JANUARY 8, SATURDAY

HARMONY OR WRENCHING CHANGE

Let’s just assume for a minute that I was onto something a couple of days ago when I suggested that what makes Maggie the dog and me the human, fully alive and sensing meaning, is some visceral drive that is embedded deep within me, a life force that is beyond my consciousness.

I’ll give an example from my own life why this might be so. Remember that this is my own experience and I don’t know how universal it actually is. What happened was completely confusing and chaotic at the time, and made no sense at the time so if anyone else goes through a similar experience it probably seems just crazy at the time they are going through it. It only starts to make sense to me 40 years later.

In 1979, shortly after my 40th birthday I was on a trip around the world for Warren Wilson College which I had dreamed up as I had dreamed up so many of my activities at the time. I was in Pago Pago, American Samoa staying at the Rainmaker Hotel at the arrangement of Warren Wilson Alumni who were running the school system in American Samoa. I had being to Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Japan on an eight week trip trying to attract more international students to Warren Wilson and was headed back to America. I was floating in a blue lagoon under Rainmaker Mountain when suddenly I realized with intense clarity that I didn’t want to return to Warren Wilson. I didn’t know why, but I just wanted to stay there, floating in that lagoon.

But I did come home and the feeling was buried. I plunged into activities. I got a grant to take a work crew, a Traveling Troupe of International Students, in a van to public schools for thousands of hours. They even took one eight week term to travel the Eastern United States to put on international shows of song and dance for school children, mostly 7th graders, about their countries getting academic credit for having an intercultural American experience as they did so. The next year I got another grant and led a group of Warren Wilson staff to India on a project to create an Indian village with a house and well and many activities in the log cabin, now gone, Williams Building which we did. Seventh grade classes would come for a morning and experience life in an Indian village and then cook and eat an Indian lunch. We had a summer international camp for school children using the Indian village. Stevenson dormitory became for three years an International coed dormitory, the first coed dormitory on campus. We had weekly international dinners in the basement. Once a year we invited hundreds of school children in yellow buses to campus for a day and decorated all the classrooms of Jensen, each as a different culture, where Warren Wilson international students would do a twenty minute activity from their home country for the children who went from room to room. In the dining hall the children had a meal with food from a dozen countries and before going home filled Kittridge and saw the traveling troupe of international students perform. I thought I was having a great time.

But the feeling I had had in Pago Pago under Rainmaker Mountain only grew. I realized slowly that I didn’t want to be an administrator, of anything, that I couldn’t be an administrator of anything, that I could not go on the same way. I was slowly becoming paralyzed. I had to give up everything that I enjoyed doing because everything had become a chore of my own making. I was coming to a dead halt whether I wanted to or not. And so I was forced to stop doing all the things that had given me so much pleasure. The grants ran out and slowly I let go of every activity. And when I did I was left aimless and purposeless with nothing to sustain me, bitter almost.

For me the pain felt individual and inexplicable and very intense as if I was being singled out for punishment of some sort. I couldn’t stand myself and everything around me turned to dust. I could barely function. It harmed me, it harmed Kathe, it made me very hard to live with. I was changing direction completely against my will and was angry.

And then, slowly, through reading journals, mostly written by young women, and listening to them and responding to them and seeing the world through their eyes as they made their mythic journeys I came back to life.

It was through some awareness of the feminine side of myself, at least that is how I felt it, just a growing nameless feeling. And by 1984 I felt more alive and more centered than I had for years. I started traveling again and took a group of students to Sri Lanka in the spring of 1984. The Sarvodaya Buddhist village development movement which showed villagers how to live simply and well and the beauty of Sri Lanka with it’s golden green rice fields and dark green mountain tea plantations and coconut palms hanging over white beaches was radiant with life. I was having my own sensual feminine experience and was coming back to life and felt more fully alive than I had since I was a boy in India.

Now I realize that what was happening to me was a mid life crisis, a common enough experience undergone by many people. But at the time I only felt wrenching pain followed by inexplicable delight.

Me, my conscious self, who I thought I was and what I thought I enjoyed doing, was demolished by some almost alien force within me that was beyond my control or understanding. The change wasn’t my choice, it happened to me. But the change saved me from myself. There was nothing wrong with all the activities that I enjoyed. They were good activities and even touched people. But they weren’t right for me. Being an administrator was wrong for me, that’s all. Years later after retirement when I followed my passion of photography and for a while became a wedding photographer and earned good money and became a kind of administrator, a businessman, the same thing happened again. Each time a passion turned me into an administrator and I was forced to quit by something inside myself, which in the second case, when I let go, allowed me to photograph again just for the fun of it without commercializing it.

So this is one of the reasons why I feel as if there is some visceral drive within me that is reaching for fullness of life and fullness of meaning even in a universe that is here by chance and appears to be absurd. It is a force that is beyond me, somehow built into me.

A disconcerting thing is that I would prefer that the changes that were necessary for me had been good for others around me, but I don’t think that was always so. In both cases the wrenching changes within me were often painful for the people around me, made me prickly and hard to live with. That bothers me. I realized that my almost manic need to create new activities was harmful to family life and my sudden shift to delight was also uncomfortable for Kathe and others. But I didn’t choose either. They happened to me. And when I look at the pain that humans cause each other in their drive to fulfill one form of satisfaction or another I see the pattern all around me. Something drives a person to do one activity or another. They think, I thought, that I was doing it for others, but I was really doing the activities for myself and was sometimes harming people in the process, people I loved. But I don’t know a way around this because I didn’t make the choices in the first place. But it does make me more understanding of the pain that people cause other people. Harvey Weinstein’s erotic drives may have made him feel more alive. As an overweight and homely guy he used his power over women to sexually molest them. But something within him drove him to do it and now he is suffering for his addiction. Marjory Taylor Greene is having the time of her life promoting conspiracy theories. I don’t know why this is such a turn on for her, but she is hurting many people and may run into her own dead end. Donald Trump is doing the same narcissistic thing as have numbers of gurus and evangelical preachers. Human beings cause each other as much pain as they cause delight, driven by something deep within them and then pull other people along with them. I have no idea how to resolve this tension. It just happens, as it happened to me. But in my case the changes were good and necessary and I’m sure that for many people they are. I just don’t know.