Looking With Persephone

A couple of weeks ago, I was taking an evening walk when I noticed how pleasantly cool it was. This was in the midst of a heat wave, which made exercise in the middle of the day unwise at worst and unpleasant at best. It was one of those evenings that gives you a foretaste of fall. A true summer evening, even as it cools down, retains a lazy residue of the warmth and humidity of the day. Those evenings that signal change have a completely different character, even a slight urgency. Hurry up! Time to get the harvest in and the barns filled! You'll be carving pumpkins before you know it!

At the time, I thought, "How nice this feels." Even as inveterate a fan of summer as I am can't help but be a little refreshed by the cooling and hint of change in the air that generally comes around Labor Day. This year, having been baked to a crunch during an unusually searing summer (on the Fourth of July, it seemed the height of foolishness to step outside the door without a sizable water bottle), even I say the cooling is welcome.

There have been times in the past when I didn't want summer to end, but my feelings are conflicted this year. September and October are usually very pleasant here, and the turning of the leaves can be spectacular. You're always aware, though, of November, that moody month with a split personality, out there waiting in the wings. In the best years, it's a continuation of October's glorious red and gold riot, Keats's "close-bosom friend of the maturing sun"; it may even be an Indian summer extravaganza. In the worst of times (which seems to be most of the time), it ushers in an unending series of dark, damp, and gloomy days that last, off and on, until the latter part of March.

Still, there is a certain buzz about the early and middle days of autumn. I have been reading essays lately about the association of fall with new beginnings. A Jungian writer points out that this is when school begins, older kids go off to college, and adults return to their jobs with (we hope) renewed vigor and enthusiasm for new projects that couldn't get off the ground while people were out on vacation. There is a cozy quality about fall and all of that soup-making, squash-baking, leaf-raking hearth and home activity touted by homemaker magazines and advertising campaigns for cardigans and corduroy. It's beguiling, in a way; you can still be active outside, but the inside of your home is more welcoming than it was in July, and you may actually want to be in your kitchen, making chili, pigs-in-blankets, and apple cake.

I think this emphasis on change and new beginnings is real but ironic. In nature, spring is the time of the new. Spring is when Persephone, forced underground in the autumn to spend the six dark months with Hades, comes joyously back to the earth accompanied by new flowerings, the greening of fields and trees, and the warming sun. For many of us, however, although spring is a very welcome sight, it does, in fact, signal an ending -- of the spring semester at school, of the season of serious work and deadlines, of the calendar of normal activities soon to be interrupted by summer vacations. When I was an undergraduate, I sometimes felt at a loss in the spring, viewing summer as an upheaval that required new plans to be made.

I'm different now, having reverted to my childhood mold. I always say that no matter how hot it is, I'll take a summer day over a winter one any time. Exhilarating winter days of sunshine on clean, sparkling snow are an ideal but rarely seen, but a summer day is always a summer day. Spring and fall are more ambiguous, each signaling change in its own way and each (unless we work on the land) at odds with some of our human purposes. Maybe "April is the cruelest month," if your circumstances are unlucky, as mine have sometimes been. But, all other things being equal, could it ever top the last week of November? Or the first week of January?

Even as I welcome the release from the heat, I find myself looking back over my shoulder with regret, like Persephone, at the bright skies, warm nights of fireflies and crickets, and full-leafed trees of summer now receding. Orion is rising, but Persephone is fading. Three months from now, I'll be dreaming of July. Have I ever dreamed of December?

Reading With Others

This summer, I tried something new with reading. I usually pick out books by either browsing or selecting titles I've heard about that sound intriguing. This year, I came across NPR's "Book Lists," which provide recommendations in various categories like "Books for Introverts," "Travel Memoirs," and "Intelligent Romance." I figured my tastes were probably a lot like those of most NPR listeners, so I looked over their suggestions and decided to take some of them on. I was also assisted by a recommended reading list I saw in Real Simple (a short list of five, all of which I ended up reading eventually).

Call it a book lover's experiment. How does picking out books on my own, based on my own predelictions and idiosyncratic interests, stack up with relying on the suggestions of intelligent tastemakers? (OK, I am a librarian, but I don't think that's relevant -- I never worked in a public library or in reader's advisory.) I was curious to see how closely my tastes coincide with those of other "discriminating" fiction lovers (I stuck with novels) and whether this might give me a short cut to that most elusive and highly desirable thing, a joyous banquet of summer reading.

I was excited to encounter these lists because, to tell you the truth, finding the kind of books I enjoy isn't that easy. It's wonderful to come across serendipitous finds, but a truly momentous book doesn't come along every day (or even every month). I guess it's a lot like relationships, where the really big finds are few and far between and therefore precious. I figured taking suggestions from others would get me out of my rut and expose me to writing I wouldn't find on my own, sort of like a Match.com for bibliophiles. It was worth a try (which is what I said when I tried out the real Match.com).

In June I started checking the library for the Real Simple titles, which are what I started with, and I finally realized that when you're interested in the same books everyone else is reading, you have to reserve them if you want to get your hands on them before Christmas. Then it wasn't until the end of June that any of my reserved titles became available. The first was The Innocents, a contemporary version of The Age of Innocence set among a close-knit, well-to-do Jewish community in Hampstead, in the north of London.

The mythologist in me always likes seeing an old story appear in a new guise, so I enjoyed the way the author made the story her own and found it to be, in true postmodern fashion, more nuanced and ambiguous than its predecessor. Who was sympathetic and who wasn't? Hard to say. Next, I read Seating Arrangements, the story of a Cape Cod wedding, whose wealthy characters I deemed greatly annoying throughout most of the book. My main take-away was genuine surprise at the end when these characters, whom I had found unlikeable, suddenly became understandable, each in his or her own way, in the last pages.

Next, I dipped into The Spoiler, a sharply written send-up of publishing, newspapers, and the collision of entertainment and journalism. I liked it, despite the dark and ironic ending, and appreciated its evenhandedness and crisp style. The Uninvited Guests, which I had been especially anticipating, turned out to be an almost indescribable blend of an English comedy of manners, Dawn of the Dead, and a bit of Jean Paul Sartre. It had one of my favorite characters of the summer in Smudge, the family's enterprising youngest daughter (and the only child in the story). Next, I tried to read Overseas, an unabashed romance/time travel combo, but I somehow couldn't make headway with it, in spite of the fact that I kept picturing Hugh Jackman as the male lead. (This novel was highly popular and NPR recommended, but I guess I need my romance more subtle, not to mention that time travel is a tricky thing in my book.)

I also delved into a couple of NPR's picks from last summer, both of which had Shakespearean themes, which I seem to be slightly obsessed with lately. The Great Night, a re-write of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park (near Haight-Ashbury) seemed like a sure thing. Alas, it was full of broken characters and a downright scary troupe of fairies that left me sad, despite a very imaginative handling of the magical realm. The Tragedy of Arthur, which involved twins, their relationship with a scoundrel of a father, and the discovery of a purported new Shakespearean play, was like a bookend to Great Night, with its tale of betrayal, tragic flaws, and a curious amalgam of true and false. I couldn't bring myself to read the play, which appears at the end, all the way through.

By August, I had covered The Girl Giant (which starts out sad but gets better. Moral: don't put off those doctor visits) and The Red House. I had read Mark Haddon before, but to me The Red House is his most accomplished work, poetic, insightful, and engrossing. It reminded me of Seating Arrangements with its sly way of slowly revealing all its characters as multidimensional, upsetting any judgments you may have made along the way. It also had an unforgettable and truly disturbing ghost story intertwined with the family drama. I moved on to The Age of Miracles, which was accomplished and original but depressing. I wanted to say to the author, hey, couldn't you at least have left Julia and Seth alone to spin out their story? It's the end of the world, for crying out loud, do you have to kill off the romance, too?

To finish my experiment, I read Mission to Paris, the tale of an actor caught up in the moral quicksands of pre-World War II Europe, which I found fascinating. I liked the main character's intelligence and principles, but I found the sex scenes, which seemed heavy on adolescent male fantasy, jarring. The last book on my list was Gone Girl, an addicting, unpredictable mystery combining black humor, a Manhattan couple, the recession, and a bucolic Midwestern locale to unforgettable effect. The end was a bitter pill but hardly surprising considering the psychotic nature of the couple's relationship. (Note to self: Is this what marriage is really like? Must find out before doing it.)

So that was it, my tour of what other people are reading. What was the outcome of my experiment? I have to say, honestly, that while these books provided moments of amusement (and at times, incandescent writing), I'm not sure I did any better with this list than I would have on my own. A good book (like beauty) really is in the eye of the beholder. My taste, offbeat and unique as it sometimes is, is still, I think, my best compass when it comes to the wild and woolly terrain of reading. (I came to the same conclusion about Match.com, it may not surprise you to know. I guess I really do have to figure things out on my own.)

To celebrate the end of my experiment, I went back to an old favorite of mine, with almost the feeling of someone who's been eating all her vegetables only to break down and get what she really wants, a hot fudge sundae. It's been over a decade since I came across Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars, and I've read it two or three times since then. I never heard of anyone else who's read it. I don't know if it was ever on anyone's Top Picks or bestseller lists. I'm not sure if the library even has it . . . and that arcane quality is probably part of the appeal.

I finished it a couple of nights ago, with some sadness. It will be a while before I can re-read it (you have to pace these things). But I've already started another book, one which I found by browsing in a bookstore some months back, and so far I'm really enjoying it.

To each her own.

A Visit to Earthsea

I spent the last few days re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy. I first read A Wizard of Earthsea years ago for an undergraduate Psychology and Literature class and was really taken with not only the story but the prose. Ms. LeGuin's style in these books is low-key but elegant. Her hero, Ged, is homespun and unprepossessing; in the beginning, he's not even that likeable, having rather a large chip on his shoulder and a need to constantly prove himself. Of course, as they say, pride goeth before a fall, and Ged's flaw leads him to the edge of darkness, where he struggles to undo the damage he has done and mend the dangerous hole he has created in the fabric of the world.

How to describe the charm of LeGuin's EarthSea? It's no country you recognize, although her world of islands, surrounded by an ocean whose outer boundaries are unknown, is a little reminiscent of Europe before Columbus. It's a world beyond time, with villages, castles, goatherds, wizards, sailing ships, and dragons (and these dragons speak, but you have to know the language). Each island is a different land, with its own customs and peculiarities. Osskil, in the North, is cold and strangely inhospitable; Roke, in the Inmost Sea, is famous for its wizards; Havnor is known for its beautiful city of white towers. Karego-At, in the East, is the home of a Viking-like people who raid and plunder; Wathort, in the South, is the island of Hort town, a place of ill repute. The little-known Western lands, on the very edge of imagination, are remote and vague; dragons live there.

EarthSea is a world in miniature, which may explain part of its inimitable appeal. It's almost like a child's imaginary world, with everything scaled down to an almost cozy dimension. Only the ocean suggests great distances. The countries are pint-sized but together constitute a prosperous, various world full of people and animals we recognize, though dusted with a peculiar magic, and all the usual virtues and vices. There is also a matter-of-fact darkness running through the stories, very like the age-old darkness we recognize from fairy tales and folk tales.

Ged is a marvelous anti-hero hero. He is not handsome and not even tall. As a boy, he's brash and foolish, if clever; as a man, he is taciturn and scarred, yet inspires great love. In the midst of LeGuin's childlike world, he is complex and very adult, wild and ungovernable as a boy and silent and self-contained when grown. He grows from an impetuous child with a gift he does not understand but is impatient to use to a thoughtful man who uses his considerable power only rarely. He comes to understand that a wizard's powers, glamorous and alluring to an outsider, appear very different to one who has attained them and understands the true costs of things.

When I first read A Wizard of Earthsea, it was in the context of a discussion of Jung and the shadow. As an apprentice wizard, Ged unleashes, through an unauthorized use of a dangerous spell, a dark creature, who emerges from a rent in the fabric of things. Ged spends most of the book in atonement for his error, which takes the form of tracking down this darkness and putting it back where it belongs. One of the most memorable scenes has Ged tracking the creature across the sea in his little boat, as it walks, formless but terrible, on the waves. As he follows it further and further south, rumor reaches him of its passing, and he begins to realize for the first time, as people shun him, how much this shadow actually resembles him.

What Ged has created has emerged from his own darkness, the shadow of his own nature. Coming to terms with this makes him whole again.

A Wizard of Earthsea, the matchless beginning, is my favorite book in the trilogy; the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, is dark and almost painful to read. I think this is because the anti-hero heroine of that tale, while outwardly a powerful priestess, is in reality the victim of a cruel deception. The last book, The Farthest Shore, seems much longer than it is, somehow enfolding a feeling of great time and distance into a modest number of pages, bringing to a conclusion the theme of the balancing of light and dark introduced in the first novel.

The Earthsea trilogy encompasses many mythic themes in its simple, unassuming tales. Reading the stories at this juncture, I found myself occasionally catching a glimpse of a familiar landscape, though remote in place and time from LeGuin's Earthsea. The school of wizardry on Roke, of course, bears a slender resemblance to Harry Potter's Hogwarts. As Tenar and Ged groped their way through the fearsome underground passage beneath Atuan's tombstones, I was suddenly with Ariadne and Theseus, looking over my shoulder for the Minotaur. As Ged and Arren sought the source of the opening that was siphoning light and magic out of the world, I thought of Mordor; when they stepped through the faint doorway into the bleak, monotonous land of death, I thought of Childe Roland. When Ged, worn and exhausted, asked Kalessin to carry him to Gont, at which point he disappeared into the world of legend, I thought of King Arthur, spirited away and healed on the Isle of Apples.

LeGuin's books echo the themes of other timeless myths while creating a memorable and original world of their own, which is worth revisiting from time to time. I think it must be marvelous to be the creator of such a wonderful work of fantasy, but LeGuin would no doubt tell me that this kind of wizardry has both costs and benefits. Most things do.

A Forest, Near Athens

Last night I went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream in the arboretum. It's my favorite of the Shakespearean comedies and, as I've written before, once helped me climb out from under a mountain of research that was crushing me. For, behold: the forest outside Athens is a maze, Theseus is in the play, and the lighthearted entanglements of the lovers fit perfectly into my Chapter 4. It brought a badly needed element of fun and fresh air to my dissertation, like the throwing open of a window to a party on the lawn.

Unfortunately, for the people putting on the play, rain showers moved into town this week and look to be staying for a while. After examining the forecast, I decided it was less likely to rain last night than it would be on any other night of the run. So I packed up refreshments, a blanket, binoculars, and my folding chair and headed over on foot through the damp, yellow grass.

The sun dipped below a solid bank of gray on its way down, flaring out suddenly behind me as I crossed the field, soon turning the entire Western sky a flaming orange. In the opening scenes of the play, the dramatic sunset was a counterpoint to the subdued early action, in which Theseus and Hippolyta discuss their impending wedding, Egeus importunes the king to force his daughter to marry the wrong boy, and the lovers make their secret plan. The characters were framed at certain times by the woods behind them, so that even though we were on an open hillside, the presence of an actual forest was very palpable.

I've got to hand it to these people. The costumes, the set, and the staging let the magic of the play shine through. It can be difficult to bring MSND off without veering into slapstick and making it all seem silly instead of funny. I mean, you have fairies flitting around, quarreling, rubbing magic flowers on people's eyes, and turning a man into an ass. It's barely there, like a dewy cobweb, and needs a light touch to keep the whole thing afloat.

The cast had the outdoor setting, fading to black once the sun disappeared, on its side, the dark trees looming in the near distance, insects chirping, and the mild summer air effortlessly conjuring up a sense of place. We were in a midsummer night, those dark trees could be the forest outside Athens, and those insects flying high near the lights, radiance reflecting off their tiny wings, could be little sprites.

Onstage, the floating costumes, fairyland colors, and actors disappearing and reappearing through mysterious openings--sometimes even appearing from the direction of the audience--seemed to be who they told us they were--confused lovers, befuddled aspiring thespians, kings and queens, and mischievous fairies. Titania's bed, cushioned and bedecked just as a fairy queen's bed should be, floated out and disappeared at judicious moments, evoking the dreamlike feeling of a magical summer night.

Naturally, one must be ready to suspend disbelief in these circumstances. If the cast and crew are magicians casting a spell, the audience participates in the enchantment by bringing imagination to bear. For that reason, the play is different for everyone present. For me, there seemed to be something solemn peeking out from behind the trees in the forest near Athens, something unspoken running through and behind the words of the actors, something to do with the mysterious life force represented by the fairies, representatives of nature, who fix things for the lovers in spite of the king and Hermia's father. The play was woven of both light and dark in a way it hadn't ever seemed to be before.

I was sorry when it was over, and I took my time walking home, sidetracking and pausing within a grove of trees, gazing up at the cloudy sky, not wanting to break the spell. Some of it clung to me even as I was brushing my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror a little later. I was reluctant to turn on too many lights, and the shadows in the corners, instead of appearing merely dark, seemed filled with possibilities. Maybe there was some impudent Puck hanging around, ready to sour the milk or knock over a book once I was sleeping. I didn't mind too much. Perhaps another fairy would mop the kitchen floor for me, to even things out. Sometimes the material world needs a little moonshine to keep things lively (often, in fact).

Then, in a twinkling, it was midnight, the witching hour, and time to go to bed.

The Mythic Road

I was driving down a particular country road the other day, a drive I hadn't made in years. It was a hot, lazy June afternoon, just another summer day in Kentucky. I've always liked that road, which is scenic and beautiful no matter what the season is.

I attended an art exhibit at a tiny museum on this road years ago in the dark time of the year, the result of a collaboration between an artist and a poet whose imaginations ran to fauns, fairies, and living blackbirds baked into pies. It was exactly the sort of thing I liked, and I remember how magical the frosted hills and fields seemed when I drove home afterwards, as if someone had sprinkled pixie dust along with snow all over the landscape.

I remember another occasion when I took a weekend drive, this time on a benign April day of blue skies, out on that same road. As my car rose and fell with the roller-coast hills, and the miles of plank fences, grazing horses, and bright spring greenery rolled by my windows, I remember catching my breath, thinking, "I live here, and I still feel like I'm in postcard, not a real place."

Then there was the time I was returning from the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort, which is always held in November. It was twilight on a gloomy autumn day, and I was driving down a section in Woodford County where the trees on either side form an arched tunnel, so that you might almost imagine yourself in the nave of a very long Gothic cathedral. On this isolated stretch, with fields rolling out in all directions, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a large deer (or were there two?), leaping away from the low stone wall at the side of the road. That was long before I heard Rumi's poem, "Unfold Your Own Myth," with the line about chasing a deer and ending up "everywhere," but even so, I recognized some magic in this encounter.

I was remembering all this while driving the other day, drinking in the beauty of the countryside and tooling along modestly, when--lo! From the left side of the road, a blackbird flew into my line of sight. Flying low and deliberately, he swept across the road in front of my car, and I heard a thump. Looking back, I couldn't see anything, and I had visions of myself motoring down the road with a bloody bird on the front of my car. When I got to a place where I could safely stop (which happened to be the parking lot of the museum), I got out apprehensively, fearing a gory scene. To my surprise (and relief), there was nothing.

I got back in the car, somewhat mystified. Had I just winged the bird? It made an awfully loud thump for just a graze. And what caused the bird to do that, anyway? It's not as if he couldn't have flown above the car, or behind it. It reminded me of the only other time I recall hitting a bird, when one flew into my windshield as I was driving to Florida for a job interview. It had seemed like a bad omen and may actually have been just that (I didn't take the job, and I believe it was a good thing that I didn't). This latest bird, though, seemed to have melted into thin air, like one of the blackbirds from the pie, winging his escape from a floury end and not caring how many Toyotas he dinged in the process.

A few miles down the road, I had somewhat regained my composure and was musing over how much history I actually had with this road, when to my right, I noticed a sign for a narrow lane, "Faywood Road." My first thought was, "Of course. There are definitely fays in these woods, and somebody knows it besides me."

Sometime later, I realized that the name probably referred to the location of the road, running through two counties, but I like my explanation better. I can just imagine them, creeping out quietly under the full moon, once the farm dogs have all settled down for the night. They have their banquets and fairy rings under the trees in summer, and they dance and sprinkle frost under starlight in winter. Blackbirds fly in and out of their intricate dances, and they are occasionally accompanied by fauns.

One particularly sore and irritated blackbird will probably be sitting out the dance tonight, telling anyone who will listen, "If it's not one thing, it's another."

When the Fat Lady Sings

This is not at all the way I imagined I'd feel after defending my dissertation. In this strange new world, I'm feeling a lot of things I never imagined feeling. I just pictured a little more joy and a lot less weariness.

I remember the first time I understood the meaning of the expression "bone tired." I was traveling with friends, and we had spent a day walking around Amsterdam after three days in London (and a channel crossing) with little or no sleep. Jet-lagged, irritable, and looking a bit worse for the wear, we climbed endless flights of stairs in our very vertical hotel (Dante's Purgatorio had nothing on that place). We had to get up early the next morning to catch a train to Berlin, so prospects for R & R were not looking good. I remember falling into the huge bed, thinking, "So, this is bone tired."

If I had known I could ever feel more tired, I think I would have just stayed in that bed, which would have been a shame because I would have missed Salzburg, Italy, the Venus de Milo, and several pounds of really good European chocolate.

Who knew a dissertation could take so much out of you?

I started my degree program with excitement, anxiety, and uncertainty, but especially I remember the excitement. I knew I was doing something big and kind of daring, and I recognized the same feeling in most of the faces around me those first days at school. We heard the poem by Rumi, "Unfold Your Own Myth," which pretty much told the whole story, better than we could have imagined. We had all jumped into the rabbit hole, and there was no telling what we'd see or where we'd go on the way to our degrees. There was a part of me that, out of caution, held back a little, whispering, "Just take it a quarter at a time. This is putting you into debt, so be sure it's what you want." But two sessions into the first quarter, and I knew I'd be staying.

Our campus is a beautiful place, with gorgeous gardens and trees, glorious views of the mountains, and even a glimpse of the ocean if you know where to look. I always thought of it as kind of a Garden of Eden, a magical place I had finally managed to find after many hard years of searching. Yet, as I was telling a friend last night, as mythologists we are also aware that the snake was a part of the story. Now, there are many ways to look at the snake from a Jungian point of view, and in some interpretations this creature is a necessary means to achieving greater consciousness, a consciousness that could never be attained in a state of blissful unawareness. It's always been hard for me to accept the idea of treachery in the midst of so much beauty, but after all, ignorance is not bliss. If you were asleep, no matter how beautiful the dream, wouldn't you rather be awake? I would.

So there were many bumps along the way, and some disappointments. Still, it was the work itself that was so sustaining, and that never changed. All of the sacrifices made to go the distance were absolutely worth it, and I would do it all again (perhaps a bit less sweetly and with a lot more attitude). Those hours in the classroom and the talks with friends over meals, around campus, and during walks on the beach were golden. Even now, all of those memories are lit with a beautiful light in my mind, a light that will never grow dim.

I enjoyed the classes so much that I didn't think a lot about the dissertation until our final year. Although my topic had already chosen me, I think, I was not aware of that, and the process of closing in on it was painful. Although I had confidence in my ability as a writer, I had never written a long academic piece, and the idea was increasingly daunting as it became more real. Even though the dissertation formulation process was painful, I'm glad now that it happened the way it did because I was forced to really think through what I wanted to say. For a writer who writes intuitively and not from a plan, this was a challenge, but by the time I had finished my concept paper, I knew I had something solid to work with. Whether I could make it fly the way I wanted it to was a different matter.

Writing the dissertation was a lonely process. I knew it would be, but I didn't know just how lonely lonely could be. There were times when I felt like the last person standing on earth, wondering where everyone else had gotten to. My long-standing interest in mazes and labyrinths took on a much more sober air when I actually entered the labyrinth of writing about them. It's suddenly not a lark once you're in one for real, wondering, "How do I find my way out?" "When will I find my way out?" "WILL I find my way out?" And after a certain point, "When I DO find my way out, what will be waiting for me on the outside?"

So now, having struggled through and emerged, not always in perfect form, but determined, like Childe Roland, to the last paragraph -- here I am. I've done it the best way I know how, I've learned a lot about myself, and I'm hoping for a bestseller when I turn this sucker into a book. Maybe one of these days, I'll recover some of the carefree feeling I used to have and shake off the tiredness. I always wanted to be a full-time writer on my own terms, so maybe my dream will be realized now that I've finished my degree.

So, would I recommend that YOU get a Ph.D.? Well . . . that's a question only you can answer.

The Doors of Perception

I posted on Facebook the other day that I was going to try to see the divine in everyone I met. It sounded like a great idea, but after half a day I realized I was going to have to leave the apartment to do it (ha, ha!). To avoid getting blasted by the divine light that was sure to result, I decided to take it slow. I went to Whole Foods and Joseph-Beth Bookstore last night, and it was fairly late, so there weren't many people around. One of the employees at Whole Feeds greeted me with a friendly smile -- it wasn't at all hard to see a light shining through her. I was off to a good start.


But looking back now, I realize that even with my goal in mind, I was avoiding looking at people around me. I am often hesitant to look too closely at other people, whether from shyness or fear of appearing rude or whatever it might be. Actually, I'm now wondering if the habit of not really looking at others is part of what makes us dehumanize them. It's easy to go from avoiding their eyes to seeing them as objects in your way to the checkout counter to cutting them off in traffic. And it's no difficulty at all to move from that to projecting all of your shadow onto them. Everything you refuse to own in yourself gets shifted onto other people, and the less they seem to be like you the easier it is to do.


Did someone tell everyone about what I'm doing? All I know is that I received a radiant smile from a young man, a stranger, in the parking lot a little while ago. When I got to Starbucks and decided to challenge myself by actually looking around to see who was here, I immediately caught someone's eye and received another smile. We all know how powerful a smile can be, especially on a dark winter day. I've received at least three bonus ones in the last 24 hours, and I really think it was my unspoken intention to be more open that communicated itself to other people. Change your mind and change your life.


I was at a conference at school in the fall, and a young artist was there with an exhibit she called "Mirror Box." It consisted of climbing inside a machine that, with the aid of light and mirrors, allowed you to see your face and another person's superimposed. It sounds so simple, but consider: you climb inside and find yourself face to face with someone completely unlike you and then, by the magic of art, see what emerges from putting the two of you together. I tried it with two strangers, the second of whom was a young man with very dark skin and hair, about as unlike me with my Irish paleness as could be (his family was from Iran). Yet when I looked at the combination of our faces, there was nothing strange about the result. We looked like an ordinary person, not even particularly exotic.


I think we have been sold a bill of goods that encourages us to either ignore the suffering of others or to blame them for everything that's wrong, whether it's the Democrats demonizing the Republicans, Christians doing the same to Muslims, whites and blacks at each other's throats, or the rich against the poor. (My guess is that many of the 1 percent are just as upset at the state of the world as the rest of us.)


For all the thought and energy that goes into policy discussions on how to solve problems like famine, poverty, environmental degradation, and lack of economic opportunity, I'm starting to think the answers might be more basic than they seem. Maybe we just need to, as they say in Jungian terms, take back our projections. I think that is an eye-opener far more mind-blowing than any psychedelic experience could ever be.


If you ask me God left the world unfinished on purpose. We're supposed to do the rest. We are the co-creators and need to figure out how to eliminate suffering, advance the condition of the human race, and live in harmony with nature. Seeing God in others is not limited to human beings but includes all other creatures and the world itself. It means supporting efforts to eradicate hunger; sending money to help save the wolves and the polar bears (I know we'll be sorry when they're gone); and supporting the efforts of other countries to attain higher standards of living and more human rights. It means paying attention and speaking up.


I'm not saying anything that hasn't been better said by others. I'm not saying anything that I haven't always believed, but what's different now is that I better understand how I'm implicated in what's wrong in the world, usually by the things I fail to do more than bad intentions. Studying mythology has made me aware of (1) how unified we really are and (2) how there is often something very different from what appears to be there, on the surface, trying to peek through. There are so many openings to the divine, both in and around us. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern." -- William Blake.


I also have to say quite honestly that some of my best education has occurred since I stopped working and stayed at home to finish my dissertation. I have time to read, think, and consider. I think the struggle to make a living blinds a lot of us to what is really going on because it takes so much time and energy and leaves little over for anything else. Do we need a revolution in the accepted way of doing things? Is our Protestant work ethic making us less human? Just saying.