The ad said a mommy-to- be had an extra DVD player that was given to her as a gift. She'd only played it a couple of times, but it worked fine, and she'd sell it for $20 including the remote. Coincidentally, my DVD player died today, and I know better than to waste any time trying to fix it. I called and said I would be over right away. She sounded so relieved and grateful. She thanked me. I didn't think too much of it.

I missed the exit, or, more correctly, that exit didn't exist, so I called her number again to have her repeat the directions and a guy answered. He gave me long, involved directions, not even remotely resembling the directions she gave me, but I still thought I pretty much knew how to get there, so I tuned out the last bit, and just concentrated on the exit part. At the very end of the conversation he asked me how much she had advertised the DVD player for, and I said $20. He said $25???(incredulously) and I said, no, $20. Two. Zero.

Long silence.

he said, "well the remote is another five dollars."

I said "actually the ad specifies that the remote is included."

Another long silence.

Now I'm getting irritated, so I say, politely "I'm assuming you'll honor the price since that's how it was advertised"

he said "Sure, I guess so.......but I wouldn't say no to a tip!"

"I only have a twenty dollar bill with me." I said curtly, since I had already driven five miles out of my way, and was turned around and retracing my steps back that five miles.

I pull up to the house, and walk to the front door and knock on it. Dogs inside go crazy. There is a very long wait while the dogs continue to go crazy. I hear a guy in the background telling them to be quiet.
They obey, sporadically. Still, no one comes to the door.

Now I'm really irritated, and in my imagination they've decided that they want more than the $20 it was advertised at, and they just are not going to answer the door. I notice that the outside of the deadbolt on the door is missing and it's taped up on the inside. I start to think maybe this isn't a great idea. Maybe I should just go back to the car.

I'm stubborn and stupid and I knock again, louder.

finally a woman's voice says "Sorry, I'm coming...." The dogs accompany her, still barking. She opens the door.

In that minute the whole picture snaps into focus. I'm in tweakerville. She's got straggly hair, and her teeth are rotted out and she can barely concentrate on me. The dogs, little ones, are weaving in and out around her feet and she's having enough trouble steadying herself as it is. She's drunk and high and that much is obvious, and she's not sure how to do this. I say "That's okay, I'll wait out here - you can bring it out to me..."

She turns around and picks up a slim, dusty, stained DVD player, obviously well used. I say "Isn't there supposed to be a remote?" This further confuses her, and she turns around in a circle again, and then picks up a remote off the floor by the door, but it's the wrong color. It isn't the remote for this piece of equipment.

I am standing there and I don't want this DVD player. First, I'm not at all sure it even works. Second of all, I recognize a tweaker selling off stuff to buy more drugs, and I'll be damned if I'm giving her twenty bucks to help her poison that baby in her belly. Third, the energy around her, and the house, and the transaction, and this piece of equipment is really toxic. I don't want to bring it home with me. It's literally making my hair stand on end.

I stand there, unsure of how to get out of it. I stammer something about her boyfriend sounding like he wanted more money for it, and how I was fine just walking away, and she could re-list it at a higher price. She said "No, No, we only want $20.00 for it. It's fine. It's a fine DVD player. You can call us if you have any problems with it. We just want $20.00. $20.00 is fine...." She trails off.

But I just look at her and I don't want anything to do with this. I start backing up off the porch. "No, No," I say "...I just don't think this is the DVD player for me. Thanks very much...." and her little dog tries to follow me out onto the porch, but she comes out and scoops him up.

She's disappointed and it's awkward, but the wave of toxicity coming out of that house, out of that situation, is hitting me like a brick wall, pushing me all the way back to my car. I can't get in the car fast enough.

I'm driving away, and I'm glad I didn't buy the thing but I feel sick and sad from the whole scenario. It makes me cry and I cry all the way to Carmel. I'm crying for that little baby, curled up and helpless in her body while she poisons it over and over and its little body struggling to process the sheer volume of evil that she floods him with. And I'm crying for that woman and her desperation for the drugs, and where her heart must be that she can enact these crimes against her unborn child - because you know she feels what she does to him and she just can't stop herself, such is her desperation. And I'm crying for humanity and the world at large - which is full of so much hopelessness and helplessness and loss. I'm even crying for those dogs, because how can they all be getting what they need with parents like that? And I'm crying for me, because why did God give her a baby but not give me one? Why was I denied a child when women like that are popping them out all over the place and then crapping all over them for the rest of their lives, breeding more hopelessness and helplessness and despair?

eventually I get to the beach, and I am cheered up by the sun and the surf and the sand. The wind is high, and the foam lifts up off the crests of the huge, huge waves in a glorious salty spray, and the dog is beside herself with joy. We play until I'm too cold to play anymore, and I sit down against a granite boulder with the fragrant plants blooming above and around me, sheltering me from the wind. I'm listening to OK Go "This Too Shall Pass" on the mp3 player, and I have my hood on and my sleeves pulled down over my hands and my dog is curled up against my thigh, just watching the kids and the birds.

To my left a young boy, probably about 13 or 14 is building a sandcastle. He is rapt in his attention to it, stooped over it, stroking it with his hands, shaving off smooth surfaces with a piece of plastic he has with him, going over to the little stream that flows beside him and collecting water to drizzle over the top of the tiny parapets, smoothing the arches with his lean fingers. And I'm thinking that he's too old, and he's a boy, to be so captivated by this, but I then I see it, crystal clear. He's an artist. He's completely in the zone. The rest of the world goes on around him, but he is so meditatively fixed on his work that he doesn't notice them at all. The sand and the water and the wind are talking to him and he is answering them with his hands, with his heart, and there is a purity about him that is so beautiful that it's healing to me just to sit there watching him work. Watching the way his hands are moving, so deliberately and with so much care. Watching his face lost in concentration. It's amazing. I am uplifted and inspired and reminded, blessedly reminded, of how rich and varied the human landscape is.

God tells me every day to give up my attempts to understand the the humans in shorthand. God tells me every day that any conclusions I might draw about them are superficial, and flawed and absent of the love that is required to see them clearly. What matters in this situation is not whether the tweaker mom is a bad mom, or whether it's fair that she gets pregnant, but I could not, or whether the young boy on the beach represents a better model of humanity or worse. None of the judgments and comparisons matter. None of the ideas that I can come up with to classify the humans matter. This human is like me. This human is not. This human is good. This human is not. None of that has anything to do with what it means to be a human.

What matters is the connection. Connecting to the humans. Love matters. Today I loved the baby in her belly. Today I loved her even in her struggle and the way that she hates herself for what she can't stop doing. Today I loved myself through my loss and my confusion and my anger at God. Today I loved that boy for reminding me that we are all touched with grace. That we are all capable of everything.

And today I even loved myself for trying, always trying, and always in vain, to think up a shorthand. Some way to understand the humans. To understand myself in light of what it means to be human. To stand bravely in the threshold world where I am neither blind nor sighted. Where I belong neither to the camp of the blissfully ignorant, nor the camp of the blissfully enlightened. It takes stamina to stand in this place and to see and to see and to keep seeing and to keep feeling and to keep the open heart even though the "knife of uncertainty" surrounds me constantly. But this place, this threshold place, is actually what it means to be human to me, right now.

Behind the boy comes a blissfully ignorant man with four huge matching Weimaraners. He's walking right toward the sandcastle, and his dogs are bolting ahead of him, totally unaware of the work of art about to be trampled. the boy has just finished his masterpiece, smoothed an area and signed his name and he is rinsing his piece of plastic and his cup carefully in the stream. He looks up and sees the man and dogs coming straight for his castle. I am gesticulating wildly to the man, who is confused. My own dog is now confused. The man gives up trying to understand what I want and brings his attention back to his dogs, who are charging on toward the sand castle.

The boy merely glances at them, dries his hands casually on his jeans and runs off toward his family. Doesn't even look behind him to see if they trampled his masterpiece or not. I can see by his movement that his body is relaxed. His work on the castle is complete and his attention has moved effortlessly on. He is completely unconcerned about the well-being or longevity of the castle. He is a zen master; totally immersed in the moment, and completely unattached to the outcome or the physical representation of his efforts. He gets it.

I realize that I have been blessed by this boy. Watching him, I have been shown in detail how to do this living in the world thing and to do it well. It's a tiny parable - a little demonstration in real time. I'm certain that I will need to be shown again and again and again, because I always forget, but one thing I know I can count on...For every time I forget, Someone will remind me. I will always be reminded.

The dogs and the man swarmed around the sandcastle, but none of them noticed it, and never looking down at it, all of them crossed essentially right over it, some of them missing it by as little as an inch. None of them even touched it. Miraculously, they went about 50 yards down the beach, turned around, and retraced their steps, crossing over it again, never looking down, never noticing it, and leaving it completely untouched in their wake.

Excerpt from a letter to a friend upon the death of his estranged brother… included here because this may be of use for someone one else in a similar situation…

“…For me, because of where I am, I can see that your brother was simply a broken soul. Some people are just not born for this world and they don't survive it. There are those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go out and face the challenges, and toughen up where they need to be tough, and dig in where they need to dig in, and seize the day. You are one of those. So your brother is probably incomprehensible to you. You have not been able to fathom that brand of weakness and lack of character that would allow someone to not only fail their own life, but to erode the relationships that they have with the only people they can count on, until those people eventually have to cut them off. The irony, the great insult and injury, is that the people who most try to help these broken souls are the ones who bear the brunt of their inability to behave in any decent way. The people to whom they owe the most are the ones they tend to injure the most. If you think they do not know this and that it does not pain them, you are mistaken. They live with it every day. They know every day. He knew.

But the best that we can do as individuals differs from one to the next. He may very well have been doing his best all along. His best was certainly not good enough, but it may have been his best. In the end, after much soul searching and back and forth and struggle, we come down to the only thing that we all share - we have it in our very first moments and we have it in our very last moments - it is the intense frailty of what we are. We are totally vulnerable. Completely and totally helpless and vulnerable in our essence. We know it the moment we are born, and we are reminded of it the moments before we die. In between most of us do a remarkable job of being unaware of it, except for rare and precious moments in between. We feel it when we become very sick, or very lost or very frightened, or we lose something we had counted upon in a mortal way. We catch a glimpse of it here and there. But we don't live with it in our faces all the time.

Some of us, though, never really develop the ability to become unaware of it, and so it follows us around all of our days. We try many, many things to get to where the others are - where that vulnerability does not pursue and haunt us. We try drugs and alcohol and jobs and lovers and television and books and sex and food and whatever we can get our hands on to quell that sensation. Whatever filter the rest of the world uses to be okay, to function and interact and get by and be happy, we just don't have one. Or if we do, it's broken. So we try to build our own filters, our own escape hatch, until the hatch takes over and it never quite works, but now that it has been installed, it has a few demands of its own. And broken people become its servants, trying unsuccessfully to fulfill its constant, unreasonable, impossible demands. It is a testament to the human spirit, that the broken soul does not give up on these strategies that never quite work. That relentless belief that there might be some relief is what keeps the broken soul pressing the lever, like those monkeys in the intermittent reinforcement behavioral experiments - it is relentless faith that if it worked even once, one blissful moment it worked, then it might yet work again. So then we are addicts. Addicted to food, addicted to alcohol. Addicted to television. Addicted to sleep. Faithfully, faithfully we push the lever, pushing the lever over and over, hoping for relief. Rarely, but sometimes, it comes. We keep at it.

And this is a path, my friend. It is not a path that cultivates the respect of others, or creates any sort of normalcy or safety in the world, but it is a path, as any path is - designed to teach those who journey it. Designed to heal us in the end. There will come a day when you will see your brother's life neither with pity nor with scorn, but simply with acceptance. He neither failed, nor was he a hero to anyone other than himself and God. But he made it through the world in the best way he knew how. People just don't fall down like that for no reason, my friend. What lives in us, and what tortures us, and what comforts us and what teaches us....all remain a mystery to the observer. Even the closest observer.

In the end, you will find it less useful to sit in judgment of his life, and more useful to mourn him in the way we mourn any soul who has made it through this world and gone on from there. There is no standard to which he needs be held now. Honoring somebody's struggle, and their battles, some won, some lost, and the way that they just made it through this life is enough. In between this person had humor, and warmth and hopes and loves. He was also selfish and greedy and defensive and hurtful. He was afraid and he was compassionate, in different measure and at different times to different people. The sum of his life will not be apparent to you soon, or maybe ever, but never believe that you can measure it by his "accomplishments." For some the challenges are external (what you can achieve) but for some they are within. Nobody will ever see the mountains they scale, and the valleys they traverse. Their successes and achievements will remain invisible to most, maybe even all.  But don't believe for a moment that they did not exist, or that they were not worthy.

For now, it is enough just to be present and to be a witness. When you go through his things, you are not there to clean up the mess he left. You are not there to discover his secrets. You are not there to feel sorry for him or the shambles of his life. You are there as a witness, to honor his life. In the same spirit as we used to carefully wash the bodies of our loved ones and dress them and prepare them for burial, that is the spirit of your journey. All the multitudes of feelings that you had for him during his life, and those that crowd in on you as you approach the acceptance of his death, all those feelings will attend you, but you will not be there to serve any of them. You will be there to serve him. Not because he "deserves" or "earned" your respect and honor in life, but because you are a deep and honorable man and you are fully capable of respecting the task at hand and the relationship as it was, and the spirit of the person who lived, broken, before you most of his life. You would be capable of that, even if he were a total stranger to you, and you had been called upon to do this duty for a stranger. Remember, that by the time he died, he was a stranger to you. Whoever he was by then, you were not there, you were not on the inside.

And he was not always broken. He was once a small boy, and you were too, and he was your brother, and you will find a way to honor the memory of your brother even though he did not do as well as all hoped he would and he did not live up to anything, maybe, that was expected. It will be a measure of who you are, in the quality of the way that you approach this task, and it will inform and shape who you are going forward. You stand only as a witness, to honor and respect the passing of a soul who did his best to do his best. You will find a way to let go of how he failed you and failed your family and failed his life, and you will simply stand for what was best in him, and what was purely uniquely him, and what is now gone from the world. That is all true too, and it is all that matters now. It won't come immediately, but that realization will come in time, and the more you can keep your intention on that, during this, the more easily it will come, the more quickly it will come, the more peace you will find. ”

Lately I’ve been obsessed with watching The West Wing on DVD. I don’t know how I missed this series when it was on TV, but somehow I did, and so I’ve only just discovered it in the last month or so. I LOVE this series. It’s smart and fast and ultimately profoundly stimulating.

My current inspiration from the program is the whole “News Cycle” concept. The idea that within any give period of time there is a finite space/time allowed to deal with ideas, so that the timing of an idea is key, when it enters the flow of information. Over and over throughout the show they talk about the message, the agenda, and staying on topic with the “agenda” rather than letting inflammatory nature of certain events or pieces of information “hi-jack” the “agenda” and tie up the “news cycle” for weeks at a time.

It struck me that this is exactly the dynamic that happens for most of us on an internal level. We know what we are working on, where our focus needs to go, what we hope to develop in the coming days, weeks and months. But then, along comes some event, some interaction with another person, and suddenly that event hi-jacks your entire mental and emotional news cycle.

Some interesting things can be observed about these events and interactions – usually they are not generated directly by us, but they do carry quite a payload of symbolic emotional triggers. Sometimes it’s a relatively simple event – but it pushes on a hot button for you, and takes center stage immediately and for a long time. Like your neighbor leaves you a note asking you to take in your trash cans on trash day instead of leaving them out by the curb for three days, for example. Now this is a simple request, easily met, and usually totally transitory – but somehow it pushes your hot buttons around territory, and authority and shame and whatever other primal Frostian-Fences-And-Neighbors theme you have playing in the back of your mind. All of the sudden all of your conversations are about the incident, most of your thoughts are about it – for a few days you are running around collecting data, polling your circle of friends and family, assessing the threat, meeting in the metaphorical “Situation Room” of your life, strategizing whether compliance, negotiations or retaliation are the best options, etc.

You see where I am going with this example, right? It’s a simple thing – you can easily comply, but for a brief period of time, it draws all your focus, most of your resources and is treated like a potential threat. Of course, eventually the energy you have around it is dialed back down to a reasonable level, and you may or may not choose any of the options you considered, but for that brief period of time, none of the things on the agenda you had planned to spend your energy, attention and resources on seem to matter. They get completely pushed to the side and overwhelmed while you run around alternately fueling fires and then putting them back out.

We all do it. We all have hot buttons, and we all, for the sake of our spiritual evolution, draw to us opportunities to address those issues in a way that does not derail and devastate us. Sometimes we see them for what they are and let them move right through us. Other times, we let them dominate the stage of our lives, simply for not recognizing them for what they are, and addressing them in a way that defuses them, and releases them.

So the big questions I am asking myself, and I suppose, also asking you are these:

What, specifically, is my current agenda, or message? What are the main, broad stroke topics that I want to stay “On Topic” about with my attention and my energy?

What are the things that have lately hi-jacked my “agenda” and dominated my “news cycle”? What do they have in common with one another?

What are the things that have tried unsuccessfully to hi-jack my news cycle, and how did I respond to them in  way that prevented them from doing so?

You may want to spend a little time “briefing” yourself on the answers to these questions and exploring this concept in your day to day!

Namaste!

-K

A brief bit of business - working on the book has taken up most of my bandwidth for writing, so you'll notice that the posts here had dwindled to nothing for a time. That wasn't working for me either, because it wasn't balanced enough, and there are things I want to share that have nothing to do with the book, and everything to do with being a busy mystic in the world....

So here are the new developments for the Busy Mystic: You can look for more blogs, occasionally interspersed with podcasts, or available in both formats. You can be notified of new posts via Twitter, since I'm adding Twitter to the Busy Mystic world. You can look forward to a variety of different approaches to blogging - some stories inspired by my daily life, some recommended resources, some quotes, some interviews, some guest posts....in short, I'm leaving the earlier "essay-style" format, primarily in audio, and I am shifting to a more loosely arranged and not so labor-intensive model in order to keep posting during the completion of the book.

I'll keep you posted on the book too, and any upcoming events!

love and light,

Kaite

In this episode, Kaite explores what it is like, as an independent mystic, to go against the grain in a world designed with a "pack mentality." What happens when you are placed in a situation where you must choose between being liked and accepted or being true to your chosen path of devotion?

Listen and enjoy! All comments are welcome!

In this episode, Kaite explains what she means when she says "Mystic" and what criteria she uses to make this distinction. What does it take to be a mystic? How do you know if you are one? How do you know if you are not?

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This is the first installment since the sudden, unexpected passing of Kaite's husband last fall. In it, she explores the re-envisioning of the purpose of this podcast, as she works to re-align her work with the circumstances of her life!

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In this installment, Kaite will explore what it means to live a spiritually courageous life nowadays. Although there are still some parts of the world where life, limb and freedom are threatened by one's revealing one's faith, for most of us busy mystics, the challenges may be more subtle, but sometimes just as effective. How fully are you living your faith, and what can you do to bolster your spiritual courage?

For more, listen to this...