It had been the best and worst of times from conception through developmental readiness for preschool, and now Nell and Sam had a screaming child in the carseat of the volvo as they sat in stagnant traffic on Lincoln.  In Brett Ellis’ day people were afraid to merge, but now they were back to the old fear:  terrified of being left out.

They parked, partly in the red, in front of a tiny cottage worth north of a million dollars and hurried toward another tiny cottage where young parents were streaming in with either feigned, or worse yet real, social assuredness.  Ant met Sam and Nell at the door, warmly greeting with grey hair and an earthy handshake; CSI treatment of her strong yet lovely hand would have revealed traces of Playdough (particularly purple and brown), sand dust and Fig Newton with hints of juice.

“This is Martzy,” Nell said, gesturing their large-eyed vaguely languid when not enraged 2 1/2 year-old.  Ant locked eyes on Martzy, as Sam wondered if her brain was like the Terminator, scanning for defects, social disturbance, retardation, ADHD, Autism and anything else that might make a child a “poor fit” for a prestigious institution of elemental learning.  Meanwhile Ant dropped in a squat, and offered two fingers for Martzy to grasp, which he did like a natural.  Nell was already filled with hope:  her boy was gifted and Ant was a wonder-worker with children—The Toddler Whisperer.

Nell caught Sam’s eye with a smile both proud, nervous and promotional:  she had already been promoting the mystique of “Little Chairs” as preemptive defense against the likely push-back about driving to Venice every day, or at least three mornings a week, not to mention the cost that, before charity fundraiser, would be in the environs of 10K.

“Martzy?” Ant asked, wisely.  Nell nodded along with Martzy, as if willing him toward social niceness with all her mother’s heart, adding for color:  “Sam’s best friend who died when he was young’s dad was Marcel, a holocaust survivor, and he was like a father to Sam and when Marcel, who everyone called Martzy, died we thought it would be lovely to name our first born after him.”

Suddenly that all just hung there and sounded psychotic:  sure, we named our own kid after a traumatized holocaust survivor because we are completely neurotic and project our weakness and fucked-upness onto our kid so, like Dorian Grey, we can walk around looking fresh and successful while our progeny pulls the sled of our shit.  “Please just take him,” thought Nell, picturing kinder transport rather than snack and circle time.

Ant, gracious even with grown-ups, swept them along toward the group, adding “I’m Antonia, but everyone calls me Ant… I’m just a little worker in the big colony of preschool.  Please don’t be nervous, there are many wonderful choices out there and things happen for a reason and it’s all about a ‘fit’”

Sam was a shoe-scanner, he knew who was the real deal and who was faking based on shoes; the fraud goes for the top of the line jeans, sunglasses and car… but then cheaps out on the shoes.  Ant’s shoes we expensive Parisian flats, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought they looked current and expensive based on his recent times holding Martzy on long sad Sundays trying to kill time until nap and the vague hope for  a love-making opportunity; picturing Nell trying on shoes, taking the shoe-trying on pose of one foot toward the shoe mirror and the other back and at a rakish angle; childcare is fattening and shoes are good no matter what’s going on above the ankle.  Little did Sam realize that Ant had put on her good shoes because she too knew that the bankers and producers would be evaluating her harder than she was evaluating their children.

The prospective parents all gathered in a circle around the rug.  Some sat criss-cross apple sauce, mostly those with older kids already in the system, those who did yoga and wore patchouli and sported just the right amount of ink; some dads, perhaps on round two of the whole child-rearing thing, being balding and grey and married to willowy patchouli chicks, stood at a discerning distance.  They would write fat checks if it pleased them and to them visiting schools was like going to a whorehouse where they did the picking.  Sure they had to pass muster with Ant as de-facto Madame of the establishment, and that was why they limited their pot consumption to a couple of hits and no more in the Ferrari.  Maybe they were a little nervous, maybe that never goes completely away.

The dads more on Sam’s level looked artsy and successful, relaxed guys who inherited good fortune and then towered Stanford or Harvard on top of it, who always fit in and found angles and hung with other cool people.  These were society’s winners.  They were not sensitive like Sam.

Sam and Nell scoped the other kids:  adorable blonde girls smiling and laughing like they were 27 at a cocktail party; adorable mixed race kids; little strappers ready for football; an elegantly tall and aloof boy with glasses who looked like he’d already created something important.  Sam hoped that no one else would think that Martzy looked a bit too much like Stewy from “Family Guy.”

Soon the teachers led the children out to the play area where they tried the trikes, or at least stood near them, or the sand or the climbing equipment.

Sam and Nell sat on the little chairs and Ant explained her philosophy of early education, about how kindergarten readiness was not so important as social learning, how sitting in a circle and putting your napkin in the bowl after the snack was teaching kids to be part of a group, to be good citizens and care about others.

Sam tried to catch a glimpse of Martzy through the doors to the garden, he suspected everything was a test and he hoped Martzy was doing alright.

Sam thought about the other preschool they had visited where they’d gotten a lecture on the brain on a smart board and he could no longer remember if Mrs. Fox had actually said that the children no longer do show and tell, but rather they did see and sell, based on readiness to present their ideas, brand themselves and win in a fast-changing world.  Was that an exaggerated joke or was there truth in the joke?

Ant seemed more low-key, but it still seemed like getting into Brown instead of Harvard—feigned chill masking killer competition rather than overt killer competition.  He couldn’t tell which was worse, as he felt like a fish wriggling on the dock either way.

Sam could not at this moment know that Martzy would indeed be putting his napkin in the big plastic bowl that Ant held for the children, teaching them to care.  Sam could not envision, in that moment, that he would come to love Ant and himself begin his redo in this little school.   He could not yet imagine Martzy on the climbing structure when he was a full-on preschooler, hanging there like a proud monkey—expressing his gift for large muscle groups more than fine motor coordination.

Sam could not in this moment envision walking to his Honda Civic on bright mornings and crying a little as he said goodbye to his boy who didn’t want him to leave.  Sam and Martzy and Nell shared a deep dislike for separation, and they would come to share a deep appreciation for Ant who had handled countless little separations helping humans become circle-sitting, napkin-contributing citizens.

A dim flash did pass through Sam’s mind:  himself hanging facing a monkey on the climbing structure.  He dismissed it and turned his focus to the little cup he held and the juice that was being poured into it.

It was Christmas Eve of 1977 and the phone rang many times, but I didn’t hang up.  I was calling the Chicago Sun Times and I’d asked to speak to Roger Ebert and had been connected to some phone that I pictured ringing in a classic newsroom.  And then a voice.

In the background a party was raging, but over the din the person who picked up heard my request and told me to hold on.  The party went on for a few minutes and then a jovial Roger Ebert was on the line.

I was a snarky seventeen-year-old and Rober Ebert was my film critic.  I read the Chicago Sun-Times and he was not yet internationally famous, but to me he was plenty famous and my heart raced a little to be speaking with a celebrity.

And then I remembered my mission.  ”You gave The Gauntlet four stars!” I blurted in outraged disagreement.

“I thought it was a good film,” he said in an even tone.

This was before thumbs up and down, before weekend box-office was reported to the public at large.  Back then four stars was like four Michelin stars for a restaurant—reserved for masterpieces, for Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now, even Dirty Harry but not… The Gauntlet, a cheesy b-picture.

Roger Ebert listened to my rant and rather kindly said that reviewing movies was a subjective thing.  He could see my point and respect my opinion, but he liked the movie and that was why he gave it four stars.

Roger Ebert was a very positive person.  He could certainly not like a movie, but he was awfully nice to a random kid interrupting him at his Christmas party.

He politely said he needed to get back to the office Christmas party and we parted ways amicably.  I never spoke with him again, but those few moments he took with me made the snow falling out my window in the suburbs of Chicago feel alive with spirit, like James Joyce snowflakes falling on the Sun-Times and on my suburban house, on the good movies and the bad, on the loneliness and on the connections, on the living and the dead.

In being a famous person connected with movies, Roger Ebert, in talking to me, helped form a bridge of belief that something so far away and magical could become a world I might aspire to learn more about, even enter into in that dimly conscious search for community that all outliers face in their lonely corners of experience.

When I heard that Roger Ebert had died, today, I looked him up and learned that we shared a birthday.  When we spoke in 1977 he was 35, the virtual half-way mark of what turned out to be a 70 year life.

Taking the perspective that parenting is as much an attitude of caring and connecting as it is of biological reproduction, I felt moved to honor Roger Ebert’s passing.  I didn’t always agree with his opinions on movies, but he helped me love movies and learn how to look at them and talk about them and bond, discuss and think about making them.

Movies became my passion, and then my path and then my destiny.  In some sense I “failed” to launch a movie career, but I tried my best until I found something else to try my best at, and along the way I met Andy (at a Fellini Screening at Lincoln Center).  Thus I’d have to say that we never know what small gestures of kindness will have rippling effects on the lives of others.

And in that spirit I give Roger Ebert, the person, four stars.

The blogosphere is a sort of collective water-cooler where we come out of our cubicles for a minute and talk about whatever.  So, did you see the most recent episode of Girls?

“On All Fours” made me feel sick.  It took me a night of dreaming to realize a little more.  Freud, who was at once brilliant, frequently wrong and very intent on being seen, heard and famous, made much of Oedipus Rex, which literally translates as “hurt foot king.”

Freud is not the father of psychology so much as the father of modern literature, and Lena Dunham is nothing if not a superb writer.  In Sophocles the riddle of the Sphinx is about what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three at evening.  Oedipus realizes it is man, who crawls, walks and then uses a can in later life.

Repetition compulsion is about unconsciously reenacting our tragedies, but the deep point is our hope to undo, to transcend, to heal.  Our prison dread is also our wish to be free; our abandonment drama is also our wish to be found and loved.

In “On All Fours” Adam, an odd and darkly awkward man who has finally shown a winning streak of normalcy in wooing the lovely daughter of a fellow AA member, falls hard, fast and darkly from his brief taste of grace.

Adam goes to an engagement party with Nat (Natalia).  Dis-engaged is Adam’s comfort zone position, yet he’s lovingly connecting with Nat when he sees his ex, Hannah, who is coming from the ER after the removal of a Q-tip from her ear.  The symbolism is rife:  she is pained by OCD, but also by the need to get something out of her (splinters, angst, dread, loneliness and the wretched cacophony of our current culture); Hannah is anxious, but she is also quite alone.

Adam and Hannah had a disturbed relationship, and together or apart they are mirrors of each other.  Adam goes back to the party and relapses.  At first it leads to wild dancing, but we know it is a tragic dance.

He takes Nat to his apartment, and she witnesses the depressing, dirty and weird inner world that is Adam.  He is possessed by the dark impulse of shame and cruelty and he literally compels her to crawl on the floor.  She is a good girl and a good sport, but then he brutally fucks her like an animal and climaxes on her breasts as she says, “Please don’t do that.”  This may or may not cross into rape, but it is most certainly the murder of love.

In the surreal moment where Adam comes back to reality to see all hope of love dying before his eyes he acknowledges that he “didn’t know what came over him” and his abashed smile mingles little boy bad with darkness and hopeless shame.

A psychological take on this scene and situation might be that Adam’s primitive terror of annihilation was triggered by the possibility of love.  If our core dread is lack of control and abandonment leading to feelings of annihilation, we are triggered into rage (an animal instinct, not a moral position) and we misperceive those who might love us for those who might hurt us.

At once we take control by hurting and annihilating the threat, and we defend against being left for no reason by creating the reason.  Once we are alone, we become terrified and begin to fantasize intrusive persecution (i.e. where Hannah is at the moment—writing a book in a wish to be seen, and fearing she will fail and not be seen, but rather be revealed as an unlovable failure).  We wobble between dread of too much overwhelming closeness and the dread of too much aloneness.

In showing us the dread of abject failure, loserdom and pathos Lena Dunham holds the mirror to our narcissistic time and we love it, because it is us.  Once we undertand that we all actually do love us, in all our pathetic need and tragic terror, we will calm down and get together in a less prize-winning, magazine-selling, attention-grabbing manner.  After all, it’s not Integrity Fair or Authenticity Fair but rather Vanity Fair that still sets the tune and tone for our macabre karaoke of look-at-me despair and alienation.

If we are truly seen by anybody perhaps we will feel loved and not need to be seen by everybody.  Perhaps, each in our own way, we are all working on this.

Besides an animal enactment, Adam’s need to ejaculate on Nat’s breasts suggests that he was overtaken by his generation’s curse:  porn.  Porn is not about sex; Nat is game for sex for pleasure and connection.  Porn is about turning humans into objects, which are then productized and monetized.  Porn exploits the brain and kills what the man could be.

Adam’s “money shot” is also primitive magic:  he puts his potential to co-create life onto her potential to nourish life, but while even brutal intercourse keeps the magic in the cave of the woman, which could lead to a new beginning for someone, porn-sex leads to a sad end, plain and painful for everyone to see.

As we grow conscious, choice emerges:  the choice to be kind, to help each other feel seen in beauty, but also seen in shame, fear and isolation, in rage and terror and destructive primitive baby-like behaviors and feelings.

Who would poison and blow up the world?  Smart people?  Certainly not wise people.  Adam is a pathetic victim.  The real perpetrators are those who know better and don’t do better.

Lena Dunham makes art.  I’m a psychologist.  But I think we both want to heal ourselves and others, to be able to keep it real, have actual friends, actual relationships, actual love, enough money but not more than that, enough attention but not more than that, enough safety to transcend our lonely situations and enjoy our collective one.

Collectively and individually when we are scared we are on all fours.  But perhaps we don’t all have to get up and soldier on, perhaps we all need to drop down and rescue the animal which is us by calming the savage beast which is the baby, within and between us all, not yet properly loved.

In drama there must be conflict; in therapy (and parenting) we must navigate conflict and stress, but we need not manufacture it.  Our cure is not going to come from smart ideas, our bad behavior comes when the animal is scared and confused.  Paradise was life amongst the animals; the fall is divorce from the animals.

Lena Dunham is a poet, she knows the language of our animal.  Her work rings emotionally true, it is compelling and interesting, it evokes love and pathos.  What higher praise for art?

In the prior episode Hannah’s OCD first flares up and she goes to a therapist.  My son, Will, asked me, “Is he a good therapist?”

Love is a good therapist.

My first panic attack struck when I was fifteen.  It was March and my father had taken my brother and I out of school to accompany him on a business trip with my mom to London.  No school, The Grosvenor House, going with just my brother to the newly opened Hard Rock Café, a driver to visit Stonehenge, jimmying the lock on the driver’s car with a wire hanger in the rain after he’d locked the keys in it with the motor running in Bath (he bought my brother and I Empire Mugs in gratitude)… and The Old Operating Theater.

The Old Operating Theater was located in a garret atop a church adjacent to a hospital.  It harked to the 1820’s and the decades before anesthesia had been introduced.  The emphasis back then was on speed, and the most frequent operation was amputation—often in a matter of a minute or two.  It was a theater because of the 1815 Apothecary Act requiring apprentice apothecaries to attend public hospitals:  they needed to watch.

The operating theater was not in the hospital proper because of the distress caused to other patients in the hospital should they hear the sound of patients receiving amputations and the like without anesthetic.

BTW, I’m telling you this as part of my review of a book you really must read:  Breathing For Two by Wolf Pascoe.

Backstory to my London panic attack:  my best friend, Jonathan, was killed when struck by a motorcycle in Chicago when we were kids.  His funeral was my fourteenth birthday.  One thing I knew about his death was that in the time between when he was hit, and when he died on the operating table, I was gripped by unspeakable dread even though I was a couple of hundred miles away at the time.

Jonathan was a very sporty guy, loving hockey, soccer, football and bicycling.  Apparently, or so I heard via secrets whispered and overheard by Jonathan’s brother Michael and shared in the bedroom in Jon’s house where we surviving kids huddled… the doctors had been trying to save Jon’s leg and it may have been the focus on the leg that contributed to the loss of Jonathan.

And so it was, a year and a half later, that talk about amputations and agonizing minutes and no anesthetics hit my unguarded brain and caused the return of complete dread, with absolutely no conscious awareness about why.  Links so obvious to me now were as obscure then as the 1800’s viewed through London Fog.

*

I met Wolf Pascoe online, a friendship born of a love of words, and solidified through complementary métiers.  Wolf, being an anesthesiologist, works by day to take patients on the night sea journey and then bring them back safely.  He does this so that they can be operated on without pain, and every time he faces the risk of no return.  As a psychologist I climb into caves of despair and traverse mountain cliffs of terror to locate my clients and then do my best to lead them back to the group, to safety and happiness and the realization that even with all their “issues,” they are lovable.  My worst nightmare as a clinician is when despair runs so deep and flies so impulsive that a person may try to end their own lives.  Wolf’s worst nightmare has all to do with going fey, but you must read his book to learn what that’s about, I’ll suffice to say that the taproot of Wolf’s being is his deep caring, it is what, in my view, defines him (and perhaps tortures him as well, a curse/blessing to which I can at times relate, and part of the glue, perhaps, of our bond).

Wolf and I always have a lot to talk about.

In Breathing For Two, Wolf takes us along on the night sea journey, only our eyes are not taped shut.  Like Ishmael, we find ourselves in the watery part of the surgical world and we are at once fascinated and slightly afraid.

My pitch for reading Breathing For Two is this:  read the first paragraph and see if the current of Wolf’s writing, his humility, his humanity and his compassion don’t sweep you along.

As I used to tell the five-year-olds at the school where I consulted as a psychologist when I was about to read them a fairytale:  it may get a little scary, but everything is going to be okay in the end.

Breathing For Two is a deep and resonant book; in writing about what he knows Wolf follows that age-old writing advice, but in having written much and long, Wolf layers subtext and raises profound questions.  A natural story-teller, Wolf engages us immediately and the book’s current runs swift and steady and before we know it we are done—awake, abruptly stepping back into the light of day like kids after our first time on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland.

As of this writing Wolf’s book is only available for download, and I prefer reading this way, the glow of my Kindlefire echoing the dying embers in the hearth or in the cave when all the great stories are told in that liminal space between night and day, between awake and asleep, between fiction and non-fiction, between private reality and the dreams, stories and adventures shared and made collective—the universal give-and-take of hearing and being heard, seeing and being seen, the weaving of the great tapestry.

It has been said that education is life, and in being a story-teller and an honest and compassionate travel mate, Wolf educates as he recounts, teaching us the history of anesthesia, of innovation and of an ever-evolving medicine.

It has also been said that company is the best medicine, and on this count I can affirm that Wolf is good medicine indeed—over lunch and around the story-tellers circle.  It’s been a long journey from two sticks rubbed together in a cave to fingers brushing a glassy tablet, but the effect of enchantment and transformation remains eternal.

*

It was in AP English, two years after my London panic, that I first came across the words of T.S. Eliot:  “Let us go now you and I, with evening spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table…”

Those words immediately gripped me and have never quite let me go, and in the tapestry that weaves Jon’s death, with 70’s London, with modernist T.S. Eliot, with Wolf’s friendship and writing… we seek our place, that harmony between freedom and security, between awake enough to fully savor life, and asleep enough to never lose the magic, the poetry, the faith and the reason we bother to sedate and revive, the reason we care if the other makes it through that night sea journey… Love in all its fluxing incantations and incarnations, through epiphanies and moments alone in the wine dark sea.

Wolf tells us about how he preps his patients for their own night sea journey, and while it varies on how much info a given patient desires, Wolf writes:  “But I always end with the same words to everyone:

I’ll never leave you while you’re asleep.  I’ll be watching over you the whole time.  But you won’t have any sense of time passing.  You won’t believe when it’s over.  When you wake, you’ll be asking when it’s going to start.”

In a world where extraversion and egotism have grown like dinosaurs thundering stupidly over the earth, Wolf runs with a pack of mammals, compassionate quiet creatures who you might not hear much about but for the web of word of mouth.  Psssst, I say, read this noble creature’s tale of someone who watches over you when you are utterly vulnerable.

Wolf Pascoe is a writer with a lot to say, he’s one to watch and I know a little bit about some of the other stories he has up his sleeve.  If you do not yet know his voice, read Breathing For Two, subscribe at the end to be informed when he releases new work and it will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Happy Valentine’s Day, 2013.

Today I feel loathe to offer opinion, yet am struck by several observations around the theme of ash.

In Dresden there are clashes between those who commemorate the firebombing of that city during WWII in a context of the dark forces that provoked the annihilation in the first place and those who view the anniversary as a holocaust of their own.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The anniversary of Dresden’s bombing also happens to be Ash Wednesday, and if a cross marks the spot, perhaps there is something in the human noggin prone to casting ourselves into the ashes?  In German, Cinderella, which means ashes girl, is Ashputtel.  The Grimm’s story is a little different than you may think from Disney versions, and it includes the theme of birds separating grain from ash, spirit helping the girl who loves, and mourns, a mother who has died.

In Chicago, where I grew up in between holocaust survivors and Tony Soprano 1.0, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was what Feb 14th was all about.  Al Capone once firebombed my grandfather’s liquor store; someone once set fire to my parent’s house when I was asleep inside in the care of a deaf baby-sitter.  A fireman carried me out in the night and I watched the house burn from across the street.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

As President Obama was giving his State of the Union address, calling for legislation on guns, a former Los Angeles police officer who had posted a manifesto on Facebook about corruption and unfairness, and who then went on a revenge spree shooting cops and children of cops, was burning to ash in a cabin in the white snowy mountains just outside the city of lost angels.  They are still trying to identify his remains.

Once upon a time Los Angeles burned.  Actually it was more than once upon a time, but once I bore witness from my window and it appeared that the revolution was indeed being televised.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

I’ve tasted dirt in my time, but have not eaten at Ne Quittez Pas in Tokyo where dirt is the culinary theme.

But maybe, per Flannery O’Connor who tells us that everything that rises must converge, all which burns and ends as ash and dirt too must converge.

When things do converge, when spirit is distilled and dirty ashy chimney sweep Burt dances on the roof or has a jolly sparkling holiday with Mary Poppins and kites fly and geese winter in Los Angeles and raise their babies perhaps a love too deep for words blankets us, weaving all our tattered threads into  some unifying tapestry.

Ashes, Chocolate, wings and tears

Wishing all much love this Valentine’s day

Books are like people, they need friends, they need to be loved, and by loved I mean understood, interacted with, allowed to inspire and to move and to raise questions.  Books are not at all the same as authors any more than children are the same as parents; books are related to authors, they come from authors, but as much by the grace of God as by the mere intercourse of imagery, words, thoughts and urgings, the mingling of fear and desire the requisite transgression and forbidden voyeurism, the nakedness and the hope of true love and a yearning for something fine and sublime that we know when we find it but can never quite put our fingers on.

Being a late bloomer in many ways, I realize that if I wait until I have truly gathered what I want to say about Katrina Kenison’s new and luminous book, Magical Journey, I may be far behind the social network of relevant timing.  Katrina’s book is not a book to rush through (although feel free to rush to purchase), for it is all about her personal journey of slowing down, savoring, presence to the moment—the truly good stuff—and it is an invitation to the sort of party those of us who feel otherwise invisible and wall-mountain-flowery might feel safely coaxed and ever-so-glad we pushed through self-doubt and self-negation and simply showed up to accept that we are indeed included.

Books come to you, sometimes they leap a little off the shelf and you never admit to anyone that you saw it happen for fear of being labeled mad.  Sometimes someone recommends a book, like an acquaintance dying of AIDS on a balcony at a party in the Hollywood Hills and you think, “Wow, amidst the bullshit here is a true tip.”

A client gave me a book, they said it made them think of me, and after a couple of years of it sitting around I read it, starting in the middle, and it proved wonderfully transformative, as if it was a conversation waiting patiently to happen.

Another client told me about a book and I read it in Ireland and drank it in deeply and it remains with me, even though its author passed on to worlds beyond ours.

And so it is that my words show up here in this time and space to point you toward a friend of a book waiting as patiently as a yoga teacher for you to drop into its soft pages and find a friend with whom you can laugh, cry, talk and… drop the bullshit that leaves us feeling outside, inadequate and like we’re missing something.  Magical Journey is a shard of mirror reflecting as much of the world as you can soften your gaze to see, a shard to reflect the little bit of world you carry with you in your own unique soul, and, mirror to mirror, soul to soul, Katrina will help you see what you hoped was always there—what you saw with your own beginner mind back in the day before narrative and social constructs, before you knew enough to fear a party much less an invitation.

To be frank, I am only one quarter of the way through Katrina’s book, but I felt so arrested and liberated by pages 63 and 64 that I paused for a blog post.  I fully intend to savor this book at my own damn pace, and I shall say what I please about it in the future.  Many of my best blog buddies have read to completion already and are singing Katrina’s praises; I’m just singing along with the chorus even if I haven’t learned all the words yet…

Yet, I wanted to invite any random reader who happens upon these words to consider:  what are you looking for?  What makes you think you haven’t found it?  What makes you think you’re not good enough, or “there yet,” or complete?

I’m not entirely sure why I dog-ear pages and write in margins.  Rarely, I return to the margin notes and often I am unable to read what I wrote.  It’s like trying to capture a river, or come to terms with time; you just cross and cross and cross until you become the river of time.  Still, the first quarter of Magical Journey has more dog-ears than the Dog Park and Go, Dog.  Go! (one of my eternal faves) combined.

Rather than quoting Katrina’s book at length, suffice it to say that writing (and music and films and painting) that truly moves me, tends to move me to write or paint or sing-along off-key in the car.  Katrina has me writing here; thinking about how she is a soul sister across a continent, how our shared adoration for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and our never-met but parallel play lives in 80’s New York, and our transformational experiences of yoga, and our take on parenting offers synchronicities and magic of their own.

Okay, fine, I’ll quote a little:  “Wiping the kitchen counter, putting the last dish away, I’m overcome with melancholy, wishing the phone would ring or, better, that the back door would fly open and the sound of teenage voices erase the quiet.”

I write my words at the kitchen island on a sparkling Saturday morning, and soon my boys and I shall meet Andy at Pete’s for coffee and then we’ll spend time together and Sunday too promises to be a gift… and then on MLK day Nate will be on that plane back to college and his room will be still and empty but for spirits lingering slowly in the warmth of hearth and home before trailing back, just like Lewis and Clark once did, in that pioneer quest for something sacred, true, timeless and new.

Katrina writes about Joseph Campbell and stumbling into the abyss of our dark places to discover our treasure there.  And just as I live in teeming LA to Katrina’s quiet New Hampshire, I am stumbling out of a long time in the dark abyss, the deep dark forest of the endless self; perhaps I shall find my treasure in the marketplace, the golf course, the sports stadium (not as any star but as an ordinary fellow amongst fellows).

Oddly, in my quest for masculine development, it has always been the women who most affirm me, most see me, most make me feel at home and included.  And just as I am raising sons (along with Andy and Agnes) Katrina too mothers boys and evokes the intrepid and brave part of ourselves to venture forth, perhaps to meet at the party of our collective soul.

Maybe we take our mothering where we can, and although I love my mom, she’s more one to ride along with the to séance, a journey always nutty and dark enough, than to teach me how to find my treasure in not my strange dark places but in the light of day and normal fun, in the public water-cooler chat of that great book you’re reading and so you tell your friends.

Read and walk along with me as I walk along with Katrina (as I walk along in my mind, sometimes, with Carl Jung and with the spirits of native Americans who once lived and loved on the land where I now squat between two rivers, albeit lined with LA concrete).

Maybe we’ll talk some more along the walk?  Let us go now, you and I…

Like the story of a man who has fallen on ice and cannot get up, no matter how many people try to pull him up, the old master comes along and lies down next to him on the ice, and then he gets up.  Did you picture the old master as a man?  I do not, and Katrina does not hold herself up as any sort of master, subtitling her book “An Apprenticeship in Contentment,” yet I must say that I find access to the master, in part, thanks to Katrina’s spirit.

Old Joe Campbell, and now Katrina too, urge us to commit to our journey and find that magic happens, friends show up.

I hope to be your friend, for I fully admit that I do not want to be alone and want very much to be included and to have lots of great friends (which I do, and I am blessed with this) but we have to share, and trust that love and friendship are abundant.  Who am I to suggest you be friends with Katrina?  You’re probably already friends with her, but I can second the emotion.  I’ve got that notion.

“Silence fills the house, melting snow drips from the roof like a stream of clear pebbles falling to earth, and my body moves slowly through the familiar sequences.  I am like a swimmer doing laps, steady, in flow, outside of time.”

“… the clock ticks relentlessly now, and I hear it, feel life passing me by…”

“I think about the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron’s suggestion that we try exchanging our intense desire to be comfortable for a willingness to be curious instead…”

This takes courage.  Courage rests upon love, safety, and trust.  It’s all about the love says Pamela.

KW assures us that we need this book like a soul-warming long walk with a friend.

Say, “yes my mountain flower” to Katrina, to her spirit; accept her offering.  Check out the book:  Magical Journey

When I heard the muffled sound of the garage door rising I would drop my blocks and my Legos and run for the door, shouting “Daddy!” as I leapt into my father’s arms, taking in the smell of snow and faded cologne.

We had a ritual, my father and I, and as he washed up for dinner and changed from his suit into a v-neck sweater I would bring him a Johnnie Walker Black Label over ice.  I did this since I was five or six years old, and as I stood at the threshold of his bathroom as he splashed his face with water over the sink I could smell the scotch melting and mingling with the solid cubes.  He would turn to me and ask if I wanted a sip, and like a miniature priest I received the first fruits of my father’s spirited libation.

“Promise me you’ll always drink good scotch,” my father said in what I believe was the only promise he ever asked of me.

We buried my father on December 3^rd on an atypically mild, albeit atmospherically rainy, Chicago Monday.  As I watched the casket lower into the good earth I knew one simple thing:  I am alive.

One thinks about the day one’s parents will die.  One may imagine what it will be like, but you really cannot guess for certain what it will be like for you, or what you will feel.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with my brother, Jordan, at the cemetery and our bond was clear and our love dear.

Some of the clumpy clay that I shoveled from a pile onto the lid remains caked to my black boots, themselves still enshrouded in soft velvet travel bags, now in my closet in Los Angeles.

One time, in the early 1980’s, my father was in New York on business and I was a student in film school.  He told me to meet him at 21, the famous restaurant on 52^nd Street.  “Wear a jacket,” he said.

It was summer.  I’d like to think it was June 21^st, as it would be poetic if that were true, seeing as I post these words on the winter solstice.

My dad and I drank scotch, and ate steak, and sat at a table right next to Diana Ross.  We had more scotch, and maybe there was dessert and we talked a long time and we laughed a lot and we were both happy.

I suppose a man’s relationship with his father is a complicated bit of business; at least it was for me.  “Honor thy mother and father,” is something I hope to do by holding onto the best parts of my dad and by striving to be a good ancestor to my kids, to all those I hope to assist in whatever way I can, and to those who will come later, be they biological or spiritual offspring of our time, of our living and learning and loving together in this life.

Beyond my biological parents, when I think of “Mother” I think of matter, of earth, carbon and the constellation of the tangible; when I think of “Father” I think of light, waves and spirit.  When I think of the Divine I try, but fail, to imagine the paradox of these opposites, forever ebbing and transforming, being at once spirit and matter in the eternal flux.

This year I lost a spirit father, lost a friend, published a book, turned 52 in Zurich, drank Prosecco in hill towns in Umbria, launched a child to college, saw my other son learn to drive, graduated from a very good therapy and buried my dad.

A few weeks before my dad died I found myself weeping hard in my office.  Sometimes we know things before we officially know them.  I surrendered to my grief, as has become my habit when dark and drizzly storm fronts move through my soul, and a soft realization emerged in the wake of the melancholy:  I love.

I am alive and I love.

I don’t think this is unique, but I do think it is special and precious and worth knowing.  On this winter solstice, or whenever you may happen across these words, I hope that you know that you are alive and that you love.  I hope you realize that this is enough.

I hope you are my friend in spirit, as my worst dread is to be utterly and unspeakably alone, but perhaps so long as we are alive and we love we shall discover that we are not alone—even if at times what promises to most deeply bind and bond us is our sense of aloneness.

While my father could be difficult, I owe a great deal to him and with his passing I find myself loving him without conflict; I see the turbulence of misunderstandings and mixed messages settling like sand in a lake and the clarity of love moving strong and true like that river in Wyoming we once fished together, along with my sons.

After dinner at 21 my father and I walked down Fifth Avenue together, perhaps weaving just a bit thanks to that good scotch whiskey, on a soft summer night.  And on this the shortest day of the year in our northern hemisphere I choose to remember my father, and honor him, in the spirit of a long and well-lived summer’s day.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have gone to Italy,” said Andy.  I was in a sour mood on our evening Agnes walk, a pile of bills, tuition payments, penalty-laden property taxes and other such signifiers of a certain sort of “reality” vexing me from their wicked scatter on the kitchen island, and just down the way an empty bedroom where my older son had been for the last ten years adding insult to my transient sense of injury.

But as soon as she said it I knew it was wrong.  I wouldn’t have traded that trip for a few pathetic dollars in an economic IV bag drip-drip-dripping its way toward flat-line end of the line what-was-it-all-about-anyway, Rosebud exhalation.

I’d been waiting all my life to turn fifty-two.  I’m not a card-counter but I have become a year-counter.  Twenty-six brought near death and a loving release in an ICU, it brought new love and a harmonic convergence.

In the full deck that has been my life so far, first came clubs, birth through bar mitzvah, and they didn’t suit me, bludgeoning me with loneliness; then came spades and we kicked that dark suit off on my fourteenth birthday by burying my best friend.  Twenty-seven began my time of hearts, marriage and children, lucky in love; the fourth suit was diamonds, but the kind you can’t sell, the carbon of my very soul pressed slowly into crystal though the process of finally growing up and learning just how much I do not know.

My aunt Lil once said to me, as a young boy smitten with her beauty and glamour in her elegant Gold Coast home, “Do you want to play fifty-two pick-up?”  I nodded eagerly, always game to have her attention.

She took the deck and suddenly threw all the cards wildly about her fancy apartment.  I was not accustomed to grown-ups making messes and she found pleasure in my confusion.  “There are fifty-two cards in the deck.  Now pick ‘em up!”  And she threw her head back and laughed, her elegant neck exposed, her coiffed blonde 60’s doo quivering with mirth.

She wasn’t mean, my aunt-Lil.  She wasn’t really my aunt either.  And as a teenager when she fell slowly into the hole of Alzheimer’s, it was her eyes that shown moist and confused as she dropped in and out of knowing who I was at lunch one afternoon at the most elegant hamburger restaurant in Chicago, the Acorn on Oak.

I turned fifty-two on a plane to Zurich.

I ate schnitzel at midnight at an outside café with my younger son, Will, as Andy and Nate slept in the hotel.

I sat at dusk under a linden tree and ate chocolate with my older son, Nate, and heard the ringing of seven-o’clock bells and a sudden swell of choir music and it was magic.

In the Italian Alps I ate yogurt under soaring chestnut trees in a sun-dappled morning garden, and felt as if I were in a dream.

One night storms rolled in from the mountains and Nate and I stayed up late talking as the trees blew madly about and we retreated to the empty lobby where gusts blew open the shutters and the curtains fluttered and by the flash of lightning I gazed into the eyes of my past and future self and drank in the closeness like a fine grappa.

Tragic news found us in Venice, and we contemplated loss and time and suddenness.

Under the Etruscan sun we encountered lizards and scorpions, butterflies in the lavender and sunflowers shoulder-to-shoulder to blanket the hills.

Andy and I found a little working-class town free of tourists and a café run by Mrs. Vanilli who made terrific espresso, deeply satisfying pastries and all sorts of excellent recommendations.

We played a card game called “Oh Hell,” and lay about on blankets by a lake and drank Prosecco and it was all more than very good.

In small hill town under an inky velvet sky we watched Italy beat Germany in the semi-finals of the Euro-cup, cheering and eating and drinking and honking our way home to our crumbling farmhouse, bonding and living.

At night I couldn’t sleep sometimes and heard footsteps on the stones at the hour of the wolf.  Ghosts and feral cats trod softly upon the ancient hills and eyes peered out of the blackness.  Etruscan tombs and offerings to eternal life lay half-raided under “melons” of rock and earth and oak trees, layers of vanished peace luminescent and ever-present under crumbling ruins of Roman conquest and erasure.

Up in the sky I saw Scorpio, and the great bear’s chalice spilling treasure into life’s cistern as distant trains slid along the valley floor with mournful horns and passing night-lights.

We staked a spot in a famous square and watched a rough and ready horse race, Il Palio, spill about the place and we were intruders in the dust of five centuries.

When the train from Italy could go no further because a landslide had blocked a former goat-herding tunnel, we took a bus over the Alps.

Meanwhile the Large Hadron Collider, just a stone’s throw away, was preparing to announce the biggest discovery of our era:  matter can indeed come into being out of absolute nothing.

This was announced officially on the day we got back to LA, 9am at the French-Swiss border.  I listened live on my Kindlefire though the blur of jet lag.  It was the 4th of July.

Soon we were on the archetypal trip to launch our son to college.

On the long drive to bring Nate his comforter and toiletries (he had spent his first week before college in a church basement helping feed the homeless) Andy said, “Is that a mountain up ahead?”

“No,” I replied, “Those are clouds.”

“I think that’s a mountain,” she ventured.

“If it is, it must be the tallest mountain in the universe,” I declared.

A hundred and fifty miles later we were gazing in awe at Mt. Shasta, an oft-exploded volcano, glaciered with ice and snow, soaring to heaven, a gathering of spirits and yet an anthill upon the hot sands of time.

In the dorm room, when it was time to say good-bye, Nate turned to us and said, “This is big.  This is like a scene you see in movies.”

Andy and I cried for thirty miles down the highway as the moon rose.  We looked over to see a big sweet dog riding with his head out of the sunroof of the car beside us, just as we were beside ourselves.  The wind lifted that dog’s jowls into a feckless grin, an easy rider on the open road.  And so we laughed and laughed.

Back in LA, still adjusting, we ran into a friend who made a movie with an epic weepy college dorm good-bye and we hugged her and told her how we’d just lived her movie.  We talked about parenting and art-making and then dashed off to our days, into the mysterious and eternal movie that we call life.

Even if it’s a blur, sometimes all we can do is tell our story.

On this, the fall equinox, please allow me to wish you love and compassion.  I’m blogging less, but caring about you, and our world, just as much as ever.  If I can be of friendship, comfort or assistance to you along the journey, do not hesitate to ask.  Perhaps I’ll throw all my cards on the table or all about the place; perhaps I’ll help you pick them up.  Perhaps you’ll throw your cards all over; perhaps you’ll help me pick them up—for I’ve never known less than I do now, nor have I ever felt more alive.

As we near the summer solstice, and I prepare to take a little break from blogging, my mind drifts back to turning twenty in Rome.  I could barely afford a bottle of Asti Spumante, but when the cork flew out past open double shutters of some cheap pension and into the soft inky night of my very own Roman Holiday I felt free.

I met that year’s solstice, a few days later, on a beach in Corfu, walking further and further out onto the rocks to watch the big red ball meet the ancient sea.

I remember a Norwegian beauty showering on the beach; she was that unobtainable anima and I was myself an eternal child.

Now I’m married to my anima and the father of two eternal children… and yet one boy has graduated high school already, closer to twenty than am I in this fluxing eternal moment as Venus has double-crossed the sun and I find myself hoping for greater love in our time.

I fished as a boy with my mother and father, once, at a sad little pond that was the universe to me at that time.  My mom caught a fish through the eye and none of us could see straight.

My dad went off in pontoon planes to wild Canada to catch big fish with big teeth and bring back stories of Indians and lightning, of danger that I heard about with the taste of pike delicious in my mouth.

I fished at summer camp, and once caught the back of my own head with a Red Devil.  I caught sunfish under a dock beneath which I nearly drowned—glimpsing the bright sun through murky water and slatted boards, slimy algae against my desperate fingers.  Perhaps Neil Armstrong was stepping onto the moon at the very same moment.

I fished in twenty-five foot waves off the coast of Jamaica, and prayed to fall into the sea for I was so seasick.  I caught a rainbow-colored fish, but my brother had to reel it in.  I blessed the dock, and sat on it and was very slow to get up as the rising and falling sea still pitched and heaved in my un-tethered mind.

I fished alone in eastern mountains as a young boy, and carried one home in a canvas bag and ate a trout with almonds cooked up in a fancy hotel dining room, and I felt like Nick Adams before I knew who Nick Adams was.

I fly fished in Wyoming and cooked whitefish in a cabin owned by a big Hollywood producer who I didn’t actually know.  We won a week in that cabin, for a song, at the pre-school auction.  I served those pan-fried fish pulled from a fast moving river up to Andy and my boys, to my parents and my brother and his family.  There was a dog there who retrieved rocks.

I fished with my boys in Yellowstone and caught a small brookie, rainbow lovely, and we let her go again into the pools that gathered upon the rocks in days of tangled lines, adventure and laughter.

I fished with my boys in lakes from New York to California, and in streams and ponds—always wondering what might be lurking under the surface.

As a boy I watched The Andy Griffith Show almost always, after school, and in reruns, and was charmed by the walk down to the fishin’ hole just outside of Mayberry.  Years later I would walk along this path, in a canyon in the midst of Los Angeles, and some years later would learn that it was the very path where Mayberry was made up, somewhere on the grounds of the witchy Hotel California from which I’ve stopped trying to check out.

When I was twenty-six I had some strange heart problems and I read Moby Dick in the I.C.U., and it seemed that there was something deep about fishing that I couldn’t really understand, but at least I understood that much and found myself released.

I’m twice as old as that now, and I have no intention to catch any fish, only to enjoy the sound of the river laughing and crying and marvel at its play of sunlight.

I started blogging three years ago.  At the summer solstice of 2009 I committed to post every day for a year.  At the summer solstice of 2010 I committed to weekly Wednesdays, and have done that for two years.  It’s time for a holiday.

If you should find yourself in need of summer reading related to parenting, perhaps this is a perfect time to read a labor of love (click at right to visit the egress).

So, while I have no plans to actually fish in the coming weeks, I’m off on whatever adventures any eternal summer promises—and I hope that you will have many lovely moments yourself.

Until then… Namaste, All Good Wishes and, most of all, Love

Morning found me weeping on the floor

Oh, how

Much I feel as

My Nate-Nate rises to walk, and say

Yes to the world

Andy walks with Helen, then off to greet Tiki

Nate sleeps still with friends

Death

Informs my watery lungs

And yet God (or whatever you call Great Source)

Reveals

Eternal Love

Oneness and deep humble gratitude

Nate has helped teach me to love

Every fluxing One:  so Thank You Nate