brooking caldwell

The Vulnerability of Having Opinions

3/19/2015

I have a dirty secret: I don’t like most poetry. Even the supposedly ‘good stuff’, the classics, the greats. I spent last Saturday morning flipping through a book of poets talking about their ‘first love’ poems — Yeats, Stevens, Kinnell, Lorca, Blake, etc. I felt like a country bumpkin at a cocktail party full of pearl-donned elites that were just, well, not that interesting to talk to. I could appreciate the beauty and craft of these ‘great' poems, with effort, and coffee. But my heart’s response to most of them was a shoulder-shrugging “meh”.

To me not liking a poem feels as wrong as not liking another human being. I’ve been busy committing both of these sins lately. I recently admitted to a friend that I don't really like someone:. I say it with excess tact: “There’s beauty in her for sure. And if I had to, I could focus on that. But I don’t mind not having to make that effort.” And then comes the waves of guilt, shame, and discomfort in admitting aversion.

Opinions like this chafe against my well cultivated ability to see the lovable essence in everyone. We are all amazing snowflakes of God underneath the elaborate defenses. But sometimes this seeing just takes more work than it’s worth. Sometimes you just have to let the soft animal of the body love what it loves, and not love what it doesn't.

When I get over the guilt, there’s something quite freeing in having likes and dislikes. The privilege of having a preference is pretty central to this whole being a human thing and denying it tamps down the life energy that could otherwise go to enjoying the things I actually want to enjoy.

It's the same with poems, and poets. Poetry is an art, an act, a lover, a way to experience and express our love. And just like love, it’s messy, inconsistent, full of projection, and quirky as hell. So it takes a certain vulnerability to admit what we really want. What we do and don’t enjoy. What we may have liked last week but just aren’t excited about today.

Stuck on an island, I'd take a pile of Dickinson poems over Wordsworth in a heartbeat. And no matter how much I love Mary Oliver, I’d get sick of flowers and birds if I spent too much time with her work. Intimacy’s like that. It can be hit or miss no matter how much you love someone. Sometimes Billy Collins tickles my soul bone. Sometimes he seems to be tickling an entirely different audience to which I don’t even want to belong.

Maybe that audience includes you. And that’s great. You and I may have different preferences when it comes to these things. Can we actually allow ourselves the vulnerability of difference? Must it pose any threat to our connection? (And, as an artist, can I actually allow you to have your opinions and preferences, too? Hell, I don’t like all of my own poems either!)

The good news is, there’s lots of artists, poems, and styles of expression to choose from. You don’t have to love them all. Let’s have the courage to say No to those that don’t light us up — without making them wrong or writing some literary critique about it. And let the preferences change, as they will. This is the ultimate vulnerability.

Which reminds me of a poem I’m liking lately. Enjoy it — or don’t. As you will.

Open Sky (Jed McKenna)

If you're not amazed by how naive you were yesterday,
you're standing still.

If you're not terrified of the next step,
your eyes are closed.

If you're standing still and your eyes are closed,
then you're only dreaming that you're awake.

A caged bird in a boundless sky.

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From the Inside

3/5/2015

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Writing from the inside is a bit like singing a song while treading water.

Some days it’s easy enough — the lake is placid, the waves slow and palatable. Other days it takes a bit more focused attention to tread and write as the seas roll dark, and fast, and deep.

On these days, it’s so much easier to take the bird’s eye view of one’s own experience. To fly up into the clear air of mind, away from the wet waters of the belly. To where the waves seem almost containable, or at least distant.

But what fun is that!? Where’s the art?! I grow bored and tired at the thought, with heavy wings.

I don’t have words for this womb of weather. But my body has much to say. It can move, can be danced. And the dancing heals rifts, blend elements. Let the body be the water as the foot makes love to earth and the breath gives life to air. Moving, swirling, crying, reaching, yes. There is room for it all in the dance.

Dancing the movement of questions, losses, potentials — giving birth, letting go, resurrecting… reaching out with moving arms and daring to say: “I want”….

In this song, in this dance, there is no fathomable aloneness. We are all, in the depths of our ocean bellies, simply dancing and reaching for questions.

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Dear God: WTF ?!? - 1st Installment

3/2/2015

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I’ve decided to start a new blog series called Dear God: WTF ?!?

This decision stems from my painful experience trying to write for imaginary “readers" out there, and finding this wholly dissatisfying and somewhat soul crushing. I feel like a narcissist telling her life story in an empty amphitheater. I am not yet good at writing about “what you care about”, so I just write about my own experience. Gotta Take the First Step, as David Whyte says. I’m going to titrate the pain of this failure (though learner and masochist that I am, I’ll also continue that experiment) with some more straight talk. Since no one cares and I’d rather be having these conversations directly with God anyway, I’m just going to go ahead and do that.

The other inspiration is that I am a bit tired of the life-killing impact that forced gratitude, emotional neutrality, and rote positivity can have. Yes - in general, getting those positive grooves going is good for all of us. But denying sad and afraid and confused and angry when they are there is a recipe for depression. Hence this series. I do a lot of thanking — read this post to learn more about me and gratitude. But there’s a place every now and again for a good old fashioned WTF rant.

Side note on “God”: I don’t mean this word in any religious sense, per se. I’m kind of a pantheistic atheist spiritualist, and just like the simplicity of the title. I don’t really have any big explanation for what it actually points at, other than the mysterious unnamable force of life itself. Sometimes it’s comforting for us humans to feel like there’s some rhyme or reason or loving deity floating on a cloud listening to our prayers and complaints. Make of it what you will. Call it “source” or “universe” or “creator” or “does not exist” — whatever floats your boat. I’m going to capitalize on our cultural history of personification and just have some chats with God. It’s like Dear Abby, but I’m not really wanting a reply. You never know though, they say God works in mysterious ways…

Ok. On to the show:

Dear God,

What the Fuck?!? Why sadness? What was that choice all about? I’m pretty sure sometimes that you are more cat than dog — letting humans do sad seems as pointless and cruel as the way a cat toys with a mouse before eating it. Why did you program that one into us? What’s the evolutionary value of sad?

I suck at sad. It makes me feel other things like afraid and angry so I don’t have to feel the big black molasses abyss of sad. Then I also get to feel shame and inadequacy for being unable to hang out with sad.

Did you know that more than 50% of our modern Western population will experience at least one bout of depression in their lifetime? Since none of us actually know how to do sad (or angry, or afraid, for that matter), we hide, deny, dwell, repress, and get stuck in a distorted numb not-feeling of all the pain you sprinkled into our world and our wiring, and take pills to make it go away. I think other cultures at some point in history may have done better. It’s time for a course-correct. Please add this to your trello board.

Love anyway,

Brooking

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Feeling the Forecast

2/28/2015

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At first I thought it was sadness. A sugar hangover, the solo Saturday blues, or the flip side of yesterday’s joy.

Then I thought it was just a lack of coffee. Though my espresso never did quite kick in.

Now I am nestled in bed at 2 in the afternoon, relaxing and listening to podcasts. Staring out the window, watching the movement of clouds.

--

I might enjoy this more if it wasn’t the third day in a row. Thursday I indulged in a 3 hour nap. Friday was walking and chatting with friends.

And now here I am, doing nothing again, waging war with that niggling ‘should’. Forcing myself to write a blog post in bed, because I said, way back when, that I would. Though the world doesn’t seem too concerned.

It’s amazing how much we can shame ourselves for relaxing. The tension between the impulses for creation and surrender can cause so much unnecessary pain. Why lie, most of us feel more worth-while when we’re busy. We feel terrified of ourselves when we’re not.

--

It rained for just a few minutes just now, and something about this felt right. Something matched.

But the sky stopped her weeping so quickly. And the tension between plants and sky became palpable, just as quickly. It’s as if they are stomping and flailing their leaf-laden arms, in a tree tantrum plea for more moisture.

Our bodies are not immune to the pain of the landscape. Our bodies are no different, really.

We’re all anxiously waiting for rain.

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Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken

2/25/2015

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This morning I encountered a tiny dog. One of those itty-bitty purse sized fluffy things that has been bred to look like a puppy it’s whole life. It was cute, and it was pathetic.

I tried to imagine the wolf spirit inside this little fluff ball of a being. Was it still there? This dog still had animal instincts — sniffing, suckling, barking. But it had also been bred to be docile, stupid, amenable to laps.

It’s owner was a strong adult male, with beautiful tawny skin mostly covered by jeans and a sweatshirt. Walking a little leashed dog on a Tuesday morning through the concrete jungles of Oakland.

I pondered our own species’ domestication. What wild spirit lives inside that man? How might he live if he let that spirit lead?

Do any of us really have a clue how our own human equivalent of wild wolf spirit feels, looks, sounds, moves? What are the fiercely beautiful animal instincts we’ve lost along the way? How have we bred ourselves for our own domestication?

Walking home from a business meeting, these questions announced themselves. And my own life force responded: for most of us, short of the Into the Wild approach, we answer by living a dual life.

One way to define the spiritual path is the soul’s determination to reclaim it’s wildness. We have all tasted this call at some point in our life — a childhood memory, a camping trip. A love affair, a David Deida workshop. Giving birth, watching death. And yet most of us don’t live in alignment with our wild nature all the time. We choose to remain participants in this thing we call civilization, with its many taming forces that guard us against the vulnerability of our own true nature.

Still, most of us make some time and space to touch our inner wildness. The only alternative is depression. We all have our favorite ways to touch in with our untamed selves — meditation, sexual liberation, laughing. Backpacking, football, dancing. Hunting, drugs, dreams.

And then, we come back. We go to work, pay our bills and our dues. We stay faithful to our partners. We eat processed and packaged mono-crop foods. We sit at desks in rooms sheltered from storms. We make choices.

Many of us find ourselves caught in the constant tug-of-war between the practical realities of a domesticated society and psyche, and that flame inside that pushes us forward in our own unpredictable unfolding. With no map. That’s the irony: the wildest game in town is these days is in the human experience of finding our way back home.

It’s also where we differ from Fluffy.

Where wild beasts at least know their own territory, on this strange journey we find ourselves on as modern humans, we’re on an epic Lord of the Rings kind of quest — hungry and scaling cold mountains, on a conscious pilgrimage toward our own preciousness. Our untamed ancestry. Our missing sense of tribe and belonging. And the quiet of our creaturely minds.

Meanwhile, together, we are marching on in a society gone mad. These concrete jungles grow wilder by day, more violent by night, and our hearts and our nerves can’t keep up.

So we get house plants, and patios, and lap dogs. And we take them for walks in the morning sun, needing movement and air, just like them. Pale and domesticated as we may be, we’re still creatures, and spirit embodied.

Our wild hearts can never be broken.

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Moving in Worlds beyond Words

2/23/2015

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This past weekend, after more than seven years of dancing, I finally attended my first multi-day dance intensive. It was a 3 day 5 Rhythms retreat on the theme of age. There was a lot of moving, a lot of crying, a lot of stomping and emoting through the body. There was a lot of letting go of knowing what the hell was going on. A lot of opening up parts of my body that had been lying dormant for years, just waiting to be danced alive again. A lot of conversations through the expression of dancing bodies and eyes.

And a lot (especially for me) of speechlessness and silence.

I loved and hated this feeling of having nothing to say. It humbled and tickled me to sit in our daily closing reflection circles and having nothing to offer but a listening heart. Each day, each dance, for me, was a rich conversation in the territories beyond words. It was about listening, following, desiring, responding. I found myself dipping into that potent well of silence and stillness available inside the sound and movement of the dance. A whirling dervish emerged, with throat and lips sealed soft with opening awe.

And, much to my personality’s surprise, every time we were asked to speak, it felt horribly awkward, jarring, and beside the point. Compared to the full-force movement and subtle dreaming work we were doing in between these interludes of verbal sharing, words felt hopelessly impotent. A totally inept form of expression.

This may not be an unusual experience for many of you readers. But for me, a babbler by nature, the experience of words not cutting it has been a humbling, surprising, uncomfortable, delightful trip. My whole life words have been the medium through which I feel my fullest expression. But this weekend, they had nothing on the movement of the body, in community, touching into profound and subtle topics of birth and death, living and aging.

I shared some bumbling version of this sense of ineptitude with a friend over lunch. “But you’re a poet!”, she cried back. Exactly, I thought. Yes, sometimes, poetry flows raw and now from the lips, like greens picked fresh from the garden. But sometimes it’s more like wine — it takes time to become itself, to ferment that raw sweet innocence into a rich and wise intoxicant. And sometimes, maybe always, it has nothing to do with words.

As with the death theme we worked with all weekend, there’s something about letting go to let come. To letting time do it’s thing with us, tender mortals that we are. So yes, enough said. Let's dance.

I’m still dancing, and the weekend is still dancing me. The grapes are still begin stomped. And as reflections begin, as my mind comes back online for it’s daily responsibilities, the grapes go into the cask. There they sit in the cool dark recesses of this mysteriously intelligent body being. And with time, they will age, and ferment, and incorporate.

And I may or may not ever have anything more to say about it.

But if you listen, there is always, always, always a conversation.

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The Heart of Power in Politics

2/17/2015

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Last week I visited D.C. for the first time in many years. I went for evening walks around the capital, and felt blown away by how differently power shows up in Washington than it does in California.

Three men walked by in long black coats. They felt like GIANTS. I looked back and they were not physically that tall — I was feeling their energetic potency. This was a different flavor of power than I am used to feeling walking the streets of San Francisco. It was not creative or sexual power, mere financial power, or the wily energy of entrepreneurial power. This was political power. And it nearly bowled me over.

Across the street loomed the department of justice — this giant white monument to an ideal that has become so tragically distorted in our country.

I imagine I am not the only one who finds herself distrustful of power in American politics. The word politics itself has come to connote dishonesty, ethical compromise, playing games with status and influence. Getting things done in our political system in any meaningful way often feels impossible. Our own president is having a hell of a time getting anything meaningful done — the most powerful man in our government still has to play the games of politics in America.

Living in San Francisco, it’s easy to think that 'social entrepreneurship' is a more potent force for social change in a country where the private sector runs our political system through lobbying and campaign finance laws. But distorted as our democracy is, the reality is that legislation is still an incredibly real lever of power and change in our country. And as disenchanting and disheartening as the game of politics can be, I still have a lot of respect and appreciation for those who stay with it in a heart-felt effort to enact lasting social change.

And that includes our President. Earlier this month, Obama was interviewed by HONY. The interviewer asked him this probing question: “When is the time you felt most broken?” His answer, I hope you will agree, is food for thought, whatever your political stance, whatever your line of work:

“I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ --- then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”

Whatever you call your work -- whatever lights you up, whatever impact you’re hoping to have on this tender planet -- may it inspire you beyond yourself. May your way be lit by the care of your own heart. That, my friends, is real power.

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The Art of Asking Questions - a Humbling Inquiry

2/10/2015

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I think it’s fair to say I’m a growth junkie. It’s part addiction, part healthy hobby — always working on increasing my mindfulness and skill around something. Lately, the thing I’m examining is the art of asking good questions.

What sparked this interest in questions, you ask? For me it started at work — I am a “process consultant”, which has the strange distinction of being a form of consulting where you charge people to ask them questions and help them do their own work and find their own answers. Getting clients to see the value of paying you to ask questions and do their own work differently is not always an easy sell! Where the masters trust this approach, I still get insecure about getting paid for something other than begin an expert or a minion. Lately I’ve been noticing how my lack of mastery can trigger professional insecurity, which triggers, in my case, a patterned tendency to cover that up with coming across as knowledgable. In the exact moments when I should be pausing and listening for the question that wants to be asked, I often get nervous and make up an answer. Though this is rewarded and expected in much consulting, it’s actually counter-productive to a lot of the purpose of my work.

Ok. So what’s so great about asking questions? Clearly I’m still working on understanding the answer to this one. So I asked a colleague Beth Kanter for some advice about it. Beth told me about Edgar Shein, someone who’s studied these things for about 50 years. So I asked Amazon about Shein, and promptly immersed myself in his short and sweet little book Humble Inquiry.

What I’m learning from Shein is that asking open-ended questions rooted in genuine curiosity and acknowledgement of ignorance opens worlds of learning, innovation, connection, and trust-filled relationships. Clearly this is not the norm in our culture that rewards doing, telling, and perceived competence. It's rare to take time for relationships and acknowledge what we don’t know, especially in fast-paced work environments. But without humble inquiry, strategy is short-sighted, crucial communications don’t happen, and collaborations fail.

Now that I’ve got my eye on this pattern, I am noticing it showing up outside of work as well, and it ain't pretty. A few days ago, for example, I was at an art show and watched myself nervously “socialize" by telling people my views on some paintings. Thanks to Shein, I was aware of what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop myself! It’s a nervous tick, literally, and especially when I’m not feeling very grounded and centered in myself.

And the irony of course is my social insecurity can come across as intrusive, arrogant, self-absorbed, or intimidating — all totally unhelpful for genuine connection. Part of why this pattern has persisted though is that it has been useful and rewarded in many contexts; the clever chatter can also come across as smart, competent, confident, feisty. But lately I see how it does not serve in the kind of work I am doing as a process consultant, and as a person interested in developing more genuine connections in the workplace and beyond.

Hence, project ask don’t tell (which is somewhat at odds with project blog more often, but alas, life is full of paradox). Changing these sorts of patterns requires not just awareness, but practice, patience, self-compassion, support, humor, and willingness to slow down and get curious about life instead of imposing oneself onto it. Humbling inquiry indeed.

Any questions?!?

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The Wild Geese Are At It Again

2/6/2015

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It's windy, near raining, and some wild geese just flew by my window. I hear their squawks as a very clear: "you do not have to be good". I always enjoy this reminder.

I wonder what wild geese said before Mary Oliver lent them her voice.

They also say things like "it's okay to be awkward" and "go ahead and be mean sometimes", and "I may be fat but I can still fly!". But isn't all that in her poem?

And what would a horizon be without David Whyte? I can't even point to one poem here; for Whyte, horizons are everywhere. Here's one favorite, "The Opening of Eyes". He doesn't even use the word in this poem, but sketches it's meaning. What is life but "a vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold"?

Billy Collins has completely transformed my relationship with the word "suddenly" in his poem Tension. Every time I hear that word now, the poem kicks up a tickle and stealthily tills my soul.

Sometimes I feel alone in this particular flavor of madness. Sometimes I wander through the woods on hikes reciting Rilke koans to myself and wonder if this is the edge. If I'm slipping too deep into love.

Of course I have this same sort of relationship with many of my own poems, too. Maybe someday I won't be the only one for whom spiders trigger reflections on the cross, or for whom dry lavender inspires a world-as-self meditation. Regardless, it's a sweet way to talk with the world. And maybe, today, you can join me.

Which brings me back to wild geese, and this bumbling art of public sharing. Perfectionism can be a biting, honking terror, and there's just something potent that Mary catches in the awkward grace and harsh beauty of these geese. As far as poems go, this one's pretty damn universally relatable: Stop trying to be something. Just do your thing, share your shame, give up seeking. Just be you. The world doesn't care, but it's also harsh and excited and waiting. Step forth and announce yourself. Stop quibbling over goodness and just take your place in the family of things.

Fine, Mary. Fine, geese. Thanks for the reminder, again: it does not have to be good, you do not have to be good, but do what you're here to do anyway. Okay, I say. I'll keep loving, keep writing.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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