response to conditions and situations? Coloring all my thoughts and experiences because I'm not aware of it and can't complete the bodily movement into and then away from it? Not impossible. Not even unlikely.

So I was working between these two poles, of full settling at the trough of the exhale and full expansion at the crest of the inhale, both in as relaxed and unguided manner as possible. And at bottom I am finding disgust/antipathy/some feeling I don't even have a word for. Eep. I really don't want to feel this, but at the same time I am just relaxed and tranced enough to be dispassionate and let my curiosity look there a little.

Like I say; no name. Horror sounds way too dramatized. Self hatred is one aspect but not the whole. It's akin to feeling like I have made some horrid mistake and am about to experience the consequences, whether natural or personal. I guess that could be characterized as dread. Dreadful. Yes. And trapped.

At the other pole, having my upper chest spontaneously open felt like the location of the feeling of joy. All feelings and emotions have bodily correlates, of course. Without the body changing there would be nothing to feel and nothing to feel it with. It seems to me that "joy" is an aspect of what happens in the body when the upper chest opens. In my body, that's where it seems to be centered.

Now this doesn't mean I can switch from dread to joy just by breathing into the top of my chest, although sometimes it helps. It doesn't even mean I can breathe unimpeded into my upper chest just by wanting to. The learned posture of decades is not overcome in an instant. But it does motivate me to gently work with my neck and back to allow them to find a new alignment so my breathing can flow more freely.

And here is the tricky part. Homeostasis is created through feedback loops, right? So I get stuck in a positive feedback loop of fear and revulsion leading to poor posture (I want to get away but I can't get away so I'll curl up) leading to injury to the upper spine, leading to immobility of same, leading to inability to feel joy, leading to diminished engagement in life, leading to further curling up and so on. But if I can shift at some point in this cycle, even a little, it can relieve not only the fear or the pain or whatever unpleasantness I am directly working with, it can affect the entire loop. A modicum of pleasure in what I can create leading to an uncurling of the upper chest leading to less likelihood of neck pain leading to an easier time doing the things I find satisfying leading to a slight bit more pleasure in what I can do, et cetera.

Now this isn't always apparent, and often sounds like bullshit. But occasionally I have an experience such as the other night that brings it back to my awareness and supports me through the odd experiences that go along with this kind of shift.

My neck? It seemed worse for several days as different parts hurt while something shifted, and I wondered if I was being some kind of Pollyanna ascribing pattern and benefit to a bunch of random and meaningless discomforts. And then I went to see my bodyworker, and with her help shifted into a more grounded, more open posture that feels really different. And I feel very centered and a great deal less inclined to hate myself. Now that the disgust is not present, I no longer need to apply it towards myself and look for external remedies. This may only last a while, but I am glad for the respite.

Gods in Biosemiosis

Given that relating to a living system is akin to relating to a person, it makes sense that human societies create gods and have personal relations with them. It’s the only way that we can represent to ourselves that relationship with anything close to a sufficient degree of accuracy.

The gods as real.

Many times I have heard it stated that the gods are real. But never what it is that real means.

Generally when we claim something is real we are claiming that it is a correct or authentic instance of some category or class.

The velveteen rabbit was “real”. In his case it indicated that he was not a toy any more, but was a living being, despite his appearance as a toy. But any reader of the book knows that he was still a toy. What was real, in the sense of animating the child’s relationsip with him, was the child’s love for the toy. So in this example, which is perhaps the best known explicit claim of reality for something that was never born or … , there are two things being real might refer to. One is being a (real) living being despite the appearance of being a human construct, and the other is being loved, which is to say being an emotionally significant other to a human.

I guess either of these definitions could apply to a god. Those who talk about the reality of gods generally claim that‘s not what they mean, that the god has some kind of a priori reality. But in this case we ask again, a real instance of what? A body? A living system? An aspect of the laws of life?

Thank Goodness

    A friend who professes to atheism uses the phrase "thank physics", as, I suppose, a parallel construction to an offensive 'thank god".
    The impulse to thank persists, even without positing a personalized recipient of the thanks. Surely, the health benefits of thankfulness have been amply demonstrated. Gratitude not only arises, we cultivate it for our own benefit and well-being. I conjecture that it is largely this impulse to give thanks that gives rise to a belief in deities. We are simply unaccustomed to non-dualism, to gratitude having no personal object.
    And yet "thank physics" rings false to my ear. Physics reified as a recipient of thanks? Ouch. I stick to an older formulation.
    Thank goodness.
    After all, what is goodness? It is a marker of appropriate reciprocity. It shows that we belong here in our world, in our life, that we are part of this fullness containing that which we find good.
    Goodness inheres in the interplay between what we are and what the world is from which we arise. It shows up in contact between organisms, between an organism and an ecosystem, an organism and a product or creation or aspect of another organism or ecosystem.
    Our perceptual systems are necessary for us to know goodness, but they are not sufficient. The sense of taste detects goodness in the apple, in the sashimi, in the chocolate custard. Are they there? No, they're in the encounter. There's no goodness in an apple for a housecat, nor in sashimi for a giraffe.
    The things and individuals, creations and complex systems we encounter are necessary for us to know goodness, but they are not sufficient. A warm bed provides no goodness when we are ready to go play. Nor a lovely sunset when we are in a dark room. There can be great goodness in music if it is neither so loud as to be painful no so soft as to be inaudible. There can likewise be great irritation or plain old boredom. Our senses need to encounter and be ready for these things in order for goodness to happen. The tree that falls unheard in the forest may exist, but whether it has goodness depends on whether your nest full of eggs was at its top or you were waiting for a sunny patch on the ground to open up so that you can sprout and grow.
     At root, goodness occurs in biological systems encountering and recognizing what they need. Goodness is a result of coevolution, of survival of the fittest. Not the fittest in the sense of having big muscles and not smoking. The fittest in the sense that my environment fits me like a glove. I can eat and breathe and shelter myself with what it provides, It can incorporate my CO2 and my dung and the erosion my footfalls create back into its dynamic equilibrium so that we sustain each other. That's fitness.
    Goodness is the experience of recognizing fitness. It is the communication of that perceptive recognition to the ongoing narrative that is our sense of self. Our senses respond to our encounters, and our mind constructs a world containing goodness.
    So goodness is the gauge of our congruence with what we encounter; of whether it is appropriate and nourishing for us as organisms. Goodness marks the reciprocity of biology, the life we are part of, which cannot occur without give and take, perceive and respond. Thank biology.
    Thank goodness.