The Silence behind the Noise

I found myself in an apartment full of French people getting ready for dinner. I had been graciously invited to join the dinner party by the host who was a friend of a friend. I entered the apartment dressed in my fanciest dress, wearing cute shoes (that i had put on just moments before going into the building having walked miles in my pumas to get there.) The wine was free flowing, appetizers served and i struck up an conversation with an actor which proved to be a good choice. His elocution was superb. He spoke slowly and paused for theatrical effect (which allowed me to catch up with the conversation...merci mon Dieu) and i felt like a rock star as i followed the conversation, made appropriate comments, asked questions and generally had a complete conversation. And then we sat down to dinner.

The hosts had conceived the guest list with careful precision: a commedienne (tres connu--famous) along with the actor, two high-end interior architects, a musician who wrote scores for films, his wife the judge (and also the host) and a Polish woman who just enjoyed life or so i was told. With this cast of characters, the dinner conversation was lively, convivial and changing faster than the cars navigating the Etoile (the famous round-about known to test the most harden driver's nerves). I could barely follow a thing and by the time the main course arrived and two glasses of wine had been drunk. Well let's just say the French just turned into gobble-di-gook.

I looked around the table and became acutely aware of how each person was interacting with each other and the group. I began to notice a non-verbal conversation that was nearly as loud as the oral one. The joy and pleasure i received in becoming aware of this non-verbal communication was immense. The next day i began to reflect on that evening.

When we understand a language, our attention gets hooked by certain words and often by habit we have automatic responses. Furthermore we often have a need to voice our opinions or prove ourselves right. But when you take away the words, the automatic hooks, you are left with a pure communication, a heart to heart connection so to speak. I believe that one of the main reasons we "talk" is so that we can connect with others. It is so interesting to see this connection without words, that is to connect in the silence behind the words. That silence is ever present and sometimes words rather than facilitating the connection in silence distract us from fully feeling the deep connection between us all. But once you are aware of that silence it is difficult not to go there because it just feels really, really good. Connecting in silence with others and ultimately with ourselves is a delicious treat. Really, the best dessert.

Walking through Death

I deliberately walk through the cemetery every morning on my way to the studio, carrying my art supplies and giant portfolio. No one is usually there except for the occasional maintenance person. The Montparnasse cemetery is big at least according to my standards. There are paved streets and dirt paths throughout, with tons (literally) of marble funerary markers from classic temples to modern sculptures. Founded in the 17th century when some lord was forced to relinquish his lands, expanded in the 19th century and still with the occasional available plot, the cemetery occupies a big chunk of valuable Paris real estate.

The trees that line the streets are big, but there is space between the streets so there are expansive skyline vistas in all directions. It is calm and quiet. Why wouldn't you walk through here on your way to anywhere near? Maybe people don't generally like walking through places where lots of dead people are deposited. For me it is a great reminder of the circle of life. Dates on headstones indicate children as young as 7 and adults as old as 102 are buried here. Lots of people die. In fact we all gonna die. For some reason this comforting to me. I will eventually join the legions of people that have died just as i joined the legions of people that were born. The little me isn't quite so important. Life continues on and on.

And if i'm not so important, then i am free to live big without expectations of who i am supposed to be, or what important task i am supposed to accomplish or even figure out who i am. And what emerges unhindered is this beautiful unique expression of life, in my case, called Kelsey. I adore watching her tramp through life, getting scared, taking chances, experiencing the ecstasy available in everyday activities. I am afforded daily joy and adventure as i never know the twists and turns that Life has mapped out for this particular life form on this particular day. My job is to say yes to Life. Yes to Life on its terms, not mine. So i have formed a covenant with Life. Life is the leader and the little me is the follower. No matter what i am experiencing i know that Life is my partner. Even if is is scary, I say yes. Even if it seems bizarre or irrational i say yes. And the result has been a life beyond my imagination. (Well duh...my imagination, ie the little me, is pretty puny in comparison the imagination of the force that created Life. A much better navigator!)

So i leave the cemetery, having reconfirmed my commitment to say yes and head into the studio where while creating i say yes to the scary strokes, yes to the bizarre ideas (crumple charcoal on paper and draw with your foot while looking at the model...it didn't work so well) yes to the irrational and at the end of every day i come away having spent hours in communion and sometimes i get the additional bonus of a product that rocks.

Making Change

You never know where you are going to find childlike freedom. I walked into the homeopathic pharmacy looking for some herbs and walked out with elation. Europeans take their homeopathic, i.e. natural, remedies quite seriously. The salespeople are dressed in white coats, stand behind tall counters and wear formidable expressions. I waited in line and approached the counter with my pre-practiced spiel. It mostly worked because the woman came back with exactly what i needed. She told me the price, "huit, quatre-vingt euros." (8,80 euros).

Lately I have been accumulating quite a bit of change because buying things goes something like this: somebody tells me the price of something, i usually understand the first number or two, i quickly round up, grab a bill that will cover the cost, accept the change and throw it into the bottomless depths of my purse. And everyday i make a dozen purchases, a coffee, a baguette, veges at the market, oops more veges across the street, metro tickets, drawing supplies. Well you get the idea. I accumulate a whole lotta change.

My purse isn't so bottomless and change gets heavy, so here was my opportunity to go to the next level in paying for things and make the exact change. I tossed down a 10 euro note and then began carefully counting out the change in 1,2 and 5 centime increments. The saleswoman looked incredulously at me. Quel horreur! I don't think she believed that i was going to count out all of that change. In no time at all, I got to 24, exclaimed "Viola", beamed a proud mother-of-the accomplished-student smile and gave the exact change to her. "Mais Madam, j'ai dit quatre-vingt centimes." You see in French the word for 80 is 4-20s and instead of 4-20s i heard 24. Now it was my turn to think "quel horreur!" No more dinking around, i grabbed a 50, 5 and 1 centime piece, completed my trifecta and handed her the correct change this time. I smiled appreciatively at the clerk. She beamed back the kind of smile that is reserved for special needs children. I laughed and tossed my purchase in my bag.

Oh, to be a child again. It is so much fun to try things, make mistakes and learn something. I think this is one of the great joys of being a child and i think this is one of the great joys of being in Paris. There are plenty of mistakes to be made.

Re-committing to Natural Rhythm

First of all, I lied. The next blog, i.e. this blog, is not about how the Unmanifest experiences itself through the manifest forms, i.e. humans (we are so self-centered that if honest most people will admit they are concerned primarily with themselves first and all others second AND this is okay) but rather today's blog is picking up where i left off when i was in Paris because now i am back in Paris again.

After being en route for nine days the traveling endorphins finally wore off. I slept until 9AM and spent the next six hours, eating, internetting, studying French, napping, eating, napping again. Oh joy!

The first six days were spent in London trying to settle Mari into her new home as she is attending Central School of Speech and Drama to study theater. After finding her house, meeting her housemates and noting everything she didn't have (Mom, i thought i should buy a toothbrush here...Really?) we carefully made our plan of shopping attack only to be foiled by a transportation strike the next day. Instead we quickly regrouped and decided to "go green and buy local" (i.e. any shop within walking distance to the hotel) and carried back armloads of blankets, towels, lamps, a closet and yes even a toothbrush. After three days at the hotel, we called a taxi; the hotel plied us with gratuitous good bye champagne and we enlisted no fewer than 4 hotel employees to carefully pack the moving van, oops, i mean taxi. Luckily the driver spoke English, no small feat in London these days, and we seemed to amuse him (thank you champagne.) He deposited us at Mari's new home, a grand old house (with emphasis on old not grand). Mari promptly departed for the obligatory pub crawl and i stayed home to put together her closet and see if i could possibly create a nest for her in the 7 x 9 monk's cell of a bedroom. The next day we spent 7 hours walking, undergrounding, walking and bussing it to IKEA, shopping, arranging for home delivery and in reverse, busing, walking undergrounding and walking home. Still the endorphins were pumping. Dinner with all of her roommates, the visiting parental unit (me) obligatorily picking up the tab for all and then going home to pack for the impending journey the next day. IKEA arrived as we were walking out the door for the underground. Mari was left with cartons of furniture to put together with all of those knuckle busting Allen wrenches and millions of tiny small screws, bolts and washers to sort. She won't have internet for another week so i cross my fingers that she is okay, that she painted her room and that she found a place for her toothbrush. I boarded the Eurostar (the direct London-Paris chunnel train) knowing i could have done a lot more to help settle her and at the same time knowing i did all i could.

"Knowing you could do more and at the same time knowing you did all you can" is something that most of us experience. And in that phrase there is almost a requirement that you side with either "could-do-more" or "did-all-I-could." When you side with "could-do-more" often you experience feelings of guilt, inadequacy, shame and the like. On the other hand, when you side with "did-all-i could" there is a sense of acceptance, of completion. My Spring journey to Paris was about discovering "me". Who was i without all of the labels, mother, business owner, friend, girlfriend, yogini? And secondly how could i treat this human form in the very best manner?

Treating the human form well means loving, respecting and honoring it. Listening to the human, feeding it when it is hungry, resting it when it is tired and engaging it when it wants to connect, create or express. Most people never even think about the human form. The mind is so busy with its virtual reality, its myriad of story lines that it never stops to consider the vessel in which it lives. The human form dutifully performs all that is asked, working when physically exhausted, operating on too much/not enough food and processing all those neurological chemicals released by the brain when nasty thoughts or even pleasant thoughts are present. It is our most loyal subject and yet we rarely treat it with the respect, care and love that it deserves.

Life changes when you change your relationship with your human form. There is a natural rhythm to life when you follow the body. There is an ease about living. Everything seems in its place. Basically you have removed resistance to Life from your life. There are so many distractions in modern living to pull us from the natural rhythm of Life: family, friends, work, hobbies. I think this is why i am back in Paris---to re-commit to my natural rhythms. Oh and nap again.

Tour Guide for God

Several people have asked about the title of this blog and what it means. Tour guide for God (TGFG) is a concept, a point of view borne out of years of experience, observation and self-inquiry. Is it right? Is it the Truth? Is it religion? No, no and no. In the Anosognostic blog I mentioned how we create our own experience of our world through our beliefs and most people have some pretty nasty beliefs calling the shots when it comes to experiencing their lives. We've all experienced those days when everyone seems out to get us, a driver cuts us off in traffic, the waitress spills coffee on us, the bank teller closes her window as we walk up to it. Any time you are feeling the "victim" you can be sure that nasty beliefs are operating.

One of the biggest beliefs that seems to dominate many people's thinking is that they somehow have to live their lives "right". They search frantically for the right job or they get completely depressed in the job they are doing and find a way to numb out. They look for the right person to complete them. They look for the right way to give back. We are told thousands of times each day what is right and what is wrong via advertising, unsolicited advice from co-workers, bosses, friends, family members, even strangers. We all know the myriad of shoulds that pepper our lives. (And if you don't this is a good time for a little self-inquiry. Just notice how many things you do in one hour that includes a should; wake-up, get dressed, brush teeth, eat, sleep, etc. And if your brave try it for an entire day.) And somehow the unwritten agreement is that if i do all the shoulds then i will be rewarded with...happiness, wealth, health, love, etc. But i have come to the conclusion that this thinking is all backwards and it is based on a faulty premise that somehow our job is to figure out who to be rather than be who we are. So where does this TGFG come in?

From my point of view, the world is made of the Unmanifest (Life, God, Universal force, Allah, the omnipotent, etc) and the manifest (humans, trees, animals and every thing that populates our world. I am using God in the sense of ALL not in the sense of the big man with the white beard who sits on a mountain and throws thunderbolts at the dunderheads on earth. And God in its unmanifest form consists of ALL, everything, tous. Well the bad news is that in this form he can't experience anything because he is everything. So in his all knowing wisdom he separates himself into millions of life forms because in this separateness he is able to experience himself. (He also maintains the ALL status because that is one of the things you can do when you are calling the shots. So he has to "forget" that he is All when he is in his manifest forms.) Y viola, ipso facto, we humans are one of the life forms and most of us have done a pretty good job forgetting who we really are but that is okay because it plays right into the TGFG concept. Humans are particularly nifty life forms because they are in reality giant, supersensitive, feeling machines. The myriad of physical and emotional sensations is enough to keep God creating over and over, day after day for all eternity.

Now imagine that God needs you to experience himself. Without you he is one big all-knowing, all-experiencing, undifferentiated blob but with you he has the possibility to feel and therefore to know himself. This is how God gets his jollies. Imagine that your only job is to feel. The next blog will show you how this works.

Anosognosic

I learned a new word this week: agnosognosic. Basically it means someone who doesn't know what he doesn't know. Initially this word was used to describe people who had lost an arm or a leg and didn't know it was gone or someone who was paralyzed but didn't know they were paralyzed. It is quite an interesting idea to think that we don't know what we don't know. The people with paralyzed or phantom limbs completely created their world to reflect what they knew, i.e. they had functioning limbs. If for example you put a pen next to someone's paralyzed arm and asked them to pick it up they would say that they didn't want to or didn't feel like it, some might even use the non-paralyzed limb to pick up the paralyzed limb picking up the pen. Do you follow? The conclusion was basically we create our own world and during my stay i have had many opportunities to witness this.

Last week i went to the Palais Tokoyo, contemporary art museum in the 8th arrondissement. I was with a friend and as i approached the ticket counter the woman asked me which tariff i would like to pay. Searching quickly, I ruled out senior, child, group. I replied the full tariff. She asked, "are you sure?" I looked puzzled and then she asked if i was an artist. My friend immediately responded "Yes, she is." She asked for proof but i had nothing except fingernails full of charcoal. I showed her my hands--not good enough--(not surprising). Finally she said, "I will give you the professor's discount and a ticket good for six months. I was way ecstatic. As we went to enter the museum my friend said to me, "Wow, she really gave you a hard time didn't she?" I had no idea what he was talking about. Here this French sales attendant just went out of her way to give me a discount after i had said i was happy to pay the full fare. My experience was that this French woman (notoriously known for coolness) was incredibly kind and generous to an obvious stranger. My heart was somersaulting thank yous. And yet my friend had a completely different experience, apparently one based on rudeness and meanness. Who was right? Who cares? Personally I like my experience better so I'm sticking to it.

So if we really are creating our world, that's really good news because it means that we are responsible. If something is happening that we don't like, we can change it (and by change "it" I mean what is in our control i.e. the "like" aspect not necessarily the "event" aspect.)

Calling Me To Wholeness

The finding, the following of the flow of Life has been a big theme for me on this journey in Paris. But what happens when the flow of Life spins, twists and throws you under water? I just found out. Before I wrote about taking the wrong train and getting locked out of my apartment and the ease of finding equanimity in those situations. Once again i found myself challenged. (Perhaps i did such a good job with those things that the gods decided I was ready for the next level. Ha!)

The details are not so important but suffice to say that "love interests" were not going the way my little mind thought they should. Letting go of the final vestiges of a relationship is much like that loose tooth that won't fall out. It is tender. Sometimes you stick it back in the socket and hope it stays there, other times it just dangles annoyingly. I stuck it back in the socket. It didn't fit. It just hurt more.

So here i was in pain. Where was the flow? What was i resisting? All of a sudden i could see my identification with the pain and not the flow. The flow was taking me under water and i was resisting, "No I'm not supposed to be here (i.e. I don't want to feel this). I want to be somewhere else (i.e. I want to feel something different)." Obviously i was losing the battle. Somehow through grace i was able to see that in this moment the flow was turbulent, under water and over rocks. Even though "i" didn't want this, it is what was present. Could i allow myself to be pulled under (ie feel the death, the rejection and whatever else my mind was naming)? Well it was obvious to me that i could continue resisting (it was so tempting) but that resistance only called up more pain. So deep inhalation, expand and surrender. Over and over i had to practice until I found the current or at least was out of the eddy.

I guess what i am trying to say is that the flow doesn't necessarily go smoothly all the time or maybe it does and I am still letting go of little bits of ego especially around those deeply held beliefs about love and what it looks like. Whatever this has been another opportunity to love myself even in the midst of falling into pain. And loving yourself no matter what seems to be the key. Pain really isn't so bad when you don't resist. It moves through the body pretty quickly. Even though i don't see where the flow is taking me (no invitations to exotic places so far) i know that even this is necessary, it is part of the plan calling me to wholeness.