Monday, August 25, 2014

Gratitude

An eclectic group of good friends and family, zesty food, pleasant late summer weather, spectacular natural ambience framed by towering red rocks and lush green meadows, a group hike, lots of love:  this was my 40th birthday party this weekend. Thanks to my wonderful wife for planning and pulling it off.  Without a doubt one of the best nights of my life.

When it was time to wrap up, friends stayed behind to take down chairs and tables, carry coolers, and load up my truck.  A neighbor took the kids home, and since we drove separately, Elizabeth hopped in her car to head out.  I told her that I was going to check the picnic area one last time in case we'd left something, and I'd meet her at home.  She smiled.  She knew what I was really up to.

"Just going to think for a while?" she asked.

"Yeah. Think I'll meditate up here tonight."

"Okay," she said, "Did you have fun?"

"Are you kidding me? This was the best. I can't thank you enough."

She smiled her radiant smile, which still melts me these fifteen years later. A kiss, and she pulled out of the parking lot, headlights piercing twilight.

Now I was alone in this gorgeous park in the Colorado foothills, only five minutes from my home. The last rays of sunlight were slipping behind the mountains. I made my way up the short slope one more time, calves burning from a long run that morning. I sat on the terraced steps just below the upper pavilion that overlooks the valley. Soft breeze, bats fluttering in and out of the rocks, harmonic resonance humming in the chest, a tranquility of soul. Memories of kids and dogs, rattlesnakes, thunderstorms and rainbows. I wrote a third of a novel at this very spot. I still jog through here often in the early mornings.

At the big 4-0, I'm glad I have a place like this, a physical locale imprinted on my mind. It feels--resonates--like home. I have a half dozen sacred places, all in Colorado and Arizona: Iron Springs, Beaver Mesa, Keystone, the backyard of our current home, my super secret Fortress of Solitude, which is known to no man but which infuses me with my superpowers.  And here.

Clouds igniting like lava, paling to peach, then gray. Violet sky dimming to the color of . . . what?  Blackberries. Sunlight's final strokes silhouetting pines on the crest of the foothills. Breathe in, breathe out.

My planned post for today was going to be about the rough structure of my self-imposed program for this year. But it will wait. Today, I feel and express gratitude to the Universe for forty years of life, for this sublime moment amongst so many others, for consciousness, for joy. For friends and family. For this frame of earth, the space and time in which to experience it. For pain, for suffering, for fear. For cancer and disillusionment. And for peace amidst the storm. It all comes bundled. I'm ecstatic and humbled to be alive at this moment. It won't last forever. I'm okay with that. Now is forever.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Welcome to Uncertainty: A Preamble


"I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."--Vincent Van Gogh

With the Big 4-0 upon me, I want to publicly declare that I don't have it all figured out. Not much, at least. Not yet, and I don't ever expect to. This should surprise no one. This is not false humility. This is the acknowledgment that, while I have some hunches, some lived experience, some sketchy assumptions, some deep-seated hopes and fears, I really don't know what's going on with this precious moment of life we are experiencing that envelops us like our own skin. Shouldn't a guy, a darn doctor, at age 40, have it all figured out? For my children's sake, for the sake of others who question, for my own sanity, I'm no longer willing to pretend like I do.

I take solace in the fact that I'm not alone.  With the exception of Jesus and the Buddha, and maybe a shout out to Ghandi and Lincoln (and maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he seems pretty sharp), I don't think any of us have ever really known what's going on here, not really, even when we act like we do.  Not the astrophysicists, not the economists, not the philosophers, poets, politicians or priests. Certainly not me. We all know bits and pieces, but none of us can fathom the whole.

That doesn't mean we are being dishonest if we think we've got it figured out. I like to believe that we are all doing the best we can within whatever paradigms we've inherited. And this is not to disparage the power of the scientific method. It is by far the best tool ever devised to help us discern truth. But a person could have all the formulas, calculations, experimental evidence of every aspect of the composition of the universe at their fingertips, from galaxies to quarks, from the Big Bang to the event horizon, to explain the What, Where, and How of the universe, and still not have a clue as to the Why. We believe, we hope, we wish, we dream. We hypothesize, we assert, we guess, we suppose. But what do we really know? And how can we create meaning out of our ignorance?

We are trapped in Plato's cave: reading the shadows on the wall, yet never seeing the fires and figures that produce them. This predicament is not our fault. Like the Taoists have taught for eons, we fundamentally cannot know--or even name--the Tao, the Way, the ultimate source of meaning in the universe. We exist as oblivious subjects of the Cosmos, like infants opening our eyes but not yet self-aware, looking through a glass darkly, too limited by our frail bodies and fickle brains, too busy breathing and eating, sleeping and dreaming, working and playing, to have the infinite perspective it would take to ever put a finger on it.  It's not that we can't name it. It's that it can't be named. The more we know about a particle's location, the less we know about its destination. And so we live in a world of uncertainty and metaphor.

     "We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . 'Seems like we're just set down here,' a woman said to me recently, 'and don't nobody know why.'"  (from "Pilgrim on Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard)

The irony is that most of us live with the illusion that we do know the Why, or at least that somebody does. We are born, we grow, our brains develop, we learn languages, symbols and sounds that convey meaning but forever fall short of the essence of what we're trying to describe.  Our words are full of holes, leaking out essence like a slotted spoon, and by the time we get the ladle to our lips, the soup is gone. Think of blackberry:  when we see that jumble of curved lines, or when we roll those jangling syllables off of our tongues, we think that we have understood or communicated the idea of blackberry. And we have, sort of. But those are still just letters and sounds, pixels on a screen or vibrations of air, not the thing itself. (Props here to Robert Hass and his brilliant poem Meditation at Lagunitas. And man, do I ever love blackberries.) These symbols and syllables could never be that juicy, sweet, tart fruit that we know in its essence by taste, touch, sight and feel, that deliciousness we experienced when we first tasted it, warm and soft, in grandma's cobbler. The point is that the essence of blackberry can be experienced, but not conveyed.  Something is always lost in the translation. Our words, even our ideas, are metaphors.

By language and culture, we plug (or are plugged) into a matrix of thought: a religion, a country, a career, a community, and we learn to live by their codes. Those codes are written organically, sculpted by human nature and frailty in an undirected way over generations, over millennia. They take many specific shapes, but the end result is that, in a world of infinite vastness, complexity and fundamental uncertainty, they offer us the local and specific assurance that we most crave:  that the path we are following is known, the life we are living is correct, and in the end we will be okay. Of course, with most codes comes a cost. Conform, don't question.  Be prepared to pay a penalty if you ever have the courage to cut yourself free.

So into my uncertainty, here comes the Big 4-0, a convenient milestone of sorts. I'm ready for it. I think I've lived a good life, and I'm happy where I'm at:  a husband, a father of three, a doctor, a friend, a neighbor, a citizen, a seeker, an adventurer, a writer, a musician, a creator. On the surface, my life looks pretty much like I envisioned it would thirty years ago, with one big exception:  I'm no longer Mormon. That foundation, with all of its assertions of certainty and eternity, crumbled nearly five years ago, and everyday I'm still picking my way out of the rubble.

For the next twelve months, I'm going to conduct an experiment on myself.  This blog will chronicle an intentional spiritual journey, building on my first forty years and then launching into the unknown: my quest to see what sort of meanings--both practical and ultimate--I can carve out of my precious moment of consciousness in this infinitely complex, chaotic, beautiful, uncertain universe.



Thursday, August 7, 2014

Things Fall Apart, Things Come Together


We recently resigned from the LDS (Mormon) Church, and this post is a brief explanation of our family's situation.  

To some facebook friends, this may be a surprise, but it's actually old news.  We left the church four years ago, though we only recently sent in our letters of resignation. Our intent is to live an authentic life, and as part of that process, we want those who care about us to know where we stand on one of the most important matters of our lives.  We hope not to lose any friends over this, though we're aware that could happen.

Here's the nutshell version:  Elizabeth and I left together, along with our three kids; after much studying, pondering, praying, researching and meditating, we came to the excruciating conclusion that the LDS church is simply not true; we are happy, healthy, and hopeful for the future; if you are facing a similar journey, we feel your pain, and will support you however we can.

Here are the most relevant details:
  • Elizabeth and I left together, along with our three kids.
  • We did not leave for reasons of sin, pride, or taking offense.  In many ways, our lives look pretty much the same as they did 4 years ago. We have a simple family life that revolves around our kids, our community, and our jobs.  
  • We left because after much study, pondering, prayer, and meditation, we came to the conclusion that the church is not true. Perhaps it may be construed as "true" in the sense of promoting human values such as love, service, forgiveness, community and family. But many churches and systems of ethics promote these same values. However, we do not believe the LDS church is true in the manner it presents itself, as being the only true church on the earth and the only pathway to salvation.  Once we came to that excruciating conclusion, our personal sense of integrity required us to leave, no matter the fallout.
  • We feel that the church's track record in its treatment of women, minorities, and gays is poor and that its history, doctrines and policies often do harm to individuals and families, even to the point of family destruction and suicide.  We realize that many women find great fulfillment in the church and do not feel mistreated in any way, which is great, and we believe them.  However, we feel that the simple awareness that Joseph Smith had at least thirty-three wives, eleven of whom were concurrently married to other men, is all that anyone needs to know to discern that there is something wrong at the core of Mormonism in regards to women.  We are not willing to allow our daughter to grow up in a religious environment where acceptance of that doctrine and history is okay, and where women are still not allowed to hold positions of priesthood authority.
  • We don't regret having been raised Mormon.  There are many wonderful values, relationships, and experiences that we gained that will always be central to our lives.  We are happy to have served missions, gone to BYU, been married in the temple, and served in various callings.  At the time, our worldview told us those were the most important things we could have been doing, and they were important steps on the journey to where we are now.
  • We view our leaving as part of a larger journey into spiritual awareness.  We are not afraid of the future or what happens after death.  We feel reverential awe and humility towards the scientific and artistic truths of our human family, the earth and the universe.  
  • We are happy and healthy.  Our children are thriving.  While there are many struggles we face that are common to all families, we love each other and love our lives. We have new awareness of how precious this life is, how precious all of our relationships are. We intend to make this life count, to do good and leave a legacy of love.
  • We respect our family and friends who choose to remain Mormon.  We had to leave based on our sense of integrity, yet we recognize that many friends choose to stay out of their own sense of integrity.  We honor them, wish them well, and hope to remain friends.  We all have to navigate our own path according to our conscience.
  • We harbor no ill will towards towards any current or past leaders or members.  We believe that nearly everyone is just trying to do the best they can.
  • As is our nature, we will be vocal in standing against injustice and advocating for what we think is right.  We don't consider ourselves "anti-Mormon", but rather pro-truth, pro-justice, pro-love.  I may occasionally post items or thoughts that I feel are important and would like to share.  If you disagree, I invite you to either engage with me in respectful dialogue, either public or private, or to just ignore things that bother you. Please consider that if you haven't unfriended me in the past four years, I doubt you'll find a compelling reason to now. In most ways, we're still the same old Mark and Elizabeth you've always known.
  • One of the main reasons we are posting this here is that we are aware that some of our friends may be silently struggling with their faith at this moment, and others may one day question things that now seem so certain  If this is or will be you, please don't suffer in silence.  We have walked that lonely, terrifying road, and we will walk it with you if you would like.  We will engage you without judgment in whatever circumstance of faith or doubt that you find yourself.  Seriously.  Reach out.  We could use the companionship, too.  Beyond the darkness of this moment there is an exhilarating, soul-expanding journey ahead, and you are not alone.
  • Finally, leaving was one of the most difficult, most courageous, and best decisions we have ever made.  That may be hard for some to understand, but we feel that if you could see things the way we do, you would respect us for the integrity of our choices, even if you disagree with our conclusions.
Thanks for listening.  Health and happiness to all.  

Peace out.

Mark and Elizabeth