You Can't Go Home Again

Okay. 

<Deep Breath>

I figure that if I'm going to write about the highlights, the successes, that I need to be equally open about the setbacks and heartaches.  A one dimensional picture is hardly useful in trying to describe a three dimensional world, and nothing is as easy as it sounds when you only describe the times when it's easy.

<Deep Breath>

Over the past couple of weeks I've been struggling.  My reasons are personal and specific, but they'd be recognizable to anyone who's ever read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, or ever attended any kind of 12 Step meeting, or known anyone with addiction issues.  Really they'd be recognizable to anyone who's ever done any kind of deep spiritual exploration and discovered anything important about how the human mind and heart work when operating under the control of the small-s "self" rather than the large-s "Self."

The reasons aren't that important; the results, on the other hand, are.  I ate some junk food.  Actually, I ate a lot of junk food.  Had some McDonald's for lunch one day.  Then Burger King for breakfast the next.  I wolfed down a couple of jumbo hot dogs.  Consumed some pizza.  Some fried chicken.  I even ate a breakfast of hash, home fries, biscuits and gravy, and sausage -- both links and patties.  In other words, I stepped off of the path of my new way of eating and resumed old habits that have been causing me harm.

The good news -- and I do like to try to find the good news -- is that Thomas Wolfe was right . . . you can't go home again.  After clearing up my system and establishing new patterns as I've been doing for the past several months I found that I couldn't return to my old ways of eating.

I could, of course.  Obviously I could, because I did.  What I mean is that I discovered in a newly clear way that it's really no longer an option for me.  What had not that long ago been accepted parts of my life were no longer acceptable:

 

~ My brain essentially shut down. The "brain fog" was so dense that my short term memory was shot and my ability to think ahead was nearly non-existent. I couldn't make connections, and struggled to put words together in any kind of coherent way.

~ And all I wanted to do was sleep. Not only was my brain filled with fog -- or, more accurately, smog -- but my body was weighed down. My arms and legs felt heavy, leaden. It was all I could do to get myself out of a chair. And my sleep was not restorative in the least -- I woke up each morning even more tired than I'd gone to bed the night before.

~ My sinuses began to fill up, and my whole body began to itch -- especially my scalp and my back, but my arms and legs, too. My chronic athlete's foot condition raged again. I started feeling hot in cold rooms, and cool in hot ones. I began to sweat again, easily and profusely.

~ And in case it's not intuitively obvious, my depression came back with a vengence. Negative self-talk regained the ascendency.

And all this after just a few days of eating junk again!  Admittedly, I ate a fair amount of junk during those few days, but there was a time when I ate fast-food for at least two out of three meals most days and easily downed a 2-liter bottle of coke and a whole pizza without giving it a second thought.

If I had any doubt that the way I was eating was harming me, and that the changes I'd been making were helping, the response of my body and brain to this last binge removed it.  The cause-and-effect is so incredibly clear.  And having had something of a break from these mental and physical symptoms, having experience another way, I find that I cannot stomach (excuse the pun) the thought of letting myself go backwards. 

And, so, the juicer is back in service again.  And I'm discovering (again) how good it feels to think and move and really live.  I'm reminding myself, and being reminded, of the addage:  There is no such thing as junk food.  There is food and there is junk.  And while I cannot say with any degree of certainty that I'll never slip like this again -- in fact, I can say with more than a little certainty that it's likely that I will! -- I do now know that I will never again make my home in this unhealthy place.

In Gassho,

RevWik

I Don't Know

The last sermon I preached while the settled preacher in Yarmouth, Maine was titled, "Everything I've Said Was Wrong."  In this sermon I looked back over eleven years of preaching and tried to show how every single thing I'd said from that pulpit was as wrong as it had ever been right; that the words we use to describe the ineffible are, by the nature of the task itself, going to be short of the mark.

I was really proud of that sermon -- proud of the intellectual and spiritual humility I believed it demonstrated, proud to see those words on the sign board out in front of the church as if they summed up my ministry.  And, in a sense, they did, although I'll confess that I put a lot of thought into the sermon that showed that my thoughts had been wrong, and the idea of being proud of your humility is a bit of a head scratcher.

This morning my friend James Ishmael Ford -- who is both a Unitarian Universalist minister and a Zen priest and teacher -- wrote a really fantast piece on his blog.  In it he said,

"[D]on’t know.


For heaven’s sake don’t know.

It is the universal solvent to all human ills.

Doesn’t mean give up.

It means don’t know. Really don’t know, right down to the soles of your feet."

Now I know all about the Zen concept of "Don't Know Mind," and have always advocated it myself.  I think that that's partly what I was trying to point to and embrace in that sermon.  Yet I was reminded again this morning of this advice and saw more clearly than I have in a while just how hard it is to put into practice.

And I mean, I want to be clear, how hard it is for me to put into practice.  I can remember the summer I first learned to juggle.  Or, to be more precise, the summer I was first taught to juggle.  Now, in the years since I have used exactly the same technique to teach a couple of thousand people how to do the basic three-ball cascade that is the foundation of most juggling.  I can teach you in an hour and, if you practice for fifteen minutes each day, you'll be juggling solidly by the end of the week.  I can say this with some certainty because I've done it so often.

Yet that summer that my friend Donna Hunt tried to teach me I just couldn't get it.  No matter what, I couldn't pick it up.  Forget the one-hour lesson, she tried for days and weeks . . . nothing.

I've come to realize that at the camp where this was all taking place I had something of a reputation.  I was a magician and a clown.  Everyone assumed that something like this should come easy to me; that I'd be a natural.  And, so, for psychological reasons of my own, I developed a real block.  I didn't want to not-know how to do this and, so, I was unable to learn.

I've seen that in other situations in my life, too.  (And I've heard about it in the lives of many of the people I've talked with over the years.)  Not-knowing requires a willingness to be a beginner, to risk appearing less than.  If I don't-know, why would anybody want to listen to my sermons (or read my blog)?  If I don't-know, how will I demonstrate my worth (having grown up so valuing intellect and knowledge)?  If I don't-know, how will I gain status, or prestige, or respect, or . . .?

And yet, not-knowing is the only way to learn.  (Unless you embrace your not-knowing you'll never have any room inside for learning anything.)  And, truth be told, not-knowing is pretty much the real state of things anyway, just as not-in-control is.  (But that might be the subject of another blog sometime.)

So todayt I'm thankful for James' reminder of the importance of not-knowing, "right down to the soles of your feet."

In Gassho

RevWik