Crash and burn

In the middle of one of those cycles in the journey through the Underworld of letting go of everything. It started yesterday, somehow triggered by Andy Bey's version of Lush Life from his 2004 release, American Song. Also by reflecting on Dia de los Muertos coming up, feeling that autumnal grief I feel every year. And encountering the absolute and total unmanageability of my daily life. From little things (tried to clean up a coconut oil stain in saltillo tile by using a calcined clay poultice sold as the magic solution to just such a thing-- ended up not removing the stain and adding a lovely white additional stain) to "big" things, experiencing total systems collapse. 

Another catalyst for this crash and burn has been doing a very thorough sex inventory-- really a lot more about relationship, but definitely including sexual conduct. The source of most of the misery of my life and the arena in which I have caused most of the harm to others, is absolutely in romantic, sexual partnerships. The thoroughness of the process using the Big Book Awakening workbook has been humbling for sure, as well as horrifying in some ways. 

Burning culm dump

I miss the woman I'm in love with so desperately and insanely that it's been a sort of immolating feeling the past two days. Combined with that acute feeling of desire for this absent woman is an unusual upswelling of insecurity, neediness, lack of footing and lack of confidence. What follows from that is a lot of negative self talk and a feeling of self loathing that is not pretty. And last night, I realized that I have been holding on to this situation for dear life, trying to control and keep it. Operating on that old canard that if I just work hard at it, it won't evaporate and I'll have earned consistency and reliability. I knew that what I had to do was to let go and find some way to trust. Turn it over, step 3 wise. That I had been exhausting myself trying to manage it. That I just had to roll the dice and keep my heart open and stop acting out of fear. Easy!

The PhD program has been frustrating for the past several months, and I have my annual committee meeting Friday, 11/3, and I'm feeling hopeless about the entire enterprise for some reason. Just one of those phases in any long, arduous process-- the dark and down cycle. 

Get knocked over seven times, get back up eight times. That's what this ends up being. But for the moment, I am flat on my ass. Nice. 

The Spiritual and the Unknown

The power of sight does not come from the eye, the power to hear does not come from the ear, nor the power to feel from the nerves; but it is the spirit of man that sees through the eye, and hears with the ear, and feels by means of the nerves. Wisdom and reason and thought are not contained in the brain, but they belong to the invisible and universal spirit which feels through the heart and thinks by means of the brain. All these powers are contained in the invisible universe, and become manifest through material organs, and the material organs are their representatives, and modify their mode of manifestation according to their material construction, because a perfect manifestation of power can only take place in a perfectly constructed organ, and if the organ is faulty, the manifestation will be imperfect, but not the original power defective. Paracelsus -- De Viribus Membrorum

The above text encountered at James DeKorne's wild website of encyclopedic interpretation of I Ching hexagrams, for the morning's message. 

The image of a mountain on a mountain. 

As I read the passage from Paracelsus, I was struck by what total bullshit it is, from the standpoint of neuroscience. Because of course from the materialistic and reductivist body of knowledge that we now have, indeed consciousness "resides in" the brain and ends with the brain and that is simply that. 

This is what irritates me about "spiritual thinking" or writing or whatever-- it is an endless round of the postulation of "invisible" forces that are somehow a priori or ontologically grounded and that provide the basis for consciousness or reality. "There is absolutely no material evidence whatsoever for God." "Well, God is that invisible power moving behind things, or underlying everything, or integrating everything, and there is no material evidence for God but you just have to have faith in order to start to have the experience." Annoying. 

I want the human race basically to shut the fuck up about God. I realize this is a desire that is unlikely to be fulfilled. It's important probably for me to take a closer look at why I am so irritated by all this God talk. I know that my irritation arises in large measure from the weekly ways in which I hear 12 step people talk about God, "about" being the key word. Like talking about music, like talking about the wilderness. No fucking value whatsoever, except in various ways of self-reassurance, pride, vanity, public performance, grasping at straws, etc. Whistling in the dark. 

All this language is but a benighted map of metaphor, at best merely the most laughable simulacrum of experience. I know that we small humans, in the face of our blink of a lifespan and our woefully limited knowledge and mental abilities, have to whsitle in the dark or past the graveyard in order not to go mad, or kill ourselves, or disappear into the desert swathed in a stunned vow of silence forever. 

But it gets annoying after a while. 

Because the absolute best that language can ever do is point to whatever is not certainly known and say "THAT is where God is." This is exactly the definition of superstition. Whatever is unilluminated, in that dark lacuna is our laughably limited concept of magic, mystery and the divine. It's ironic that one of the metaphors for God is that "He" (oh my fucking god that's annoying too, this grating insistence on the male gender), anyway, that "He" is light. Because it seems the best we can do with any of our ordinary awareness is to repeatedly find this boogieman God of ours in the dark, wherever we are most stupid and unaware. 

And whenever we open the carton of the unknown, and advance the hilarious horizon of our puny intelligence a little farther, well, lo and behold, God isn't really in there after all. Everywhere we turn our mind and subject whatever object to scrutiny, God disappears. Funny motherfucker who seems so shy or perversely unavailable as to want to never be apprehended. 

So I am in a space currently where I lament this kind of God who is so small as to be Him (as if gender mattered to the infinite?), as to be the receiver of petitions (as if God were some kind of cosmic bureaucrat), as to be the dwarfed concept of sentimental "love" (as if an omnipresent Barry Manilow), as to be ooooooh cue spooky music and show slide of a starry sky Mystery (as if a late night cable television psychic burning incense and wearing shawls).

Now-- the real unknown-- that's terrifying to us. The basic idea that there is the divine and that it is in fact everything that is and that we have no way to apprehend it, express it or even get close to comprehend it-- that's humbling. Humility is endless because the sacred is infinite. 

And yet we persist in making containers and claiming confidently that our own containers are where this infinite resides. Usually, I find this forgivable, humorous or even an enjoyable activity. Lately, it's been annoying the fuck out of me. 

Never Not Broken

Akhilandeshvari as a black cat

It seems the fundamental law of being human, that we are never not broken. Of course, we can become more broken, or less broken, it seems. But always broken, nonetheless. That is-- somehow falling short of perfection, as it is conceived by us, or somehow with a flaw or defect always, or in some way suffering, always suffering, even in the face of joy or whatever equanimity we can access for however long. 

Nobody's got the broken loops like Basinski's broken loops

Or to think of it some other way, maybe it's what TS Eliot wrote in East Coker-- "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

Back to having no idea how to do what I am doing. Back to admitting powerlessness in radical and essential ways. So many different experiences take me to this place these days. The feeling is of admitting complete defeat, as Bill W asks in his treatment of Step 1 in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. "Who cares to admit complete defeat?" he asks. "Practically no one," he answers himself. 

And yet, there is not one area of my life where I am not powerless. I am powerless over others, I am powerless over my emotional comings and goings, I am powerless over the functioning or non-functioning of all the things I rely on, I'm powerless over the inevitable entropy of all things, even as I continue to show up to work creatively with it all. I was powerless over the story long before it was even a story and I'm powerless telling it and revising it and I'm powerless to get free of it. 

This-- that is, "Thisness,"--is unmanageable by me. 

These truths are not acceptable to most people. "Practically no one," said Bill W, and he ought to know. 

My first AA sponsor used to talk about what complete defeat looks like from the perspective of the ego, of one's attachment to one's "look good," and what complete defeat looks like from the perspective of the Self, the whole self. For the look good, complete defeat is of course catastrophe-- the very last thing we'd ever want to experience, the thing we fight against with so much might for so much of our lives. For the Self imagined or experienced as a whole, however, it is no different from complete victory. The Self is whole already-- for it, there is no gain nor loss. It is complete unto itself. Nothing can be taken away from something whole, nor added to it, by definition. In fact, complete defeat is a kind of homecoming for the Self or soul, an opening to the end of delusion, to connection with one's essential nature. In theory. And in my experience-- when I get to good old endless humility (or when I'm humiliated), there's a sense of vast and unshakable serenity and reassurance, running right alongside the wound to my ego. 

It must have been from the very bottom of the constant fall into endless humility that Julian of Norwich conceived the central idea of her philosophy. "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." That feeling absolutely does not come from my look good or my ego, at least not in any sustainable way. 

Also from East Coker:

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Is there a Book of Defeat? A Book of Failure? It looks like there are a few, but they don't seem to catalog the kind of failure I mean-- the sense of an absolute failure of life purpose that must be part of the experience of anyone who attempts something personally meaningful. It would be an oddly reassuring task, to research and write such a book. A run down of anything one could find where people considered to be great successes, or at least highly significant achievers, talk frankly about their failure. It would also include, of course, people who are now viewed as rousing successes in certain fields, but who actually cared about something else and were failures at it. Isaac Newton, for example, who is of course the archetypal Enlightenment scientist and mathematician, who went to his grave disconsolate over the failure of his exegesis of the Bible. 

“I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact, that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state. Why indeed should I continue to exist?"-- Carl Gustav Jung, in a letter he wrote in 1960.

Of course, a year later, he was dead, so I guess be careful what you wish for. Which Jung himself would warn. 

There's a well known story about Jung that involves him being visited at his house by a dear friend. The friend is in tears and says, "Well, Carl, I have been fired from my job!" And Jung exclaims, "Congratulations!" and breaks out a magnum of champagne. 

The temporarily crushing collapse of my last partnership-- I am quite sure Jung would have wanted to celebrate that. 

Yin and yang, sittin in a tree

I regularly consult my scrappy, cranky, irascible and cantankerous friend, the I Ching, but haven't posted regarding an I Ching meditation in a while. 

The most recent consultation began with the above hexagram, all of the interpretations of which are rooted in the strangely patriarchal and binary dualistic symbolic ground of the interpreters of the I Ching from China, especially via Confucianism. That is-- the broken, yin lines are viewed with suspicion-- "dark, feminine, magnetic, weak, highly productive but only within the proper placement"-- and the unbroken, yang lines are seen as powerful, dynamic, male, light and creative (although the yang lines too can be wrongly placed in the hexagram and herald problematic situations).

So the single yang line at the bottom of the other 5 yin lines is what gives rise to the various interpretations of "the return of virtue/goodness//strength/revival" etc. 

I have been dissatisfied with this binary yin/yang dualism that favors yang over yin-- every single one of the interpreters of the I Ching throughout history that I am aware of is male.  (Except the book in the link, which I have never seen). By contrast, the Tarot is interesting in this regard, as the most "favored" suit is cups and the least favored is swords. Cups in the Tarot represent water, emotion, love, fecundity, happiness and are of course easily construed as "feminine," as receptacle or vessel. Swords are almost always problematic in the Tarot and represent air, intellect, analysis and repression of emotion and of course, are phallic. 

It's always interesting to contrast I Ching readings done in the same consultation as a Tarot look. It's often been true for me that if the I Ching symbolism can be construed as mostly "positive," the Tarot is dark and stormy, and vice versa. So using the two symbolic systems together is maybe a little like consulting a male oracle and a female oracle, and letting them fight it out. 

Of course, the symbolic system of the I Ching is essentially binary, since the entire symbolic universe within it is established by the solid line and the broken line. I think this is the power of the set of symbols, this essential dualism. But the male interpreters who have a bias toward the solid lines and have written both ancient and modern texts expressing suspicion and negativity around the broken lines seem to me to only have half the picture. 

I ordered the above book, A Woman's I Ching, released 20 years ago, and we'll see how Diane Stein deals with the patriarchal imbalances that have become more and more apparent to me. It is perhaps the case that the origins of this system were much more unitary before the bland ethical black and white Confucianists got a hold of it. 

Anyway, more on the actual reading later. 

Self pity

I have no idea what I'm doing. 

I am often wrong, I am often confused, I am often basing my opinions on outdated or wrong ideas, or inaccurate perceptions or bad information. 

These perceptual and epistemological shortcomings are compounded by a set of entrenched character defects that are my default way of trying to protect myself from hurt or threat. Bill W wrote in the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions: "The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear-- primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded." (p. 76).

a scarlet Ibis. a little blurry. saying "it's not very complicated"

Yesterday, I started the day with a nearly totally unconscious, fierce, aching, chronic desire and longing for the company of someone who is distant. I think part of the reason I wasn't even aware of my longing was that I *always* want the company of this person, these days-- it is a persistent feeling of just never being able to get enough. Much of the time, I am able to turn it over to the larger container of faith that everything will be all right and that it can help to dive more into my ordinary life-- simple things, like cleaning the floors, taking a walk, reading, meditating-- or more complex tasks, like grading, or working on my dissertation proposal, etc. But, for whatever reason, I lacked all perspective and sense of proportion yesterday. 

And it was especially haunting because I was completely unable to determine with any accuracy or clarity exactly what was dragging me down and down. The feeling state was just one of deep sadness and weird, unattached nostalgia. I'm prone to these moods in autumn anyway, and sometimes they just wash over me like a tsunami and I have no ability to find a place to put my feet.

One of the big feeling states that arises in me as a result of self-centered fear is self pity, a kind of co-creator with fear. The prospect of losing something I already possess can cause self pity. The prospect of not getting something I desperately want causes self pity. Of course, self pity itself takes on a variety of forms. It might look like anger, resentment, jealousy, sadness, "romanticism" of the Goethe-esque, Sorrows of Young Werther kind, hatred, suspicion, fear, etc. In the work of becoming more emotionally sober and more self aware of emotion, I have learned powerfully that there are some deeply causal elements-- self-centered fear or self pity-- and there are symptoms-- anger, sadness, etc. The work is essential for me. It reminds me of this funny little saying that floats around AA: "Poor me, poor me, poor me, pour me another drink."

Generally, self pity has a few recognizable symptoms that are common to whenever it rears up. Negative self talk-- "You are such a fucking idiot, why have you gone and allowed yourself to be so vulnerable so soon after having been so hurt? She finally realized what a waste of time you are and rightfully has turned her attention to more imporant things. You are a sick fucker. So weak and codependent. Is it any wonder she doesn't want to have anything to do with you? Why don't you fucking step up and be a REAL man?" It's always eye opening for me to write down the thoughts I have when that voice is working in my head. When those demonic and hateful insults are in black and white, it's jaw dropping how "normal" and familiar such internal statements are, running in the background of my life. It's funny how I have successfully removed other people who might have talked to me like that, but the introjected hater is still sometimes very much in my mind. 

Another symptom of self pity is destructive impulses. Self-centered fear arises because I don't think I will get what I want (in this case, the love and attention of this person) and then self-pity sets in. In the midst of the feeling, and mostly to try to find relief from the pain, I sometimes have powerful impulses to isolate, lash out, tear down the structures of trust and intimacy that have taken a long time to build, get angry, accuse, sulk, act out. 

Another symptom is to get into extreme efforts to control the other person or the entire situation. Even while my fierce longing for this person was unconscious in me yesterday, I kept having these fantasies of just ditching the PhD program, moving to where this person lives, completely turning over the apple cart, just to have a greater feeling of control. I had no clear idea why I was having these wild impulses. There's nothing necessarily wrong with changing one's life to be with someone, but when it arises out of a desperate desire for control, it's toxic af. 

Performing sadness publicly on social media is another symptom. Posting sad songs, sad poems, projecting darkness. Again, nothing wrong with going into sadness in order to grieve, cathart and heal. But the ego display of bleeding out is an ineffective and maddening cul de sac.

Yet another set of symptoms of self pity for me is that I puff myself up, demand more recognition, demand to be taken seriously, a sort of "do you not know who I am?? A man of my caliber!!" egotism. This especially happens when I feel someone is actively depriving me of something I feel I deserve or that would boost my look good. In the case of my love for the person in question, I have periodic overmastering desires to shout to the entire world what I feel for her, and sometimes that desire arises out of joy and a natural urge to share great news, but other times, I have seen that it arises out of my ego-- yet another control strategy, a way of marking territory, or a way of boosting my look good, because this person is smart, funny, beautiful and sexy and I still can't believe sometimes that she's even halfway interested in me. 

There's probably more symptoms but damn it all, that's enough for now, eh?

I went to my usual Wednesday AA meeting after a whole day of this misery and soon after arriving got almost instant clarity. This often happens to me. And, as is often the case, the root of my troubles was self-centered fear and self pity, and all of the defense mechanisms and armor that I don as a result. The very simple fact was this: I was sad not to be able to spend the day with a person I love. That's it, at the root. 

My goal now is to be able to recognize such simple things and then admit them. "I miss you and I wish we could be together." Or to get even a little more honest: "The degree to which I have strong feelings for you terrifies me sometimes. It feels like there is a lot at stake for me in loving you. I am afraid I will be hurt. It actually feels like I could be destroyed. I know that's not accurate, but that's how it feels." Because it was not just that I missed this person and wanted to spend the day with her. It was also that this feeling was so magnetic, so intense and so all-consuming that it was forcing me, against my will, to face how attached I am and how vulnerable I feel. 

These awakenings are capable of moving me from the morass of self pity to the healing of self compassion. I can start to take good care of myself and calm my fears. Once my fear that I am going to lose this person or not get to be with this person subsides, the entire scaffold of ineffective self protective strategies crumbles. 

This goes directly back to my concept of a power greater than myself. I am not able under my ordinary steam to turn in that deeply shifting way, from the terror of loss to a peaceful acceptance that everything is exactly as it is and there is nothing I can do about it. This shift only happens for me on that ground of faith, that mystery that there is some kind of something essential happening that I am merely a part of-- and that "all I have to do" is let go and show up. (A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, said good old Tommy Eliot). 

Effing the ineffable

Last night's topic at the men's group meeting that is my home group was "What is your concept of your higher power?" I usually dread this topic because it often results in weird shares, vague platitudes, bizarre barely veiled references to Christianity, bold proclamations of atheism, rambling and nonsense. It can have that aimless and ultimately meaningless feeling to it, similar to people talking about music rather than just listening to it. 

But, as usual, the guys came up with some interesting and useful perspectives last night. And it is simply jaw dropping to see yet again the contrast between physical appearance and general attitude versus deeply held beliefs and intimate experiences that have changed our lives. 

the ordinary and the extraordinary

Anyway, there is no way around the simple fact that the 12 step approach to recovery and healing and wholeness involves the imperative of coming to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, turning my will and my life over to the care of that power, and seeking through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with that power and attempting to know the will of that higher power. 

This whole enterprise is deeply repellent to a great many people. In his curious and eccentric little book, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, in the chapter on step 2 (Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity), Bill W outlines some of the categorical types of recovering people and their attitude toward a higher power. His types are:

1. The belligerent one

2. The bewildered one

3. The intellectual

4. The cynic

At one time or another, I have been one or more of these types in regard to the question of a higher power. In particular, having had white light spiritual experiences at age 14, 22 and 23 and 30, and having consciously sought a direct experience of the divine through intoxication and using hallucinogens, and never really having had much of a problem with the idea that there are mysterious, unquantifiable and tangible but highly subjective spiritual forces at work in the universe and in my own life, I have usually just been bewildered. 

Why did my pursuit of the divine go hand in hand with an almost fatal, progressive illness? How can it possibly be true that the mysteries have any particular interest in me, let alone actual positive care for me? How can I develop a concept of a power greater than myself when I am an atheist and do not experience the divine as one entity or a Supreme Being? Can I form and maintain conscious contact with my own conception of a power greater than myself reliably enough to stay sober?

These were some of the reservations I personally had. Many people faced with this core of 12 step recovery have far more serious reservations. I have worked with many men who were empiricists, rationalists and cynics to the core and who simply could not form any kind of connection with even the barest sense of the divine, no matter what they tried. Many of these men do stay sober anyway, either by finding a way to work the 12 step program that works for them or by pursuing sobriety some other way. 

But at the thermonuclear core of the spiritual malady that is alcoholism and addiction, despair reigns. My experience of the darkest side of my delusional addictive state is that it lives in complete despair. A form of pitch black nihilism and rejection of purpose, meaning, love-- leading to a total rejection of life. Not everyone experiences this completely negative emptiness, but it's there in me, and I am often reminded that it is. Maybe it is as much a cause of depression as it is a cause of addiction. At any rate, it too is a totally subjective experience that is almost untellable. 

One of the very tough looking men of our group said a single thing last night that sticks with me: God is not the object of my belief, but the subject of my experience. 

If the divine is the subject of my experience, it doesn't matter what I believe or don't believe. My first sponsor in AA always referred to beliefs as thoughts, and therefore as human products, creations of the mind. Faith, on the other hand, was experience-- transcendent and not only a thought, but an action, a way of acting in the world. It assists me to think of belief and faith as two separate realms-- one can believe in God and not "have faith;" one can "have faith" and not even believe in God. Believing has no relationship whatsoever to reality. I can disbelieve that the sun will rise tomorrow all I want, but rise (probably) it will. 

Fortunately, for me to stay sober, I don't have to believe any damn thing. I do have to live by a daily experience of faith. But this experience is a strange and mysterious one, and includes within itself the spiraling out toward greater and greater faith. It's funny because my mind starts to rattle in the face of that language-- but what do you have faith IN?? How can you "have faith" if you don't BELIEVE anything? How can you have faith that there is a power greater than yourself that gives a fuck about you at all, especially in the face of so much random suffering and horror in the world? Etc. Yes, yes. Good mind. You are doing your job. 

A dozen dead roses looking super fine

Anyway, I am unable to put into words exactly what I mean. The rationalist in me finds this unacceptable if not embarrassing and downright foolish and dangerous. Quieting that skeptical mind and not trying to fight it, simply leaving space and observing, allowing room and allowing experience to be what it is, this kind of mindfulness, is where I get the power to stay sober. For a drunk used to a big old man punishing sky God or a loving friend in Jesus, my form of the experience of the divine would probably not work. It's too "mystical" or gnostic and probably sounds vague, like one wouldn't be able to really have a relationship with it. 

But it's the actual and experienced fabric of my daily existence. 

Testimonies from Hades

Heavy-hearted emotion and grief was in the air last night at the weekly home group meeting of AA, a men's meeting populated by anywhere from 70 to 120 men every Tuesday night, at various stages of recovery, both chronologically and spiritually. It's one of those 12 step meetings where, when you look out across the room, you are astonished by the diversity of the crowd, a lot of guys fresh from work wearing fancy clothes, or oil soaked mechanic's uniforms, or biker gear, or casual shorts/t-shirt/sandals, a lot of the attendees tattooed, weightlifters, wild looking, as if barely domesticated, but many also groomed. Overall, you know the entire Valley is much safer with all of us in recovery. 

A guy with 90 days got his ticket called to share and spoke about how his friend, who had just been in our meeting a couple weeks ago, had died of an overdose. He got the phone call from the guy's mother in Illinois and called a cab, went to the airport, bought a plane ticket and flew out to the funeral. The family was deeply moved to have him there. He could barely contain his combination of grief and gratitude. 

Then a gigantic weightlifter tattooed guy with a very heavy Brooklyn accent had his ticket called, and he talked about having heard the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas and starting to sob so hard he had to pull his car over and sit for about a half hour until he could see well enough to drive again. 

Then a tough, cynical salesman who almost always has some kind of snarky thing to say had his ticket called and talked about picking his brother up at the Mayo Clinic, where his brother is getting stem cell treatment for cancer. If the treatment doesn't work, his brother has about 30 days to live. And this man completely took off his snarky exterior and shed tears. 

Then a guy originally from Philly who still has that Philadelphia swagger and accent got up and shared that one of his children had been arrested that day on federal charges and how he had been practicing not flipping out and not getting involved but getting into non-action and letting the process take its natural course, and he choked up. 

One of the great blessings of recovery for me is being with men who are finding ways to feel. The men I most want to spend time with are casting off inherited notions of manhood, diving right into the core of shame learned through years of personal and cultural abuse, and working to emerge with more wholeness, greater range and less rigidity. I've always been super sensitive, empathetic and emotionally hypervigilant, and my feeling life has usually been far, far more roiled and active than I have been able to express, especially to other men. 

I have long sought out women for this reason. Recent awareness of the way men burden women in the expectation that women will perform their emotional labor for them has had me reflecting carefully on my pattern of only opening emotionally to women and of being resolutely guarded and defensive around most men. The same sex sponsorship tradition in AA makes it imperative to at least begin there-- with one man with whom one makes the commitment to be completely honest and as real as possible. 

My experience has been that it is a very slow and painful process. As much heartbreak and betrayal as I have experienced via women, I am still willing to open to them. The wounds dealt by men have gone much more deeply into my sense of self worth and dignity, clearly, since I am usually not at all willing to be vulnerable with other men. 

In the arts, I have always longed for the approval and admiration of men, and rarely gotten it, but have often gotten the appreciation of women. I used to use writing and music as part of my woo kit for that reason-- and I always appealed to women who were inclined to be impressed by those things. Men have often rejected or been unenthused by those aspects of my expression. This goes back to the primal pattern of getting a lot of encouragement from my mother and absolutely none whatsoever from my father, an imprint that I have been reiterating with zombie-like regularity for awful decades.

This realization and the desire to grow in this area and take some risks led me to choose a men's group as my home group in AA. I realized that my gendered patterns of emotional experience were holding me back and causing an imbalance. I've been going to this meeting for more than two years now and I still feel guarded and wary. Obviously, it takes time. 

But a meeting like last night's, where guys who look outwardly like the kind of terrifying figure you'd hate to encounter in a dark alley, get up and show depth of feeling in front of 100 other guys, definitely help. 

This One Time, Doing Fieldwork

Yesterday's post reminded me of an epic, incredibly awful, foolish day on Isla Magdalena which nevertheless makes an interesting story. The experience also led to me completely revisiting my approach to doing field work and definitely upped my game regarding the imperatives of self care in the wild. Good definitely came out of it. 

May 30th, 2015, a gorgeous sunrise over Bahía Magdalena, a steady cool breeze. My usual breakfast of a Jetboil full of French pressed dark coffee. 

The plan was to hike from camp, near the tiny fishing village of Puerto Magdalena, to the southeastern end of Isla Magdalena and back, doing survey transects along the way in as many distinctly different habitats as I could find. It's about 12 km from where I was camping to the end of the island. A 24 km round trip is definitely doable for me *now*, after several more sessions of hiking and a completely different list of supplies and a totally revised procedure for route finding. But this time, I brought only one Nalgene of water (a little less than 1 liter, about half a gallon) and a couple sugary Cliff bars. 

For one thing, I had no route plan, I imagined I would have easy hiking on level ground along the shoreline. I had no map and hadn't yet learned how to use my Garmin handheld GPS as a route planner. I had no idea how far it was to the end of the island, didn't think about time and for some reason I had it in my head that it was a little under 6 km, only half as far as it actually is. I had not yet learned, also, that in an all day hike, of course the afternoon conditions can be very different from the morning conditions, especially in spring or fall, but in Baja, really any season. 

Probably most importantly, I hadn't learned from two previous experiences that I am prone to heat exhaustion, with all of its attendant miseries of extreme digestive upset, precipitous loss of fluids, disorientation and bizarre thinking. On two occasions in the past, once in the Sierra la Laguna in Baja and once in the mountains of central Arizona, I had suddenly gotten very ill with incredible diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, inability to think clearly. On both of those occasions, I just figured that I had food poisoning or something. Neither one of those experiences happened in very extreme heat, for one thing, so I didn't really connect the dots on heat exhaustion and hyponatremia. 

Anyway, it was a beautiful, cool, breezy morning, not a cloud on the horizon. 

But here's how everything always goes, especially in Mexico. Of course, as already mentioned, everything is farther apart than one imagines, which makes it essential to use an actual map and be realistic. It was not possible to hike along the beach the whole way-- in fact, about a mile south of camp, I had to climb up onto an old, totally destroyed "road" that the ever-tenacious locals had tried to clear. The road would become centrally important later. For the moment, I didn't even really notice how much climbing and descending the road did along the several ridges of the island's very, very rough terrain, nor did it bother me much that, every time the road descended through a wash, it was completely blown out by severe flooding (probably from one of the many Cat 3 or 4 hurricanes that regularly blow through). These blowouts made it very slow going, descending rock walls, navigating brush filled arroyos and then finding a way back up to the road again. 

So, of course, it turned into a very strenuous hike, But as those of you know who do a lot of hiking, the first few miles of a strenuous hike often don't seem that bad, especially on a beautiful cool, breezy morning, with plenty of caffeine in one's blood and the whole day ahead. 

The above pic shows the terrain the "road" tried to traverse, and the steep cliffs along the impassable bay shoreline to the left. You can also get a sense of the dissected blowouts and washes as well as how incredibly rocky the terrain is. I was wearing Merrill Moabs, excellent desert hikers, but they do not have very thick soles, so they aren't the best for hiking on rocky terrain. 

Anyway, by the time I got to a resting place at Punta Arena, a nice white sand beach that faces almost due east, even though in my mind it faced south, I was already pretty beat. It was almost 1 pm already-- so it had taken me 5 hours to go about 3.5 miles. I thought the end of the island was only another half mile south or so, and in fact, it was 2.5 miles, a huge difference over such terrain. I drank half my water and ate both Cliff bars. 

I think I was already experiencing the early symptoms of heat stress. The weather had markedly changed, as it *always* does in Baja. The air was still now, no breeze at all, and temps were climbing. Instead of snapping to the fact that I could use the map feature of the Garmin and actually find out how far the end of the island was, I just stuck with my conviction, based on zero info, that it was "only another half mile or so." I resolved to hike that extra half mile, do some surveying and then turn around and go back to camp. I think, even if I had done this relatively sane thing, I would have been in big trouble anyway. 

As my mental state deteriorated and heat exhaustion slowly set in, I "decided" to hike over land to the Pacific side of the island and imagined it would be a simple matter to hike up the Pacific coast line and then over a trail I knew that had only a slight elevation gain, back to camp. Again, with adequate supplies, adequate time, a map, advance planning including remote viewing, and a back up plan, this would have been an okay idea-- except the remote viewing would have shown me that the Pacific coast is just as impassable if not more so than the bay shoreline. Common sense would have indicated as much, of course, but as heat exhaustion sets in, common sense goes out the window. 

Here's a map of the island and some key markers. Camp and goal are the yellow pins. The red marker is Punta Arena, where I stopped for lunch. The exclamation point is where I finally hit the Pacific beach, at about 3 pm, after a lot of really ill advised scrambling. 

From the image, the Pacific shoreline looks promising indeed, better than the trek over the rough terrain along the bay side. But about a half mile north of the marker, the shore becomes impassable, with surf pounding against steep cliffs. I was reveling in the cool sea breeze and feeling sanguine for some reason, in spite of the ever increasing hour and the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, had 1/4 gallon of water and no food. So, brilliantly, I decided to scramble up a steep canyon, with the plan being to go up and over the island, back to the bay shore, and then head back to camp along the road. 

As I climbed the canyon, I experienced a couple of things that those of you who are experienced and (almost dead) hikers have experienced. One is that, with each successive climb up, I was convinced I would soon "reach the top," and yet whenever I got to a plateau, lo and behold, I was nowhere near "the top." The other reality was that the canyon was blocked from the sea breeze and the afternoon sun was full on the west facing canyon slope. 

The below pic is from the Pacific beach that I finally reached after crossing over the southern part of the island. Ominous. 

Ah, look! this will be an easy hike, in the cool breeze!

Up on the first plateau of the canyon I thought I could climb over to the bay side. 

Back to the path over land to the bay side. This is the last pic I took. 

I started to feel nauseated and shaky about halfway up the canyon. I sat in a tiny slice of shade for a while and started to panic a little bit. It *finally* dawned on me that I could be in some trouble. I settled down a little and tried to think. It still didn't occur to me to actually use the high tech GPS equipment to help figure out what to do. 

I decided to climb down the canyon, head back down the Pacific coast, go back over land to the bay side, and then hike back to camp. It didn't even occur to me that it had taken me 5 hours to do the hike in the first place and it was already about 3:30, and sunset was at 7:30. I also didn't snap to the fact that I had only my sunglasses, no regular glasses, and I had no lamp or flashlight of any kind, so hiking after sunset was not the best idea. 

I did scramble back down the canyon, gloried in the cool sea breeze again for a little while, but not nearly long enough, and then started trying to go back over land to the bay side. Looking back, of course I ought to have just resigned myself to sleeping near the beach and high tailing it back to camp in the morning, dehydrated but at least with a lower body temp. But I was in a low level but chronic panic and kept thinking about how I had hardly any water and no food. It felt imperative to me to get back to camp. 

A short time later the first waves of crippling intestinal disorder, incredibly intense stabbing pain in the gut, pounding headache and shakes hit me, the symptoms of heat exhaustion and/or hyponatremia. Two thoughts flooded in like epiphanies: I was going to be sick again like those other two times in the past, both of which lasted for hours, and all of these times were due to heat exhaustion. It also hit me with stark reality: I could easily die out here. It was 4:30 pm. I had 3 hours to do a 5 hour hike, incapacitated periodically by the most severe gut pain, with only a quarter gallon of water and no food. Topping all of this off, I also had developed searingly painful blisters on both feet. 

If I had been in my right mind, I would have just bivouacked, rode it out and I would have been all right eventually, and could have made it back at first light in the morning. But the panic grew. So I stumbled on, every now and then stopping to be sick. The vomiting quickly turned into the dry heaves-- the total food intake for the day had been two Cliff bars and a pot of coffee. In typical pennywise and pound foolish fashion, I had also taken a multivitamin. My vomit tasted like sour B vitamins for the duration. 

By the time I made it back to Punta Arena, the red marker on the bay side of the above map, it was 7:00. Six hours earlier, I had set out from this locale after "lunch." The sun was already on the way down. It had taken me 2.5 hours to get across the southern end of the island. I checked my GPS, finally, and saw that I was 3.5 miles from camp. I collapsed on the road just northwest of the old whaling camp at that end of the island and was in complete despair. The excruciating stomach pain worsened with any kind of exertion, so that hiking up and down the blowouts and ditches of the road was unbearable and very slow. 

And thus, dear reader, began the long and arduous and perhaps nearly fatal trek back to camp. I was obviously not in my right mind. Getting back to camp became the paramount goal. I thought it would help me to drink the last of my water, but in fact it just made me sicker. I learned later that hyponatremia and heat exhaustion are worsened by water intake without sodium. Of course, I had had only the tiniest amount of sodium all day, since coffee leaches it from the body diuretically and Cliff bars are much more carb than salt. 

Addled, I stumbled up the road a short way and then became convinced that I just could not navigate the ups and downs. So I went down an arroyo to the bayside. I went along the beach for a while, stopping every now and then from extreme pain. Then I reached the first impassable segment of bay coast. I actually had to double back, go up a brush choked arroyo and then head overland. I could not find the road. The sun was down at this point and I was hiking in weak twilight, with my prescription sunglasses on and no lamp.

Quite luckily, the full moon was rising in the east. It was by moonlight that I would wend my way. I had to keep my sunglasses on though, because I was basically blind without them. I went down another arroyo to the beach, hiked the beach a little bit. I checked the GPS, remembering that I had been 3.5 miles from camp when I started back, 90 minutes earlier. Now it said I was 3.2 miles from camp. I couldn't believe it. 

This sent a wave of panic through me yet again. "You better get moving. You could die out here," became a refrain in my mind repeatedly. I hiked a little ways up the beach but hit another impassable section. I tried to go up the nearest arroyo but could not even get through the brush that choked it. I had to double back down the beach again to find an arroyo I could navigate. Somehow these weird recursive miseries seemed better to me than the road. 

I repeated this bizarre pattern-- heading up through an arroyo from the beach through thick brush, crossing over land a little, heading down another arroyo to the beach in the hopes that I could just hike up the coast-- about 5 times. After the 5th time, I checked the GPS again. 2.8 miles. I consoled myself by thinking "That is only as far as the run you do 3 to 4 times a week. You can do this." 

One last time, I was hiking along the coast. I reached yet another set of impassable sea cliffs. I thought that just around these cliffs was clear hiking along the flat coast all the way back to camp (I was wrong). I checked the time. It was midnight. The moon was bright and cheerful in the sky. I was absolutely exhausted and despairing that I had hit yet another impassable section of bay coast. 

The idea occurred to me that the water was probably not very deep, hugging the rocky shoreline along the cliffs. I could just wade around this obstacle for about 200 yards, then I would be on open beach to hike finally home. I thought about it. I looked back along the beach, knowing I had a long way to double back to a passable arroyo. I thought about climbing the nearly vertical cliff face right in front of me and going up that way, and over. It seemed impossible. It all seemed impossible. 

So I started to wade. "I'll just keep going as long as I have footing and the water is no higher than my calves," I promised myself. It was going all right. The footing on the rough rock was very sure. The water was not very deep. 

However, I reached an impasse even here, in the water. There seemed a short stretch ahead of me where I would have to get into deeper water before getting back to shallow water ahead. I stood and tried to figure out what to do. 

The scene was high cliffs on my left, a three foot rocky shelf on which I stood, the deeper waters of the bay on my right, the surf black and roiled against the rocks and cliff bottoms, the moonlight shattering shards of silver and white off the black waves. This was one of the moments in my life where I have felt absolutely insignificant. I stood there a long time. 

I finally decided to keep going, and stepped off into deeper water. It was much deeper than I thought, actually up to my chest. I went along a little bit, still with sure footing, and suddenly realized the water was close to my pack, which had cameras, gps, data, etc. I lifted my pack off and was carrying it over my head. I got up on higher rock finally and into water that was up to my calves again. 

But. Directly on, in front of me, was a weird sort of passage along the front of what looked like a sea cave. Every time the waves would rush in, the cave would become completely filled and there was a sickening kind of deep, hollow "bonk." In between waves, I could clearly see an open passage in shallow water. It was like something out of a video game-- would I have enough time to go quickly across the front of the cave in between waves or would I get pushed by a wave as I was not yet clear? If I got pushed in by a wave, I was almost certain I would be completely underwater, sucked into a sea cave. I waited for several cycles of waves and noted that they were not regularly spaced. There would be no way to definitely time a crossing. 

It slowly dawned on me what I had been doing this whole time. I think the cool water had begun to restore clearer thinking. Before this moment, it really had not even occurred to me how much trouble I could be in, how easy it would be to plunge into much deeper water, to be knocked over by a strong current, to be tackled by the periodic much larger wave coming in, to estimate rocky passage and water depth incorrectly wearing sunglasses in moonlight at midnight. 

In spite of realizing how insane this whole thing had been, I desperately wanted to go on. I was convinced there was just open shoreline on the other side. I also didn't relish the thought of wading back through the water the 100 yards I had already come and doubling back, with soaked boots and clothes, to find an arroyo to get back up on land. It especially occurred to me that wading back through that one passage of chest deep water might be problematic. I stood there for a long time. Then I realized, without a doubt, that the tide was coming in. 

That was the last deciding factor. Imagine being stuck here as the tide comes in, I thought. They'll find you floating face down someday, if they ever find you at all. 

So I turned and waded back. I made it to the shore and was grateful. I looked back at where I had tried to cross and felt queasy and terrified by my own irrationality. 

I tried to go up a couple of arroyos, but they were impassable. I finally doubled back what seemed like a long way and climbed up, soaking wet, with wet boots and increasingly agonizing blisters, until I was on almost level ground. Incredibly, the cold bay water had helped my condition significantly. I felt, for the first time, some relief from the stomach pains and other symptoms of heat exhaustion. The relief was so profound that I lay down on the rocky open ground, put my pack under my head, and fell asleep. 

I have no idea how long I slept, but I had the strangest dream or waking auditory hallucination. A voice came out of the cool moonlit night and said, "You have a GPS. Why don't you actually use it to help you get back? Use the GPS." 

I sat up and turned it on. Based on survey markers from earlier, I saw that I was only 400 meters below the road. So I gathered my strength and slowly plodded my wet booted feet up. Eventually I reached the road and lay down and slept again. Then I woke and decided to stick with the road no matter what, and that was maybe the first truly sane though I had had since about noon. 

Once, when I went down one of the blowouts of the road into thick brush, I was met with the sudden high pitched and nauseating flare of a rattlesnake's rattle. I'm sure the poor snake was as startled out of sleep as I was to hear its rattle. How lucky for us they have a rattle. I hovered out of balance on a rock and was able to avoid falling forward right into where the sound was, and changed course, giving the snake a wide berth. I actually said out loud, "Seriously? Seriously?" 

Periodically, I would lose the road in the moonlight, but the GPS did indeed help me find it again. I kept checking my distance and the movement toward camp was agonizingly slow. 

I reached a wide, gently sloping, low flat and saw that I had finally come to where the road wound its way down to the shoreline, and knew it was open shore the rest of the way because that is how I had hiked out in the morning. This was the first moment that I actually knew I would make it back to camp. I worked my way down to the shore and only had about a mile to go. Every step on the shifting rocks, shells and sand was sharply painful. 

When I finally did arrive back at camp, it was 3 am. It had taken me 8 hours to stumble my way back, mostly in moonlight, with dark sunglasses on, a long way with wet boots and wet clothes. I crawled into my tent, got undressed, got under the warm sleeping bag and gingerly took sips out of a full Osprey water bag I had left behind. The nausea had finally subsided. I had made it. 

This harrowing experience taught me a lot about how to do this kind of hiking. I changed my entire preparation and planning routine. I always carry salt tablets and extra food, usually with sodium. I always carry extra water. I am prepared to bivvy if something unexpected happens. I know my route and I never deviate. I don't guess and I don't speculate. I leave my route plans for every day of field work with my friend on the peninsula who takes me to the island in his boat and with his cousin in Puerto Magdalena. I check in to Puerto Magdalena every morning and, if I don't, the agreement is that people will try to find me along the previous day's route. 

I guess it took all of the above to get me to get real about the dangers of the kind of field work I do in the terrain where I do it. 

It's amazing what it takes, sometimes, for us to learn.  

A Dark Turn of Mind

As Percy prepares himself for a journey to unknown shores within the context of a surreal, blessed and heart opening adventure in risk-taking, there aren't many narratives jumping up to be limned. The return to the quotidian details of working toward a PhD, an unexpected health issue, a welter of sudden work and simply the relatively dull round of daily life all conspire to temporarily put a kind of cone of silence around story. 

But make no mistake. The trip through Hades continues, no matter how reassuringly routine or layered with transcendent beauty each day is. In particular, the aspects that are reminders of the passage through the Underworld:

Haunting dreams, sudden surges of complete lack of trust, fierce possessiveness and jealousy, fear that feels bottomless, the uncertainty of navigating new terrain (professionally and personally), further, deeper step work around the sex and relationship inventory in step 4, body dysmorphia and food control issues, excoriating self talk, retreat to meditation that yet is an experience of the chatter of a million ghosts, arguing with oracles, feeling stuck in regard to the behavior and choices of others, powerlessness over my own fate, and an enduring, haunting, shadow sense of my own mortality. 

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by; but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
--TS Eliot, excerpt from The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets

The Pacific side of Isla Magdalena, BCS, from a day before I knew better where I almost died from heat exhaustion-- but that's another tale

All the Sleazy People, Where Do They All Come From?

Good old Percy made the mistake of forming a professional relationship with a woman who runs a tour company in Baja California, based on the proposal to put together a trip specifically oriented to the cactus flora of the peninsula, an area in which Percy has deep expertise, but that's a long long story. 

All was great for the most part until the materials were completely put together for the trip. Suddenly, the company wanted Percy to do all the marketing and was proposing some very aggressive, spam-like approaches. Percy naively agreed to have a dummy Facebook timeline set up to promote the trip. All of a sudden dozens of rando friend requests were being sent from that dummy timeline, indiscriminately, to all of Percy's FB friends. 

Cease and desist! cried Percy. But still he held on to the idea of doing the trip. And things were temporarily righted, but a few days later, the page was back up and friend requests were going out again. 

Enough was enough-- relationship ended, withdrawal from the trip, etc. One of Percy's cactus acquaintances had already signed on and paid a deposit, and told Percy today that in communication with the woman who runs the tour company, he was told that she had no idea Percy had withdrawn his involvement. Wow! Sleaze factor times 10. Insane. 

Anyway, here are some beautiful pictures of beloved Baja. Maybe someday Percy will lead his own trip through that magical land. 

The road from Punta Baja to El Rosario de Abajo, Baja Calironia Norte, July 2012

The amazing panaderia, El Major Pan de Tecate

Sunrise over the river in San Ignacio, Baja California Sur

A small patch of lichen covered rocks where fog crests Isla Magdalena, BCS

I have not appreciated this process. I was always the cactus gSuy for the trip but suddenly found myself much more involved in marketing for you than I realized would be the case. I didn't realize my boundaries until the process unfolded. Then I set boundaries and they have been crossed again.

Please remove my name from all of your materials, remove my blog post from your website and, if you don't inform Jeff Harris today that I am no longer involved, I will inform him myself.

Good luck.