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Learning Is As Learning Does

Good God! What a year, what a lifetime. In so many ways I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout. Trouble in the Middle East and what feels at times like a narrow escape out of it. Surviving my dysfunctional family of origin with reasonable wit, occasional depression, and believe-it-or-not optimism (which at times seems like a friggin curse!) A dozen moves in childhood that left me feeling nestless!

Fast Forward To Now

So here we are, here I am, entering 2023 with a bang or a whimper. I can’t decide what mood to settle on, instead lurching uncontrollably back and forth between the two states.

I won’t lie; I could but what would be the point?! I’ve always been too transparent even to myself. I’ve had a hard road these last few years with health issues, surgeries, occasional “ah ha” moments followed by self-doubt and dare-I-say again, optimism! At heart, I am a forager for the puzzle. And the lesson!

Why won’t it leave me alone; that pesky perverted instinct or drive to unmortify things, look for the lessons regardless of emotional states I inhabit, contained within an insatiable hunger to learn? I insist on looking for what I need to know. If I can’t find it initially, I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not.) Occasionally, I make it up, inventing a lesson, however small, until a greater insight arrives. I’m just that restless, driven.

What on earth do other people do with their heads if not trying to figure out what things are for, from personal and world events to good and bad people, triumphs or tragedies alike? What their meaning is to them subjectively or not, that deeper meaning? Growth is everything, why else would we be here?

Everybody Loves Raymond

I’ve been mainlining Everybody Loves Raymond recently for comic relief; you know, that sitcom of years ago that replays on one of the streaming channels. There’s so much wisdom besides insatiable humor, in most of the episodes. One I recently saw had the little girl Ally asking her dad (Raymond) why does God send us to earth? Why do we come here? Let that hang in the air for a second.

Of course Raymond, being the perpetually struggling simpleton that he is, actually has the most amazing and uncanny ways of learning himself, whether it’s through his wife, Deborah, or flat out events that demand he address issues in some way by their very existence, all by himself like a big boy. It seems he’s helpless on his own, but with the help of others (ding, ding, ding) including his family, which is dysfunctional as any in America, serves as the grist for helping him along to new insights, one way or the other.

When he goes to Deborah, the insight seems simple but profound. She tells him God just wants us to be with other people, to not be alone. Implied in that of course is the very earth school that is serving Raymond through Deborah in the whole crazy clan of his family. The metaphor is apt in the comedy and also apt for everyone’s individual life contained therein, subtle and obvious both.

All In This Together

Everything I see in the world around me is about growth, death, regeneration, and furthering more growth (evolution perhaps??) but all from learning some nugget, a component atom in the larger molecular structure of the small and big Self and the community it lives in. From a plant as a simple expression to holocaust survivors or the war in Ukraine; from the bottom of the food chain to the top. But always, always within the context of others.

My Own Classroom

Having been blessed to know a Survivor, and write about his life, Bennet mirrored that from his experience. One of my favorite speakers is Esther Perel. Both of her parents survived the Holocaust, which, of course was only but brilliantly the ginormous earth curriculum that they “grew up out of.” 

Perel describes other survivor friends of her parents, after creating new lives post-liberation, chatting about their concentration camp experience minus the drama of the tragedy but within its milieu. Instead, their intuition was to glean their own sustenance from it to forge new individual selves, transcending it, knowing somehow, some way they are greater than the sum of its parts, as a tribe which by definition includes “together.”

An Uncanny Therapy

In the very act of asking one another things like ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’ from camp ‘such-and-such’, their experiences become unmortified from the larger tragedy itself. While their experiences were gigantically large, I have my own Rosalie lessons as paltry as they seem in comparison, but included in an environment of people parts (as well as body parts.)

Fast Forward the Physical

My body challenges have surely demanded I pay attention to and learn what I need to know to grow emotionally, psychologically, but especially spiritually. It is my curriculum if you will, but too often have resisted. How many times have I spouted this little mantra while actually living from that belief and heavy identification of mySelf as “the body,” and therefore separate from others. My belief in “others as teachers” is heavily challenged.

For whatever reason, I am faced with more bodily breakdown, decay and surgeries, and cannot help but intuit this remains an opportunity for learning something I need to see but have heretofore denied.

The Excitement of the Drama 

It doesn’t need to be so hard, but we—I— insist on having tragedy even in the face of incredible gifts, because we—I—misunderstand the purpose and value of things including tragedy. Tragedy as well as comedy is a learning device. Just ask Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy can surely attest to. It (the war) may be couched in an oversized drama, but his drive to transcend it is clear, palpable. It is preceded by comedy, his earlier life’s work, but for whatever reason, a different “energy field” of tragedy has been required for him.

And so in an odd way, like Ally, Raymond, Zelenskyy, Holocaust survivors—pick a category—my seeming tragedy of yet more body breakdown is no tragedy at all. Nor is it a comedy either. It simply serves as a learning device, a vehicle for communication. Instead, it strikes me as I am greater than the sum of any of my individualized body parts. If I believe I am spirit as the real me—I must view “me” through the whole of those folks I know and love…and sometimes even those I don’t. Whenever I ultimately do leave the planet, I’m not hauling this body thing along with me. Rather, I will be in a field of spirit—not woo woo, mind you—but from that field of love which is the only true “me” there can be.

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The Great Salt Lake City

It was a sisters’ week in Park City, Utah. Glorious, mostly sunny with hints of rain, food-filled and sight-seeing galore. We were glutted on it, which I will write about later. But the earth-moving, mind-arresting and spectacularly surprising day for me was the trip to Salt Lake City. 

Now, the Mormons have a unique and checkered past filled with polygamy, treks west that were not for the faint of heart, and a sturdy trust in their belief system of prophets and clean-living. The city either directly or obliquely reflects this historical milieu. And while Utah is now only 49% Mormon, I suspect it’s higher in Salt Lake City itself.

CLEANLINESS NEXT TO GODLINESS

I was struck immediately by the astonishing cleanliness of Salt Lake City’s center. I’m guessing there was dirt and trash somewhere but I never saw any. The city had a near gleam to the place. Additionally, flowers were lathered everywhere — fragrant, colorful, well-appointed, full beds with no weeds that I could see. I mean, no weeds! It was a pleasure to just breathe the fragrant air. Sensual, actually!

Female mission representatives dotted the streets, ready with a smile and cheerfulness that was arresting and warm. You just couldn’t help but be startled and smile back. These unofficial goodwill ambassadors created a warmth and energy field one was helpless to ignore, pulling you in with their tractor beam. The funny thing is, you didn’t mind either.

THE HIGHLIGHTS

We toured The Beehive House, which was “the official residence of three Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith.” We also saw “This Is The Place Heritage Park” overlooking the city, where the Mormon trek across the West is commemorated. We drove through parts of the University of Utah as well, where the first mechanical heart transplant occurred. On the other side of it were lush, tree-lined neighborhoods sporting multi-generational founding families’ homes.

Our little tour bus stopped at a magnificent structure — the Cathedral of the Madeleine — as we circled back to the center of town. While not in the same caliber as a cathedral in Europe, it was nonetheless impressive with massive stained glass windows, high ceilings and an intricately carved altar area. You could smell the wood. It was stunning.

BUT THE CHOIR!

The highlight of our touring was witnessing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra during a rehearsal. They were practicing in a large pavilion, I believe called the Tabernacle, very near the world famous Temple which was veiled in scaffolding for earthquake retrofitting and refurbishing. It was all but invisible.

But the choir! I can hardly put words to it. Over 350 voices rising skyward, rearranging the air we breathed as it floated down into our lungs! All volunteers — these singers, rehearsing  a minimum of five hours a week! The orchestra, the same commitment with just over 100 musicians. It’s not possible for words to convey the feeling for me of listening to them all. It’s why we have music—when words are insufficient unto themselves. The word heavenly comes to mind yet still feels inadequate.

ATOMIC POWER

The totality of the singers’ voices dancing on the wings of strings, reed instruments, flutes, horns and tympanies is, well, a sight to see and feel. I was drunk on the majesty of it all. Helpless! The atoms rearranged themselves as a consequence! My internal organs moved, gently stimulated as if being massaged. Had there not been seventy-five or a hundred other people in the audience, I would have wept!

I’m sure I could have slept in a pew that night but alas we had to catch our tour bus, get our car and go back to Park City where we were staying. Oddly, it strikes me that Park City’s mountains are a physical, secular manifestation of the divine in their own right—music made of rock and earth. My God, no wonder Redford was moved. The area is magnetic.

IN THE END

I want to go back. I have not had enough of the energy and inspiration this geography provides. While it feels primal in some ways, it also reveals a sort of grooming possibility, ripe and rich with regeneration and potential, much like I think of birth. 

And maybe even Heaven!

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Have We Lost Faith In Ourselves?

I don’t know how I feel about the recent article below and its position. It strikes me as a chicken and egg debate and therefore a bit fatuous, intellectually self-serving. So many things have broken down in our culture, and institutions seem symptomatic of that. As highly educated elites, and let’s face it that is what we are—well educated, ponderous, separated in so many ways from those who aren’t—I think we also have to look at ourselves and our own self absorption, our own precious positions that we cling to. We are those institutions—we are them and they are us.

America has gotten so big, so unwieldy, so degraded on so many levels and not just institutions, I don’t know how we change our perspectives. Sometimes rot and decay take on lives of their own. Can this very large ship be turned around, chart a new course? Is anyone reading this article willing to change and volunteer or go work for any of these structures?? Not a criticism; just a question we owe ourselves to consider.

I have no answers, no recommendations other than taking a steely eye turned inward to examine our own participation or lack thereof. What does it mean to love our neighbors as ourselves? What is the difference between equality and equity? They are not the same. Equity is providing resources, financial as well as modeling behaviors/examples to those who are deprived, and provide them with what they need to sustain and flourish their lives. Equality assumes that everybody has to have the same $10 no matter what. It’s absurd.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Joan Dideon is her talent to hold a mirror to my generation, our generation. I miss her voice. We have been as selfish and self-absorbed as what came before ours. We also inherited highly virtuous qualities and values as well: hard-working, commitment to community to some degree, a reasonable sense of right and wrong. How we apply these positives has to be recontextualized, however, which is the rub. 

Obviously not everyone has the same talents, expertise, aptitude or abilities. Yet can’t we all see we needn’t not “self-segregate” from those we perceive as having less, or who are not like us? If we have no courage to be the change, that is what our institutions will mirror back. Helen Keller’s quote springs to mind at this time in our national crisis:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” 

If we are not dead there is likely something all of us can do as individuals to “be the change.” It is our charge to figure out what that is, large or small. After all, if we have lost faith in our institutions like the title of the Op-Ed below suggests, that also implies we have lost faith in ourselves. Yet only we can regain that faith. It is high time we held ourselves accountable as well.

To access article below, press graphic to select link using touch screen or right click with mouse.

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