Ubercaring

I don’t know why I care so much. I don’t consider it a mark of superior character to care about everything from the war in Afghanistan to my daughter’s problems with her renter and everything in between, to the extent that I could lie awake for two hours in the night thinking about all the things that need to be fixed in the world.

Some people are constitutionally constructed to care more than others. The Ubercarers are often women, fitting into one of those Enneagram categories that describe a set of coping mechanisms we’ve developed in childhood. I’m not really a helper Two or a worrier Six, more an observer Five, but still, I often care more than is useful.

Ubercaring is marked by mulling over things you can’t, or won’t ever, do anything about. And by thinking a lot about other people’s lives and problems. But most of all, you may be an Ubercarer if your mood often sinks to a level that seems to match the state of the world, whether it is the nuclear crisis in Japan or the latest crisis in your nuclear family.

The sinking mood is the curse of Ubercaring. Whatever the situation is, feeling bad about it probably won’t help and may even make things worse. Many well-intentioned people believe they need to feel bad about the world in order to do what is needed but—maybe it’s just me--I have found the opposite is true. Feeling bad paralyzes me. And feeling bad is contagious. It spreads to those around me.

So I look for coping mechanisms to address my own Ubercaring. One of them is Byron Katie’s method, which she calls The Work, described first and best in her book Loving What Is. I won’t go into it except to say it is Buddhist detachment made everyday-practical, just the thing a Practical Mystic might recommend.  It’s mainly a cure for judging and blaming others, but it’s also an antidote to Ubercaring.

My other antidotes to Ubercaring have to do with shifting out of thought and into feeling, and letting the bad feelings dissipate. For instance:

A beauty soak. I am sitting on my porch at dawn, in the presence of trees. A rooster crows, the wood thrush trills. Lalo-cat hovers nearby. Rather than wishing for the world to shift and change to suit what I think should happen, I bask in the beauty that is present. I absorb it. I see it. I become it.

A hot bath often works the same way. Or a swim in a cold lake. A walk down a gravel road. A bike ride over the hills. (No wonder my sprained ankle is making me grouchy. It has immobilized me for a few days.)

But sometimes I have to let the bad feelings rise to the surface first. Cry. Or rage. It's ok, they are just feelings.

Meditation is good if I am truly able to stop my thoughts. Breathing, opening myself. Prayer, but not wish-prayers. Prayer as waiting for what comes.

Sometimes, after the mulling worries have stopped and the feelings have shifted, solutions and ideas rise to the surface. Things I can do, things I can try. Sometimes they don’t. But at least I move back into the world knowing that I am much less likely to make things worse.

Misery v. wellbeing

The security line at the airport is longer than I have seen it since the early post-9/11 days. And yet everybody seems calm and patient, no restless neck-craning to see how far we have to go, no line-budging. We’ve gotten used to the routine, even when it’s worse than usual. Long lines no longer  push people into instant anxiety and frustration.

There is a fine line between misery and wellbeing and we cross it numerous times in a day, no matter what our circumstances. I woke this morning in misery. I expected to sleep till 6:30 or 7 but a previous occupant of the guest room where we were staying had set the alarm for 5:30. Vic jumped up and squelched Morning Edition but 10 minutes later the news was back on. And 10 minutes after that. It was a sophisticated new clock radio and the settings were not easy to figure out, especially for the sleep-deprived. I finally got up at 6, showered, dressed and then sat, unable to move. Miserable.

We had spent much of the previous evening at a sports bar, watching the Bulls v. Heat in game 4. This was a first for me, watching a whole game at a sports bar, but there really was nowhere else to watch the game since we were away from home.

At first it was fun, the beer, the greasy fries, the noise of the fans around us. The Bulls were missing their outside shots and getting the short end of the officiating but still it was close, the lead would spurt in one direction and then the other.

After a while, though, the beer, the greasy fries, the noise, and the missed shots made me absolutely miserable. I wanted to get out of there but I was trapped by my own need to see the outcome. The 4^th quarter was l-o-o-ong. And ended in another missed shot and a tie. How could we sit through another 15 minutes of this?

The overtime began with more missed shots. Miami was up by three. Vic and I looked at each other. “Shall we leave?” Vic asked. I breathed a sigh of relief and we escaped. Minutes later we were in our friend’s lovely guest room and went immediately to sleep. (The Bulls, indeed, lost.)

This morning the misery of waking too early disappeared after three sips of a Vente Awake tea (two bags). I’ve been luxuriating in wellbeing ever since. On the way to the airport we watched someone else’s morning get ruined—a left turn across two lanes became a fender-bender with a car coming too fast in the apparently empty second lane.

The four-year-old boy ahead of us in the security line handles the wait with aplomb. A 3-month-old baby rubs his eyes and begins squawking, crossing the line from wellbeing to misery. I come through the scanner and panic for a moment. Have I lost my husband? He was right behind me! 

We find each other and all is well again. A different line had swallowed him and spit him out at another exit.

I think of the millions of people in the world who live in apparent abject misery most of the time but still find moments of wellbeing. May we be grateful for the wellbeing that is accessible to us and help others find their way across the line.

Missions accomplished

At 9 am I sent an email to the techies and designer with whom I’ve been working, saying I thought we were ready to go live with the new website, www.cumulativeimpacts.org

I don’t normally do websites, but this one has been my baby from the beginning. When did I start working on it? I was sketching out ideas for it in August, thinking in September about the kind of specialized search system it would need, muddling through with the rest of the staff the whole chaotic, sprawling notion of “cumulative impacts” that we were trying to get under some kind of conceptual control. Tried things that didn’t work, found more people to help, entered data, more data, and more and more. Tested and re-tested, tweaked, posted.

So it’s been about 9 months from conception to completion, appropriately. And it’s not a static site but will continue to grow. You could say it is a baby ready to breathe in the world and grow. I haven’t really had any baby dreams but if I had I would know what they were about.

I am alone. There is no one with whom I can even clink mugs. It is too early to call anybody.

This is left-brained work. As a practical mystic, I know that I need a balance of left- and right-brained projects. But the left-brained stuff exhausts me. Yesterday late afternoon I found my head just hanging low. I went for a bike ride but it was difficult, my knees protested, my butt was tender, no extra energy available from my spirit. Everything felt like work.

Recreation yesterday was finishing the laundry from the weekend, the last of the sheets and towels used by eight houseguests. I can’t do it all in a day because I air-dry stuff on three drying racks. The weather has improved recently and I can get two batches done in a day. It’s a satisfying production line. The towels dry rough. The sheets catch all the dead tree blossoms and sometimes a bit of bird poop but everything also picks up the Essence of Outside. My linen closets reek of the woods.

I got an email from someone at The Mennonite asking who had taken a certain photo I sent so I guess they are publishing the article I wrote on the Congo Cloth Connection in preparation for the big Congo Cloth Market we are holding at the Mennonite Church USA convention in July, in Pittsburgh. Check that one off.

More emails about the Congolese guests who are coming several weeks before the convention. I agreed to pick them up in Chicago in mid-June and, several weeks later, take them with us to Pittsburgh. Meanwhile they will be passed around to other hosts in Michiana. (I smile at that term but it’s descriptive. There really is an entity, a territory, a culture that bridges northern Indiana and southern Michigan.)

Vic doesn’t know about all of this yet. Our French will get a much-needed workout. Nina calls those of us working on the project the Fellowship of the Cloth.

Just got an email from Michael, the main website techy. “OK I’ll make it live …" You could read "live" as an adjective or a verb. I like the verb sense. May my new website live. 

Later that day

Read the previous entry before you read this one.

Something about the way I wrote about the first night of the dream retreat makes it sound like entertainment. That night was, in fact, sort of entertaining, intriguing, relatively gentle, full of beauty. Above all, we felt Divine presence.

The second night, however, was downright rigorous. The Dreamgiver rather put us through the mill, asked things of us.

Several women reported that they dreamed so much they didn’t have time to sleep. Things happened in the night that interrupted but didn’t stop the dreams. Some had trouble going to sleep but the images began before they fell asleep completely. Anger flared in the dreams, hard truths were exposed. Joy, nakedness, circuses, high school, weddings, celebrations, cemeteries. Some dreams skirted the edge of death. Dead parents showed up.

I slept well the second night with no remembered dreams but now at the end of it, with everyone gone, I am tired, and not just because I’ve scurried around hosting and arranging and cooking. I feel like so much work has gone on--difficult, demanding spiritual, psychological, and communal work. It was a dream workout. Some left invigorated, some left calmed, some were downright exhausted. We sealed and smoothed the energy around the group before we left.

I don’t have the energy yet to clean up the remnants of our final feast—a thrown-together brunch that reflected the wildness and flavor clashes of the dreams: a rich, custardy puffed-apple pancake with maple syrup; one pasta with garlic mustard pesto and another with woods nettles and asparagus; leftover quinoa salad; sweet spiced tea.

But here is the thing. The dreams sharpened our perception of who we are, what our current spiritual tasks may be, and who we can become in the world, for the world, both as individuals and in community and alliance. There is so much work to be done. Women of spirit are needed to show alternative ways, to be different kinds of leaders. We are needed for healing and cleansing and repairing and creating, for generating life, for stopping destruction. Not that these are callings exclusive to women, but women must rise to the challenge in these times as never before. Hard times may be just ahead and hard times may have already begun.

Here is a dream image: Women are standing on a kitchen island. One is scrubbing out a stain on the countertop. The stain has political meanings and origins. The women have put water on the stain to soak it. They are working very hard. It takes time and it is almost impossible to remove the stain but it is slowly being erased. There is just enough progress that they can’t let it go. They have to keep on scrubbing.

Women know how to do this kind of work.

Dream retreat

I am in the middle of a dream retreat. It is early in the morning and I am awake but the others are still dreaming. I do not remember my dreams except the presence of a dear friend in them.

This morning some dreams will be reported in great detail, some will be elusive images, and some will leave no trace in the memory but what will happen is this: the dreams will speak to each other and they will speak to us. We will be informed, entertained, instructed. Common themes will emerge in our dreams and we will be found in each other’s dreams. We will dream for each other. The images will unfold, reveal themselves as clever, compact stories in themselves. The detailed dramas will have surprising and unsurprising points to make

Already we have had one night of dreaming and this has happened. I have led this kind of retreat several times and it has always happened. The Dreamgiver is reliable. Ask together and you shall receive.

I only do this because of long experience and observation. When people gather in one place, things happen in their dreams. You don’t know this, of course, unless you report your dreams to each other. The thing to do is to start speaking of your dreams.

Years ago I began writing to a close friend who had moved away. Our correspondence had the immediacy of email and the detail of letters. We continued a practice we had started in person, talking about our dreams. After a few months of correspondence the letters became almost entirely about dreams because that is where the drama of our lives was playing out. And our dreams became intertwined, instructive and descriptive not only to us as individuals but to each other and then to the church community of which we were a part. And who knows, perhaps even to the world.

I have tried to write a book about this but the story is as elusive as a dream. I can’t quite do it justice. Meanwhile, however, it continues in many forms, not only with this friend but with other communities and individuals to whom we are connected. Powerful dreaming has been discovered, uncovered, and prompted in some way by our dream partnership and the way we have woven it into our lives and experience. But I wouldn’t say the two of us have caused anything to happen. Rather, we have tapped into something.

See, it’s elusive. It’s hard to describe. I can’t begin, in my favorite 500-word form, to do it justice.

But my current chapter in the story includes these dream retreats that I now offer to groups of trusted friends. (Trust is important because the boundaries between people are permeable when you dream together.)

On the first night of this retreat we requested the presence of the feminine Divine and she came, believe me, she came. One by one my friends are now waking up and we prepare to break the silence of the night with a report of the second installment of our dreams.

The single image I retained from my dreams of the first night says it all: it was of a curtain of snow, with points here and there as if beings on the other side were trying to poke through.

The veil is thin. The Divine tries to get through. Dreams, when our defenses and boundaries are down, offer access.

War dreams

I dream of seeing an article I wrote years ago for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reprinted in a bland church magazine. (I really worked there, I didn’t write an article like this.) It is accompanied by black-and-white photos. It is about war and Russia. Everything is grayed, faded—the typeface, the photos. The clearest, most dramatic, least faded photo is of soldiers’ legs and feet, in rough boots. 

The dream wakes me at 4 30 and I can't get back to sleep. I come downstairs and make tea, read the online NYTimes. I come across this article: "Face that Screamed War's Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later." It is about an Iraqi girl who was photographed in 2007 as an agonized 5-year-old after her parents had been shot by American soldiers. She was seeing the photo for the first time at age 12. 


That event was not the end of her suffering. Her brother was killed in an attack on the house 3 years later. She is no longer in school. She is beautiful and sad now in her long red dress.

 

This photo was not as widely published as the photo of the napalm-drenched child in Vietnam. At least I never saw it. The photographer who took the iconic picture was dis-embedded, banned from the unit he’d been covering after the picture was published. He was recently killed on the front lines in Libya.

I wonder about my dream, the faded gray of my passion against war, my passion to understand it, to understand Russia--the enemy--juxtaposed to the full-color terror of a young orphan. Her terror has faded, too, sunk to depression, an inability to focus on school though she vaguely wishes to become a doctor someday. She now dreams, she says, of her dead mother, father, brother.

Jon Stewart went serious for a few minutes the other night and said yes we should see the photos of the dead Bin Laden, but only if we also were allowed to see photos of all the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, our own and the others. We are under a shameful censorship.

If we had seen, would we have put up with these wars for ten years???? (I refrain from inserting obscenities.)

I have no wisdom to offer, nothing to say, really.

The leaves unfold in the spring woods. Is that a wood duck I see perched on a tree trunk? A pair visits every spring, looking for a nesting place. Every spring they realize that there is no water nearby, so, despite the lovely holes in some tall trees, this is not prime wood duck real estate.

Life goes on but death goes on, too, at our collective hands. I am sad. I am angry. My anger is gray and it will fade. I don’t know what to do. I pray.