Sippin' on Gin and Juice: and other moments with God

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of God
absolutely clear.
–Hafiz

I am in Orange County visiting my 6-months-and-some-change pregnant friend Carol Ann. The sky is blue, sun is out, and it's warming up for the day. Cherry blossoms are in full bloom around here, which Carol Ann assures me is alright for late January. I am listening to The Gourds version of Gin and Juice, remembering to take a nice long laugh at life.

Orange County was about a seven-hour drive from Big Sur, which I decided to drive on Saturday evening, mostly in the dark. Driving has always been a sort of passion of mine. I love road trips, and this late departure after a whole day of working made me feel like a 21-year-old version of myself. Long drives by myself have always created great containers for prayer to be formed as conversation – with plenty of time to speak and plenty of time to listen. The first two hours were spent along Highway One, in the dark, fog, misting rain, winding, curving, narrow, ocean hundreds of feet down the cliff side to my right. In these first two hours, I practiced a lot of forgiveness -- of myself mostly, as I laughed out loud at my poor judgment of departing so late, however unavoidable. I kept thinking of my bike trip, remembering the moments when it seemed impossible to continue or make it to the top of ridiculous hills, and how I had to just keep pedaling, moving forward, letting the miles roll away -- and it was easier if I didn't fight it. This drive along the One felt this way to me.

The juice of that experience was more so that I became anxious, more than a little bit, in the process of letting the miles roll away. I was talking to God, wondering why this anxiety is so close to me, so much closer to the surface than in the last few years of my life when I seemed to feel it so often. In these last few years, I truly always thought it was situational -- that it was living in Portland, having a full-time job, doing the specific work I was doing -- and all of the anxiety that was produced from those things, matched with the restlessness that I felt so strongly, which felt so often like a true longing for God and for nearness to God. What I am realizing, and what really came down the pipe on this section of highway was...well...two things:

1. However much I thought I was making decisions to get further away from this feeling in my life, I have only moved in more closely to it. It is near the surface, easily accessible, often, the only thing there is. I had to get closer to it instead of further away -- and I have to go through it instead of bypass it.

2. Active belief makes all the difference. The drive made me nervous, like the first few days of being alone in very remote wilderness. I couldn't see very well. I had never driven this section of the One to be intimate with its twists and turns, narrows and grades. I can recognize that part of this anxiety is equal parts wanting to die, pass through this thing and into the next life --- and --- being nervous that I will die. The active belief comes in, as I am praying in tears, wondering in desperation at the gravity of this feeling, and as always, what it could be for (of which there are countless possibilities). I know that we do not all necessarily get the chance to enjoy calm or peace before we die -- but I felt very strongly that in this particular struggle, whatever it is about, and however long it lasts, however many years it takes to get close enough to it to finally move to the other side -- I will get there in this life. I do not believe that I will have to die to get there, as I have honestly thought (and in moments asked for) in these last few months. That was an interesting and important moment of active belief -- which I admit, has felt at times so far away in these last several years.

Then, the road straightened and small towns began to appear. I scanned the radio for pop music and sang all the way to Orange County.

When I was a small child, I remember loving God, feeling a nearness to God. From the time I was twelve until I was 23, I pursued a relationship with Christianity, with the Church, with the Bible, with a Christian God and culture. I went to a Baptist college in Southern Missouri where I met some of the best people I will ever know. People, who like me, loved God with a deep love, the kind one is born into the world with. People, who like me, were not motivated by guilt or spiritual perfection, but by love and devotion. In the years since college, several of us have stayed in close contact, but with physical distance, we share our spiritual journeys less directly and quite infrequently. It is also quite likely that we have shared less because our views have changed, sharpened or fuzzed, and our pursuits of God have a new or different language. I do not feel as if I have been shy about sharing my ever-altering perspective of Divinity, or what I believe, but it seems that it is only in the last year or two that I have had words to begin to describe it.

On Sunday morning I awoke to an email from my friend Melissa, written to a few of us from college. She was compelled to share some recent developments in her faith journey, to which we have all responded with some of the same from where we stand these days. I admit that I have to plow through my own thoughts that I am the odd-man-out in this conversation – that my experience for many years now does not have to do with a Christian God, with Jesus, the Church, and least of all the Bible. I feel like the odd-man-out less and less, and now I am at the point where I am not hesitant to say anything. I can just let those thoughts be there and roll on past, just like miles of highway underneath my Kona or VW tires. This makes for far richer conversations.

From time to time over these last few years, I have found myself in written correspondence with one of these old friends about questions and wonderings of God. Something that I have employed is the format of the I Believe poem. This is an assignment that the 10^th graders at the Waldorf School would complete during their poetry block. I was always so impressed with their 16-year-old versions of the things they believe in, that I have been encouraged to write my own as part of these conversations where I know less where to begin and where I want to be clear that I hold no animosity as I have walked away from this certain set of beliefs.

The I Believe poem is simply what it sounds like. Each line begins with I Believe and it can exist in many forms. Though not my best example, here is a little bit of what I wrote to my friends this morning:

To be honest, I do not think of Jesus much -- which is not to say that I do not think much of Jesus.

It is also true that I have chosen or maybe most honestly, I have come to not believe many things any more. I do not believe in heaven and hell. I do believe in many lives, in reincarnation. I do believe that it takes our souls more than one pass through this earth -- not to "get it right" but to get further along, become more full. I believe in the poetry of Rumi, of Hafiz. I believe in sunsets and natural rhythms. I believe in purpose and daily possibilities for transformation. I believe in my eight-year-old self, full of an overwhelming love of God. I believe in that -- simply, and alone.

Much of our conversations a decade ago and still today are filled with playing with or trying our hand at different forms of spiritual discipline. I trust that there are countless ways to deepen ones’ soul life with a dedicated spiritual practice – but for me, I believe in mixing compost, art making, writing, physical endurance and sunsets as spiritual activities. Beyond those and a side of yoga, I feel very much like I'm at the front door of the spiritual discipline shop, looking through the windows, waiting for the sign to be flipped to "open". One of these days, I am going to realize that mixing compost is enough.

Still. There are things I have chosen, things I am trying on. In fact, I am in Orange County, of course to be with Carol Ann and the growing baby in her belly (a spiritual experience and practice all its own), but also to have a few days of quiet and clarity before I drive North to a small town near Kings Canyon, on the edge of the Sequoia National Forest for a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat. It is with the sort of impulsiveness that I come by naturally, but also nonchalance and intuition that I have chosen this experience to explore. This will be my schedule from Feb. 3-12 -- beginning with an evening opening on the 2nd and ending with a final meditation early in the morning on the 13th.

4:00 am                      Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am            Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am            Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 am            Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am          Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00                Lunch break
12-1:00 pm                 Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm             Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm             Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm            Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm            Tea break
6:00-7:00 pm            Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm             Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm             Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm            Question time in the hall
9:30 pm                      Retire to your own room--Lights out

I am new to meditation. By new, I mean, barely out of the womb, or maybe even in-utero, still absorbing the nutrients of the idea of the thing. It is hard. Mostly, I have chosen to pursue meditation in these last few months, without particular diligence, and very intensely in these next few weeks, because I desire more tools to deal with myself, to recognize our interconnectedness with all things and the way that will change the ways I move through the world. This of course, first and foremost, begins with the way I deal with myself. Maybe I walk away with a remnant of something that gets me a little closer to this anxious place – the one I have resigned to go through instead of around, the one I actively believe I will move to the other side of in this life instead of the next. Maybe it will be like Hafiz says, Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. I will have endless hours to live in it, and I am only curious what it feels like, with no expectation of a particular outcome.

Do I believe this meditation experience will offer me something richer than mixing compost, watching the sunset, or going on a long drive? Unlikely. But it will offer me a new way to search my soul and touch the void – the void between me and God, a void that exists, however small or large, whether real or imagined, inside my own chest or out somewhere between the soil and the stars. And, it is likely that all my writing and all my days are about this very thing – and that they will continue to be. Don’t worry…Gin and Juice will be playing in the background.