“Our life is a manifestation, and we can very well make that manifestation beautiful and meaningful and have a good influence.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh

No doubt, manifestation is a potent word. It is also so commonly used in this time and age that it has lost some of its potency. People seem to say it and yet not really reflect too much upon its deeper meaning. To manifest. It comes from the Latin manifestus meaning detected in the act, evident, visible.

man·i·fes·ta·tion
ˌmanəfəˈstāSH(ə)n,ˌmanəˌfesˈtāSH(ə)n/
noun

1. an event, action, or object that clearly shows or embodies something, especially a theory or an abstract idea.

To me, manifestation is energy, highly focused energy. In a sense, it is really about taking control of potential through focus. Einstein was as much a philosopher as a scientist. E=MC squared, to me, is also a lesson about manifestation. In physics, E=MC squared is the concept that mass and energy are equivalent. The implication is that any small amount of matter contains a very large amount of energy. Thus, an atom can hover stagnant and do nothing or create a nuclear transformation. His idea was radical because he theorized that all atoms have that nuclear potential, the potential of manifestation. And, of course, like nuclear potential that potency or potential energy can be used for the good or for the bad. I believe humans are the same.

Newton was also a philosopher and a scientist. His law of motion speaks to the same understanding of human potential. His first law of motion is often stated as- An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. The motion of an object, therefore, has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with inertia. If life is energy contained in a mass, then the same rule applies.The atom can hover stagnant or it can manifest. Action, in both accounts, is everything. 

Speaking about our actions as humans, Lord Krishna advises, “Perform the prescribed duties because action is superior to inaction. Moreover, if you are inactive, even the maintenance of your body will be impossible.” I believe, we are here to fulfill our dharma, and if we leave the work undone, which is our choice as humans... we can do it that way, then we are missing the point. If you want to build a bridge, you have to start stone by stone. If you want to write a book, you have to start page by page. He advises us not to escape our commitment to our dharma, or in Newton's words, to not allow ourselves to be "acted upon by an unbalanced force". 

It's all up to us though. Dharma (or the energy or work) is a manifestation of God and not a mandate. There is infinite potential. In Hinduism, an avatar (from Sanskrit avatāra "descent") is a deliberate descent of a deity to Earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being (e.g., Vishnu). Avatar is mostly translated into English as "incarnation", but more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation". Like human potential, the various incarnations of Vishnu are innumerable. Shiva and Ganesha are also described as descending in the form of avatars. The list goes on and on. Vishnu most often would descend for a very specific reason. The Bhagavad Gita describes the typical role of an avatar of Vishnu:

“Whenever righteousness wanes and unrighteousness increases I send myself forth.
For the protection of the good and for the destruction of evil,
and for the establishment of righteousness,
I come into being age after age. (Gita:4.7–8)"

He comes to bring dharma, or righteousness, back to the social and cosmic order. In many ways, I like the word Avatar better than manifestation. The Sanskrit noun avatāra is derived from the verbal root tṝ "to cross over", joined with the prefix ava "off, away, down". To split the atom and release all of the human potential within. I love watching the Olympics for that reason, to see a collection of people who've crossed over that threshold. Of course, for me the real work of life is love. For me, writing is a manifestation of that higher purpose. If my writing was not infused with my heart, it would simply be words on a page. Love, like Vishnu, has infinite incarnations and it is not limited by the walls of an office building. It is wake and it is sleep.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou

I first read the Odyssey when I was about 16. Loving books and having never really felt at home in the world, the story resonated with me at many levels. At home. Home. It's got to be one of the most powerful words. It encompasses a certain type of love and feeling safe and then much more, a place, however small, to rest your head. The book is the hero's journey home. My character is working out this dilemma in her own way.

Anne Sexton poem-

On the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness.

All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun by the boat
where the Italian boatman slept
with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could
read a book through it.
Water so buoyant you could
float on your elbow.
I lay on it as on a divan.
I lay on it just like
Matisse's Red Odalisque.
Water was my strange flower,
one must picture a woman
without a toga or a scarf
on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto
were everycolor blue and
you said, 'Look! Your eyes
are seacolor. Look! Your eyes
are skycolor.' And my eyes
shut down as if they were
suddenly ashamed. 

-Anne Sexton

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

I bump up against it all of the time. This issue of being, our sentience, our taste, our touch, the cascade of emotions that are in constant flow... and our limited capacities as human being to cope with this constant ebb and flow. I had the privilege of seeing the vacant body of a family member recently. She looked so beautiful and peaceful. No more struggle. She was a musician and she chose three songs for her funeral. Amazing Grace, I'll Fly Away, and a composition from the Ken Burns Civil War Series called Farewell Song. It was a violin piece played by a savant. It was chillingly beautiful. I'll Fly Away was sung as a round by a chorus. It was deeply stirring for me, speaking to this human existential desire to be released from the looping, lonely pain of being. 

I have spent an extraordinary amount of time in my life watching my mother and my sister cry under the excruciating weight of depression. In those times, I have wanted nothing more than to leap out of my skin and soothe them in a way that my words and love and touch could not ever quite reach them. I think that is part of why I lay my palms open at the end of my practice. I am offering everything thing that I am and all that I have and yet, somehow it really has never been enough. Not once, ever enough. All I have ever really been able to do is to know more deeply the deep-textured contours of their solitude. 

At the end of my yoga practice now, it is now my habit to fold forward with my forehead to my mat and face my open palms upward. I don't know why I started doing this. I just did and it feels like the right thing to do at that moment, I guess an offering of sorts. 

Growing up, I never had to ask permission. As long as I took care of family matters and school matters, I could do whatever I wanted. Looking back, there are so many times when I made these bold, sort of outlandish choices, usually to travel places, and remember just letting my parents know that it was going to happen, then I would be gone and they would never ask me about it after I returned. It wasn't that they didn't care, they just trusted me and were preoccupied with the crises at hand. Also, I was incredibly shy so outside of travels, I spent much of my time reading, writing or running alone so there was a lot of quiet and there was no need in my house for permission to be still and quiet. 

Permission-
noun 
1.authorization granted to do something; formal consent:
Late Middle English: from Latin permissio(n-), from the verb permittere 'allow' 

So oddly, one of the first times, I was confronted with this issue of permission was when my friend Rich and I were traveling in Asia. He is Taiwanese and was blocked from getting a visa to Indonesia. It was our plan and at the random whim of a border agent he was not given permission. There was no way to get around it and so we had to re-route our trip North to Malaysia instead. It was an enlightening moment for me.  

To me, the most important kind of permission is the permission we give or do not give to ourselves. Most often we are our own prison guards/gate keepers to whatever we are scared of, we allow to be bigger and scarier than we are. In graduate school, I worked at a domestic violence help center for several years. People would come to me with their stories and I would listen and then I would help them with the paperwork and accompany them to court. What always astounded me the most, as a very petite person myself, is how puny these abusers often were. The word pipsqueak comes to mind. This monstrous person I'd heard about for a month, so scary in my mind's eye was just some punk, one, I remember, was a professor at Dartmouth. I was afraid the abusers were see me in this small town and follow me home or threaten me, but, of course, they never did. They only had power within the abusive relationship. It shows how subjective fear is, and always, the abusers were super afraid of me in spite of my small size because I knew their story. But to my clients, these people were all-knowing and all-powerful. Their fear was real, to be sure, but also subjective in a certain sense as well. The people I worked with, most often, were too worn down to give themselves permission to live differently.

I am certainly the gatekeeper to my own prison of intense anxiety, that is me alone, my struggle, my lonely prison; I created it and I now guard it. In struggling with anxiety last week, I did something I almost never do. I asked for wisdom and insight aloud before I fell asleep. The last time I did that this summer, in a deep ditch of anxiety, I dreamt about the word ahimsa all night. I was profoundly touched when I discovered the meaning of what I got back. And last weekend was the same thing, a word rung out to me all night, again a word I didn't really know. The word (except I am not even sure it is a word) was non-efforting. I mulled it over the last two days and came to my own conclusions about its wisdom and then I did what we like to do in the modern world... I googled it. It turns out it is a spiritual term.

Don't get me wrong, I am clear this is not an excuse to give up on life or be lazy. More, I really think efforting has to do with attachment and outcome. Non-efforting, in actuality, means to give energy, commitment, focus and passion to life. It is really simple in a way and really complicated in another. For me, that is an easy nuance to grasp because that is the way I write. I am clear in my writing that I am led, not leading. I am passionate and committed and so focussed but I am not certain of the outcome. There is no outline for the story, just a loose affiliation with the Odyssey and a strong flow.

One website I found states about non-efforting, "So how do you know then if you are meant to do a certain task when it appears to have huge resistance to it? The key is always to watch your inner state of beingness. If there is some resistance to what is being presented, or even denial of it, then this is a sure sign you are in fact heading in the RIGHT direction. And when this direction constantly activates internal frictions, then you can be sure you're revealing a pattern. This synchronicity is a sure sign you're on the path of Right Action...."
In these cases, a key to integrating the lesson and transcending the pattern is as follows...

To watch for the synchronistic pattern continually activating similar aspects of inner tightness; then to work with the energy, not deny it, but to apply oneself with commitment, diligence and resolve. At the same time, to keep surrendering, opening and expanding internally so as to overcome the restriction of our beingness."

Um, okay... All of the information about non-efforting talks about an open hand. And I've noticed that sometimes the body knows things before the mind, so I am hoping that my ritual this year of making a full offering of myself and my practice was a start along this path of non-efforting, of being happily, readily non-resistant to the flow of life. 

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke


As always, I have a lot to learn.

There is a long section in the book about riding the trains. In high school my friend Jay and I came so close to doing it. There is a train track that runs right through my family's farm. We had a good plan. We never quite did it though and it is something that I have always regretted. 

In the book, she rides the rails though. She rides the rails with these characters I call the misfits. Really, they are the Sirens from the Odyssey.  In my book though they are a group of freak show performers with golden hearts who take her in. I have toiled over this section for almost three months, waiting for it to reveal itself. This week was amazing. In three five hour, virtually uninterrupted, writing stretches, I finished the Siren section. Instead of a ship though, she is riding the trains in the 1930s. Much of the hobo culture evolved from this era, people out of work and desperate to travel and find it during the Depression. The culture and the stories are fascinating. I could go on and on about the nicknames and death-defying experiences, the danger, the endless random acts of kindness. I have researched it endlessly and finally the story emerged for me. I could cry I feel so relieved. I bled for this section.

Hobo culture is fascinating. It is a community of outcasts but organized with strict rules and language. They care deeply for one another. They love without judgement.

Here is the code of ethics they decided upon (this is universal for all hoboes):
1 Decide your own life, don’t let another person run or rule you.
2 When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3 Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hoboes.
4 Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but insure employment should you return to that town again.
5 When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6 Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals treatment of other hoboes.
7 When jungling (camping) in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as bad, if not worse than you.
8 Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9 If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10 Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11 When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12 Do not cause problems in a train yard, Another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13 Do not allow other hoboes to molest children, expose to authorities all molesters, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14 Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15 Help your fellow hoboes whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.

It's a fascinating code for many reasons. What I want to focus on, as always, though is the vulnerability and the love... and trust. Theirs is a complex matrix of vulnerability, love and trust and it's what makes the whole thing work. They all agree to offer love and support. It's boils things down to its essence. no belongings just love. 

From the section of my book-
"Like a room full of obstreperous children, Virginia was chasing Coote swinging her bag. They were laughing. Sweet P could see that he was angry with Virginia for dancing with another man. But instead of showing his anger, he teased her. Teasing, she knew, was a potent form of love.

She felt at home with the misfits. She noticed how other people would stare, and while she took umbrage to the rudeness of the judgements of others, it made somehow made her feel more secure. The misfits would never wallow in the scrutiny or unkind words. In many ways, she could see that through their dancing they were more at home in their bodies than the others. Like the hoboes, being outside is what made them the most free. She was intoxicated by the freedom."

They are malformed and outcasts and they teach her to decide her own life, to not let another person run or rule her and to love without restraint or fear of judgement.       

Sweet song that became the anthem of my writing week-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRbKzumSPVw

I woke up with this song running over and over in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e7sccDrC0A

It accompanied this strange dream where all of my freckles and moles became perforations or holes through me. It was so surreal my shadow cast was freckled with all of these points of light. I remember looking up through my arm and I could see little pinpoints of blue sky. 
 

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

-Mother Teresa

paradox- noun
1. a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.
2. a self-contradictory and false proposition.
3. any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature.
4. an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted opinion.

Søren Kierkegaard, for example, writes, in the Philosophical Fragments, that

But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow... This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.[11]

What is interesting to me about the etymology of the word paradox is that its Greek root is paradoxon meaning literally beyond belief. There is no broken down root, just the word itself. Paradoxical thinking must be part of the human condition. I think it is why we are so drawn to puzzles and riddles. 

Love, it seems, is our biggest puzzle. 


To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

~ Woody Allen

It makes sense in that we are caught in this dance of actions, words and understanding. These are our tools.  It seems that e-mail, texting, etc... has only added to the melee. I think that is why with blindness, we often see what's real. Or as the Little Prince teaches, what is most important cannot be seen, it can only be felt with the heart.

Dogs, for instance, have it worked out pretty well. They sniff and strut around and then reach an understanding. Birds, for example, as well, I love those video of birds in their elaborate dance of courtship and love. It's not paradoxical, it just is. 

Here's a video of one of my favorite bird courtship dances-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7QZnwKqopo

Human's are so complex though. I am trying to convey this paradox in my book. My main character is deeply wounded by love. She loves until it hurts over and over again and, in the end, hopefully though I am not there yet, finds more love, an ocean of it, the bigger version. I am hoping both personally and professionally that what Mother Theresa says is true. It certainly resonates with me, like in alchemy love can burn off the impurities to a more refined and potent state of being.

When looking for inspiration, I like to read books that I love. The Little Prince is a book that inspires me.

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” 
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

What an amazing story. I pulled it off of the shelf while thinking about my French teacher from long, long ago. I read it with her a long time ago. It is about an airplane pilot who crashes in the Sahara desert. While he is trying to figure out what to do, he is approached by the little prince, a little blond boy who is from a small planet called Asteroid B-612. The pilot learns that the little prince has left behind three volcanoes and a rose that he loves.


“In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her... But I was too young to know how to love her.” 
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Before reaching Earth, he visited other planets and met some very strange people (adults whom he finds baffling): a king, a conceited man, a drunkard, a lamplighter, a geographer…  On Earth, he speaks to a fox who teaches him that:


"What is essential is invisible to the eye, says the fox."

He wants to return to his planet and his rose, so The Little Prince allows himself to be bitten by a poisonous snake. He feels that his planet is too far away, so he cannot take his "shell". The aviator repairs his plane,  and also leaves the desert. Every time he looks into the sky, he thinks of his dear friend. The Little Prince teaches him about love and human relationships. 

“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...” 
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince


I love The Little Prince because there is nothing extra in it. It is simple and beautiful. I also love it because it is a children's story and an adult story. The illustrations are fascinating. It plays with the idea of life as an illusion and pushes the parameters of imagination. It is both dreamlike and true. Most importantly, it is a lesson about love, which I think all great books should be. Books likes this are some of my favorite teachers. I keep coming back to them again and again.  

Bereft. It has been a hard and long week. Too soon to write about it though, so I will focus on something more familiar.

I haven't had a moment to write this week, but I have had a lot of time to think. One question I am always thinking about is the question of creativity, specifically how to cultivate it and nurture it. I know running, yoga and meditation are all a part of that process for me, but it has been an on-going conversation as to how. I feel like I am getting more clear on the answer.

According to neuroscientists, it's all about quieting the prefrontal cortex- getting your mind out of the way. Creativity, it turns out, is different than intellect and intellect can often interfere with the creative process. It is why free-writing is so helpful, it defies the organized mind. With yoga, I think it is about getting out of your mind and into your body and quieting the analytical mind, letting go. Though I haven't tested this theory, I think reversing habitual motions might be helpful too, in attempt to flip things in such a way that a new perspective surfaces- switching dominant feet and hands for example. Mostly though, like with most things, it is about getting really quiet and noticing and recording what bubbles up. Yoga, running and meditation facilitate that process in a beautiful way. 

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...” 
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

According to his psychodynamic theory, Freud believed, the "real functioning of thought" was presumed to be driven by the unconscious desires, by letting go, we could reveal the true nature of things through the world of dreams and free associations. 

Neurologists have observed that patients with extensive damage to the prefrontal cortex cannot inhibit their stray thoughts and feelings. Neurologists believe that the prefrontal cortex is involved in filtering, or executive control, as in the conductor of an orchestra. Without such control, thoughts and feelings are moved by whatever random waves of brain activity are occurring. 

It is suggested that creative moments may require the prefrontal cortex to be shut down. They have scanned jazz musicians while playing and it has been demonstrated that during those performances that large regions of the prefrontal cortex were deactivated while improvising compared to when they were playing from memory. The part of the brain that was lit up during creative moments (the frontal polar cortex) was the region that is associated with the implementation of higher-order goals or high-order feelings (to use the orchestra metaphor- the sheet music that the orchestra plays from). During creative acts, it may be useful to suppress prefrontal control to some extent and simply be guided by the frontal polar cortex instead and let the stray thoughts and feelings from the rest of the brain rise up and be filtered there instead. The deactivation of prefrontal cortex may allow thoughts to bubble up that otherwise would have been suppressed as irrelevant or inappropriate. 

I have to do some more research about the frontal polar cortex to figure out how to stimulate that while suppressing the prefrontal cortex. That would be the ideal scenario it seems. Also, the prefrontal cortex is the voice of doubt and negative self-thoughts. Less of that would be nice for sure. And maybe I should keep a dream journal. Dreams tell a story. Dreams allow a deeper layer of yourself have a voice for a while.

Asleep or awake, my goal is to get really quiet and close my eyes and try to feel my way around.

“The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.” 
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince