Katabatic wind, idiot wind, and so on

I recently stumbled down the weird rabbit hole of the Dyatlov Pass Incident,  which, in typical internet fashion, has attracted the attention of all sorts of conspiracy theorists and others trying to explain what happened, generally people who seem completely unfamiliar with Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation does seem to be the katabatic wind explanation, but that in itself is fairly harrowing, and not an explanation that is particularly reassuring. It does nicely fit the title of this blog, however, as well as having rich potential for metaphor. Some of the other words used are appealing somehow as well, such as williwaw, squamish wind, and piteraq. 

Anyway, the unfortunate adventurers killed in the Dyatlov Pass Incident were prepared. They just weren't ready for whatever happened. This is a perfect example of the crucial distinction between being prepared to the best of one's ability to be prepared, but just not being ready. I have been meditating on this distinction a lot as I prepare for my dissertation defense. The best we can do in life a lot of the time, especially under pressure or where it feels like a lot is at stake, is prepare. We still might not be ready, but at least we're prepared. This comes up for me as I practice the PowerPoint presentation that opens the defense. I have it well-prepared, and timed down to about 34 minutes, every time I practice it. But one never knows. One never knows. 

I am especially antsy about two of my committee members Skypeing in, one from Uruguay and the other from San Diego. If there is a serious technical difficulty with that, the defense has to be rescheduled, which would suck, especially since my oldest friend is flying in from New Jersey, etc. But one never knows. 

Anyway, the thought of camping somewhere already brutally cold but then having a 200 mph wind descend on one's campsite out of nowhere is the stuff of nightmares. I prepare really well for all of my contingencies while cam;ping. I have a lot of experience, and good gear. I try to be sensible. But so much of my field work in Baja was completely off the grid, and I was alone for a lot of it. Looking back, this approach was not ideal at all. In fact, I would not recommend it to myself, in the future. haha. As I arrange for more field work in remote locales, I will be subscribing to a satellite location and emergency notification system. Isla Magdalena, where I camped for days on end, is known for being infested with venomous rattlesnakes, for example. The possibility of falling was high, given the terrain. It was sort of idiotic of me to have spent so much time hiking alone there, let alone the run in with heat exhaustion I had that almost killed me (which is one of these blog posts, but I'm too lazy to go looking).

All of which ties into the great, bitter Bob Dylan song, Idiot Wind, one of my favorites. 



Which, in turn, ties in to a lot of the work I have been doing around self-compassion, kindness toward myself, a more gentle, awakened heart toward my own and others' shortcomings, real or imagined. I have been spending a lot of time with Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times and Start Where You Are, and encountering a lot of facets of my mind, my narrative, and my heart that have proven to be challenging. Most of all, it has become apparent that I benefit from being more gentle, more patient, kinder and more compassionate, toward myself and others, as well as letting go of narrative and creating more space, more often. Meditation has been helping a lot. So much time utterly alone has been helpful, in spite of the sorrow, heartbreak, and tender core that gets touched when there's nothing to do and no distractions. Or, really, because of that, not in spite of it. 

I've been having great interactions with my old friend, The I Ching, over the past several weeks. Recently, things have been pointing to success, transition, good results after a lot of work, and other basically favorable directions, which is reassuring, considering the transition I am in. Last evening, the first hexagram was The Cauldron, sometimes called The Sacrificial Vessel, basically, a large bronze cauldron for creating lasting results for oneself and the world. The changing lines were line 2 and 3, with some appended remarks here from James DeKorne's Gnostic Book of Changes:

Line 2: 

A. The situation is favorable, but you must be on guard to maintain it.

B. Divisive forces covet that which is under your control, but cannot harm you if you are careful.


C. Your idea has merit. (A cauldron with food in it.) Develop it carefully and don't get carried away. (Protect it from the enemies of doubt, over-enthusiasm, etc.)

Line 3:

A. The dynamics of your situation have changed, but you are still operating on old assumptions and have missed the point or not gotten the message. However, the condition is temporary and will resolve itself naturally.


B. The image suggests a stalemate followed by eventual resolution.

Both of these messages definitely resonate. One of the difficulties I have navigating change is waking up to the change that has already occurred, as it is more typical for me to think conditions are the same as they used to be, not realizing sometimes the profound ways that change has set in until I can see it in the rear view mirror so to speak. The whole thing about waiting for things, which has really been a major theme of the past few years, has recently changed. I am no longer waiting for anything. What's done is done, and what is happening right now is all there is. I do often feel like I have missed the point or not gotten the message, however. Like there are huge forces at owrk that I just can't see clearly at all, much larger than my ability to put into proportion. Combined with all of these themes, a repeated message from the ethers has been this landscape of envy, covetousness, jealousy, outside threat to my situation. So this goes back to being as prepared as I can be, and letting readiness take care of itself, since who knows exactly how ready I am?

It reminds me of Peter 1:13: Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

Which then reminds me of John 3:8: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

In the sense of simply being prepared. The idea of grace being a cosmic whim, unable to be earned or to be deserving of, but that doesn't mean we can't prepare to encounter it, in whatever form it takes. I have a feeling that there are a great many moments in my life when I have not been prepared, and grace arrived, and I had no idea that is what it was. On the other hand, there have been definite moments when the wind blew the right way, and I was prepared, and embraced the experience as deeply as I was able. Falling in love can be that way, and loss itself can also be that way. In particular, if I am able to let go of gain and loss as concept that I hold fast to, and if I can simply enter more into an awakened, kind, compassionate heart, the grace that might be otherwise hidden from me becomes more clear, sometimes. 

Sometimes. 

Weird that these themes are reminding me of my old Sunday school days, and fairly deep, definitely musty Christian background. I do credit Christianity with my earliest and most primal and inexplicable experiences of the awakened heart and mysterious nature of reality, though, so I guess it makes sense. 

There's a funny re-framing available through this lens of being prepared versus being ready. It occurred to me yesterday that, if I were to suddenly be offered *everything I think I want* or even everything I actually do want, I bet I would not be ready. Like a katabatic wind, that old williwaw of desires fulfilled would probably feel like it could kill me. How funny it is to be human and to think being ready is a prerequisite to saying YES. In fact, the best I can do is prepare, as much as I am able, and show up bravely in the face of the fear of not being ready, whenever possible.  

Winged Heart

I recently caught myself saying "I'm not very skilled at containing or controlling intense feelings of love, or keeping myself from communicating them," and I spent some time after that wondering what it would be like to see my effusive, expressive, enthusiastic and wild, fiery tendencies in that regard as a strength. To rephrase it as "I am very skilled at having and expressing intense and enthusiastically ardent feelings, at being vulnerable, unprotected, and honest about how much I love people." It changed things to reframe it in those ways. It's problematic when good, solid boundaries are violated by my communication, and I get that. But that's not the same as being unskilled at restraining my feelings or their expression. That's just a situation where I can practice redirecting myself and my words, and creating more of a safe space for people who have set a clear boundary. The skill isn't to shitcan how I feel, but to redirect. 

I get wrapped up in what I myself can handle or not, and forget that other people may not be exactly as they seem, so I've been reflecting on that too. I have known some people who just seem completely stainless steel, unable to be fazed, strong, tough and completely detached. But it is valuable for me to remember that my words and choices have consequences even for these people, sometimes, who may not be as tough as they work on showing. 

The defended and the undefended in myself, and in others, always fraught territory. 

I'm remembering simple tenderness, bodhichitta and compassion, respect, simplicity and good boundaries. So much practice. Mistakes are inevitable. 

The Sufi symbol of the winged heart has been appealing to me very strongly lately. 

The symbol was chosen by Hazrat Inayat Khan who introduced Sufism to the Western World: “In brief, the meaning of the symbol is that the heart responsive to the light of God is liberated.”

As an atheist, I reflect on it more as the "awakened heart" of Buddhism, that is, the heart of compassion, the heart of caring about suffering and confusion, the heart of tenderness and openness to the suffering of all sentient beings. When this sense of things is awakened in my experience, I find it easier to let go of things. My jealousy and anger and hurt feelings diminish. My openness to the true and highest happiness and well being of people I love, and sometimes even for all sentient beings, starts to be more possible. It begins in sorrow, for me. In the sorrow that one touches in the human heart, borrowing the phrasing of Pema Chödrön. 

St, Valentine will not be denied

People are sometimes surprised that one of my favorite holidays is Valentine's Day. I get it, since I also have a satirical bent toward aspects of the holiday. In general, people sometimes confuse my satirical or sarcastic humor for dislike of something, and sometimes that is the case, but maybe just as often, I find humor in satire of things of which I'm very fond, as well. Isn't it the case that everything is, in one way or another, fucking ridiculous? While sometimes, simultaneously, sacred and precious? 

Limited Edition

Fundamentally, falling in love has provided me with some of the core experiences of my life, provided access to the divine, inspired a lot of my creative behavior, brought adventure and surprise, kicked me into areas of intense growth that I would have avoided otherwise, and more. Since I'm a flaming cis het, it's also brought me a lot of understanding of the extraordinary challenges women face. I don't know exactly why such remarkable, intelligent, intense, heart-centered, visionary and passionately excellent women have seen fit to throw their lot in with me, but so they have, eventually to varying degrees of chagrin. 

The experience of romantic love has also provided me with the worst suffering of my life. It's an existential kind of suffering, and some might say that, if love lost is the worst I've suffered, I've been lucky. I'd say that may well be, but it could also be that anyone who might judge it thus hasn't had the experience in quite the same way I have. Some might also say that, having been destroyed by the failure of romantic love, I ought to stop being open-hearted in that direction, and be sensible, and (drumroll for the American idea of strength) "get over it and move on." Even if I were able to accomplish this Herculean feat of utter emotional death, I don't want to. Some of my recovery friends, suspiciously cynical and bitter about love, seem to think it's a problem to be solved and done away with, or grown out of, or 12-stepped away. This feels untrue and unfortunate to me. Growing toward loving the beloved in more and more unconditional dimensions instead seems more legit. 

A friend of mine and I were lamenting various vicissitudes of the heart the other night over dinner, and both of us gradually realized we wouldn't change a damn thing. The weird hypothetical, "if you could go back, knowing what you know now, would you change anything?" We both grudgingly admitted the answer would be, no. Not a thing changed. In some cases, so precious and unforgettable that we'd not trade a single nanosecond of any of it. That case is usually also the one that is most painful, as if the combination is a law of the universe. Tell me the universe doesn't understand satire. 

Anyway, behind the crass commercialization and goopy sentimentality masquerading as love, there's magic, life, blood, compassion, tenderness, risk taking, humility, deep mysteries, story, real guts and courage. It seems a shame to me that many respond to the wounds, the pain, and the loss with the understandable impulse of "fuck that, I hope I never, ever catch feels for someone ever again." I get it, believe me, but there's the whole trip out of the dark that I think sometimes gets by-passed, and that's a loss much greater than the loss of the love itself. To think it's possible to be safe in love is laughable. To think it's possible to encounter another human being so tenderly and yet not put risk right at the front of things is foolish. The ability to love is directly proportional to the ability to grieve, and that just seems to be the way of things. The bad news is loss is a part of all of it. The good news is we know how to grieve, grief is perfectly natural and an inherent skill we have, if we just give it space to breathe and give it time and honor it. 

I like to pay attention when I'm in love, and I'm devoted, and I like the romantic rituals of cards, flowers, gifts, the romantic dinner, the tenderness and regard that brings two people to acknowledge each other as mutually extraordinary, for each other. I like to learn about the beloved, to listen and to see, to be seen. My eyes are full of Moon, when it's working, but not in that weird way where the actual human disappears. I'm unashamed to admit it, obviously. I'm learning to live without it, but how could it not feel like a lack? I don't think we get over it and move on. I think, if we're attentive, we just get more skilled at living in spite of impermanence. The absent beloved is no longer a problem to be solved, but just the way things are. It's a form of cowardice for me that I don't want to enact, to try to "get rid" of the beloved, or replace, or reject. It is more a way I want to live to make room for the reality, make a home for the sorrow and loss, but also be grateful for what was possible. 

To stay tender. 

The Inconsolable

A friend of mine and I were talking about how common it is to try to talk ourselves out of things, or into things, or rationalize our way toward acceptance, tell the reasonable story, square things away with some sort of narrative hook, and yet, how rarely all of those exertions actually assuage another part of us that is not inclined to listen to "reason," is not assuaged, and remains deeply wounded by certain events. 

For example, imagine there's a situation in which your heart is fully on the line regarding another human being, and, "for practical reasons," the two of you just "can't be together." It's easy to start that machine of listing and cataloging all of the "reasons," many of which might, in fact, be incredibly compelling, quite real, not even rationalizations. The experience is not likely to be much of a way to mend the heartbreak of loss or the sorrow of disappointment, no matter how compelling the reasons may be. 

There's something like an inconsolable child, or emotional animal, "inside" of us that refuses to accept all of the narrative, reasons, stories, explanations, and "yes buts." No matter how obviously, practically true all of it is. The fact remains, for example, that we were not enough to be chosen. Someone else or something else was chosen instead of us. We were not enough. 

It's easier in some ways, sometimes, when we head forward thinking we are the ones who have made the choice. There's little heart satisfaction in it, a lot of the time, but at least there's a feeling of combined rationality and power. "We were just star crossed, and that's that." Its been true for me, though, that there's still the "soft animal that loves what it loves" left behind, ignored, shushed, "reasoned with," placated, but still inconsolable. "The heart" wants what it wants, we sometimes realize. Reason, reasons, be damned. 

This operates in an energetic way, reason and rationality be damned. My friend was expressing having these feelings around someone who died, who "chose death" over her. Obviously not a rational or even reasonable narrative. But her honest feelings, nonetheless. She felt somewhere "deep inside" that she was not enough to keep her lover here, that her lover's soul didn't want her, but wanted death instead. 

Since we're capable of these odd, probably usually secret, irrational miseries, it seems interesting that we ourselves and most of the people around us are going to try to "talk us out of it." You can probably immediately hear your own or others' phrases, all of those attempts to placate, to "reason with," to console. 

My experience the past year or so has been that the only things that console me are going toward the irrationality of it, not trying to go away from it. Connecting with the hurt and loss, not trying to deny its reality or talk myself out of it. Talking myself out of it plays a valuable, functional role in my being able to show up for necessary life, and there's a value to the narrative, for sure. But the real healing is on a cellular, blood and guts, balls and breath level. It feels like it moves a lot more in the body than in the mind, that's for sure. 

Please, thank you, and no hooks

I flashed on what it would be like to frame all of one's decisions and interactions with the "world" in terms of two simple principles: consent, and gratitude. Consent being basically asking, seeking permission, saying "please." And gratitude, of course, being the thank you in response, whether the answer is affirmative or not. 

There was a tiny fire ring at the campsite in the Sheephole Valley Wilderness and I was going to build a fire in there. But there was a whole community of little green plants and ants and so on living in that protected circle, and there clearly hadn't been a fire in there for months, maybe years. So I asked, do I have permission to build a fire in here? And I swear to gawd, call me crazy (wouldn't be the first time), the answer was a resounding "NO." Turned out it was a wildly windy and dangerous night to have a fire anyway. And at the next campsite over (the second of two, altogether), there was a larger fire ring with ash, and nothing growing in it. The next night, that's where I built my fire. "Thanks, it's nice to have a fire."

Imagine if all of human history had been conditioned by saying "please" and "thank you," rather than the usual sense of total entitlement and temporary, acrid satisfaction with which humankind has fucked over the planet and each other. Imagine if the European expansion into the "New World" had included the humility of asking permission, and the gratitude of finding a way to navigate what is a "yes" and what is a "no." The holiday of Thanksgiving would make a shit ton more sense from this perspective, definitely. 

As it unfolded, taking without regard to permission and feeling smugly entitled or deserving, and becoming violent in the face of clear NO's, seems a lot more the basic framework of how we confront the world. This, I'd argue, without any actual evidence, is the paradigm of the patriarchy. It's what makes rape not an exception, but the rule. It's not as if we have never had permission, but we have never even stopped to ask if we did, in just about every interaction with the indigenous Earth. It reminds me of that ignorant Christian missionary, John Chau, who pulled the stunt of "witnessing" to the Sentinelese, and was promptly killed by them, and justly, rightly so.  Except that, throughout much of our history, the consequences were not so immediate, and the lines not quite so clearly drawn. 

There's a reverent and devotional way of life that includes, at its core, please, thank you, and attempts to enlarge awareness. A difficult part of this reverence is also in letting go, when the answer is "no." It is a silly rationalization to say "please" and then proceed without listening to the answer. "I asked for consent!" is obviously not a good enough reason to take. The universe does, frequently and loudly, say NO. 

Sometimes, even with regard to our most ardent hopes and wishes, much to the sorrow and sadness of our broken hearts. 

I've been thinking about the image of hooks. It might be because the clade of cacti I am writing my dissertation on has hooked spines, but it might also be due to language used by both Melody Beattie and Pema Chödrön, regarding something capturing us, holding our attention, getting us tangled, which they refer to as "getting hooked."

I've been experimenting with letting go of getting hooked in response to the big NO's that the universe has delivered. Think of a kid in the checkout line at the grocery store, fascinated by all the impulse-buy candy on the racks, maybe asking Mom "can I have this? can I have that?" and knowing of course the answer is NO, the answer is *always NO* and has been *NO* for years. But we tend to still have that energy directed to the objects of desire, no matter the precedence, no matter the inevitability. 

So I'm working with just saying "no hooks" and letting something go. Invasive thoughts that would spur hot jealousy, despairing bewilderment, lonely self pity, or some other extreme discomfort, can be met with the simple phrase, "no hooks." Let it go. You got your answer. No hooks. 

It's a necessary tool in the face of a life of reverence, asking consent, when the answer will often be NO. If I want to emerge out of the tendency to manipulate, use wounding or darker magic to capture something I want, push, whine, rage, or all those other states of being where we have gotten a clear NO yet just cannot move off the goddamned dime, I am going to need a way to let go. When I'm hooked, I feel it. The hook sinks in deeper the more I try to shake it. The tangles get more complex. If I can just gently and in a focused and disciplined way, remove the hook, step away, and let go a bit more, there's a feeling of safety and sanity that at least partly settles down.

There's also a lot more energy in wait for when the universe hollers a great big HELL YES into my face, which, if I am hooked and wounded by the last NO, I could easily miss, and have. This goes to the deepest definition of consent, way past "not saying no," to the *enthusiastic yes*, which men in particular need to learn is what consent is, and can be withdrawn at any time, and is fully within whatever boundary, no matter how enthusiastic.  

All of this process goes to spending so much time alone. The past several days, I was free camping on BLM land in silent, beautiful Sonoran Upland. Just me and my grief and anger. In these circumstances, it becomes essential to find a way to welcome one's own thoughts with "basic friendliness" as Pema puts it. My "no hooks" is similar to her gentle word, "thinking," the way to reduce the spinning out of the mind. It has been especially helpful in finding my true feelings, not those that are made more incendiary by attachment to outcome, by stubborn and bitter adherence to story, by the pride and brittleness of my sense of self, my sense of *deserving* and being *denied*. 

No hooks.