August 28 2023
The 3rd step of the 12 steps in AA is this:
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.
Daylight is diminishing. I have generally dreaded the night — a fear rises in me. And so from June 21 to December 21, as the days get shorter and shorter, my distaste for autumn and winter grows. The seasons themselves are fine, but being forced into that much darkness unsettles me.
This is especially true when I believe that and live into the idea that I am in control (even as the seasons are telling me that, obviously, I am not).
The 3rd step, when embodied, and even simply in theory, brings comfort. I’m not in control. I need so much help. Joshua, turn your will and your life, your thoughts and your actions, over to God as you understand God.
Then some recurring phrases from the Jewish Scriptures and the New Testament start churning in my body: Do not be afraid. Do not fear.
With turning my will and life over to the care of God, and with the embracing call that tells me I do not need to be afraid — maybe I can welcome the darkness.
I am dipping my toes into new waters this season:
I see you autumn. I welcome you. I feel you , sweet darkness. Come close.
••••••••••
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
(Sweet Darkness by David Whyte)
August 25 2023
Murphy, the one who looks like a Murph, snuck a toy car to school on his first day of kindergarten. He took it out at his desk, and his teacher (who is fantastic) saw it an asked him to put it away, which he did.
Ten minutes later she saw him playing with it again and told him to go into the hall and put it in his locker, which he did.
Thirty minutes later she saw him with the car again. Murph had asked to go to the bathroom, but instead of going to the bathroom he went to his locker and got the car.
I received a very nice email from his teacher about the whole thing. I told her, “Welcome to Murphy. Enjoy the ride!”
Murphy and I talked about it that evening. I told him that he needs to wait at least a week before taking anything else to school. (How can a boy’s pockets not be filled with collections, with wonders?) Then I told him I’ll give him something small to sneak in to school (maybe a little keychain or a fridge magnet). His task will be to sneak it in, never take it out of his pocket, and return it to me that night. Then we’ll pick another item for the next day.
Murph gave me a huge hug.
My boys will be domesticated during their childhoods, which is inevitable and neither good nor bad, but who will teach and guide them to be wild in a way that is honoring, kind, curious, and mischievous? I will, and others I trust will as well.
•••••••••••
Has Anyone Seen the Boy by Rumi
Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here? Round-faced troublemaker, quick to find a joke, slow to be serious. Red shirt, perfect coordination, sly, strong muscles, with things always in his pocket. Reed flute, ivory pick, polished and ready for his talent. You know that one.
Have you heard stories about him? Pharoah and the whole Egyptian world collapsed for such a Joseph. I would gladly spend years getting word of him, even third- or fourth-hand.
August 21 2023
Keep coming back.
That is a sort of mantra for AA folks like myself. In my circles we say it at most meetings, sometimes one person to another, sometimes collectively.
For the newcomer into the program, at its most basic, it’s a call to continue going to meetings. Keep showing up. Just get into the rooms. Get yourself around other sober folks, around support, around stories. When you don’t know what to do, just get to a meeting; it’s part of how it works.
You work the program and the program works you, and the only way for that work to happen is to get your tush in a chair and show up, again and again and again. If you do that, if you keep coming back, your chance for sobriety and a depth of living increases dramatically.
Don’t show up, stop coming back, and it becomes much more difficult.
•••••••••••
“Keep coming back” has expanded in meaning for me. It’s a call to go deeper and to remain there.
When I am at my end with the boys, keep coming back Joshua. Turn your face and your body towards them. Return, return, return.
Joshua, return to God, over and over. Return to the great weaver. Every movement away from God is an opportunity to return. Every shift away from connection is a chance to reunite.
Joshua, keep coming back to salads. You need that good earth in your body. Walk away from Oreos.
Keep coming back to silence, to stillness. Be still and know. Make yourself available. Return to listening. Creativity is often mystically birthed from the womb of silence.
Keep coming back to the earth. Get your bare feet in the soil. Smell the evergreen needles, taste the honey, feel the bark of the black locust.
And Joshua — keep coming back to yourself. Return to the goodness that is in you and has been in you your entire life. Remain in your value, which does not come from your job or bank account or furniture or status. Keep coming back to you, because God is in you and you are in God. Why go anywhere else?
August 14 2023
Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me.
What else is there? What else ever needs to be said. If I am free, then I can say those words over and over, endlessly.
Recently I was a bad father, and both Waits and Murphy called me out on it.
“You’re right, boys. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.”
They hug me. “It’s ok dad. But don’t do that anymore.”
There’s nothing to hide. Nothing to run from. They are the father, and I am the prodigal son, on the ground at their feet. They need to see me in that place and I equally need to be there. How can I say I love you and expect them to believe it if I am unwilling to say I’m sorry with the same intention?
Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me. Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you, forgive me.
August 10 2023
I love when the boys withhold stories from me, when they have secrets, when they keep things as sacred. Those stories are theirs. I knock on the door. The handle turns from the inside, they crack it open, and I peek in. Can I see more? and they decide whether or not to let me in.
Sometimes they swing the door wide open. Sometimes they slam it shut. Maybe I’ll knock again, maybe I’ll scratch at the door like a puppy.
I love you, I love you, I love you. Let me in, let me in, let me in. Tell me everything, everything, everything.
I stick my fingers under the bottom clearance, that gap between the door and the floor. Wiggle the fingers, slide them along the hardwood. I’m here, ready for you.
August 1 2023
My boys will either stay with me, leave me, or reject me. They will do all three at various times, sometimes simultaneously, but ultimately they will choose one of those paths. I can’t speak to the feminine, and the ways I think about a boy staying with/leaving/rejecting his mother are difficult to articulate (and difficult for me to consciously enact) as my mom died when I was a boy. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I started to consider the fact that I still walk those paths as an adult even though she was absent after I was 12 years old.
Oooof that’s something real and heavy right there. Started off sharp didn’t we. Ok let’s take a quick break with a dad joke.
How do you know a joke is a dad joke?
It’s apparent.
Boom. I’m 40.
So my boys have these paths: stay, leave, reject. I have the same for my father. Sometimes I am aware of which path I’m walking, sometimes I am not, especially when I am on the path of staying and clinging. On that path I am 12 again. You know how when you go back to your hometown to visit your parents, and right when you walk through the front door you’re in an instant emotionally a child again? And you don’t realize it until after you’ve left their house driving back towards yours? Or maybe 10 years later?
I know the path I want my boys to plow: they will need to leave me. Not yet, though. Right now they are building up their healthy egos, strengthening their foundations. But, even at 8 years old, I can see it starting to happen with my oldest boy.
We went to the trampoline park, one of those warehouses that is nearly wall-to-wall trampolines and dad injuries, dads like me who think, “I could do a flip when I was 15. Surely I can at 40.” We’re all so dumb.
We’ve gone to these trampoline parks since they were old enough to jump. It’s fun. The boys are getting more adventurous with their jumps and I move in the opposite direction, which means I jump up and down in a stiff motion, sometimes daring to bounce on my butt then back up to my feet. That’s all I’ve got anymore. I can’t afford to miss work because I broke my arm showing off to, let’s face it, other parents.
I noticed on the most recent trip to the trampoline park that Waits, who is 8, went off by himself much more than usual, and he didn’t shout “Dad! Watch this!” nearly as much as I wanted him to. Murphy, who is 5, stayed close to me in general, always checking over his shoulder to see where I was and to see if I was watching his moves.
Waits has entered into a new stage of leaving. He needs me less. It broke my heart and also I am thrilled for him.
I don’t yet know what leaving will look like for them as teenagers or adults, but I do know that part of my father work is to prepare them to leave with the best foundation possible, to develop their wildness while also being their to hold them, make their food, buy their clothes, and constantly say no you can’t have your own phone you dumbdumb child.
Will they reject me? Absolutely, and it will hurt. Will they move close to me and try to stay in the safety of their childhood container? Again, yes. But my hope is that, when it’s time, they will leave well, with all of the blessing I have to give, to become their own men. They can develop only so much under my eye — and so much development will happen under the eyes of others and in the embrace of the earth.
Just not yet. Not yet boys. I’ve still got more time with you and I will soak up every second I can.
Except when they’re assholes. That’s when they can go to their mother’s.
July 31 2023
I sing because I am a man with a song, and I do not fully trust in a man who has no song. I dance to help the sun rise in the morning — that’s a good grandiosity. I weep because I live with the full and vast spectrum of desire, and I weep in front of my boys and with my boys so that they will not forfeit their ability and quickness to weep that they were born with. I will not stand by with cowardice as the world around them tells them to stop weeping. It’s not the earth that says that, but rather it’s the fear of men. I sit in silence so that I am practiced in listening, in waiting, in being slow to everything that requires slowness. I sit in silence in the morning before my boys awake so that when my anger is stirred by them I do not unleash on them what is not theirs to bear. I fill our home with the incense of the earth so that our senses are filled with florals and cedar and tobacco and not drywall and paint and plastic. I admit that I am powerless and I open my hands to let go, to do my best to welcome everything. I show my boys the scars on my body and the scars on my heart, telling them the stories so that they know from birth that there is no success and there is no failure — there is only being and loving and compassion.
May I believe what I say and may my boys believe what they see.
July 30 2023
I know so very little, and I believe from my own experience and from observing the experience of others that peace is not related to career or financial success. I don’t always feel that that’s true, but I believe it somewhere that exists in the roots below feelings.
When I feel disrupted, unhappy, or am treading the waters of a sense of my own failure and incompetency, then my feelings say that some amount of success will be a balm to the disruption. And maybe it would be a balm, like blowing cold air on a burn. Cold air does nothing to address the repeated action of putting my hand in the fire.
I met a guy who had achieved the sort of career success that seems so far from my reach. I have thought if I reached that place then I’d be set.
But my rooted beliefs know that peace does not live there, and I saw it in that man as well. When talking to him he had an air that I recognized in myself at times, that he was unappreciated and undervalued.
I know that feeling. I feel that when my beliefs are thin, exposed, easily wounded. Of course they are, because that’s when I think my value and appreciation comes from outside of myself and away from, as we say in AA, our higher power.
That’s the place I’m writing from today. The roots of feelings are exposed.
Go back to the depths of being, Joshua. You know that rich soil.
July 18 2023
Suffering and wonder — these two paths are what have invoked almost all (possibly all) of the change in my flickering 40 years. Pain and love. Trial and awe.
Neither are necessarily easy, maybe because both require acceptance and letting go.
Loving and being loved are difficult in their incompleteness. I love you, I want to love, and I don’t know how. I’m tapping into this love from a higher power, transferring it from my body to yours, and I’m limited. I’m scared and I’m scarred and my self-protection flares up without my knowing. Let go, little boy! Open your body and heart and soul and love what you can love and let it keep expanding. But what about if and when I get hurt? Uh huh. Yes. Risk is absolutely necessary, and can you trust that you’ll be held?
Suffering, same story. It goes against my nature to sit in the ashes, to allow the pain, to resist trying to fix it because you can’t fix it — we are not in control.
Open your hands, little boy, little girl. Unclench your fists and let the scars in your palms heal from where your fingernails dug in deep. Listen to suffering. Listen to love. Go slowly, walk humbly, be gracious.
July 10 2023
Made a loft for the boy’s room. Next I’ll had some climbing/hanging elements. Those boys will climb any and everything, so I figure I might as well provide them things to climb on.
