100 happy days

There's been this challenge floating around social media called the 100 happy days challenge, a miniature phenomenon. I've never been good at following through on such things. I love the idea of training to run a marathon and lent, things that require commitment and determination. People who do those things are admirable to me... and alien. My days are too changeful. The only things I do everyday are the necessary ones that would make me a disgusting human being if I didn't - brushing my teeth, untangling hair that's natural state is to be tangled, maybe washing my dishes, and remembering to pay my bills on time. Everything else? ... meh. I write sporadically, I practice my violin when I feel like it, I eat whatever I want at random times and have irregular sleep patterns. Basically, my life lacks the kind of structure it would seem necessary to have in order to pull off something like a 100 day long challenge in how successfully I can annoy people that are barely acquaintances.

I noticed this challenge a few months ago. Folks post something everyday that made them happy during that day. It seemed redundant to me. I already saw Facebook and other social media outlets as highlight reels of peoples' lives, for the most part. Why lay it on any thicker?

There's already loads of research that's been done into the negative side effects of social media and how it contributes to depression, anxiety, addictive behavior patterns, and shortened attention span. If used unconsciously, it becomes a tool for comparison. We fall victim to comparing the unhappy aspects of our lives with the often over-shared aspects of others' happy lives. And so I've tried to be a more conscious user.

I took on the challenge 15 days ago after an unexpected breakup opened my eyes to several issues that I'd been avoiding. The relationship itself, had become more important than my happiness. I loved the relationship more than myself, which caused me to objectify my partner and ignore my needs. I lost myself and let the things that normally made me happy wither in the shadow of this perceived romance which I was using to medicate another much more significant loss. I tend to forget that the world and its beauty and its love are also mine for the taking after I've lost someone. I see beauty and think of the person I can no longer share it with. I think of my plans and feel shaken knowing that they will no longer be a part of them. I think that much is natural. But ignoring my needs was a sign of something wrong.

So I'm doing it. Not so much to be a happier person, but to get back in touch with myself. To live more graciously. To focus. To follow through on something good.

Gains

I've been in South Korea for nearly six months. I left three days after my birthday and now I find myself wondering if any new urges to move on or  move back or stay still will surprise me. Holding still does not come naturally to me.

In truth, I have always moved to escape some part of my past or my self. When I came here my dad had been gone four months. Between his death and my arrival here the depression that hovered over me from my late teens into my twenties morphed into numbness. I had constant anxiety and insomnia. I stopped eating but drank too much. I threw myself recklessly at love hurting myself and several others in the process. I felt isolated from my family and alienated from my friends. I was rootless, floating aimlessly from place to place, hoping whatever was weighing me down would let up someplace else. And finally last year, with no job, no permanent place to live, and no forseeable future, I felt I had to get out of the States to start over. These are feelings I've rarely shared with anyone. I was broken.

Whenever I move I remember that saying which haunts me like a ghost - wherever you go, there you are. For a while the newness of being in a foreign country completely distracted me from the weight I had been carrying for years before. But my habits under stress and the truth that I was still very much in the depths of grieving the loss of my father and my own shame at my lack of self-worth crept back into the peripheries of my life like an old friend.

I look at the pictures on my Facebook profile. I remember a friend asking me if I was truly as happy as I seemed since relocating. And the answer is... yes! Getting on the plane to come to South Korea was the first time in my life that I chose me and not someone else. That I did something frightening because I thought it might teach me something from the outset. I didn't do it for a man, or a friend, or because of some perceived betterness at being there as opposed to anywhere else. I chose to go to a place where I knew no one and left everything known behind me, left even the potential for romantic love, because I had to. I believe I was dying.

The moment I got on the plane my life began to change in a way I never thought imaginable. Believing long enough that I, my sanity, my heart and my soul was worth the 10,000 mile trip caused a shift in me. I'm still grieving, I'm still a love addict learning how to walk the journey of someone who loves themselves first. I still stumble along the way. I've already recklessly fallen into and lost love in the six months that I've been here. I still catch myself in old patterns. I'm still tempted by old self-destructive habits. The difference is the joy I carry with me now as I face these challenges. The difference is the friends by my side who saw my hurting self and loved me whole again. The difference is gratitude, each and every day for being able to wake up and try it differently until I get it right, for me.

Being open about these challenges, telling on myself, is a liberating process. And so I hope through my sharing that the weight becomes less burdensome, and my heart opens more still.

The loss

My dad passed away last weekend. There was less clarity before than there is now, which is not what I expected. Anticipating Dad's passing was like an amplification of the anticipation of a painful procedure with no anesthesia for several years, and now, it's over. For ten years, it was cancer and treatments and surgeries and side-effects. My dad's health declined steadily in stages, each surgery literally and emotionally taking a little bit more out of him each time. Radiation treatments and infusion therapies that poisoned his cells and took the pigment out of his skin, inflamed his arthritic knees until he could barely walk and made it next to impossible for him to eat a real meal. Tumors fractured bone, infections regularly sent him to the ER, and life-threatening pulmonary embolisms popped up that could end it all in one fell swoop.

That's the ugly.

Playing in my favorite arms

Now that all of that has passed I have more room to remember a man with a dark and imposing figure and the gentlest of spirits. Someone who once called me every Monday morning before school to make sure my homework was packed and my shoes were tied. Someone who gave me pearls when I turned 16, mailed blue irises to my office at 23 and hand delivered a Jane Seymour pendant on my 25th, even though he didn't celebrate birthdays. I remember being tossed in the air by his strong and able six-foot-four-inch frame. Games of tickle monster, very big shoes, Star Trek marathons, and Evergood hot link sausage sandwiches during basketball season. I remember every admonishing smack, every blow-up, and every make-up. I remember Take-Your-Daughter-To-Work days at the office and bumper car rides on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. A man who twice drove me from San Francisco to Alabama to spend the summer with my grandmother. A man who taught me to read by opening the Bible and to spell by playing Scrabble.

I remember Johnny Williams Jefferson as a man who made me his own only child by raising me from infancy to womanhood as a true surrogate dad, when my own father was absent. Through his divorce from my mother and our own seemingly insurmountable spiritual differences, Johnny, has always been there.

Learning to drive at three years old!

Not only was he there for me, but as an elder in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses, he was there for everyone in his congregation. He advocated for the rights of Jehovah's Witnesses in hospital to not receive blood as a tenet of their beliefs. He saw countless others through bible study and baptized more. He did what he loved the most by serving his God and telling as many people as he could about his faith. He always hoped that one day I would find myself on that path and I regret I couldn't tell him what he wanted to hear before he died. But while he taught me about Jehovah he also lived in his truth, teaching me to do the same. In a mainstream culture that sees his faith as fringy and strange if not cultish, my dad stood in his truth, teaching me to embrace my odd pagan earth-worshipping Tibetan buddhist spiritual hybridism in a family chock full of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Dad and I at a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses when I was a teenager. He was in a biblical re-enactment that year. I'm trying so hard not to blush.

Holding the hand of someone I love who is staving off spiritual crisis when their beliefs are different from my own, has shown me the true meaning of compassion. In that way, I have come out on the other end of this journey a better person.

I've wondered why I'm not more tearful... and then I think about all the years I spent crying in my room so that my dad wouldn't see and the inescapable pain wracking his body that sent tears streaming down his face. I think about the night he died, still trying to get out of bed before collapsing right in front of me... And then I think I've cried enough.

I have wept. And while there is the blindsiding grief every time I think about him and all the days more I wanted him to live, I wished that they could be healthy days. He's finally free from the most awful of diseases and I can finally let the memories of his healthier more vital days fill the void he has left behind. My dad can be as he once was in memories present. He can be the man that once chased mirages with me through Death Valley on a trip to Eclectic, AL when I was four years old.

July 4, 1949 - October 12, 2013

Dad owning the Golden Gate Bridge

Preparing for Loss

... for me, is full of strangeness. At some moments, I feel extremely restless, while completely serene in others. At the same time, I feel acutely that I am an alien in unfamiliar territory. It's like one of my dreams, where everything seems the same but is painted a different color; every thing feels backwards and inside out; everything smells different, tastes different, looks different but I'm somehow still able to identify the world for what it is. Yes, this is still the world. Yes, I am still Shari. I'm falling between what has passed and what hasn't happened yet, dancing between the life of yesterday and the surrender of tomorrow. I'm a stranger in the bitterly uncomfortable transitory present.

Sitting with my dad in chemotherapy today was a journey into this very weird plane of existence. Outside the hospital window, a beautiful urban sprawl beneath blue sky and soft heat. Inside, a man being eaten alive by his own mutated cells. Outside, a billboard reads, "1 in 3 children born today will live to be 100." Inside, a 63 year old life veteran, teeters between mania and orneriness because of the breakthrough pain that makes living almost unbearable, because he's been cheated by something he can't name.

I feel so irritable, so imperfect, and so damn uncomfortable, all the time, my own grace and ugliness underneath a self-imposed microscope. Seemingly everything in existence - themes and objects and emotions -  is in constant juxtaposition in front of me. Everything is either living or dying. People are either in the throes of euphoria or in the depths of depression while I'm in grey limbo. That's the lense of my world these days. Everything though, seems to stand in opposition to my dad. I see what he sees on one side of a boldly delineated line, which is the potential, opportunity, hope, and wonder of unlived years.  Today, dad is on the other side of that line.

The me I know well is disappearing. I wonder how this painful transition will birth me into my tomorrow. I have no idea. There is no instruction manual on how to lose someone you love. Anything and everything is a possibility.  And somehow I have to let the river run its course knowing I will come out on the other end, not quite different, but not quite the same.

HOME

Life changes us...
And I find it all a bit uncanny. The small yellow house where I was born is less than a block from the flat I just moved into. On some subconscious level, I know this was no accident. Returning to the place where I chose to enter the world has given me a new sense of agency. Forever yesterday, today, and tomorrow, I am as bitter and vexed as I am resilient and blessed. My journey through depression, facing a deeply rooted fear of abandonment, continuing to grow as a writer, musician, and spiritual activist, yielding to self-love and acceptance, harnessing the ability to lose control and LIVE by choice and not by default... Every moment has enriched me. I chose to have this life with these moments.  The yellow house reminds me to take a look around, examine forgotten scars, and nurture new beginnings. I kind of go through this time scratching my head with a smile. I know it is all really quite good to be right here right now. I also know that whatever it is about today that I love or hate could very well be gone tomorrow. One day, it will be, or I from it.

"I like who I am Becoming."    - Maya Angelou

A proclamation for a few

"Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged"     - Rumi

Maybe you’ve gathered that I’m pagan. Maybe we met recently and I introduced myself to you as Dove. Maybe we’ve shared sacred space together. Maybe you knew me on Maui. Maybe you’re family, just trying to understand me a bit better. If any of what I've just said comes as a surprise, then this post was made just for you. This writing was born out of personal necessity and I’d like to get it out of the way so that I can get on to writing about things that really matter to me without you wondering where the heck that came from or getting offended. Maybe that won’t happen at all and I’m just projecting, again. But you can see, just the idea of writing what I want has made me a little neurotic.

I choose the name Dove, primarily among close friends and my spiritual community, because doves serve as a reminder to me of the inherent sanctity and perfection within us all; they are pure, innocent, and sacred. One flew over Christ at his baptism. In Greek mythology, doves draw the chariot of Aphrodite, the Goddess of love. The Hindu god, Yama used doves as messengers, and the Japanese god of war, Hackiman, used doves to announce the end of war. They are understood cross-culturally as symbols of peace and compassion. For me, they bridge the gap between my Christian upbringing and my pagan reality. One of my goals for the year is to write more and that includes this blog. I've spent a lot more time making it look nice, than I've spent writing on it because I've refrained from writing about themes that really inspire me. That changes here. I choose to be Dove instead of Shari here in this webspace, because I created this space to express myself from a place of spiritual integration, and being Dove is a part of that. If that makes you uncomfortable, then lets just be Facebook friends. 

I don’t want to write about what I believe in or why. I have absolutely no interest in explaining myself. (If you really want to know more, just read the quote above. That pretty much sums it up.) I just want to write without there being this line, this boundary that I won’t let others cross, the line that shows you who I really am and what I really believe in. Having any sort of limitation, hinders your ability to really express fully from the heart. It’s stupid to live in the United States and not express yourself and truly be who you were born to be, even in spite of your friends and your family and the people you love. And after years of struggling against my natural inclination to hide, I realize that it is frighteningly easy to play that game in a place where everyone has the liberty to think and believe and do whatever the heck they want. I don’t need to be accepted by you. I need to be liberated from my fear of not being accepted by you. And that’s all this is, a simple letting go, so that I can get closer to being me. It's still a work in progress.

Insight into Activism on MLK, Jr. Day

On the day we remember a leader in civil rights and liberty for all, I wonder why the Occupy Movement has dwindled.  When Occupy began I got caught up in the current and the rhetoric and the adrenaline; so many people, all sorts of people, having conversations that mirrored my concerns. I’m disappointed that the media has decided it’s over. “Why?” I asked Marc, my mom’s boyfriend. “Why couldn’t Occupy have the same staying power as the Civil Rights Movement?”

           He said, “Well, because we had a leader for the Civil Rights Movement. We had a clearly defined message with a clearly defined goal."

And in light of that I see how activism has changed since the early-mid 20^th century. When you think about the names of the major movements of the 20^th century, you hear it – We wanted Women’s Suffrage, we wanted Civil Rights. What do we want now? Balanced wealth? Corporate accountability? Evenly distributed taxes? It's a hard question to answer because what we want no longer falls under one umbrella. These movements of the 20th century had visionaries and a face that could be distinguished from the rest of the crowd. There was consensus. We had Susan B. Anthony and the National Women’s Party. We had MLK and the NAACP. Blacks during the Civil Rights movement knew that they were marching into police brutality, unemployment, and terrorism as a result of their visible unrest. It was the brutality under which they suffered that brought the Civil Rights Movement to the world arena.  When they were sprayed with fire hoses and beat with police batons, when they were being stabbed and beaten, when their daughters were blown up in places of worship, they responded with peaceful protest, not physical violence. What would happen today if officials did that to a crowd of Occupiers? We would not sit peacefully and wait for the world to see, we would vandalize and we would fight, because we have a much deeper sense of entitlement now.

That’s why our approach to protest has changed.  We defend our rights instead of acquiring new ones.  The voices of our protest come from every race, religion, sexual orientation, employment status and ability. Our face is every face. And instead of having a clear goal, whether it’s a law to be passed in Congress, or an Amendment made to the Constitution, we have instead opted to turn political theatre into a stage where we can express the diversity of our opinions and show the world that the injustices that we are facing today transcend the boundaries that we thought once separated us.

Yes, Occupy has faded, but new avenues of conversation have opened up in academia, in politics, and in economics.  The truth that there is an imbalance of wealth has found it’s way into the media; people are now trying to define the “1%.” And in the midst of Occupy, Bank Transfer Day was born, which lead to Bank of America changing one of its major policies around debit and checking fees. Things seem to be changing from the bottom up instead of trickling down. It’s got people buzzing in the age of information, and that’s the legacy of activism today.

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

   

 - Martin Luther King, Jr.