Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Empty, Dumb and Free at Last!


62012
Empty, Dumb and Free at Last!
i used to think there was a “right answer”. I was trained to think that. When I got the right answer-said or did-the right thing at home, i got approval and acceptance. When I got the answer right, especially when I got it right quickly, I got praise and high grades. When i grew older and  left home and finished schooling I began working in the so-called, adult world. 
I rebelled against the world I had been raised to fit into and chose to live on the edges complaining about the injustices of the world, the horrors humans perpetrated upon one another and to assuage my suffering, did a lot of drugs and lost myself in brief pleasures. All the while I was keeping one eye on the lookout for “the right” answer for myself. I was on a laudable suffering journey looking for the meaning, the purpose of life. I became a very depressed existentialist.
Many years and people and jobs and marriages and children went by. Many workshops and seminars and recovery rooms and rituals and personal growth and enlightenment books went by. Many many years...
Finally I gave up or more accurately began the process of giving up everything I knew, my beliefs, my judgments, my rightness and my wrongness, my ideas of good and bad. From this empty and dumb place I finally became a student; one without the learning disability of arrogance or despair. Now that the student has appeared, the teachers are everywhere!
They were there all along but in my compulsion to find my perfect  “guru” I was habitually looking for my answers “out there”. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Now that I can see, the answer (as per usual) seems so simple and clear. 
The purpose of my life is to create a purpose for my life. I decide the meaning; what is important and what is not. And...I knew who I was and what I was about until the colossal self doubt that I developed from working so hard to be what I was not, to fit into a deranged world founded on fear, a belief in scarcity and bereft of any support to fuel a genuine spiritual (not religious)  connection, separated me from the truth of myself all these many years.  The powerful need to belong and be acceptance from the herd over rode my authenticity and my relationship with my real self. 
For some and at different times in ones life, the meaning and purpose of life changes. Perhaps scaling a mountain is your calling, at least until your knees go bad like most knees eventually do. Or singing or teaching, or traveling and writing; it really doesn’t matter. For me, as long as I source whatever it is I’m doing from kindness and appreciation for the world and everything and everyone in it-including myself-then the endless seeking journey ends and life becomes ongoing moments of arrival after arrival to this very moment here and now.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

LIVE LARGE

61312
Live Large
(You Only Die Once)

Sing
i don’t care if you sing in a church choir
a prayer of praise and thanks
or if you wail the blues in a dark smokey tavern
whose chairs are mostly vacant,
Sing
Dance
i don’t care if you dance a drunken stagger 
among tombstones in a graveyard
or kick your heels to the sky in a leaping pirouette
Dance
Cry
i don’t care if you cry because your beloved has been crushed
by a errant runaway truck
or because your first born just won the nobel prize
Cry
Laugh
i don’t care if you laugh because you suddenly 
notice what a fool you’ve been all your life
and you sure as hell are not alone
or if you laugh when one final obstacle drops out of the sky
stopping your mad urgent rush
to complete your “to do” list,
Laugh
Love
i don’t care if you love because the one 
you took for granted has left you 
with nothing but a letter of departure 
or because your toddler has
crawled up to cuddle himself in your lap
Love
Forgive
I don’t care if you’ve held a grudge for years 
until the moment that you recognize we all are doing 
the best we can
or if you finally accept your human imperfection
and embrace your self wholly 
as you imperfectly are
Forgive
Run
i don’t care if you run because a stick snapped in the darkness
and the door to safety is a half mile thru the woods
or if the love of your love has just returned
alive from a war in a foreign land
Run
Embrace
I don’t care if you embrace your grown up daughter
with a blessing and a letting go at her marriage
or if you embrace someone you blamed for your pain
releasing your darkest enemy
Embrace
Live
I don’t care if you wake up with a sudden jolt
of insight that you are the creator of everything you think and feel
or if you draw your last breath with satisfaction
that you have loved many and loved well
Live
Breathe
I don’t care what you do or don’t do
today,
but if you wish to be here to explore tomorrow
Breathe

Sunday, June 17, 2012

FATHER'S DAY


11/20/2002

My father died today at 2PM almost two years after entering a nursing home in Chicago. He was 96 and a half years old. He outlived his wife, my mother Jeanette by 8 years and a month. He surprised himself-he surprised us all. My father had determination; we called him stubborn. He believed in what he believed in; if he had any doubts, he never shared them. He was a good man, a dutiful man, a man with strong feelings who rarely showed them. He was afraid of feelings, he was afraid of love and still, he loved. He had a very astute mind. He was a short barrel-chested 5 foot 2 inch tall fellow who liked to say, “Where I come from a man is measured from the neck up.”

My father was the son of a Russian peasant farmer; he was born and raised 50 miles from Kiev. He came over on a ship when he was 8 yrs old. Thirty years later he had graduated from the University of Chicago and become an attorney. He worked hard, made a modest income and supported a wife and five children with a comfortable middle class upbringing. He was honest and he was naïve. He wore his shoes until there were holes in the soles but drove nice cars.

He came a long way in his long lifetime, a long way from a Russian farm, a long way from a childhood where his mother would hide him under the bed when Cossacks would ride through and raid their villages, looking to kill young Jewish boys.

On the boat over he would go for food twice, turning his cap backwards and scrunching his face into a disguise his second time through the mess line in order to get a second meager helping.

My father never danced a lick in his lifetime. I began laughing just by picturing him dancing. It is an absolutely inconceivable image to imagine. He didn’t understand or like music, had absolutely no conception of rhythm-listened only to talk radio if he listened at all. As irony would have it, my mother’s most favorite thing to do was, dance; that, and to sit in the dark nursing a martini, listening to music and lamenting by the glow of her cigarette. My father was an absolute teetotaler and the most responsible person in the world. My mother was an alcoholic who avoided and delegated responsibilities and resented those responsibilities she did fulfill. Dad never complained; mom never stopped complaining. Evidently God did everything possible short of breaking a two by four over their heads to awaken them to their shadows but, both remained gratefully unaware of the cosmic irony; they were both equally strong willed.  In this way they were more alike than different. My father had no need of religion; believed it was a crutch for the weak and/or ignorant. My mother liked the pomp and party possibilities religious occasions could present; she loved any excuse to dress up.

Meanwhile, my father did what good men do, he worked and worked some more and paid the bills and enforced the discipline when we got too big for mom to. He never “hit” us; he didn’t believe in violence as a solution or teaching tool. He relied on reason and reasonable punishments, which resulted in sentences of being grounded. The worst sentence he ever imposed on me was for thirty days. On the twenty ninth day I went to him and begged for one days reduction so that I could attend a very important high school party with my girl friend who I missed dreadfully. He said, “No.” It took me a while to get over that one for me; about thirty years or so.

My father played poker with the boys 2 to 3 times a week and often stayed late at “the office”.  He had one affair. He got caught. I don’t know that my father ever knew that he loved my mother but I do know that he needed her. He begged to stay and she let him because she needed him too and years later when she died he cried repeatedly in his grief, “I never knew how much I needed your mother.”


I remember his sandpaper beard.
How the skin was loose around his mouth and cheeks allowing a young son to climb onto his lap and stretch his mouth into funny crooked smiles. Of course there not many times we played like that, there are never enough times that we get to play with our fathers. I would have liked him to smile more. Later, I believed he wished the same for me.

My father wore Old Spice after-shave of course. When they came out with a musk scent, as a man I switched to that. Evidently, it wasn’t popular enough and was discontinued so now I start each day with the scent of my father upon my own face.

My father outlived a lot of people; he outlived his friends, his work, and his sense of usefulness. He was a generous man with his money. He continued to give as long as he could because that is what a good man does.

In the end, when his spirit chose give up the ghost I tried to explain to my youngest son, Benjamin who is named after my father’s father, where it is that grandpa’s spirit went. Evidently that wasn’t necessary because he immediately offered without hesitation,  “I know dad-grandpa has become an angel.”

Stretch your angel wings father and grandfather,
And fly unfettered with all those other brave and tired angels
Who so deservedly have earned their wings of light.

Know that I love, honor and thank you.
Know that part of the gold I carry
Came, of course, from you,

Abraham Rabichow
Abraham Rubichek
Abraham Rabishov


Dad‘s Eulogy
I never did sing for my father,
While he could hear,
Nor did I dance for him
That he might see me celebrate
His strength, courage, integrity.

For far too long
Did I imagine him against me,
And so decided
To be against him.

He did not love me
In ways I wanted,
I needed him closer 
To set me straight.

I grew crooked
Without his attention..
Remembering him now though,
Straightens me.

My father never quit a thing,
Complained, or shed a tear
 For himself.
Holes in his socks,
A drunken wife,
Five children and he stayed.

I never honored my father
For pulling the wagon
That was his family,
Dutifully day after thankless day.

My immigrant father,
Peasant farmer,
Cosack survivor,
Who measured men from the neck up..
after 96 years
has finally fallen.

I sit with him in his final hours
With nothing left to say.
He is gone without a word,
to that place i don’t exist,


I place my hand upon his once broad forearm
a single tear rolls down my cheek and suddenly,
 “He’s Awake!”
And startled back to here and now.

“I know you! “ he exclaims,
Smiling and alert,
“Why you’re my number two son, Harvey!”

A leap of heart,
A flood of joy,
An ocean of tears..
All I ever really wanted from my father
Was for him to finally see me.





                     "Separate from yourself that which separates you from others."


                                 (visit otterssong.blogspot.com and join the dialogue)