Have you ever?

Have you ever stopped and sat with yourself when the dark side of the moon comes up?

Have you ever laughed into the abyss?

Have you ever died, shattering into a thousand pieces, only to find yourself alive, more than you had ever thought possible?

Have you ever stood at the top of the mountain and cried out "Fuck you!"?

Have you ever stood at the top of the mountain and said "Yes!"?

Have you ever stood at the top of the mountain and said "Look out world, here i come!"?

Have you ever lost yourself in a blade of grass, or snowflake, or the color orange?

Have you ever found yourself as a little boy or girl, and told him or her that he or she matters? And then found out that you don't matter, that nothing matters, that there is no mattering, that nothing matters any more or any less than anything else, that everything just is, and because of that you are perfect?

Have you ever run naked in the surf?

Have you ever run naked at dawn, screaming and spinning because you are dying and coming alive, all at the same time?

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a dying man and still felt your joy in the midst of your powerlessness and your grief?

Have you ever danced like no one is watching?

Have you ever danced like everyone is watching, and reveled in it?

Have you ever eaten a strawberry as slowly as you can?

Have you ever failed and said "Woohoo!"?

Have you ever had the feeling you are in love, and there is no one there but you?

Have you ever shouted at the full moon "I don't know what i am doing!" and felt her kisses on your face?

Have you ever walked, upright and striding, going nowhere, and let a smile cross your lips?

Have you ever played hooky when it rained?

Have you ever called in sick from work on a sunny day and gone to the beach by yourself?

Have you ever listened to your ancestors say “You must cry for us,” and said “No, I am not your sorrow,” and then cried for them anyway, because you are, in fact, the one they have all been waiting for?

Have you ever drank champagne from someone’s lips?

Have you ever worn two different colored socks, hoping someone would notice, and laugh?

Have you ever said “Thank you”, and meant it?

Have you ever said “No,” and been filled with the light of the sun?

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a child, and thought, “Looking into your eyes, and seeing your light, is my favorite thing to look at in the whole world,” and then told them?

Have you ever let someone love you more than you love yourself, without heading for the hills, beating them back, or crawling under a rock?

What would you do if a butterfly came to die on your doorstep?

I walked out of my house today. At the bottom of the stairs on the grey cement sidewalk lay a butterfly. The butter yellow of its Monarch wings was hard to miss. It wasn’t moving, just sitting there, its wings splayed. I approached the butterfly slowly. At this distance I could see all the details of its wings: yellow panes of stained glass, outlined in black, with a row of vibrant blue dots at the back edge, and two burnt orange O’s at the end of his tail. I lay down with him on the sidewalk. We are shielded from view of the street by my MG. We are huddled behind the old chrome spoke wheel.

“Have you brought me a message?” I ask the butterfly. No answer. I reach out my hand, putting my finger in front of him. He crawls right onto my hand. He sits awhile, then flits of my fingers, hovers in front of me, then flops on the ground, upside down. I help him right himself, and he crawls back onto my hand. I sit on the lowest step, a butterfly on my finger.

He is so magnificent! The colors are so striking, his black body with yellow racing stripes of hair, his wings with swaths of deep color and smatterings like a comet’s tail. And he is dying.
My first impulse is to save him. “What do you need?” I ask him. He is weak. Water? Sugar water? Perhaps I can take him inside and make him some honey water.

Can I take him inside? Will he fly away? Will he get lost in my house? How can I mix his drink and hold him too? Can I save him? It is all so hard.

Then a message comes to me. Let go. Just be. Just love. If this butterfly has come to die, then be with him while he dies. Stop trying to save everything. A warmth spreads through my chest. My stomach relaxes.

Yet am I willing to just sit and let a butterfly die? Oh, how my heart aches just sitting here, my legs ache to move to do something. “You do not have to save me,” the butterfly says. “You have to save you.”

So I sit and love the butterfly and let him die. For a moment, he flops off my finger, tumbling on the sidewalk, heading under the car. “No! Not that way!” I say, and reach out my hand for him. He rests again. “I’ll take you to the garden now.”

I stand and carry him up the stairs. As I open the front door, he starts to crawl up my arm. By the time I go out the back door, he is on my shoulder. I can just see him out of the corner of my eye. I walk down the stairs to the garden and I sit in a chair. He flaps his wings, and he is so close I can hear it.

I take him in my hand again, and we sit and sit. He is very still. Sometimes I see the lower end of his body pulsate, and I know he is still alive. Or his proboscis, curled under his head, will move, as if he is breathing. He lowers his head, resting it on my finger. His legs are splayed. “Now he is dying,” I think, and I wonder how long it will take. Perhaps when I am truly able to let go, he will pass. His wings flap once and he is still. I think “That was it. He is gone.”

And then my butterfly moves again. He is not dead. And I feel a tinge of disappointment. I wanted that moment. I wanted to be here when he dies. I wanted to be the one to hold him in his passage. I wanted to tell the story of the butterfly that came to die in my hands, and how I did it. I want to tell the story of how he knew this was a good place to die, how he could see how loving I am, and how magical I am that butterflies come to me to die. And if he had lived and I had fed him how I could tell the story how powerful I am that I healed a butterfly. Either way I am not here, but writing the story of my being here, and how amazing I am.

So just be. Just love this butterfly. Let him live or die. And let me be able to walk away at any time without a great ending. I do not matter that much.

My heart is so filled with love for this creature. How wonderful to be sitting here with this beautiful creature in my hand! It is drizzling now, and I see drops of mist bounce off his wings. It is so much easier. Being and loving. To love so fully is to stop doing anything, and trying to matter so much.

I lift him to a small flower potted on the table. It is rich purple, and open like a small orchid. He walks right onto the flower. I think he is going to eat. But he keeps walking, and leaps off the top of the flower. He flies gracefully up and up. He alights on top of the redwood fence at the garden’s end. I imagine he is exhausted again. I miss him. I want to hold him. I reach up to the top of the fence and before I can come near, he flies off, and lands on a tall bush, out of reach. He folds his wings in the rain.

I think of my mother and father. They are coming close to the end of their lives. I watch them struggle, my mother silently, my father louder and louder. Big things have not worked out as planned. I want to struggle with them, to save them. I want them to be the way I want them to be, so I can be loved the way I want to be loved. Now, I just hold them gently on the tips of my fingers. I walk back up the stairs, and close the door.

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Holding On, Letting Go

Have you ever had a relationship end, and the pain of it persists and is pervasive? It can be both excruciating and exhausting. Or have you managed to move on, and then you get an email from them, and it sends you into a tail spin?

What is in the way of moving on? What keeps that wound from closing?

The answer can be quite simple: The pain is how you continue a relationship with them. In every moment when you feel the pain of the relationship, you are in a relationship with them. You are thinking of them, feeling them, experiencing them. You may even have conversations or arguments with them in your head. There is a part of you that hasn’t let go. There is a part of you that is holding them desperately. There may be a part of you that needs something, and is still trying to get it. And that part would rather feel the pain than lose them.

The way to let go is to not let go. Let yourself hold them tightly, for this is what you want to do. Hold onto that pain. Hold it just long enough until you can see that part of yourself that needs them. It will most likely be you as a child. They are hungry for love, and without that relationship, are cut off from their lifeline. They are probably feeling unlovable, and depended on that relationship to avoid feeling this. In unlovable, they have attached themselves to someone else to feel lovable. And the pain of living in a dead relationship is less than the pain of feeling unlovable, for it is an intense, rich feeling. It may be preferable to feeling one’s own emptiness and worthlessness.

When you can see your inner child, find your heart, because you are a loving person, and have given many people in your life love, and love them. Let them have your heart. Bathe them in your love. Talk to them. Try telling them, “I have what you need right here,” and let them feel your heart, swim in the warmth of your love. Tell them what they have been waiting a long time to hear.

Then you will remember the love that you are. Then you can let go.

Giving Respect

Has anyone ever said to you, “You have to earn my respect”? I know when I have heard it it didn’t feel very good. Why not? There is an underlying message. It means that I start out from a place of no respect. It means that I don’t respect you until you prove yourself worthy of my respect. It means I am not worthy. And that doesn’t feel very good.

It further means that there are levels of respect. You may be worth more or less respect. It means you may be worth more or less. Your personhood is being evaluated and deemed worthy. Your personhood is being deemed worthy of consideration. And if you do not earn your respect, you may be unworthy of consideration.

This is conditional respect. It is no different than conditional love. It means you are not seen in your perfection at all times and fully accepted for who you are. It means you are only accepted for what you do, not who you are.

The confusion arises with our need to evaluate a person’s skills. Here, respect means our regard for a quality or skill a person possesses. I do want to evaluate a plumber before he takes apart my sink. I need to know his skill level. If he is a true craftsman, than I will admire him. But this is about what he does, not who he is. He is always worthy of my consideration for his personhood, independent of his skills. My love is separate from my admiration. I may not admire everyone, but I can love everyone.

We have become so obsessed with doing as a culture, that we may forget to see the person doing it. Just as they do to themselves, we think that they are the things that they do. They are as loveable and respectable as the things they do. Admiration is about the doing. Respect can also be about the doing. But it also has the sense of love.

What if I said, “You have all of my respect from the start. You are going to have to work really hard to lose it”? How would that change your life? And the world?

How could you lose my respect? If you push hard enough, you will find some place inside me where I don’t respect myself. If you manage to burrow down to the bottom of that hole with me, then in that dark place you will lose my respect. Because there is none there. For me or for you. There is no love there, either. And if you have pushed me that far, I will assume it is because you are not respecting⎯or loving⎯yourself. So there we will be, two people with no love or respect for ourselves sitting in the dark at the bottom of a hole. Pretty bleak. No way out.

How do we get out of there? It takes someone to come along who respects themselves deeply⎯meaning more than us⎯to bring some light to that place so we can begin to see ourselves again. With that glimmer of light, we can start to see again, and find our way out of the hole.

So bring on your respect. Show up with your respect full-on. There are a lot of people around us who do not respect themselves as much you do. Let them see themselves reflected in your respect for them. And may that moment be a turning point for them, when they caught a peek at themselves beyond their doubt. Let it be a moment when the lie dies, the lie that they are not worthy, for a lie cannot sustain itself once it has cracked. And let that be the start to all of us finding our way back to our full love and respect for ourselves.

Back Pain: Testing My Joy

It was a few days before my back surgery. I could stand for maybe 30 seconds before the pain hit. Maybe a minute. It would start in my hip and spread down through my thigh, down my calf, and into my foot. But it was breakfast time, and I was home alone, and I was hungry.

I made it to the kitchen. I really wanted some eggs. Scrambled would be fast, I thought. Standing at the stove, I can feel time running out, and the eggs are not cooking fast enough. “Come on!”, I actually said aloud. The pain is here. I get the eggs on a plate. The table isn’t far. I turn, walk a few feet, and it is too much. I can’t make it. I go down. The eggs don’t matter. The pain is all there is.

I am lying on the kitchen floor and I am screaming. It helps the pain to scream. I am screaming at the top of my lungs. My hip and my leg are consumed with ripping fire. If I can scream loud enough, I can match the pain, and I can almost bear it. Not that I have a choice.

And then in the middle of this agony, I realize, “Huh, you’re not actually unhappy”. Sure, I am in an insane amount of pain, but I am not unhappy. Rather, I have this odd sense of joy. Or rather, I still have my joy. Yes, I want this to be over, want to be out of the pain, but it is just pain. It is probably the most intense pain I have ever felt. I am thinking “God, this fucking hurts! But I am so alive! What a ride! Wow! Jesus, this is intense, I didn’t know I could feel this! FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!”.

But I am not making up the stories I used to in these moments. I am not making up the story that I won’t have a job, or that I won’t have a family, or that I won’t be loved. I do not tell myself, “See. This proves it. Here you are, not good enough.” I do not go “woe is me.”

It is just a sensation. Well, not just a sensation. A big god dammed horrible sensation. But here’s the thing: The pain is independent of who I am. I am here to experience it and there is not meaning to it beyond just the pain. There is no meaning to it about who I am. The pain I used to create⎯the real suffering⎯was the pain of how I diminished myself. The deeper truth is that I was already feeling unworthy⎯the pain was already there: the stories of woe I made up arose out of my deepest core pain of believing I was nothing.

So in that moment on the kitchen floor, I felt like I had passed a test: Had I really transformed? Did I really believe and know my own perfection and the love that I am? Yes, my deep joy in life comes from feeling the love that I am, and nothing, not even this excruciating pain, can change that. Love and joy are independent of the landscape of my life, independent of the feelings I have in the moment. I can still have my joy when I am sad, afraid, or angry. Or happy.

Be, Do, Get: Getting Your Life to Flow

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, with a beautiful wife, and a beautiful house, and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”.

-The Talking Heads

We tend to live by this rule: Get, Do, Be. First we decide what we want to get. Then we figure out what to do to get it. Then after the doing and getting we should end up in some state of being. The state of being is truly our goal, such as happy, peaceful, or connected. Our big mistake is not realizing this, thinking the getting is our goal. The difficulty is that what state arises out of our getting and doing is rather unpredictable: if we Get, Do, Be, what we get may not be in alignment with who we are. It is hard to buy a present for someone you've never met. And this time, the recipient may be yourself.

If, on the other hand, you start from a place of being, then you have a better chance that where you end up is in alignment with your deepest sense of being. Let the doing arise out of the being, and then let the getting unfold from the doing, then whatever you get will be aligned with your need for a state of being. When you are moving⎯doing⎯opportunities open up along your path for getting. And here, getting is better called receiving. Because it is on your path that you created from the place of being, when you Be, Do, Get, what you get will be perfectly what you need, in alignment with your deepest desires.

So here is a prescription for aligning your life: start from a state of being (this is the hardest part, because you must let go of anything you hope to get). Make sure that this is not a state of doing, like “walking in the woods”: there, peacefulness may be the state of being. Then begin to envision a doing arising out of this state of being. You must then choose from all the possible things you can do. Choose the one that makes your heart the warmest. Then once you are doing, let the getting unfold. What you receive will be equal to, and in alignment with, the energy you pour into it from your state of being. See it all lining up: the Being, the Doing, the Receiving. See yourself as the headwaters for your life. Let your life pour down the mountain out of the joy in your being. This is flow.

Finally, at Peace

It has been a long road to this moment, captured by my photographer friend Marcy Mendelson. Finally, I can stop running: I am enough. Finally, I know that I matter. And when I completely matter, nothing matters---when I know the love that I am, nothing is at risk anymore. I have what I need. What a wonderful sense of freedom! There is nothing to do. Just sit and breathe and enjoy the sun and the air and the ocean and my warm skin and the hard rocks under me so solid and my heart beating and beating and beating and I am alive. It is intoxicating. And then a desire to do arises: to help. To help other people to understand. To help other people to understand the love that they are, that we all are.