Carpe Noctem

It's been wonderful transitioning back into my previous lifestyle and getting back in touch with family and friends. So yeah, lots of fun and light stuff, as evidenced by my last entry. And on another light note, my sister and I have reconciled our differences about my walkabout, mainly agreeing to disagree. We still value one another too much to let differences of opinion stand between us for long.

But, as always, with the light must come the dark. Lately, I've often been feeling a bit burned out, or even used up. Obviously, part of this is due to my transition back into my sped-up lifestyle. I haven't been meditating, yoga-ing, and tai-chi-ing very much, so it's no wonder that I have been feeling less centered while more scattered and tired. But there may also be a certain amount of bone-tired weariness from my walkabout finally catching up with me too. It's possible that since I'm no longer living on the edge, my defenses have relaxed and now I'm feeling the deeper fatigue of my monkabout. Or perhaps this hungry life of travel and adventure has left me jaded and a bit world-weary. Lately, I feel like I have been "On" so much and now I'm looking for the "Off" switch. Sometimes when I drive late at night, the city lights beckon, promising sweet anonymity.

And on a much darker note, there have been what feels like an inordinate amount of deaths.....again. A very dear friend of my mother's who long ago had once been our housekeeper passed away a couple of months ago. She was a pillar to her family and was beloved by so very many. She was a beautiful soul who always prayed for my well-being, sensing that my wandering ways could use a bit of divine vigilance. She was in her nineties, so her passing was not really a surprise, but a couple of other deaths came as quite a shock.

The daughter of another of my mother's good friends was recently diagnosed with cancer and then died two weeks later. But perhaps the most surprising death was that of one of my mother's former boarders, a young student from Japan. I had gotten to know him during my break from the walkabout to be with my family for my Aunt Rosie's funeral and the holidays over this past winter. He was a high-spirited and active guy, enjoying all sorts of sports like surfing, golf, tennis, and even skateboarding all over our neighborhood like I used to do when I was younger. He had only recently moved out of my mother's house to live with his girlfriend when he went skateboarding down a big hill and lost control. He fell and hit his head on a curb and died. Since he was an only child, his death came as an especially hard blow to his parents. And then just a couple of weeks ago, my newly married cousin's (see last entry) grandfather went for a walk on the beach and fell off a cliff and died. He had been in fine health, so it was quite a shock to their family.

And again, I'm not sure what to make of all these deaths. (See "Going Home" for my somewhat befuddled approach to multiple deaths.) I guess it makes sense that knowing a lot of people means experiencing a lot of deaths. And I've gotten to know so many people, especially over this past year of walkabout. Perhaps the lesson for me is that ultimately I can choose my response to death. Different people will take different lessons from the same experience. Two people might remark on the ephemeral nature of life and respond oppositely, one choosing to be more careful while the other tosses caution to the wind in a newly minted carpe diem approach to life. And of course, both responses are totally valid.

For me, the fleeting nature of life lends it a deliciously bittersweet beauty. So I choose to grieve as appropriate, but most of all, I choose to honor and celebrate both life and death. And I will try to remember to do these before those dear to me reach the end of the road. And despite Dylan Thomas' best exhortations, when my time comes, I hope to go gently into that good night, and not "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." I watched Carol fight to the bitter end, and her days were filled with frustration, anger, and pain until that final dark night descended upon her. And yes, that's totally valid too, but I wish to seek the peace and harmony within the light and the dark. Of course, that's easy for me to say now when I am not faced with my own imminent demise. We'll see what happens when it's my time to turn out the lights.

Personally, the most palpable manifestation of this latest sense of internal darkness has been an anxiety that has crept into my dreams and meditations. Dark visions filled with menace and conflict have invaded my sleep. This is nothing new of course, what with dreams being a primary processing plant for the unconscious, but the nightmares have been more frequent than usual. And during my meditations I have become aware of an underlying apprehension.

For the most part, I still feel pretty upbeat, if a bit tired, but I know better than to ignore these less-than-subtle messages from my unconscious. If I ignore them for too long, then a persistent unease can easily build to a very discernable stress, which in turn can grow into sickness and even disease. Again, it might be some repressed angst that I am finally releasing from my walkabout experiences. And it very well could be apprehension over my very unplanned future. Probably some of both of these, and it could be some other emotional issue(s) that I'm totally clueless of. (Hey, I'm a guy, after all.)

So I will explore these shadowy woods and do my best to embrace the spiky beasties that lurk within. Fears and sorrows and pains, oh my! And if I can learn to play nice with the beasties within, then maybe the beasties without won't seem so frightening either.

So what---beyond the clichéd psycho-babble---does it actually mean to me to "embrace the dark"? Well, for me, this means engaging so-called "negative" feelings as fully as possible, on mental, emotional, and even physical levels. (My psychic pains usually have a corresponding physical pain somewhere in my body. I tend to carry a lot of stress in my shoulders, but this time my discomfort resides mainly in my lower back and stomach.) To do this, I meditate deeply on my feelings, attempting to understand them, accept them, and, above all, feel them---emotionally and physically.

And often, just emoting my darkness is enough. (Intellectually understanding it is often not really necessary, though it can help to learn the root causes.) In this way my unconscious realizes that its communications of unease have been received and they can cease their urgency, even stop altogether. After all, my beasties are usually just messengers who have been kept in the dark too long.

It's important that I approach them with acceptance, not as an attempt to be rid of them or even "release them". For it is also a practice of becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable. And an opportunity for the paradox to reveal and reconcile itself: the less I need the light, the more the light becomes apparent. The less I need to feel better, the better I feel. The darkness is a doorway itself. For ultimately, the dark and the light are one.

One night as I walked the forest paths in my monastery, I had a revelation. I was thinking how much easier it was to make my way in the dark when the moon was full. And then it struck me like a thunderclap: the moon is always full.

Just like us.

Seize the night.




"I saw the crescent,
You saw the whole of the moon."
---the Waterboys


"One dervish to another: What was your vision of God's presence?
The other replied, I haven't seen anything. But for the sake of conversation,
I'll tell you a story:
God's presence is there in front of me,
fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire,
another toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under on the water surface,
that head pokes out of the fire.
Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.
Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion
are cheated with this reversal.
The trickery goes further.
The voice of the fire tells the truth, saying I am not fire,
I am fountainhead.
Come into me…..and don't mind the sparks."

---Rumi, "The Question" (translated by Coleman Barks)


"And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the radiances shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven."
---Jack Kerouac, from On The Road


midnight crescent moon
whispers its divine secret:
I am always full

---a haiku I wrote at the monastery


"Brokenness is the Way." (among others)
---me, responding to a friend's insistence that I sum up my walkabout in a single sentence


“Hey, at least I’m alive!”
---a guy I met walking down an alley in Venice who recently suffered a stroke