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.

"Ashes are stardust"

That is what D tells his 6 year old lovely son G who is running around Prospect Park in his Harry Potter Wizard "Gryffindor" robe, lovingly spreading my stepfather David's ashes around various trees with a wooden spoon he was dipping into the cookie jar with a whale painted on it. I gave G first dibs because he was so enthused. G is sad David died, but somehow he gets it, too. He creates a little altar of twigs and leaves and acorn caps around one little mound of ashes he placed at the base of a tree he just knew had to have some of David's ashes.

The best thing that could have happened today was D bringing G to join us for scattering David's ashes. G asked me if he could do certain things, like place a stick he found that had been painted purple and green over ashes I had placed in the hollow at the base of another tree, one that David's very good friend had chosen to scatter some ashes. "Purple and green are the best colors! They will protect him from evil spirits!"

David had requested in his will that half his ashes be scattered here in the Prospect Park Meadow. I did not know where to place them, and so his close friend (and executor) and I asked some good friends who were with us and had spent more time with him in the park. Once we picked an area, everyone got a chance to decide where to place some ashes, which was G's brainstorm "because there's a lot!" How do kids know everything?

When we all had scattered the ashes, I stood between all the various trees where ashes had landed then turned away from everyone and cried.

David, who had been my father most of all, and yet I had not known it until he died, and how could I not have known it since he came into my life at the time I was G's age, picking up the pieces of some pretty dire predecessors, even though he was picking up his own pieces from Vietnam, and his mother's sudden death and suddenly having to care for his teenage siblings (48 years ago yesterday - on Veteran's Day - which brought him home from Vietnam early - and probably saved his life - at least that is what his sister surmises, and that may be true - not that David would have taken that trade if offered. He went to Vietnam not as a true believer but because he thought it was unfair someone poorer than him who didn't have a college education should have to go in his place. Which may be why he left money in his will for one of his good friends to go back to college, which he is now doing, and appears as a man transformed - someone finding his potential. Another life David saved.)

I am so sad because I let arguments David and I had had get in the way of our closeness when I was back in NYC. Maybe he did, too, but he's dead now, and I'm left alone, knowing I definitely did that. I can never get that time back. No do overs when someone has died.

But D kept saying to G "It's stardust - those are atoms some might have been here since the beginning of time" and he's right of course and his son's joyful sadness was a testament to this belief. And everyone's love. His executor who was in charge of this ceremony said "Julia gets the rest of the ashes, she's his daughter" and that made me cry some more, and I'm crying now of course...

I was at a crystal reiki healing thing yesterday - yes if you had told me even 10 years ago I would go to such a thing I would have been...dismissive. But I did, and I found a crystal there and it had some kind of power and the reiki/crystal healer was saying how crystals are solidified light and they have all the information in them about the universe and the multiverse and I believed her, for whatever reason, and so I planted one of those crystals at the base of a tree that John had done some kind of Taoist thing with that I don't understand, and I don't have to understand, and so that's what everyone was doing, these little rituals, our rituals.

crystal planted in hollow of this tree

Which is how David's ashes - the second half - were spread.

The rest - as I wrote about in September - are in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine. Another sacred place.

I may not have known how much love we actually shared and how he was my father - because who the hell else is the person in your life from age 6-53 even if he was gay and our lives were unconventional and someone else came after, another stepfather, Tom, who I also loved very much? He was there when I found writing and theater and all the things, but also the horrible things, too, and so much, and as he did for so many others, he saved me from one of them, and so now when there are terrorist attacks or other scary things, I feel really vulnerable, because he's not there. But I do feel what he was for me now, and in some ways still is, but not here physically, and that does make all the difference.

Watching Last Flag Flying, about three Vietnam Vets reunited for the death of one of their sons in Iraq, I was desperately sad not to share that with him - the heartbreak and beauty and humor of that film. I miss laughing with him most of all, and his pride in me, which when he displayed it made me feel like a star.

So I planted the crystal and watched D's son play wizard and knew David would have loved that, does love that, and the crystal is now at a base of a tree where John dug a little hole where in 10-20 years the tree will grow over it, because we all loved David so much, and as someone said, that tree (a giant oak), was like him, "Tall, large...and sexy."

We all laughed. David would have loved that, too.

This is my NYC life - the one I shared with David - me and a bunch of fabulous gay men - all smart, wildly talented and diverse in every way, and ALL in love with David. Sometimes a small child - like G - who reminded me so much of me at that age in the way he built little shrines out of twigs and such over David's ashes and being the center of adult attention, and that was it, wasn't it, isn't it, all that love and who cares if it looks like something "normal" or now - and happily NOW this is the new normal - all reactionary idiocy aside - in real life, this is the new normal.

And isn't it wonderful.

If I could, of course, I would call David and tell him that right now, and we'd laugh until we cried.