Tracy Cochran stories on the way towards awakening

photo by James.

“For some, collaboration is not a deliberate choice,” writes architect Barry Svigals in Parabola’s current issue, Alone and Together.  “It is a way of solving problems that is deeply interwoven into the communal experience.”  He is writing of aboriginal people who couldn’t help but work together to solve puzzles in an intelligence test (and accomplished them in record time) in spite of the anthropologists’ efforts to have them work as individuals. Svigals (and his collaborators) contrast this to our culture’s celebration of the “lone genius, the myth of the hero leader….”

Yet as I was alone in the yard this morning planting flowers, it struck me that all our efforts in this world are really collaborative.  I went outside to be alone and found I was in intimate contact with life.  I was collaborating with the flowers, the soil, the soft morning air, the water from the hose, the ants that swarmed up and helped me turn the soil.  I went outside early because there were trailing petunias to plant–but also because I was grieving.  I was grieving exactly the same thing that I was just celebrating: my daughter’s college graduation, her successful launch into the world.

She is moving to London at the end of the summer to pursue graduate school, a loving relationship with an English boyfriend, a happy social life with friends there.  I am thrilled for her, really.   She has worked hard for this—and so have I.  Yet, inevitably, I am deeply aware of the impermanence of life just now. Wasn’t she just in high school?  In preschool? In Brooklyn? Where did the time go?

Around midnight last night, I concluded that the only thing to do is to let go—or its more gentle English variant, let it be.  Letting go, letting be, may be the last word—or perhaps the first and last—the exhale of the Big Band and, well, the next Big Bang (or the Great Sigh of Relief, whatever the next cycle will be called).  In the end, there is the act of seeing, which is not separate from accepting—which is not separate from knowing—or from loving.

This morning while gardening, I realized that there is a kind of complete seeing—the kind we associate with Near Death Experience—that happens when we let go of our insistence on ourselves, when we forget ourselves and collaborate with life.  As the Zen sage says, forget yourself and find yourself in the 10,000 things.  And if he was less poetic and concise, he might have added:  see and experience yourself in a new way, not as an idea or label or story but taking your part (which is itself changing) in the whole of life.

I woke up early and went outside and gave myself  over to life—to the red petunias, the soft air, soil, water, and ants.  I felt better, and I saw glimpsed something that doesn’t boil down to words.  The spiritual teacher Gurdjieff  emphasized self-observation, and so does his foremost pupil, Madame de Salzmann, who discovered on her own that “seeing is not an idea.”

Now more than ever, I am touched by De Salzmann’s efforts to attain realization after Gurdjieff died. And by all accounts, she found it. She taught that self-observation “is one complete act, an experience that can take place only if there is no separation between what sees and what is seen….”  When  the act of seeing is more important than what is seen, a special feeling can arise—“an affection that embraces everything that I see and is indifferent to nothing.  I need to see.  When I begin to see, I begin to love what I see.  No longer separate, I am in contact with it, intensely, completely.  I know, and this knowing is the result of this new condition.  I wake up to what I am and touch the source of true love, a quality of being.”

I once interviewed a Taoist master for Parabola.  He spoke of being taken to meet Madame de Salzmann.  I asked him what she was like, his first impression, and he drew on his love of white water rafting.   The white water is at the edges, he told me. The fastest water looks as smooth as glass.  It looks still.  Yet, if you put the raft down there, it shoots off because the water is so fast. That is the quality that Madame de Salzmann had, said the Taoist master.  She was very still, yet very fast.  She took in everything.

When we let go and open to life, there can be a kind of seeing that, in Madame de Salzmann’s words–“is like following a fast current, a torrent, anticipating the rushing water with one’s look, seeing the movement of each little wave.  There is not time to formulate, to name and to judge.  There is no more thinking.  My mind becomes quiet and sensitive—very alive but quiet.”

This kind of seeing allows us to be in disorder (in our judgment) yet to see in a new, much more expansive way—to be part of a new order. May we all let go and accept and become part of what is.

What a week.  Days after my car accident, I attended my daughter Alex’s graduation from college.  And as I sat on a lawn at a beautiful college under a blue sky, watching my daughter process across the stage, I suddenly realized a college graduation is not unlike a car accident.  It is another kind of heightened moment that invites us to see what we don’t usually see—including the impression that we usually don’t like to empty ourselves of ego and take life in.  We want things to unfold the way our ego wants them to unfold.   The commencement speaker Jane Lynch, the star of Glee, supported this realization, urging the graduation class to see that life is always a surprise and that the best way to receive it is the way an actor does improvisation.  She gave the graduates this mantra: “Yes, and….”

Lynch moved in the same direction that Alan Arkin does in his marvelous interview in “Alone and Together.” She encouraged these hardworking, high principled, fresh-faced young people not to plan and try to control what is going to happen to them because many of the biggest events in our lives take a form and happen in a way we could never predict.  In spite of all our long preparation and hard work, what happens—the creative or scientific breakthrough, the true love—comes as a surprise.  Usually, these surprises come to us when we abandon all hope of pleasing others or otherwise controlling events.

Most of us can provide our own examples of this truth—about the time we almost didn’t go here or there and yet we did, only to meet the person we married or step on a path that led to destiny.  It was the last thing we wanted to happen—the car accident, the lost job—and yet it opened up something unexpected.  Out of work, out of hope that our lives would ever be or look like we wanted them to, despairing that we would ever win our parents’ or society’s approval, we threw up our hands and embraced life.  We said: “Yes, and….” Embracing and then adding our own presence and intelligence to what life was serving up.  As the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff once said, playing a role can be the highest undertaking a human can engage in—provided we can empty ourselves of ego (oh, that little detail again).

Sometime during the graduation weekend, I began to associate this truth, this “Yes, and” with St. Benedict and hospitality.   This had something to do with my sister and brother-in-law (whom I associate with St. Benedict by way of their scholarly and religious pursuits) hosting a whole crew of us for dinner.  Also, my sister and her partner, who were among the guests, volunteer at a church-run homeless shelter called “Room at the Inn.”  Every great tradition includes this wisdom about letting life in, welcoming every being and every happening as a divine guest.

Benedict of Nursia abandoned his studies in Rome and found his way to a cave in the hills of Subiaco.  This cave would become his sacro speco (sacred space).  For three years, Benedict listened deeply, searching for God.  Our of  this deep listening in this cave of solitude came this Rule of St. Benedict.”  The Rule opens with St. Benedict setting forth the main principles of the religious life — the renunciation of one’s own will and arming oneself “with the strong and noble weapons of obedience”  under the banner of “the true King, Christ the Lord.” He proposed to establish a “school for the Lord’s service.”

I sat in a folding chair taking in the rich impression of my daughter’s college graduation—finding myself there, in a situation I had long pictured only to find it completely different and surprising because I, my daughter, and everything else in the picture is completely different than I could ever have predicted.  It struck me then that Jane Lynch was right, the only sane way to treat life is as a school—and a school of improvisation.  Yet I feel that St. Benedict found something that is deeply and enduringly right—and not just for monks but for all of us. How liberating it would be to live life as a school for service—to welcome everything that happens to be a teacher sent to deepen and open us so we can hold more life, respond more swiftly, love more.  There is an article from Scientific American currently being passed around on the internet exploring the concept that depression may serve an evolutionary function, that it may invite a person to shut out distractions and analyze.  I’m not inclined to agree that major depression is the most reflective state to be in.  And yet I have known dark and difficult times that became sacred spaces, places to “be still and know” that there was a majesty and wholeness to life beyond my wildest imaginings.  And that I was welcome to take part, to add my presence, to play my role.

What a week: a car accident, a graduation.  I come away a bit frazzled and tear-streaked but wishing to welcome life—not just the good times but the difficult times.  May I remember that even the most unlikely messenger may be divine.

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves,” wrote Thoreau.  I think Thoreau was speaking of that descent from our heads into the center of our beings.  At the first shock of loss, we are bereft, shipwrecked.  We search for something of value to guide us or to hold on to and come up nothing but shabby and broken things–shards of memory, old wounds may come alive and old selves come wafting out of their graves like ghosts.  But as we dive down into the wreck, down through layers of habitual postures, lost cultures and worlds, we may find our way to a stillness that is also a listening and a seeing.

Slowly we remember that we secretly knew there was more to life than thought and habit. Slowly we realize that what we need is not a striving but a quieting and letting.  An attention appears that does not take sides or make demands—that is not eager to possess anything, just wishing to know.  “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer is impossible and your heart has turned to stone,” wrote Thomas Merton (who was an orphan in an English boarding school, who knew what it is to be lost).

We understand who we really are when we descend center of ourselves—when we don’t rush to  identify with any habitual attitude or posture, just see and listen in the calm eye in the center of storm of our lives:  “The question we need to ask ourselves is whether there is any place we can stand in ourselves where we can look at all that’s happening around us without freaking out, where we can be quiet enough to hear our predicament, and where we can begin to find ways of acting that are at least not contributing to further destabilization,” writes Ram Dass.

In my last post, I wrote about meeting Ram Dass.  He told me that the stroke—and his times of being lost—acted on him like sandpaper.  “Coarse or fine sandpaper?” I asked. He laughed and said both kinds.  I realized that he meant that life wears you down, scratches the paint off, but it can also polish and refine you, taking away what is false, leaving something real.  Ram Dass had to deal with being lost. Along the way, he was dismissed as a failure and a fool and a fraud (he was called “Rum Dum” in the press).  But all the while there was another process going on (at times—in all of us, this happens in moments)—a descent into the center of himself.  The ambitious academic gave way to a kind of holy child who wished to penetrate to that still place in the center of our being.

I asked him if he had any inkling when he was young that he would have such a life. “Years ago, I had a dream,” he told me.  “I was in a huge amphitheater full of people all in white.  There was a woman on the dais.  I was standing in the back and somebody was guiding me by the elbow.  The woman saw me and said, ‘Take him out, he isn’t ready.’”

“This stroke is an ego drag,” he told me. “But for soul, it got me into that room.”

We all meet in that still place.

If you happen to be in the area, consider joining me at Yoga Shivaya, in Tarrytown, New York, this Sunday, May 13, from 7 to 9 pm.  We will practice the stillness of meditation together, then listen (and see!) the harmonic chant of singer, composer, and new Parabola music editor David Hykes, which renowned violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin has called “the music of the spheres.”   For directions contact Yogashivaya.com.  (This event is offered without charge to all mothers and those who have or had mothers, and offerings are happily accepted).

It sounds like child’s play.  In a very interesting interview in “Alone and Together,” the shiny new issue of Parabola, the actor Alan Arkin describes starting workshops by telling participants not to do anything interesting or creative.  Instead, they play with an imaginary ball or something similar, and soon people start being…creative.

“When we leave ourselves alone, when we’re flowing like we’re supposed to flow, without getting in our way and censoring ourselves and trying to please our parents or some teacher or some idea of who we would like ourselves to be,” says Arkin, “we automatically go into creative mode.”

Creativity is our true nature.  But we do get in our own way.   Over the years, we pick up ideas and biases and conditioning.  We use ideas to arm ourselves against life—defending ourselves against the unknown (in Arkin’s terms) with “Saturday Night Live, smart-ass stuff.”  Most of us have to live a bit before we can shift from grasping an idea to holding an intention.   Being really willing to be open to receive and to serve life can take living through a failure or two.

When I was in high school, I had a boyfriend who liked to wear only wore black, including a long black leather trench coat.  He liked to draw very pen and ink drawings of dead ravens.   He made delicate trees out of blown glass—which he would dramatically smash them from time to time.  These days, I’m sure he would be called Goth.  It is also clear to me that he (and probably many contemporary Goths) was living at a considerable distance from his own body, his own life.

This boyfriend’s father was a doctor, and along with a consortium of other doctors he owned a sizable tract of the Adirondacks and a big lodge.  This boy of cultivated darkness and smart-ass remarks would go there to indulge in rare pastimes like falconry.  (Even at the time, I found that over the top.)  He also liked to go there alone in the winter because–as he once told me in a dramatically hushed voice—“ the cold cauterized all sorrow.”   Towards the end of our bleak little relationship, he told me he plagiarized that phrase and that thought.

I found the admission deeply shocking, proof that I made the right decision in ending the relationship. And yet I’ve come to see that in a sense we are all plagiarists most of the time—a bundle of borrowed ideas and phrases.  My friend was in flight from real feeling.  The wish to feel intense cauterizing cold—all the intense risks that certain kinds of adolescents take—it was a reaction to the numbness that comes from living at a distance from life.  For all the talk of ultimate subjects we did in those days(discussed by the light of dripping skull candles) death didn’t mean anything—and life didn’t yet mean anything.  Being in a body in life was a terrifying prospect we hadn’t really explored.   And yet, most of us are like this, most of the time.

Yet slowly, I am learning to appreciate that we need to show up for life in a direct and simple way to have certain realizations: we find true equanimity in the midst of unquiet life, we find compassion as we suffer. There is a kind of alchemy that can happen only when we put aside all our ideas and agree to be deeply in our bodies and our lives, like children.   I’m convinced this takes certain grounding experiences.  Here J.K. Rowling addresses a Harvard graduating class on the value of failure:

“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. Failure means a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believe I truly belonged.  Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.”