The war is over...and I don't know how to live outside a war zone

I have not written here in a while. But as I was walking along in Inwood Hill Park tonight where the Harlem and Hudson Rivers meet, and watching the reflection of the setting sun (the sun itself was behind the cliffs that rise up here on the top tip of Manhattan between the park and the Hudson where the old growth forest still grows), I could hear someone play an electric guitar...not particularly well, but enough to evoke the 1970s and evenings as a child, sometimes riding in people's vans or old cars, and the odd comfort of that, teenagers or young adults playing Led Zepplin and me in the back somewhere doing whatever, but not in charge and knowing somehow for that moment everything was OK.

I then remembered this realization I had the other day when I was meditating that yes indeed the war is over, but I have no idea how to live outside a war zone. I don't mean that literally in the sense of being in the middle of an actual shooting war (aside from the time we lived on 106th and Amsterdam back in the early 1990s when in fact there were many gun fights outside our window - some with automatic weapons - so bad the police would not show up because - and I quote - "we are outgunned")...but as a child, not guns, but other war zones - some violent physically, some mentally, some verbally, some emotionally, but it was always a crisis and starting as a very young child I had to have my shit together. For instance, my mother has told me, when I was a baby and she and my father would fight violently, so I would hold my breath until I turned blue, which would finally make them stop.

That kind of thing. Rinse. Repeat.

Shift characters, locations, details but the out of joint song in which I had to keep my shit together, be vigilant at all times, and therefore could rarely be a child remained the same.

So, yeah, no, I'm not what you would call laid back. All the yoga and meditation in the world can't undo that shit. It can Help. A lot. It can keep me from inflicting it on others, and at times if I'm lucky myself, but it's not precisely a good run up to peacetime living.

I'm not going to recite my childhood. Anyone who knows me or has read this blog or my plays can catch the gist, but the point remains: no tools to live in peacetime.

Which means all the time living on overdrive. Shocking that I became an alcoholic, I know (ha!). But what is a miracle is that I got sober at 23. And still am. At 54. That shit is weird. But even so, still, no windshield and not really, you know, laid back.

BUT the difference is - when I had this realization while meditating, this time I didn't think OH NO, I HAVE TO DOOOO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS. I HAVE TO HAVE A 10-POINT ACTION PLAN TO DEFEAT MY CRAZINESS. No. I did not go through that. Instead, I just breathed and heard a gentle internal voice say: and that's all you need to know right now.

You don't have to DO anything about it.

Just let it settle in. And I am. And just this. The NOT doing, the letting it settle in, is changing my life. It's kind of a miracle. Not by trying to change my life. Instead by Not trying to change my life. The miracle of acceptance. You accept a thing, hold space for it, and voila, it changes. With no effort. If I resist it, it just gets bigger and more intractable.

And so now, somehow, when feelings I usually find excruciating come up - certain types of sadness or boredom or anxiety or whatever - instead of trying to run away, I just breathe them in. I hold space. I witness. I allow the feelings. I look and see what's there for me to see, feel, experience. And then, yes, it all changes. By not trying to change it.

It's bizarre.

Which is all by way of saying when I heard that guy playing the guitar, I let the pleasant kind of nostalgic memory of those peaceful moments in my childhood wash over me. I felt the nostalgia, the desire to be young again, to have life ahead of me instead of at least more than half in the rearview mirror, and also the knowledge that there were these moments of respite - for all the crazy and the crisis. And that while I might not know how to live outside a war zone, I can allow myself these moments and don't have to judge or overanalyze.

Of course it doesn't help these days how much actual crazy there is in the world and violence and rampant injustice and plain old meanness and cruelty. But the fact is in one form or other that's always been there. I can allow the feelings of powerlessness in and rage and all of it. I can act as I can act, which I do, politically. I can write sometimes, create theater, do my little part. I can spin out, I can step up, I can step aside, freak out, be calm, get angry, cry, wonder what the actual fuck, have a moment of calm, take a walk, stay under the covers, call someone, meditate, stay alone, go be with people, dance, do yoga, write, take a nap, watch stupid things on Netflix, write in this blog, submit work, get rejected, get accepted, feel accomplished, feel like a failure, feel loved, feel lonely, wonder again what the actual fuck, and then breathe and let it all in - when I remember to do so.

This is the gift of getting older, staying sober for a long time, meditating every day, doing yoga when I remember (not as much as I should in other words) and trying to be a decent person - I begin to be able to accept the whole package.

I was also thinking walking home: I want to live long, because I need to figure it out, and then I laughed when I heard an internal voice say: that'll only happen when you stop trying to figure it out. Which, like, of course. But what a seduction it is. For someone such as me anyway.

At night when lying down going to sleep with crystals on me (yes I've turned into That person - try not to hate me), and I sense, my God/dess, so much energy in my head, my mind churning and churning Trying to Figure It Out. And so little energy in the rest of my body. So then breathing into that mysterious rest of me - the part - pretty much all of it - that I routinely ignore. Letting the crystals bring me to those parts of my body. Wondering will I ever allow my body to be fully animated? I don't know. Part of the war zone thing, levels of dissociation I'm not sure will ever go away. It's waaaay better than it used to be. At least I know my body is here. I can even feel it sometimes. A number of years ago, I woke up more fully to my actual emotions (as opposed to the word facsimile cover story that masqueraded as such). But I have a feeling my physical body is the most resistant to my awareness and acceptance. I am only aware of Problems - either physical aches and pains or with How I Look (always wrong) etc. Not sure I will ever be able to embrace my corporeal self, but that's got to be Ok. I don't want to doom myself to this dissociation either. We'll see.

I can breathe now. I can at times be touched. Sometimes easier than others. But I have always been "touchy" - kind of prickly in a somewhat sneaky way. On the surface, I am warm, but it's a patina, something to a certain degree I taught myself how to do. But underneath there is the shrinking away scared little kid, never sure anyone or anything can be trusted and always ready to pick a fight. It's complex. I certainly don't think I'm alone in this.

I'm afraid to even write any of this and publish it in public. What will people THINK?! GASP! As if...but still.

So, here I am. This is me today. Tomorrow or the next day I will post a bunch of things with schedules of events, a staged reading and two readings, all in June. But this is a different post. So be it.

As the African prayer goes: It is. Thank you.

Even if that means I never do know how to live in peacetime. I am here. And there is beauty - and even moments of peace - in the midst of the ever whirring chaos in my brain and sometimes heart.

Acceptance is not Acquiescence: It is. Thank you.

So, there's this thing going around on social media, Facebook specifically, wherein we are meant to choose a word for the year. Kind of like a resolution I suppose or a hope.

The word that came to me was Acceptance.

And when I thought of typing this on FB, I could see the flood of people yelling at me that I was 'normalizing' the situation (aka the orange one, etc.) and realized that there was no way I could choose this word without writing about what this word means to me in real terms, instead of what it is misunderstood to imply.

Acceptance to most (American) minds implies something along the lines of weak, passive, submissive, not fighting, wussy, whathaveyou. Whereas for me it means a discipline that can only be cultivated with strength of heart and soul that confers a kind of power and clarity of action that mere willfulness or bloodymindedness does not.

Oh how we love the stubborn, the bloodyminded, the willful, the violent, etc, etc in this country! And as has been proven many times, we have a real soft spot for narcissistic psychopaths.

Fun times.

However, what I am certain is needed now is not more of the same hurled back, but instead the moment, the breath, the time to first accept. Accept what? Well, I dunno, reality for starters.

If I become aware of something I don't like and act against it reactively the chances of my succeeding are very small. Or, I may succeed, but most likely it will be a Pyrrhic victory that will redound badly on me in the end.

If on the other hand, I take a moment or however long I need to accept the reality of whatever that is, including the reality of my situation and what I do and (equally important) don't have the power to change, then I have a chance of choosing an action in response that may be effective.

My default setting - and I don't think this makes me unique - is: awareness, action yesterday! This is tempting. It makes me feel like I'm doing something, but what am I doing? Who knows. It's a reaction. It usually doesn't work.

Let's take the election for example. I have to accept, whether I like it or not, that DT will be president. I can scream and yell all I want, them's the rules. Even if he did steal it somehow. Whatever happened has not been proven yet, so he's gonna be president. There is no such thing as my president or your president, there is only the president, and he will be it. To use the language from the Tea Party, who invented the 'not my president' trope for Obama is...unwise. Also just kind of pointless. The president is not a teddy bear or bff. The president is the president.

That's a start.

Second, the fact that millions of people voted for this dude. This is something a lot of people on the left including most of the cosseted commentariate (Studs Terkel warned against this cosseting - he saw a day like this coming where reporters and papers would stop reporting news that mattered to the 99% and then lose track of reality for anyone not doing well or in certain urban areas rich in information and access) refused to acknowledge. The reality of people that have been forgotten. These people were not forgotten by some like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but they were poo-pooed as - wait for it: 'populists' - the bad word if you are urban liberal educated, populism being just code for classist assumptions about folks usually referred to as 'poor white trash' outside of polite conversation.

So, a guy who could give a flying fuck about these people wins their vote, not because he's going to do jack shit to help them, But Because He Acknowledged They Exist.

That was a start.

Ignoring people you don't like does not make them go away.

Let me repeat that.

Ignoring people you don't like does not make them go away.

You can call them all the names you want. Still. Not. Going. Away.

So, here's the thing: and this is what acceptance means to me, we have to get in the same damn room. My grandmothers, the ones I wrote about, the ones who if alive would have voted for Trump and Clinton respectively, were never in the same room. They would not be in the same room.

There's the rub.

Is it all on 'our' (aka the left's) side to do this?

Absolutely not. It's on everyone.

Are there stone racists and people who are not pleasant involved?

Yes.

Do you have to put yourself in a dangerous situation?

No. Absolutely not.

Do we have to accept that there are people in this country (on all sides) that believe things so different from ourselves it seems as if we live in different countries, even different time periods?

Yes.

Do we still need to find a way to get into the same damn room?

Yes.

Why?

Because until we can accept one another as we are, we can't get anywhere. And I don't mean by that acquiesce or submit. No. I mean accept the reality of the situation, which is generally - especially when it comes to people we don't actually know in real life - way more complication and nuanced than we believe when we want to shove people into little stereotype boxes because that's ever so much easier than confronting or attempting to communicate with an actual, living, breathing human being.

Does this mean everyone is reachable?

No.

Are there violent, no good creepazoids who are probably not worth the time of day?

You betcha.

Are they the majority?

Doubtful.

So, we need to find a way to accept ourselves, each other and the full reality of this country as it actually is, because no, in fact it was not a different country after DT was elected. It is the same damn country. We are that fucking weird.

(And our voting system is that fucked up, too, granted - but still the rules have been in place all along and Obama managed to get elected twice.)

Are there aspects to our country we might have conveniently forgotten because it was - let's face it - easier than accepting them?

You bet.

Do we know they are there now?

Oh yeah.

Is it all pretty?

Nope.

is it real?

Yes.

So, we have to address what is real, not just try to put people back in boxes again or think that if we tell people not to say mean things they aren't thinking them. This is probably the greatest fallacy we have been laboring under for like a while, that if we can shame people into appearing to be non-sexist or non-racist or not homophobic or whatever, then they are reformed.

I think we now know that was a wrong assumption.

So, while I clearly do not advocate any such prejudices or hatreds, I do advocate finding a way to listen to each other without shutting each other down (again this would have to be done by all sides), so we can fucking hash this shit out. For real.

Idealistic?

Sure.

Necessary even so?

Absolutely.

We also have to FINALLY talk about class for real, and not assume when we are talking about race we are talking about class, because this is not true. There are in fact disenfranchised white people. They are way less likely to get killed by police and such, but poor white people are well and truly fucked nonetheless, especially since most folks don't even acknowledge they exist, including half of the poor people themselves. I get the whole issue of privilege. I do. But there are many different kinds of privilege and class is one of them. One of the ways the GOP keeps poor and lower middle class white people on side is by convincing us we aren't poor. It's ludicrous, and saying that it's all people of color on food stamps and such, which is ludicrous, but when we conflate race and class, we play into the GOP's hands.

So for me acceptance is about all this. Accepting the facts on the ground and that there are all these wildly different perceptions.

This is true on a personal level as well. If I find a part of myself I don't like, I can't just talk myself out of it. I have to accept it first. Only once I accept that this part exists can I begin to ask for help to have it relieved.

And now, here, I believe the same is true. I can't make DT or his minions go away, any more than I can singlehandedly push back late-capitalism or patriarchy in its death-star supernova, but I can accept these things and through accepting how they work, begin to act accordingly.

Accepting myself is key because I have to know what I can and cannot do in response. I have to know my energy levels, endurance, mental and physical abilities, etc. I cannot talk myself into being 23. I am 53 so have to choose my battles. Very carefully.

How does the word 'battles' work with the word 'acceptance'? Well, once I accept the situation, and understand the holistic complexity of it, I may want to work to change it, at least my response to it. But no matter what I do, I need to understand - as the Bhagavad Gita says - I can take an action, but I do not control the result.

All I am in charge of is right action in accordance with my deepest self.

In order to have a prayer of doing that, I have to know who my deepest self is, which means practicing self-awareness without judgment - which sounds easy, but is really fucking hard. I have to let go of all the IDEAS I have about who I am supposed to be or not supposed to be, all my little schemes and designs and listen for the still, small voice and act from there.

And also accept that that won't happen all the time either.

So acceptance is my word for this year, my prayer. I turn my life and my will over to powers greater than myself every day. Powers I do not understand but have had experience of in my life, too profound to deny, that have in fact saved my life. The fact I cannot explain this does not make it any less real. But the key to that power is acceptance.

That is a paradox, but it is true at least for this wildly imperfect human on this earth on this day in this lifetime.

So.

Acceptance.

p.s. I should add by way of full disclosure that what I am accepting today is that I am hopping mad about a lot of things personal and political and one of the things is grief for my dead stepfather who I know died in part in response to this fucking election and it just breaks my heart because it was so avoidable, but there it is. So acceptance for me isn't even particularly pretty - what I have to accept inside is sometimes a fucking shitstorm, but so be it. Because like I don't have a fucking choice. It is.

Which reminds me of my favorite prayer I heard once in London in 2003, an African prayer:

It is. Thank you.

It is. Thank you.

It is. Thank you.