Enlightenment (Still Don’t Know What it is)

I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating
And still I’m suffering but that’s my problem
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
—Van Morrison

I woke today with Van Morrison’s voice in my head. He was singing the chorus to Enlightenment, and boy do I need some this week.

My next book chapter has been done before, but I feel I have a new slant that’s pretty compelling. The book is on creativity, and this chapter’s theme is creating a space for yourself (both physical and psychological). I had small seeds of ideas in my head and couldn’t wait to get alone and write. Tom had Gavin for the night, and possibility lay stretched out before me. I didn’t know I was about to get a loud lesson in my own healthy need for space, the psychological kind.

I turned down an invitation for a quick bite at McDonald’s with Tom and Gavin. But I faltered when someone else asked me to dinner. This someone is very close, and still someone I want to protect, so I’ll leave it as a Male Someone who is very dear to me. I told this Male Someone that I would meet him at Penny Lane, a local restaurant.

My gut said that I needed space, but I often view my need for space as selfish. And if it’s space so I can create, I seem to double the guilt. I have great quotes on my computer that remind me otherwise. My favorite is attributed to Nelson Mandela:

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

Anyway, with this particular person I have a particularly high guilt quotient. We go way back, and he is mentally ill. I try not to define him that way, but the illness keeps rearing its ugly head. I want so much to be helpful to him.

This dinner out left me in tears. My special Male Someone said some cruel things, and I want to think it was the illness talking. But over the years he has found many ways to be cruel. On this particular night, even when he could see I was vulnerable, he was relentless in his attacks. I was honest with him about how he’d hurt me, but still he pressed on. Finally I walked away. I am still sick about the whole experience.

I am a proficient advice-giver. I have a background in psychiatry, and a general affinity for being a good listener. Except to myself. I always tell my girlfriends Listen to your gut. But my gut was screaming to me that I needed time alone, and that this person (at least at this moment) was toxic, and still I sat there.

Van Morrison has more to say on enlightenment:

Good or bad baby
You can change it anyway you want
You can rearrange it

In this particular circumstance, this statement seems nearly impossible to me. I know that I can’t change this Male Someone or his circumstances. But thinking more about it, I can change how I interact with him. I can limit our contact. I can walk away sooner if it gets ugly. I can channel all my angst into a brilliant piece of creative work. In fact, maybe I should have written that night, after the tears, instead of giving up and going home.

I often wake up with a song in my head, and I think my “song for the day” tells me what I need, the way other people have prophetic dreams. All the intellectual puzzling and postulating I can muster is not enough to solve some problems, or even to understand them. The spiritual realm beckons once again, and I’ll again set a tentative foot on the path to some practice, some regimen, some religion that speaks to the deeper parts of me, to the need for peace that “passes all understanding”.

It has been a stressful week all around, and I have suffered from poor sleep. I look at least 5 years older in the mirror. Gavin, my little live-in-the-moment guru, brought me back around in such a sweet way when he woke up today. In the way that 4-year-olds do, he stammered and stuttered his way to a very important question: If it….if it….if it rains today……if it rains today and then it stops……can we jump in puddles? Somehow that question and my yes reply made everything feel much better.