Expert Terrain Only

A few nights ago, I drove past your old rental place in Boulder. I felt a bit nostalgic.

It isn’t that I wish to go to past. No, no. Past is pointless. I get that.

It was simply moments and conversations remembered.

I sometimes wonder what your experience of me was, as I first crossed your threshold. Closed. Contracted. Crouched. Cowered. Mired in story. Stuck in the futility of organizing myself around definitions assigned by a flawed other. So much time and energy asserting and defending, “I am not that, I am not wrong.” No opportunity taken to describe what else is here.

Then today. Now.

There is an invitation extended at our gatherings, “You are welcome here. You are valued. You are a part of this.” The exact phrasing may change but the interest is genuine and consistent. Why then is this petition so difficult for me to grasp and embrace? Why at times do I carry a ridiculous level of self-consciousness in response, especially when I am in the presence of some of the loveliest people I have met in recent years?

Perhaps because the experience is new. I am not accustomed to receiving and responding to simple inquiry into what is happening in my inner world. There were some friends, mentors, teachers and a couple of lovers along the way that were genuinely interested in knowing and experiencing me beyond “story”, but my ability to respond was never fully developed.

_______

My father loved me deeply. I know this to be true. Throughout my childhood as well as my adulthood, he was physically demonstrative in the expression of his love. It was abundant and enthusiastic. He was not rageful. He was not an alcoholic, he was never physically or verbally abusive. He was serious about his role as provider.

Yet, he never seemed to have a capacity to be interested in who I was as a person. He remained at a great emotional distance, aloof and depressed, for most of his life. Perhaps this was connected to his experience as a child of penniless Russian immigrants on the Lower East Side. Or perhaps it resulted from wartime experiences that left him a wounded hero. These complexities, un-examined, were buried with him.

It would be wrong to blame failures in my own relationships or my failures as a parent on this experience. At the same time, I can’t quite conclude, “This does not matter.” There must be some value in trying to acknowledge or understand. For I have spent a lifetime feeling damaged, apologizing for the room I take up and going through life trying to organize myself around what I think others want me to be.

I spent much of my adult life loving someone who was shuttered from his own emotions and who was quite interested in projecting all sorts of pathology onto me, assigning wrongness to who I was. He routinely expressed his desire that I be someone other than who I was.

I’ve left that. I no longer wish to define myself by what I am not.

I’ve done what is necessary to try to answer what seems like a simple question, “Who are you?” I have caught glimpses of what it is to know myself and live from there.

Yes there are times it seems the screen suddenly goes dark and I feel overwhelmingly empty and vacuous again, yet I am aware I have a chance.

Sometimes it seems like a passing glance, sometimes it seems like something fully embodied. An opportunity of sorts, to live now. To live from a thriving central articulated place that is me, to do so authentically and un-apologetically.

Deservedly.

“Who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“It’s your life, when are you going to start living it?”

“When did you stop allowing yourself to have fun?”

“Can you stop debating just for a minute and see what a good time we are having?”

“Can you stop searching just long enough so we can do something else together?”

“If you cannot accept me reflecting something wonderful about you, will you at least allow me to make an objective observation that can’t be disputed? You have a foot.”

“Step INTO the music. DANCE.”

There is an irony in describing it as an “articulated” place, because I can’t quite describe it. I can’t even say it is something that is felt. It is more experienced. This can’t be forced. I can adopt practices that help me be open to it. Sometimes I more attentive about those, other times I am demanding and recalcitrant, stomping my feet.

And sometimes when I least expect it, I am aware I’ve stopped. I am aware my chest and heart are open. Spontaneously, I am breathing deeply. I bring. I love. I give. I abandon story. I release expectation, demand and agenda.

Unchartered expert terrain. Yet simply exquisite.