This is The Thing

Woke up this morning to comments galore and congrats all around to my “taking the blog by the horns”.

A few days ago, while I was wrestling with going through with it, I prayed for some “Universal Applause” (this request revealed to me that maybe my stance of “fuck-em if they don’t like it” wasn’t as firmly planted in me as I had hoped it was). I’m glad that on the blog’s date of birth, it got a good reception, AND I still want to write/post without hoping for a particular response.

“Michael” queried in a comment to my first entry “Is being positive really the only positive way to be positive? (heh) Don’t we need the sorrow and the sadness? ”

I want to be very clear about this. When I say “optimistic”, I don’t mean emotionally suppressed — or “positive” in the upbeat-smile-through-the-tears sense. Sadness and sorrow could only be counter to optimism if I thought that they were “bad” experiences, which I don’t.

I think this is why optimism has taken a bad rap — for most people it seems to mean ignoring/suppressing what they judge as “negative” emotions and experiences, or focusing on the “good” stuff and being in denial about everything that falls outside their judgment of what’s “good”.

In truth, though it’s still sometimes hard to bring this into full awareness and take absolute responsibility for it, I have slowly come to realized that I actually do enjoy many of my so-called “negative emotions”. Nothing as satisfying, for instance, as a moment of righteous wrath, a good long wailing boo-hoo, a melancholy afternoon staring at the rain, or an hour or two on the pity-pot.

BUT (as PeeWee Herman once said “doesn’t it seem like everyone has a big but?”) I believe that when I forget that “I am the chooser choosing” these experiences, and pretend to myself that these emotions that are going through me are the full range of available experience (which is easy to do — they are powerful and convincing in the moment), I am on a slippery slope.

Carruch makes a distinction that I like very much: He says that “Bliss” and “Misery” are not states of emotion, but states of Consciousness. The proof of this is that you can feel Blissful while you are crying, and Miserable while you are laughing. While emotions flow in their watery way, and I enjoy them most when I allow them to flow freely, what I make of them in my consciousness and experience is up to me. I can greet them as a blessing or a curse, a bliss or a misery.

I have had, in my life, one particular form of deep melancholy — it fueled much of my poetry and song-writing in former years — and I find it almost unbearably sweet when I experience it.

Here’s a moment of it that I can recall with utter vividness:

It happened when I was about 21. I used to take long drives out into the country during those years (I was in college in Kansas), and there was a particular wood next to a cotton-wood lined creek that I was entranced by and attached to. I had parked my yellow mustang on the road and had rambled into the wood. It was a frigid January late-afternoon, and it had been snowing already when I went into the trees. Under there, the darkness that approached was deeper, and when I went back to my car to leave, the field directly across the road was blanketed with a perfect and undisturbed coat of deep snow.

I felt drawn out into that field. The evening was totally silent, and the snow had stopped. The trees were still sticks against the sky, no bird sang the evening into being. The light was the twilight of my dreams, and I found myself wondering if I was actually awake.

I walked through the deep snow, one step at a time, far into the field. When I stopped and slowly turned around, I saw my own footprints — the only sign of moving life in the landscape.
It was a Wyeth painting, a dream-image — I was utterly alone there, the only evidence of myself, this fragile track of dimples in the snow.

In that moment, a million paradoxes seemed to gel in my mind — the impermanence of life, the importance of the track we make, though it seem temporary, the marriage of the observer and what is observed, the potency of aloneness that strikes up the absolute knowledge that we are never alone. It was an achingly, sweetly sad moment, and I have never forgotten it.

That moment is one of the treasures of my life — though it involved a sadness so vast that I thought it would consume me as I experienced it. And this is something I knew at the time — that this moment was pivotal — critical — profound.

As Gandalf would say “And that is an encouraging thought.”

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