STREET SKILLS

Hanging out in a folder I rarely visit, I happened to click on this.  I'll call it:

STREET SKILLS

I’m standing on the balcony horking up a good dollop of phlegm, snorting up my nose what I can gather, then hacking whatever’s in my throat, combining the mixture in my mouth and stirring it with some saliva into a gelatinous glob.  I gaze into the air beyond the railing, aim at a 45⁰ angle to counter the affects of gravity ... and I spit.

It’s a good shot … out about twenty feet, then continues its parabolic trajectory for another ten before landing on a dandelion… dripping… proud … a good spit.  An excellent spit.

Then I hear a high pitched snort next to me and there’s my four year old imitating me, her mouth open to an exaggerated gaping maw, making cackling sounds in her throat, her nose scrunched up, a twinkle in her eye.

“Go for it,” I say.  “Give it a spit over the side.”  She looks and spits, a miniscule whitish sliver  quickly dissipates into a gentle spray that disappears before it reaches the ground.  I need to teach her how to spit.

I remember my youth, some sixty years ago and Billy Smith who could spit a good three feet further than anyone on the block, teaching us the finer points of street spitting.  He would form his tongue into a tunnel, thus creating extra thrust the way a rifle barrel directs the expanding gas of an exploding bullet.

We’d draw a line with chalk on the macadam and edge our toe up to it like a basketball player at the foul line.  We’d grunt and hork and snort and bring all the phlegm we could muster into play, gather it, coddle it up and cup it in our tongue, take a breath and blow.  The pressure formed by the conjunction of tongue and lips would hold it for an instant and then let the missile go with a 'fathoosh'.  The mass of gelatine would sail into the still autumn air, soar beyond the manhole cover, and land in a skipping splash on the street.

We’d mark it.  We’d comment on it.  Then call the next contestant to the line.

Spitting on East 29th Street, Brooklyn was an art.  I’m grateful I can live in the country, in a house with a balcony overlooking a garden that accepts my bodily fluids without disdain, and a granddaughter to carry on the tradition.

You Lucky

This was back in the eighties.  I was living in the basement of a house rented by my friend Rica... throw rugs scattered on the cement floor, books in boxes, the TV perched on a milk crate.  One morning, half awake snuggled in my futon on the floor, I heard an upstairs toilet flush.  Presently an offensive smell assaulted my nose and water began to rise from the drain in the floor... not just water... sewage.  I called to Rica as I pulled rugs away from the edges of the effluent which crept rapidly like a tide on a flood plain.  Frantically we dragged boxes away from the flow, threw the futon over a chair, lifted clothes onto the stairs.  By the time the level reached a stasis there was a fetid pond some ten feet across and three inches deep.  I sat at the top of the stairs holding my nose, and wept.

The plumbers arrived in thick pants and rubber boots.  They carried long poles with flat disks on the end.  One plumber attacked the sewer on the street while the other waded into my basement swamp, pulled the drain cover, yelled to his partner, and  commenced to pound his disk-pole into the drain with the passion of a boy in a mud puddle, making waves and spraying the room with brownish droplets and little sludge balls.  I ran down and pulled what stuff I could as far from the advancing swell as possible. 

Eventually there was a yell from the plumber on the street, and the evil fluid sank back into the hole from which it came. 

As I looked gloomily around my ravaged room the way a despondent general might survey the stinking aftermath of a battle won at great cost, the plumber ... and here’s the point of the story ... the plumber said, “You lucky.” 

I’m lucky? 

“You lucky.  If it hadn’t come unplugged we’d have had to dig a big hole in your front yard.  Very expensive.  You lucky.”

That was some twenty years ago.  Every once in a while I run into Rica, we look at each other and say, “You lucky.”  We remember that disaster, and the day that followed, in rubber gloves and boots, mopping, sponging, filling garbage bags, looking at each other and saying, “You lucky.”  You know  what.  We didn’t feel lucky.  We felt... well... we felt like the stuff we were cleaning up.

On that day I vowed never to rob someone of their well-earned misery, never to tell someone with a cast on their arm they were lucky they didn’t break their neck. ... never to tell someone groaning and sweating with the flu it could be pneumonia... never to tell someone who opens the fridge and all there is is a week-old Hawaiian Pizza that people are starving in China.  Never to tell someone whose house burned down to look on the bright side.  

REVISITING TRANSFERENCE

REVISITING TRANSFERENCE

My mother who taught kindergarten was sitting with a friend in Dubrow’s cafeteria (Brooklyn) when a pupil with his family came in.  The five-year-old ran over.  “You eat?” he asked.  Perhaps he thought she just walked into the coat closet and hung herself up at the end of the school day.

That’s transference: attributing inflated or unrealistic attributes to someone, usually one in a position of perceived authority.

Workshop participants create inflated beliefs about the leaders.  Peter Rengel, hai facilitator, once called Diana and me the ‘mom and pop’ of the Ontario community.  Yes, we were seen that way.  But the truth is we were not the ‘mom and pop’, just folks like you, doing our job.

And now that we have left HAI leadership, has the transference toward us diminished?  I know from some of my interactions that some still see us as the ‘mom and pop’, albeit estranged. 

As a well-known entertainer for most of my life, I was the constant recipient of transference, and hated it.  My fans meeting me on the street treated me as if I really was that wild guy who loved to play crazy instruments.  To me those instruments were just the tools of my job.  I left them on the stage in the way anyone leaves their tools at work.  But people saw the instruments, the stage … and not me.

Transference and my relationship to it played a significant role in my being fired.  As a HAI producer I pretty much ignored transference, denied it until it punched me in the face when, as a participant at a workshop, I shared intimacy with another participant, who later claimed she had been taken advantage of because I abused my power as a producer.  HAI’S position was despite that I was a participant in that workshop, since I was a producer, I was responsible for the other’s transference. 

I learned my lesson from that incident and took on how people might transfer theri pictures on to me, but it was too late.  Not long after, minor incidents over the past ten years were apparently collected and reported, and in the present culture of Me Too, HAI felt it safer to fire me than support me. 

HAI pays obeisance to transference.  Its policies and some of the subtle ways HAI speaks into the workshop room support it; for example, at the end of the L1 when facilitators say how participants may have fallen in love with a team member, as if there is something special about us and not simply people like anyone else, who have taken some training to help make things run smoothly.

During each workshop, I would stand up at large group share, talk how powerful it was for me to see those sitting before me whom I had affected, who were here because I led their mini, or shared personal questions.  In one way, it helped solidify the value of their path and how HAI has impacted their growth, but it was also a way of aggrandizing myself to them.  I recognize now that associating my impact with their growth contributes to their transference.  They saw me as a little bit bigger than before.  I stopped doing that when I got that it didn’t serve me.

 Stan Dale insisted we see him as the ordinary person he was.  Once, at a workshop a participant kissed his feet.  He accepted that and immediately bowed to kiss his.  Transference was Stan’s enemy.  He recognized it as the fundamental power of cults, which herds folks into obedience and robs them of choice.

I believe there are many ways in which, without thinking, HAI pays obeisance to the transference god.  And I would like us to take notice.

Recently I attended an ISTA (International School of Temple Arts) training.  There, my attitudes toward transference were validated.  It was spoken into the room and identified as something we all do and are personally responsible for.  I was invited to have whatever pictures and beliefs I wished about the facilitators -- and -- they would not take them on.  My beliefs belong to me.  Furthermore, the relationships among the team, facilitators, and participants were brought onto the same level.  We were all in this together.     

My week-long training at ISTA was a very powerful experience for me, this issue of transference being only part.  I will have more to say about it in the near future.  I highly recommend ISTA to anyone on a path of growth, and am happy to talk about my experience if you wish to get in touch.

I felt with some sadness that if HAI had the same attitude toward transference, I would still be producing and leading Mini workshops.

When All of You Have Passed

When all of you have passed, you’ll be sitting around, or floating around, or whatever it is one does after one passes, and someone will ask, “Hey, where’s Nagler?”  And you’ll say, “He didn’t pass.”

“What, he failed?”

No, he just didn’t pass.  He… I’ll spell it.  He D-I-E-D.”

“What?”

“He didn’t pass.  He doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Are you kidding?  Can you do that?”

“Apparently.”

 “Well why the hell did he do that?”

“Nagler didn’t believe in passing.  He believed in … you know … the “D” word.”

“He believed in dea…?”

“SHUSH!!  Don’t say that word.  I’m told if you say the… you know… the “D” word enough times it will happen to you.”

“Really?  Come on.”

“Just like Nagler.  He… he didn’t pass.”

 

“That’s friggin stupid.  Why would you want to… you know… when you could pass like everyone else?”

“I’ll miss him.”

“Me too.  What is he, just like atoms in the Universe now?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t want to think about it.  Hey, what do you want to do tonight?”

“Night?”

“Night… day… whatever it is here in this place of transition.  It’s just an expression.  What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.  What do you want to do?”

“We could go down to the Tomato Ballroom.”

“You wanna?”

“I don’t know.  You wanna?”

When I was young they didn't used to say 'cancer'. They said 'C'. It was a way to hold off the fear. I've been taking workshops that suggest it's OK to welcome fear. "Hello fear". And when the fear goes to say goodbye to it. Some of that fear is just energy, like the fear at the top of a roller coaster. Some of it can be transformed to Feel Everything And Rejoice. And some can be F**K Everything And Run. But whichever, it's a real emotion and I'd rather feel it than 'pass' on it. My two cents. As I come closer to it I become less often afraid to die.

Summer Storm

A brilliant lightning strike just across the river made me scrunch up my face at the impending clap which exploded a second and a half later.  I started to breathe again, marveling from the dry safety of the porch at the torrent which descended upon the yard, the trees bending against sheets of water and wind like soldiers forbidden to abandon their posts in a storm.

Earlier today in the muggy morning warmth I’d slipped out of bed and strolled naked to the shower in the woods – a portable hot-water-on-demand affair Ishwar had created some years before among the cedars south of the house.  If you walk at a certain pace the deer flies can keep up but have trouble landing.  And then I’m protected within the force-field of the warm spray.  Afterward I alternate drying off with whipping the towel about like a horse’s tail, imagining I’m a ninja holding the insects at bay.

Now I’m at the kitchen table listening to the receding thunder and peering out at the now more civilized downpour which creates a curtain descending from the roof, reminding me of that tunnel where you can witness The Falls from the inside.   

It is Summer, and the green surrounding the house has lost the fresh brilliance of Spring, still lush but beginning its slow progression to dullness until the burst of fall colour like a firework whose flash heralds the barren sleep of snowy winter.

I muse that perhaps it is witnessing the perennial rebirth of nature that leads to the foolish belief the same will happen to us.  But I, with only one life to lead, feel conflicted.  Part of me wants to break out, explore, find new adventures in other realms.  But I am seduced and tethered by this beauty; and fear that none who leave Shangri La can ever find their way back.

The Hummingbird

The Hummingbird.

The wire that hangs the hummingbird feeder broke. I found some string to hang it back up. Tied one end to the feeder and as I am tying the other to the hook, I hear the loud humming and freeze. He eyes me, flies from my left side to the right, and then around to my back. I feel him staring at my back with wings buzzing and tiny little, singular chirps. Peeps really. Then he floats to the feeder and decides to do it. Drinks and peeps, 10 inches from my face as I stand frozen, my arms above my head.  I see a brilliant green back and a ruby red throat. I see the grass below him, shaded by the blur of his wings. I see dark brows that make his eyes look menacing. He takes his time.  After 30 seconds of drinking he's done and whirs away. I finish tying the feeder.

I remember one hot afternoon several decades ago living in a primitive log house in the Ottawa Valley. I stepped out the back and headed to the outhouse. Along the fifty foot path, bordered with plum blossoms, there were bees and wasps and mosquitoes and black flies. But then I heard a buzzing so loud it had to be the father of all bees, speeding right for me. I fell to the ground fearing the sting to end all stings. The hummingbird passed me by, ignoring my curled body as he swooped to the plum blossoms. I picked myself up and dusted myself off, grateful there was no one to witness my embarrassment.

E

Orange Cat

I'm proselytizing.  You don't have to listen.

When a train stops at a station we don't usually say it has passed from motion to motionless.  We don't tend to think of stopping as a transition.

What things stop?  A song.  I might say the song stopped, or the song was over, but I don't generally say the song passed.

A bullet entering a cat's skull eventually stops.  We don't say the bullet passed.  When the beating of the cat's heart stops… it stops.  It doesn't pass because there's nothing for it to pass to.  Actions don't pass into inaction, they simply stop acting.

And so when the cat's heart stopped, when his consciousness stopped, his consideration for his sister, his insistent desire to be petted, his creature presence as a member of this family stopped, I don't say he passed.  I say he died.  He stopped being.

What did pass?  My dread passed to grief.  The dread of what I was about to do, the dread of how his life would stop passed to a state I can only describe as 'out of heart' -- when I picked up the rifle like an automaton and told myself, "Do it."  The one shot was enough but as I'd planned I fired a second time according to a script, that, once set in motion, I couldn't stop.  But with that, the script ended and my feelings flooded back in overwhelming shock.  The shock at having so suddenly lost a dear friend, a brother.  I sat and put my head in my hands.  And the shock passed into sobs of grief.

I returned to the cat's body.  My knowledge that this cat had died, had not passed but stopped, did not keep me from resting my hand on his stomach and saying goodbye as if there was a cat to say goodbye to, as if it was the same cat who, every time I let him in would mrrow with closed mouth and I would say, "You're welcome."

Yes that cat.  That cat is dead.  

When will my grief pass into a wistful regret, a poignant memory?  Or perhaps it will transform into a cold resentment at the finality of death.  Or perhaps there will always be a touch of grief until I stop.