Well I like it. I mean, cute guys, and Liza, and dish–it’s not a cure for AIDS, Jeffrey. But it’s the opposite of AIDS.
–Darius, from Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey
I know that there is more love in the world than anything else because love expands, and fear and hatred and ignorance contract. You should love someone, and you should let someone love you back. It’s the most political act you can make. It’s the only thing that really changes the world.
–Penny Arcade, from Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!
“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”
This quote is attributed to the late actor Ken Hudgins (as I myself just discovered via Google), and I believe that it stands as a universal truth. Certainly, it has been a major guiding principle of my own adult life.
As my regular readers have no doubt noticed, I have faltered greatly in my writing practice this week, as dark moods and deep insecurities had overridden my creative impulses and plunged me into a limbo of non-productivity…
Now, as I mentioned in my previous entry, I understand and acknowledge that, in this binary universe, both ups and downs/highs and lows/happiness and sadness are essential and inevitable in the human journey. What really struck me hard this week though, was the acute shrinking sensation I experienced on such visceral levels: a sensation of my spirit receding, pulling inward like a snail or turtle retreating into its shell; a loss of interest in physical activity (including yoga) or even the prepackaged distractions of reading or watching videos….
A fear. A fear so piercing that it froze me in my tracks. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that this fear was purely based on money and financial anxiety–this week’s payday netted a two-week income which was shockingly and distressingly small (especially after having taken a trip, however tightly budgeted it may have been)–but the waves of doubt and uncertainty just finally pulled me under, at least for a short while.
As the quote from Penny explained, fear contracts. I felt that very acutely this week. Love, creation, ART: these things create heat, they expand the vessel in which they are contained. Fear, and hatred, and ignorance: these things create cold inertia. They stop (or at least interrupt) natural cycles, they slow progress. As much as I have known this as truth for many years, I felt completely submerged in my own process over the course of the majority of this week. Anyone who has ever experienced a bout of depression can understand how easily one’s psyche can be drawn down into The Pit.
Money: why does it have such a hold over us? How is it possible that an imaginary unit of worth can govern and dictate so much of how we live our lives? I try my damndest not to identify with the concepts of poverty and scarcity, and despite humble means and a budgeting strategy which could best be described as “loose,” I typically manage to live pretty comfortably in spite of financial limitations…but there are periodic walls that I hit which feel like a bucket of icy water being thrown over my heretofore-unconscious body. Especially here in SF in the current time, there are reasons to be afraid surrounding us on a constant basis: Survival in this city has been challenging (to say the least) for decades, while real estate costs have escalated to an extreme which is absolute parody in its absurdity, and corporate/political greed seems to be at an all-time high.
Yet still, within the confines of this city plunged into madness, there still survives–by its bootstraps, hanging by a thread–a class of fighters; artists and lovers who are still determined to eke by and celebrate the values of The Summer Of Love. As much as Mammon has tried to erase our influence, we have persisted.
Yesterday after work, I ran into my dear friend (and now, thanks to displacement, my neighbor) Suzan at the grocery store; we’d been exchanging messages for most of the morning and had been hoping to connect at some point in the day, although a mutual girlfriend’s arrival at the airport (coming to town for a wedding) lent an uncertainty to our planning. As serendipity would have it, I ended up accompanying Suzan to SFO to pick up this friend, Kate. I had thought that Kate and I would never have an opportunity to see one another in her whirlwind weekend here, yet there we were, the three of us catching up together in Suzan’s apartment, when a third girlfriend arrived: Alli, who lives down the peninsula and needed a spot in The City to kill time before meeting more of our mutual friends for dinner. We swapped stories; we laughed until we were doubled over; we shared an experience. And when I left Suzan’s place and pedaled off to the next destination of my evening’s commitments, I mused on another quote from the play/movie Jeffrey, which began my post today:
Darling, my darling–have you ever been to a picnic? And someone blows up a balloon, and everyone starts tossing it around? And the balloon drifts and it catches the light, and it’s always just about to touch the ground, but someone always gets there just in time, to tap it back up. That balloon–that’s God. The very best in all of us.
Laughter, friendship, dance, love…these things may not be the solution for my woes. But they are the opposite of my woes. And most of the time, when I allow myself to stand in the present moment instead of fear, they can hold the key to salvation.
Unshakeable trust.
