A STEEP PATH

TO THE LAND OF OXYGEN

"She Walks Away," 2012, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas board, 12" x 16"

My daughter, Petra, is a stunt actor. Her life, perpetually on location, takes her from one part of the world to another, falling from Mongolian racehorses in the eastern Steppes, being tossed from a window in Berlin, or crashing a car on the twisting road where Princess Grace died. Petra is an exceedingly calm person, as I suppose one must be to endure the dangers and rigors of such an occupation. Her calm is such that I always find the sound of her voice reassuring. 

Everywhere she travels, Petra, as a diversion, seeks out native folk tales, She has gathered quite a collection. From eastern Europe have come stories involving incredible transmutations of nature in which, for example, a forest of dying pillar trees is inhabited by runaway children who nurture the trees – and themselves -- back to life. A story from Gambia concerns a tribe of trackers who come upon a supposedly extinct species of gazelle and are taught by them to fly. My favorite is the story of a young girl given by her father to a warring king as a peace offering. The girl, unusually resolute for her tender years, insists that, before she will surrender herself to the king, he must have made for her a wedding gown sewn from a thousand spider webs, specifically the Sicarius Hahni, a rare arachnid prized for the delicacy of its silver-salivated weaving and the deadliness of its venom. The king, wholly smitten by the girl’s perfection of beauty and intelligence, agrees.

I asked Petra to recount that story for me during a difficult time several summers ago: I had spent the previous months preparing to die. It wasn’t that I had a terminal illness or doomed prognosis or complete situational collapse. It was simply that I was debilitatingly overwhelmed with a sense of vacancy and purposelessness, and to remain in a living, breathing body seemed much too much hard work. The thought of death was the only thing that provided me any kind of motivation: before dying, I would have to complete a number of professional projects and put the last of my personal effects in order -- the will, the cremation arrangements, the clearing of my remaining debts.

It’s not that that summer had been without joyful events. A homecoming party for a best friend returning after several years in Afghanistan and a celebration for another friend who’d won a widely coveted appointment. I was surrounded by good cheer in lovely settings filled with food and flowers. Yet I moved through the events as I moved through my work – with momentary respites of gladness subsumed by plodding hopelessness and the heaviest of hearts.

This was clinical depression at its most oppressive, and it was hardly the first in my life. In fact, such episodic sickness had been life long. Since childhood I had been awakening each morning into a fog of despair that would require hours to dissipate. As this particular depression progressed, I was eventually unable to get my mind to focus until well into the afternoon. I was without appetite and could not propel myself into motion, let alone exercise, until late in the day, when the heat had abated and I had smoked some weed. At night, taking refuge in the comfort of darkness, I suffered from what I can only describe as phantom limb pain, my imaginary legs heavy with aching weakness. The message from the subconscious was clear. I did not have the necessary strength to move ahead in my life.

I once tried to describe my condition to a close friend who, with the exception of tonsillitis, has never been sick in her life, let alone dreamed of self-annihilation. She rises every day at dawn, plays a few sets of tennis, wolfs down a hearty breakfast, and then goes off with her husband to kayak until dusk. Sometimes there’s an interjection of yoga or biking or snorkeling into the schedule. My lethargy and numbness are incomprehensible to her. “It’s like a drowning person shrouded in a sodden blanket struggling to swim to the surface,” I labored to explain. “Or clawing your way up a steep path to the land of oxygen knowing it’s a Sisyphean task.”

Throughout the summer I often thought about the artist Mark Rothko’s final paintings: monochromes that bled from a suggested geometry into ethereal softness. Once his paintings finally morphed into canvas-filling studies of black, it was only a matter of time until Rothko killed himself. These paintings are so moving and monumental that a chapel was built (in Houston, part of the de Menil collection) to house them. My thoughts were not of Rothko himself, but of the softness of the images. The seduction of the soft blackness seemed almost irresistible. As did the thought of moving into death. For there I would find myself in the joyous company of all my animals and loved one enfolded within the beauty of the sights and fragrances I’d traveled the world to experience.

I consistently struggled to relieve the condition and extricate myself from the encompassing bleakness, seeking the counsel of all those who were part of my spiritual family, consulting a medical doctor( who changed my antidepressant), and a holistic doctor (who gave me sacro-cranial massage, biochemical analyses, and intense pep talks). A metaphysical healer -- and the mother-of- all-earth-mothers -- consoled me with esoteric understandings and treated me for endocrine and other issues. I restudied the Course in Miracles, a profound training that had rescued me from another depression twenty years earlier. Still the weight on my heart, a feeling of abject futility, continued. An unrelenting sense of meaninglessness oppressed me. My soul felt bruised and my body remained impossibly fatigued. I secretly considered that I might have MS.

One day as I was driving toward my house, a flock of egrets flew across the road in a sudden, beautiful white line about half a block ahead of me. The elegance of the formation, slicing the horizon at my eye level, brought abrupt tears to my eyes. I expected that after six or seven of the slender, long-necked birds had flown across the road, this vision would end. But more and more egrets appeared from the periphery -- serene, unhurried, yet purposeful in flight, a white line of fleeting beauty.  I stopped the car to watch. A few days after this, I was leaving my house at an unusually early hour when I spotted a fox on my lawn, standing stock still and staring at me. I stared back. The foxes that had once populated my neighborhood have, for years, been unseen. A moment later, another fox appeared beside the first, and then a third. I figured they were pups from the same litter – blue/gray, long, like dachshunds on tall legs, and with bushy tails. Simultaneously, they withdrew their gaze from me and disappeared across the road into my neighbor’s mango orchard. Days after this I noticed a climbing cactus plant, high in the crotch of one of my oaks. In the twenty years I’d lived on this property, I’d never seen this cactus bloom, but there, hanging delicately from the plant on the thinnest of were two vivid yellow chrysanthemum-like blossoms. I reveled in their modest show of glory for the two days before they vanished.

Even as my sickness continued, I took great solace from these miracles of nature. I repeatedly promised my dog Andy that I would not abandon him. I made a ritual of watering the garden in the evening when the javelin cry of a neighbor’s peacocks interrupted the fading light. And I reminded myself about how I needed to complete my personal and professional work. In the meantime I waited… for the depression to lift or the next act of nature to arouse me.

The phone call to Petra was a balm. The sound of her voice and the incantation of the folk tale, known as “The Gown of a Thousand Webs,” immediately brought me comfort:

Faced with his betrothed’s resolution, the king orders his subjects to scour the lands for Sicarius Hahni. Every specimen is to be brought to the palace where gardens for their breeding and thread spinning are to be built. Each morning the royal courtiers creep carefully among the flowers and bushes plucking the dew-sparkling webs woven the night before. The wedding gown will require more than 10,000 strands from the one thousand webs, and their seamless weaving together will cost the eyesight of the kingdom’s master textile artists. The king waits restlessly. He has crusades to attend, fortifications to build, taxes to collect, a kingdom to rule. But, without his queen, his powers are incomplete.

Years go by. The fragility of the webs and the complex protocols necessary to protect the web-gatherers from the spiders’ venom makes the accumulation of the silken strands and the assembling of the gown painstakingly slow. At the completion of each element – a sleeve, a lacing, the draping of the skirt – the progress is shown to the young girl who, by now, has become a young woman. She is precise in her regard of every delicate detail. The king, a connoisseur of perfection, respects her eye, but his tolerance is only precariously sustained. Finally, when it appears the gown is at last nearing completion, he urges his bride-to-be to begin the preparations for their wedding celebration. Instead, she insists on the creation of a veil whose length is to exceed that of the gown itself. She wishes to be shrouded from head to toe in ethereal delicacy before her subjugation to the bloody penetration of her wedding night and the violence of childbirth that will ultimately follow.

Years more pass. The gown, long since completed, hangs in the bridal chamber where mists of rose water are sprayed upon it daily to sustain its supple intricacy. The veil, over which no fewer than 630 skilled embroiderers have labored day and night, is lain across a cushioned frame so that not one strand of the exquisite webs can touch the floor until it is draped from the ringlets that will crown the bride’s head.

Barbarians are approaching the gate. The kingdom’s coffers are depleting. The once-loyal subjects of the once-flourishing kingdom are readying for revolt. Still, the king will take no action until he has his bride.

Recognizing that her opportunity for delay, which is to say her salvation, has reached its limit, the bride-to-be at last relents. The wedding ceremony itself will be private, while the reception is to be a spectacle grand and glorious enough to reassure the citizenry of the king’s wealth and to intimidate his enemies with its allusions to power. Most likely, it will bankrupt the treasury.

The wedding day arrives, and the bride is an apparition of beauty so celestial in her confection of silver-salivated threads that even the king grows breathless beholding her. Beneath the veil she has been meticulously coiffed and powdered; beneath the gown she has been perfumed with scents extracted from flowers as delicate as the gown itself. But on her face is a smile that neither the king nor any of his courtiers can quite discern. It is more an expression of conquest than of joy, of completion than initiation. The king grasps its meaning only upon recognizing that the iridescence at her ear lobes emanates not from the jeweled earrings he has given her as a wedding gift, but from two spiders hanging from her soft, pink skin, their legs pulsing like drumming fingers. The king tears through the veil, and the woman, no longer a girl, no longer young, collapses into the folds of the gown and onto the floor. With her last remaining breaths the sparkling webs dissolve, and the spiders, having woven the final silver-salivated threads, scamper away into the palace walls.”

I don’t know what it is exactly about this story that gives me cheer. Perhaps only a depressive could take heart from such a tale. Yet I comprehend in it several lessons: patience, for one. After all, the king, in all his great foolishness and arrogance, was willing to wait as long as needed to attain his idea of perfection. And the girl/woman understood how to wait, to use delay to save her soul, if not her life.

YOUR STORY HOLDS YOUR POWER

The Story is what's left. The Story is the destination. The Story is everything in between. Afterall, we dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct gossip, learn, hate and love by narration.

Humans, as conscious beings, are meant to live conscious lives, aware of our every feeling and response-whether painful or pleasurable, conventional or unconventional, pious or irreverent, constructive or destructive-uninhibited by the proscriptions of culture, religion, personal beliefs, or family values. We feel what we feel. Period. And that is neither good nor bad. How we respond to our feelings is another matter.

To retain or regain awareness of feeling is to develop power. To deny or bury feeling is to diminish power and choice: the choice of whether to act on a feeling or not, and if so, how.

The freedom to be conscious of our negative emotions without acting on them leads to a full emotional life, a fully present life, a healed and healthy life. We cannot be scared, angry, bored, or sad when we are living totally in the present. We are healed when we no longer hate or distrust what we feel.

Radical Writing is a spontaneous approach to writing opens doors to expression and identifies energetic leaks in the spirit and psyche. the process intensifies our abilities to sense how and where our subconscious minds affect our physical bodies. With this awareness, we heal internally and externally.

The novelist Don DeLillo has described writing as, "A form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture, but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

Whereas psychology tends to focus on the questions of "why" and "how," RADICAL WRITING applies the questions of classic storytelling: What happened? Where and when did it happen? Under what circumstances did it happen? It also asks: Where in my body do I harbor the memory? What is my pattern of response? What do I want the picture of my life to look like? What stands in the way of materializing it? Am I willing and ready for that manifestation? Am I willing to take total responsibility for my own power?

Personal power requires far more responsibility than is required to live in unquestioned accordance with cultural, religious, and family training. Therefore, it is one thing to say we desire more power in our lives and quite another to accept the changes that power will inevitably cause. Only we ourselves can determine the weight of history or the measure of responsibility we are willing to bear. At certain times, we simply may not have the strength to endure the pain of a particular recollection or discovery. Honoring our limits is one way of accepting responsibility for our power.

Resistance to acknowledging our own negativity and emotions often comes from our fear of their power. The more intensely we've kept negative thoughts and feelings under control, the more we are likely to fear that their exposure might obliterate our self-control, precipitating unstoppable rage, depression, or mania. We might well fear that our anguish will be unending or our pain will cause suffering to others. We might discover our inner resources to be inadequate-a terrible blow to the ego.

In truth, suppression of negative feelings provides only the illusion of control. When we freely express our thoughts, we relinquish illusion and release our anguish. When we acknowledge our passions and fears, we liberate ourselves from the physical, emotional, and spiritual tyranny of unhealed wounds.

RADICAL WRITING, an online course that turns up the volume on your perception safely, requires only 15-minutes a day and NO writing experience or expertise, not even any ability in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. You simply allow your hands -- not your head -- do the writing. teaches exactly this freedom. We learn that persistence on the path of self-exploration is a form of communion, that our devotion to that path is the art of healing, and that the role of Creator is ours.

THE VISIONARY’S IMPACT

HOW ONE MAN’S VISION REVITALIZED NEW YORK REAL ESTATE
and PROVIDED A PERPETUAL URBAN HIGH

It's almost as if the buildings convened to create a portrait of 20th century architectural form -- brick geometry, perpendicular glass paneling, undulating choruses of banding. Such a view! I took this photo (with my iPhone!) from one of New York City's greatest civic sites, the High Line, the elevated garden walkway linking three Manhattan neighborhoods with acres of open space atop an abandoned rail deck. Would that the visionary who conceived it, Peter Obletz, were still alive to rejoice in its pleasures and success.

Part of the High Line's allure is its physical isolation, carving its way for miles through the urban fabric two to three stories above ground. It is framed mostly by the backs of buildings and billboards, with occasional views opening out to the Hudson or across Manhattan. It has provided Manhattan with a park in the sky (one of only two in the world -- the other being in Paris), pastoral, futuristic, yet accessible to everyone.

Obletz lived in the then-dilapidated neighborhood where the Tenth Avenue train track ran down the middle of the street and, with distressing frequency, ran down pedestrians. (The street was nicknamed Death Avenue.) He began rallying for his reclamation idea nearly 30 years ago, but it was not until 1999 when a not-for-profit group of neighborhood residents, business owners, design professionals, and civic groups formed Friends of the High Line to engage the city's notables in its cause.

The original elevated railway track was built at the turn of the century to serve the warehouses along the West Side. Train traffic soon slowed to a trickle, however, thanks to the familiar death blow of the Depression and the popularity of truck transport. The last train (said to be carrying a load of turkeys on Thanksgiving morning) ran on the High Line in 1980, leaving the artery to rust and grow wild with weeds. Conrail, the railroad's owner, wanted it gone, as did a consortium of local property owners led by one of the area’s largest interests, Edison Parking, and the City. At the height of the battle with Friends of the High Line, Edison Parking launched a propaganda campaign. One flyer read, “”Money doesn’t grow on trees, and last we checked, it isn’t growing in the weeds of the High Line.” And so the High Line languished for decades.

But once the cause became invested with a certain intangible downtown sexiness -- -- a landscaped aerie planted with wildflowers, an urban oasis, a scenic retreat --  the possibilities for the long-neglected piece of industrial detritus began to excite the potential donors needed to fight for its cause. Movers and shakers of the art and architecture worlds, civic powerhouses, and celebrities such as Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick got involved, and the vision began to take root.

Property owners were persuaded by the Department of City Planning to sign over their rights using the tool of allowing the owners to transfer their development rights to surrounding properties. Then parts of West Chelsea were rezoned to allow for new, larger developments.  In fact, the partnership between city planners and High Line advocates was one of the most sincere efforts in recent memory to protect the public interest from an onslaught of commercialization. The final zoning regulations for the area require setbacks to protect some major view corridors; at other points, buildings are allowed to shoot straight up to maintain the sense of compression that is part of the High Line’s charm. The core of several blocks, meanwhile, remain zoned for manufacturing in the hope of maintaining some of the area’s character.

Today, a dozen or more luxury towers and a new branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art have claimed the High Line neighborhood. The Standard Hotel actually straddles the Line. The surrounding neighborhood, too, has been  revitalized, and real estate prices, which have escalated more than 30 percent,  are now among the highest in the city. Because of Obletz' vision and the efforts of those he motivated, even the humblest civic undertaking has now become viewed as a potential gold mine.