Do This, Don’t Do That

Do This, Don’t Do That

by Michelle Katz

I am a full follower of the Dalai Lama’s advice on learning the rules to know how to break them properly.

This week has been a real hardship for me in regards to “the rules”.  I have begun to ask myself if some rules are just made for rule-making sake? Or because some person’s indiscretion or exploitation, one bad seed creating an unjust system for everyone else? Or some practice of authority that is unchecked? 

Often times it seems like rules block progression, is keeps us caught in a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t benefit the majority.  Hoops to jump through that are actually not in service to the greater whole, leave me baffled.  This week, working my day job, has revealed to me how rules can be overly absurd and actually lead to people not seeing a greater purpose or keeping people from being of service to those who they are meant to be of service to.  It was as if rules were made to keep people down and powerless.  Then it occurred to me, that is what our systems have been doing for a long time to those who are disenfranchised.  My anger grew with the awareness of how the microcosm of my experience mirrored the larger injustices of the world due to rules created and imposed upon us. The world is trying its best to change, to struggle its way out of this restrictive cocoon we have found ourselves in: activists hitting the streets or bending the rule in back rooms hoping to not be discovered, young people with fresh ideas (the ideals of our country’s founding) fighting to be involved in politics which is over occupied by the older generation not wanting change.  Change is the purpose of the younger generation, listening to those who are younger helps our world move forward exponentially.  People have known and lived “the rules” for too long, it is time to speak about how they just don’t make sense anymore!

I come from a lineage of holocaust survivors.  All my grandparents lived though that traumatic act of injustice and genocide, rules that didn’t make sense to disempower people. One of the major teachings for the generations that followed: question.  We were taught to question what doesn’t make sense, what subjugates people, question, before it is too late to say something. Question, because silence and blind obedience can often lead to great loss.

I wanted so wholeheartedly to believe that in a post-covid world; a world full of loss, a world that’s practices have been challenged, had us stifled in our homes, had us hyper conscious about our health and wellbeing for the better of two years – we would prioritize a world of health and possibilities.  I wanted to wholeheartedly believe that in a world with racial upheaval; a world that watched George Floyd take his last breath in front of our very eyes, by the people we should entrust our safety to, the people who should hold all its citizen’s wellbeing as the soul purpose of their work in the world –that  we would take a good look at our systems and spring into action about changing them.  I wanted to wholeheartedly believe that in a world that is witness to an unnecessary war based on one man’s desire for power, we would question what leadership really means and how the heart of people is much more powerful than their might.  But unfortunately, all I seem to see is more injustice, more big brothering, less freedoms, less emphasis on caring for human beings over the systems we live in, more requirements and restrictions, and expectations gone rampant.  Less listening to each other and less actual change.  I am disheartened by the rules that keep us stuck, and for those of us brave enough to step out and question or find a way to break them, I applaud you, I implore you, keep going! Even though you face the hardships of the repercussions, I know you are doing it for all of us, for the better collective. Question.

With such great aggravation, I take a walk.

I walk the land behind my house, up and down the hills, navigating to now avoid newly (just in the last year) built fences of newly bought plots of land, fenced in.  “No trespassing” signs that once were never part of the neighborhood are now peppered throughout.  Rules, boundaries we are forced to move with when the space was once open and shared among the community.  I can’t help but wonder, rather than what are they keeping out, what are they hiding?  I’ll admit, we put up a “no trespassing “sign at one point to stop the construction workers building new properties from coming into our area to defecate, leading our dogs to eat it and get sick, we put a sign to explain our request, next to our “no trespassing” sign. A month later, when we realized our request was clearly understood, we took the sign down.  The others have not, and new signs are posted regularly.  “Signs, Signs everywhere a Sign, marking up the scenery, breaking my mind, do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign.”  How did a broken world leave us pushing away humanity?

Passed the hills and boundaries of new fences there is an opening.  My favorite part of this daily walk.  The opening to a large field that the monsoons have left bright green and covered with yellow coreopsis, towering over the dogs, leaving pollen on our tickled hands.  It is hard to not smile when reaching this bright and beautiful open scene.  Even in the winter, it is my favorite part of the walk, covered with a blanket of untouched snow that glistens in the late afternoon sunlight.  And when there is neither flowers and bright green grasses nor angelic snow, there is still an expanse and feeling of openness, a view of mountains or hills in every direction, an place that ask us to take perspective, and take in what is real and true.  A place that thrives with life: from owls and crows overhead, the coyote chasing the mice scurrying across the earth, vibrant juniper, blue grama grasses, and coreopsis and asters.  Life lives in this wild place surrounded by the starkness of a sandy arroyo and rocky hills.  It is soft here, things are flourishing in every direction of growth, unbound by hard edges that stifle development.  Even when standing on those rocky hills overlooking this part of the land, I say to yourself, “that’s where it’s at, where the beauty is, where I want to be.”

I sit here a while. Taking in this landscape that speaks to me of what is so needed in today’s world.  The hard edges all around this place, they are not thriving.  But, these special few acers, somehow, it knew how to break the rules of the surrounding landscape, it knew to make something different happen.  I look to this place, again and again for inspiration, for how to break the rules and thrive.

Grief to Gift

Grief To Gift

by Michelle Katz

After my first break up with a serious boyfriend, in my grief and heartache, confusion and scrambling to make sense of it, my dad said to me, “when the groom leaves the bride at the altar, no one knowns who is the lucky one.”  I remember it stopping me in my tracks.  This statement, that I gave tribute to as some Ukrainian adage I imagine he heard somewhere along the way in his growing up, created true pause in my experience of loss.  Like a Zen Koan landing in my lap through the wisdom of a man I would never expect such a turn of a phrase be expressed.  Years and years later, I still remember that moment, that saying, and have applied it to the many loses throughout my life: relationship losses, career losses, losses that contributed to major paradigm shifts, the most brutal experience of friendship losses, even the losses and battles with my own ideas. 

This simple and profound saying offers me the greatest contemplation about loss: ”What if it was meant to be?” “What if this terrible unbearable feeling of grief, is actually for the best?”  Holy wow!  As the Dalai Lama wrote “Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

We all have had losses in our lives.  Many of which have defined us, taught us a lesson about how to be in the world, taught us about great love and surrendering to what is.  In hindsight, all those losses can be seen as circumstances that were meant to be.  Grief for something that was once so wonderful can later be understood as necessary loss for the becoming who we are meant to be.

Loss happens in nature every day, from predator hunting prey to the extinction of a species due to the climate crisis.  There is even the line of thought that the global pandemic and it’s enormous impact on the loss of life can be contributed to nature running its course for the creation of a world that is more sustainable, conscious, community oriented.  It is a hard heart wrenching thought to bare, but, what if it’s true?  Could we bare it? There is much we grieve these days that is hard to bare. We are meaning-making-machines and it is often more about how we feel about how we feel than the feeling alone. What is the work of seeing the crack as also being the place that the light comes in (as Leonard Cohen wrote)? Are we able to see that a light is in both the broken glass and the diamond (Mark Nepo)?

Byron Katie, a great psychological thinker/author, among many others of her kind, teachers us to look at what is.  To ask the questions of what is really true? How we know it’s true? What is our reaction to our thoughts? Who would we be if we didn’t have that thought?  And what if we flipped that thought around and discovered ways that new thoughts might be true.  What an incredible, interesting, and unbearably challenging practice to take on!

Another great explored or grief, Francis Weller, teaches us the wildness of our sorrow and how the other side of it is gratitude.  Greif can be transformed into fertile ground for use to embrace the realness of life.

Vulnerably, I tell a story of the loss of a career I had been dreaming of for as long as I could remember.  My identity, who I defined myself to be, was wrapped up in this career. The loss of it left me utterly bewildered.  I failed, I wasn’t worthy of anything good, I felt depressed, hopeless, I could not see my life ahead of me.  Who was I?  How was I going to move forward?  Joseph Campbell offers, “We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”  The freedom of this terrifyingly challenging action is inexplicable.  It feels like sometimes this action of letting go could kill us, it is that threatening to our existence.  But I have to tell you, every time I have been able to practice this letting go, it has been liberating. Acceptance of what is the greatest way to lead a peaceful life. 

I watch the trees move through the seasons, loosing their leaves in the autumn without resistance.  I watch the long days become shorter.  The fruit fall from the carefully planned and tended to garden.  I watched the winter come and cover the sands and soils that are marked by footprints that hold memories of walks with a lover or friend, the small plants that took root but may not make it to another spring, the tree trunks that once invited us to sit awhile.  I watch the once pristine glistening heavenly snow turn brown and dirty, patchy and slushy on its way to melt. I watch the buds of tress become leaves and flowers in the spring, the grass growing back the best it can in the face of drought remembering what it once was in the rainy year; the wind blowing the pollen of a juniper to it’s mate like a soul leaving a living being. I watch beautiful full forests become on fire and then turn into flood grounds and then become the landscapes the elk come to know and love as their greatest buffet. I see the bunny picked up by the raptor, the snake eat the mouse, the coyote on the side of the road and it’s mate howling in the loss. I see the fallen and decaying tree, becoming a home for burrowing animals and then on its way to become soil and new plants. The world is full of loss. The loss is an energy that creates something new, something equally or even more beautiful.  If we are able to do the important work we are meant to do with the experience of loss.

My losses created resistance, morphed into grief that spoke to an enormous love, initiated a creative process and revealed some beautiful gifts that would otherwise have been unseen.  So, if the groom leaves the bride at the altar, yes, no one knows who is the lucky one, but my bet is on both of them eventually grow lucky enough to live happily ever after.

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Be Bored

Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Be Bored

by Michelle Katz

I have been hearing a lot about boredom lately. Bored in relationship, afraid to retire because of potential boredom, bored when alone at a restaurant. I listen and watch as people avoid boredom. Interpreting boredom in relationship as not working, staying in a job that’s sucking the life out of them, scrolling on their phones in order to avoid any sense of this very important experience. In my observations and listening I cannot help but see the disconnection from self in the desire to avoid boredom.

I am truly a believer in the wisdom of boredom, it can be the birthplace of genius, if only we approached it as such.

We live in a world full of distractions. Daily, I recognize my shortcomings in this world. I cannot keep up with all the waves of communication I receive, plus the 24 hour news and social media cycle. For someone who values boredom...this is all too much. I am distracted to the point that I cannot find presence. My partner, on weekend days, use to wake up asking questions like “what are we going to do today? Where are we going? What should we do with the dogs? How do you want to get there?” I ask him these questions jokingly and preemptively when we sit down for Saturday morning coffee and we laugh. He has grown increasingly more comfortable with just being in the year and a half we have known each other. What makes us so uncomfortable with unstructured time to truly be?

The amazing thing to me is that there is actually so much that happens in what we would call “bored” space! I learn this again and again and especially during 10 day meditation retreats and wilderness quests, where boredom is central to the experience. In these times, yes there is an unbelievable amount of time spent considering the struggle of every moment, noticing all the discomforts, letting the mind wondering into worry until your face becomes a big pimple, picking dirt from your finger nails with the pine needle you find beside you. But beyond the discomfort, which comes in waves, there is also the incredible realization that so much is happening when you are doing nothing! There are all these sensations in the body we never pay attention to that are truly magnificent and when noticed, can be all encompassing, sparking curiosity, interest and presence. On quest, there are all these way in which you come awake to the world alive around you and in the realization of that you too become awake to your own aliveness, knowing life is beautiful and precious.

This morning I walk out on the land, my daily walk for years now, and especially with public lands currently closed, it has become a bit mundane to me. I go over the first hill and plopped down into the first arroyo, fighting the urge to take this time to call a friend or my mom (something to distract the boredom). I see the way the shadows and sunlight make up my path. Staying with the boredom makes me awake to the present. I see a piece of litter (more now than ever with the high winds we have had) I pick it up to see it’s an answer page of a college board prep-test book, algebra answers explained in detail. I look up to the sunlit and juniper shaded arroyo, algebra answers in hand. I smile at this truly unique moment. I cannot help but think about how this page landed here, and the potentially bored teen who studied from that book, perhaps ripping this page out due to frustration. I carried it with me.

I climb to the top of a hill to my sit spot, where I speak words that are habit, meaningful but somewhat boring in the recital, after years of the same blessings. My dogs await for me ready to move, but I stay in it. I remember my last week’s writings about the Uvalde shooting as I look at the dead and living trees surrounding me. I remind myself to never forget these continual shootings, to feel them fully, to not allow them to become commonplace and to not forget it in two weeks time because all that is in place to distract us to do so. I look at the small rocks around my sit spot that I collected overtime. I imagine the cut of one particular rock was once an almost perfect square one side having sharp edged and the other side with well rounded edges. I contemplate perfection and how it never lasts, something cuts it and we must then figure out how to cope. What we do when perfection leaves is what matters. I place it next to my other collected rocks to honor this truth. I walk on, impressed with how the path I created with my steps has truly craved into the landscape. A testament to walking the same path over and over without deviation. The repetition is now hard to break and could have unintended consequences on the landscape.

I wonder about not only how I greet the two rocks to my left or the two infant pinon I walk between, these landmarks like friends guiding my way, but also how bored they may be, how they meet my passing. Life is not simply about our experience of the world but how the world around us experiences us as well. Perhaps I am the highlight of their day. Perhaps the movement through the boredom of our days could provide the most pivotal moment for someone along our way? Boredom seems to evaporate when I can see the world in the lives of other beings.

I take my usual route, but backward, utterly and totally inspired by my 13 year old dog’s decision to walk down the path we usually take back to the house. She looks back at me with a smile and I surrender to this invitation for something slightly different. The same path taken in a different direction can feel like a different path. I love that simple truth. Perspective is up to us and can color everything.

We meander through the juniper and pinon, familiar yet different, and drop down to the second arroyo, wider and more wild. I remembered seeing a healthy and beautiful coyote here just last night, the dogs strangely unaware of her until much later, as if her appearance was only meant for me. It is hard to not initially feel fear at the sight of her, but then it settled into curiosity. I worried about my dogs for a moment and stayed in one spot holding their collars. The coyote looked straight at me, a clear message of the trickster while I hold my questions about boredom and the stories of friends and family avoiding it. She pranced happily by and then was out of sight between the bush. As if she said, “Bored? Ha! Just stay still, that is when things happen.”

I heed this good advice this morning, I sit on the arroyo floor, the dogs, ahead of me, turn around to see me sitting still and come to sit down beside me, one on each side. Staying still, (what some may perceive as boring), that’s when things happen! The birds have a whole conversation, I get to ease drop on their events, joys and alertness. When you think nothing is happening, just listen to birds. I notice the growth of the trees over the years I have walked here, so much growth, seemingly slow as if nothing is happening, trees are always changing, adapting, learning how to be their full selves! Windstorms, rainstorms, snowstorms all come to rattle them a bit but they seem most content in the quiet still moments. I see that what has fallen dead has become new homes and the place of new life, lifelessness is actually a whole world of aliveness. I hear a pregnant silence that I know is the sounds of the process of creation. I pet my dogs and their desire to move seems to subside, perfectly content and in the feeling of love. I cannot help but smile at the beauty of boredom.

Staying still in boring relationship can stimulate the creation a new element of relationship, a new spontaneity to listen to, a new slow and quiet of growth, a presence with love. Retiring to embrace boredom can reveal a life in which you finally live what you value, knowing what is most important to you. Not grabbing for your phone when alone at the restaurant, you may actually hear the laughter from across the room that actives your joy. Take a new preservative on your usual “boring” path and bring your loyal companions with you because love is needed no matter what. Boredom is our greatest ally, it asks us not to create distraction but rather to become wildly creative and utterly present. I don’t know about you, but to me, this is an amazing opportunity we seem to frequently miss.

The mentorship groups provide unstructured time to connect to self and creativity. The summer session starts July 11th. Explore time outside to explore the beauty of what is within.