Squandering Our Assets

Yes, the country has a huge financial crisis. When I think about it, I have a credit crisis of my own. I’ve felt deep personal turmoil this week. Perhaps it’s the national vibes rubbing off on me. Yet I know it’s also something more specific to me. I’m funding current distractions with the energy that could build a better reality. I’m spent, and tired. I feel death hovering near me. Yet, I don’t want my epitaph to read “I’ll get to it someday soon.”

I’m currently in Idaho for a week helping my mom. I’ve felt relief from my depression because I could be of real service within the realm of my capabilities. This has given me pause to see the realities I’m avoiding. Mostly through the wee hours of early morning insomnia, obsessing about an injustice or unkindness back home. Worrying. I’ve been thinking through the night, wasting my energy. Diverting my resources from building the deep infrastructure of my craft and life. Thinking. Planning. Spinning in my head. What’s the use of this? It’s like the man mortgaging his family’s future because he puts hot cars and plasma televisions on the credit card he’ll pay for someday… someday real soon.

I spent part of the eleven hour journey to Idaho listening to the car radio. I’m strangely interested in listening to the preachers on country stations. On the narrow way through the Blue Mountains I heard a local pastor talk about pain and regret. He said there are two types of pain. One is the pain of self discipline. The other is the pain of regret. He got me to thinking that I would rather have the satisfaction of consistent focused action (discipline) than the soul bleeding regret of diverting my life energy.

As an average human being I spend much of my time in my head. In fact I’m a particular expert in the area of thinking and preparing. One example is preparing to write and to create the art that is swirling in a sunrise cloud just above my chest. But first I’ll attend to things that are not even relevant to what makes my heart sing. Like avoidance. Laying there on the couch and flipping through channels. Ordering a book about painting on the web. Then never reading it when it comes. Intruding into the choices of my closest friend and trying to make her life into something that I have not even realized. By the time I get the paint brushes out and the paper taped to the board I’m too tired. I’ve spent my daily assets.

Sometimes I even find myself paying someone else’s bills while missing my own. This is true literally and energetically. Or sometimes my debt is in the form of creating distracting energy by pushing away necessary silences in a conversation. If I regret my actions later I know that I’ve given away something precious. In either case I have not focused on relationship skills that fuel my art and gifts. This is ironic to write about. Because here I am caring for my mom intensely as she recovers from life changing surgery. Yet I am called to do this care giving. And I do not regret a single moment here. It’s the time I spend in the dark that I regret. It's the time that I spend worrying about sadness back home, or my tendency to isolate or the challenges that come from avoiding any form of boundary setting with the kids. At the end of the day my poetry, my gift, feels dry and broken… and smothered in fears. Then the fears sneak in and steal my sleep.

I’ve been considering the words of the radio preacher. I might add one more thing to his dyad of challenges. Regret subtracts life force. Discipline can add life force but only if it is amended with risk. Am I open enough to channel my discipline into action? Or am I going to spin the fine words and colors into something terrible in the night? Does my river flow any where?

There is a potential pain in risking exposure through action in the world (EG this blog). But there is a grater potential for release, healing and reward. I’m inherently a very careful person. I’m into planning and preparing so much that I often do not have the energy for the fruition. Sure, as soon as my cabin is finished I’ll write that book. As soon as I have complete silence and safety from family crises I’ll finish that painting of the Raven. As soon as my depression lifts I’ll return my phone calls. Discipline, then risk? Or regret? What/who helps me to heal and bring healing out into the world? Which will it be today, the killing pain of regret or the joyful pain of having tried?

I took a chance last month and went to New Mexico with my beloved. There we met a wonderful teacher, Debora, who began our sojourn with a challenge from the Gospel of Thomas. It goes like this:

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what is within you will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Sobering and inspiring words. I wonder what I’ll do tonight if I cannot sleep because of thoughts and fears. Will I keep the promises I made to my heart when I committed to being an artist? Will I write the pain, and the joy? Will I move it out of my body? Or will it stew? Am I paying for something that I really do not need now, out of fear or reactivity? Or am I funding my well honed discipline with the risk of moving it out into the world? When I hear Thomas’s quote, it almost sounds like a sin not to share the gifts given to us! Or am I sounding like the country preacher now? I wonder.

Rick