finding the good in every situation

Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted – a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul. Rabbi Harold Kushner

Funny how we take things for granted until they break.  I have to go buy a washing machine and I really don’t want to with the DOW going all over the place at the moment.  How low will it go?  It’s scary!   I keep thinking that maybe I should take up washing clothes in the sink because I don’t want to spend any money right now.   My biggest fear is losing the house.  My husband has a job and it seems to be very secure.  But we’ve been in that space where we’ve had to live four people in a 1 bedroom apartment and I’d really like not to have to do that again.

Then again, it wasn’t that terrible.   The worst part was definitely worrying about losing our way of life. I guess we always need to remember… no matter how bad things get, there is always something to be grateful for.  And it’s like the story Bill Moyers heard in Chocktaw County, Oklahoma where he lived before his family moved to Texas:

A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf won?”

The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one I feed.”

My grandfather always said the true measure of a man’s character is how he acts when times get rough.  Which wolf will we feed through these tough times?

McCain/Palin Attacks, Citizenship, and Report Cards

Gripe:   I am very worried that the McCain/Palin attacks about Obama’s association with terrorists (which have been checked out and proven False) may put Obama’s life at risk.   Clearly, the Republicans are desparate and trying to take attention away from the economy.  But the attacks are completely off-base and irresponsible.  I actually had a lot of respect for McCain until he made Palin his VP.  Now I have even less.  There are a lot of crazies out there and people are afraid.  Does it really make sense to insight so much hatred?  Based on the film-footage of the McCain/Palin campaign trail today, I think things could get violent if they keep it up.

Gratitude:

• I’m grateful my daughter was given a Citizenship Award at her school today.  The teachers kept thanking us for raising such a wonderful child, but I wonder how much of it really has to do with us?  I think she’s just naturally kind, helpful, and hard-working.  My son, on the other hand, is a non-conformist which doesn’t exactly lend itself to citizenship awards.   He claims that schools only give out such awards as an incentive to make students conform, which is probably true.  But I’m still glad she got the award because it made her feel good to be recognized.
• I’m grateful for my son and his wonderful, creative spirit (and his long, crazy, curly hair that goes along with it).
• I’m grateful to my husband who tried to fix our washing machine.  He couldn’t fix it but at least he got all of the water out of it so that I can take the clothes to the laundry mat (which is unfortunately at least two gallons of gas away from our home.)
• I’m grateful that both of my kids brought home decent report cards for the first six weeks.
• I’m grateful that my husband and the kids are out of work and school tomorrow.

Quantum Wellness

I’d been writing at the now defunct  Journey to the Lighter Side (a title that got old really quickly!) that I’d been on a cleanse suggested by Kathy Freston in Quantum Wellness.

I’ve been wanting to make changes for years but have had no real motivation to do so.  For whatever reason, I read Freston’s book and became incredibly motivated to make changes.   Maybe it was as much a matter of timing as anything. My husband and I had put our house up for sale in July and poured a ton of sweat into it to get it ready for the market.  I worked three solid weeks, 8-12 hours a day, painting almost every room in the house, moving stuff into storage, fixing whatever was broken, working on the landscaping (you probably know the house-selling routine).  I’m almost 19 pounds lighter than I was in the spring and I think it is mostly thanks to all of that physical work.

There is something to living in a home that is uncramped, well put together, organized and well-cared for that makes you want to do the same for the body. So perhaps it was a matter of timing.  One big purge leads to another.

Freston’s cleanse requires that we cut out sugar, alcohol, caffeine, gluten, and animal products (including dairy, eggs, etc.) for 7-20 days.  I found it extremely difficult to cut out all of those things at once so didn’t cut out gluten or dairy and eggs and I did that for almost 2 weeks.   It did make a huge difference!

Of course, my period came along and I’ve completely ruined my caffeine intake the past few days.  But I haven’t had any alcohol or animal meat at all and have very little sugar.   Until I gave into the caffeine addiction two days, I was feeling great.  The problem with the caffeine for me is that it keeps me up at night amd when I don’t sleep, I start making mindless decisions.  It’s easy to see how our habits are all inter-connected!

So tomorrow (because I’ve already totally blown it today), I’ll make another concerted effort to get caffeine out of my diet and start removing dairy as well.  I’ve noticed I feel much more uncomfortable when I’ve eaten cheese, milk, etc.  I was allergic to milk as a child so I suppose it isn’t surprising.  It’s very congesting and it also upsets my stomach.

Freston claims that if we consistently keep within a vision of our desire to change, the changes will come and they will come without force. As long as we engage in self-work, which she defines as 1) look at where we are; 2) set some goals for where we’d like to be, and then 3) chart the course on how to get there - we will eventually get there. But it requires being very honest with ourselves which isn’t always easy to do - so sometimes that ability to be completely honest has to arrive through a stripping away of the onion layers of practiced self-deceit we’ve been unconsciously engaged in.

Freston quotes Dr. John Sarno who is a world-renowned specialist in pain and mind-body disorders. He says that people create maladies within themselves in order to keep their conscious awareness away from an unpleasant emotion that threatens their comfort one. Usually this emotion is rage or anger that has steadily increased in pressure from being suppressed rather than let out. There are a lot of people who think of themselves as good (Sarno calls them “goodists”) because they are tied to an image of themselves as nice and good people. These people are extremely uncomfortable with out-of-control emotions like rage. If something happens in their life that makes them intensely angry, they don’t deal with it because they don’t like what it brings up in them. Instead they become physically ill in some way - back or neck pain, allergies, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, etc. It’s important we become excruciatingly honest with ourselves if we want “quantum health”.

Tags: health, kathy freston, quantum health

One last try…

I go back and forth all the time on whether to keep one blog or several because I get a lot of atheists reading Dance of the Mind and then they go absolutely bolistic when they see my ACIM posts.   I fully understand the confusion because it is confusing!!!  We tend to get stuck in either/or thinking and have a difficult time realizing that there is a point of view that transcends both.   How do you explain to someone who demands that either God exists or God doesn’t exist, that the question of God’s existence is ultimately meaningless and therefore, so is the answer?  The answer is both and neither, not either/or.  So anyway - I’ve found it best to keep those blogs separate because it is just as frustrating trying to explain my position to a fundamentalist atheist as it is a fundamentalist Christian.

Anyway, both of those blogs are fairly cerebral so I have been wanting to keep a third blog for more chatty, personal posts, but have yet to actually manage it.  That’s why I thought getting my own domain might work - I’d be able to keep all three blogs separately for those interested in particular aspects of my writing, but have them essentially feed into one blog which makes more sense to me, personally.

Plus, I thought it would be fun to have the flexibility of my own website.  But little did I know how much of a learning curve would be required!   Really, it’s not that difficult to get a site up with Wordpress.org.   And even putting three blogs on one domain wasn’t that difficult.   But trying to feed all of those blogs into one got tricky and required far more maintenance than I was willing to provide!

So, change of game plan again.   I apologize to the few of you who have been reading my blog since July.  I haven’t had much of a readership since then because I’ve changed things around so much that I’ve been almost impossible to keep up with.

Dance of the Mind and Journey of Becoming will remain where they are.  I’m not moving them again!  It’s too much work!!  But, I can’t promise that I’ll keep Amgibuous Squiggle, but I am going to give it one last try!

Here is the game plan: Ambiguous Squiggle will be here at arulba.com;  Dance of the Mind is back at Wordpress.com; and ACIM Lessons are back at my old blog on Blogger.

[Edit:  Never mind!  There is no way I'll keep up with three blogs.  Dance of the Mind will be here at arulba.com.]

Kyra by Carol Gilligan

This is the first book I have read by Carol Gilligan and I am somewhat familiar with her book, In a Different Voice.  I think anyone who was in college in the mid-80s must be familiar with it.  It’s still well-known in psychological development circles.   She started a revolution with the idea that women are different rather than morally inferior to men, because their moral focus is on relationship rather than rules.

Potential Spoiler Warning!

Kyra is about a woman whose husband was murdered 10 years or so ago by her half-brother. She’s had no interest in other men, considering herself to be married, despite her husband’s death .  She meets Andreas, a Director of Opera, and she falls in love which allows her to begin letting go of her first marriage. But then Andreas suddenly leaves without warning and Kyra falls apart.   She no longer knows what is real - the typical existential crisis.

To help her through the crisis, she goes into therapy with Greta, an older woman. Like Gilligan, Greta believes therapy is “tragically” flawed - especially for women who are asked to submit themselves to the rules. At some point in the therapy, woman cease to make progress. They hit a wall with the therapy that men do not and Greta offers a lecture explaining that this is very likely thanks to the difference in men and women.

Andreas leaves Kyra without telling her because he fully expects her to understand that he cannot stay. He has internal rules he must obey and he thinks Kyra is as obedient to those rules as he is. But being female, she is far more tuned into the relationship than to the rules he follows so is devastated by his departrure. She is likewise troubled by the “ending” in therapy.   Therapy is a sort of “love” relationship but when it is over, it’s over. This understandably frustrates Kyra and she and her therapist courageously work through ways to break through the old, masculine structure.

I had a very difficult time connecting with the characters. I didn’t particularly like Kyra or Andreas, in part because I had a very difficult time picturing them.  I’d form an image and then Gilligan would add something that would dash it. But Gilligan’s not a novelist and I’m sure her intention was not to create the next great novel. She was trying to convey something through story telling and I think it worked, however awkward the story.

Going through some of what I highlighted:

Kyra to Andreas talking about her first husband, Simon: “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.” Do you think this is true? I am not at all in love with my husband’s work. I have major issues with it and sometimes it bothers me a lot - it would be nice to be married to someone who is really passionate about what he does and is making a difference in the world through his work. But for the most part, my husband likes what he does and feels that he makes a difference in the small circles he inhabits at work by just being who he is and not fully buying into the corporate mentality. But I couldn’t do what he does - it would be like death to me. Of course, I’m not so sure Kyra is so in love with Andreas’ work even though she admires it so perhaps this comment is really more about being reliant upon the structures that have been created by man. Kyra realizes much later in the book that her relationship to Simon isn’t perfect and that he required a subtle submission she hadn’t noticed until her work in therapy.

Kyra to Greta (the therapist): “But the problem is not just that women need to discover they can change the structures in which they living. That’s what my work is about, changing the structure. It’s why do you set up this situation, this structure, in the first place. Why wet up a relationship with an ending built in? You’re asking women to buy this, but my question is, why have you bought it?” This makes the therapist mad. What Kyra recognizes is that therapy is structured in such a way that the patients problem is really just their problem and exists separately from the therapist. If the therapist withholds her feelings or manipulates them, it’s confuses Kyra’s feelings. Greta’s answer? This is the way she knows how to work. It was how she was trained - she knows therapy is inherently flawed, but she hadn’t questioned the structure in the way Kyra is questioning it and she now fully realizes. Which, of course, always makes us angry at first. It’s terrifying to take away those railings.

Speaking of railings, my husband and I had an interesting discussion about Kyra’s dream of walking out on the narrow bridge and realizing there are no railings but she’s too far out to go back. My husband asked me what it felt like to me to have the railings taken away and I said it felt like freedom. He said for him, it felt like chaos. I really do think Gilligan is on to something here. We women are used to a structure of submission and that submission is built into the structures of society - physical and idealogical. Submitting yourself to something greater than yourself generally requires an absence of railings. But submission to the so-called “stronger gender” is a different baby altogether. It’s a sort of bondage - not the freedom inherent in the paradoxical, mystical submission “to God”, wisdom, trust, etc.

The idea of wanting to know what is real makes a lot of sense to me. I could see cutting myself, like Kyra did, to try and figure that out - especially when what seems to be so connected turns out to be yet another superficiality. It gets extremely tiresome to have parents and societal authorities tell us who it is we are and who we are supposed to be. There is almost no concern whatsoever about who it is we are.

At some point, when you begin to trust yourself, the reigning rules and structures do begin to feel incredibly superficial.   It’s easy to think reality is based upon the structures we are born into or are trained with.  But do a bit of interior digging.  You soon realize that structure influences the experience of reality, but otherwise has very little to do with it. AND! It’s the relationship of the individual to the structure that creates the experience of reality.  We can’t know reality in any other way except through relationship.  That’s why both Kyra and Andreas were trying to a develop a fluidity within their respective structures rather than a structure that requires submission to it’s rules.

The Idiot (1951)

I’ve never actually read The idiot so can’t compare Dostoevsky’s novel to Kurosawa’s adapatation, but have seen this film several times.

Unlike Stray Dog, this movie is cold, cold, cold!!  The origination of the plot for the film is given to us in various ways: some of it is written in third-person narrative; some of it in spoken third-person narrative; and some of it we figure out through the actions of the characters.  I’m not sure I’ve completely followed the purpose of the various forms, but it’s interesting - kind of like reading a novel while simultaneously watching the action unfold in front of you.

The film starts out in written narrative: “Dostoevsky wanted to portray a genuinely good man.  It may seem ironic, choosing a young idiot as his hero, but in this world, goodness and idiocy are often equated.  This story tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.”

I’m laying out the plot just to try and get it straight in my mind…

The idiot, Kameda, was accused of war crimes he didn’t commit and was sentenced to death.  At the last minute, the sentence was revoked, and he went crazy from the shock of the pardon.  He developed epileptic dementia and had so many fits he eventually became “an idiot”.  He can’t recall what life was like before his idiocy.

Akama befriends Kameda and tells him about Taeko Nasu, whom he fell in love with because he had been repressed as a child and took one look at Taeko Nasu which immediately released all of those pent up passions.  He stole money from his father to buy her a diamond ring and this so outraged his father he disowned him.  But his father died and so Akama has recently come into his fortune.  Both he and Kameda are headed to Sapporo.  Kameda is going to see Mr. Ono, his only relative, who is tied up in some ugly business regarding Kameda’s ranch, I think.  The military had reported Kameda as officially dead, and it seems that somehow, Mr. Ono sold the ranch through Kayama?  But that has me a bit confused.

Taeko Nasu is apparently a woman of ill-repute.   Supposedly, she’s been Tohata’s mistress since childhood.  Fearing for his reputation, Tohata has offered a dowry of 600,000 to marry her off, but doesn’t really want to let her go.  Taeko Nasu, like Akama, feels like a caged animal.  Akama feels this way because he was forced to repress his emotions, Taeko Nasu because she has been a kept woman since childhood and has likewise has had to repress who she is.

Kayama is about to marry Taeko Nasu in order to get the 600,000 yen dowry and this somehow involves Mr. Ono - maybe because he sold the ranch through Kayama?  I’m not sure.  According to the film, Kayama isn’t really a scoundrel, he’s just an unassertive coward.  Secretly, he’s in love with Ono’s daughter Ayako.

There are lots of twists and turns that keep twisting and turning.

SPOILER WARNING!!

So, Akama ends up with Taeko Nasu, but it isn’t pretty for either one of them.  They look like the Adams Family but with hateful passion rather than joyful, loving passion. The doors creak of their large home creak and everything is dirty and dark.  Really dark.  Kameda ends up in love with Ayako who is likewise in love with him.  But she can’t let go of her jealously toward Taeko Nasu who Kameda also loves, but not in the same way he loves Ayako.  Ayako promises she won’t let her impetuosity get in the way, but of course it does.

Desire, rather than reality, rules the outcome of everyone’s destiny.  Nothing is allowed to be what it is.  Instead, everything is judged on image.  Emotions are repressed and come back to bite in a big way.

Like I said, I haven’t read, The Idiot.  But this sounds a lot like what I know of Dostoevsky’s story.  He was sentenced to death and somehow managed to escape and likewise suffered from epilepsy.   Dostoevsky had some sort of mystical experience during his imprisoned days that made him feel connected to all that is.   He de-magicalized the sacraments and re-framed them within existential terms.   You see a lot of those re-framed sacraments within this film.

The idiot represents Christ and the isolation that is experienced by someone who is “good”.  People recognize the “good”, but they can’t accept it because to accept it requires too deep of a look at their own lives.   Akama’s love is solely based on passion, and this eventually kills Taeko Nasu.  But Kameda’s love for Taeko Nasu is based on the Christian ethic of forgiveness.

This sort of turns the norm around - where the upper class thinks of itself as “good” while the lower classes are “bad”.  This thinking was true in both Japan and Russia (and in the U.S. although the U.S. doesn’t like to acknowledge class differentiation.)

Kurosawa is compassionate toward the suffering of those who get stuck in situations they had little control of but maintains that human beings still control their destiny through the choices they make.  It’s the existential malaise:  we are responsible for who it is we are - no matter our circumstances.  And, what we think of as good and bad has been socially conditioned - it isn’t absolute.   Those who consider themselves to be “good” and superior to those who are “bad” have no right to claim that superiority.  Those deemed “bad” by society remain worthy of compassion and are very often “bad” thanks to the actions of the “good” who refuse to acknowledge their darker sides and what it is they have contributed to the actions they deem unworthy.

Tags: akira kurosawa, existentialism

Stray Dog (1949)

Stray Dog is considered to be one of Kurosawa’s first great films.

It’s about a rookie policeman whose gun is stolen and used in several crimes.  The policeman recognizes his existential connection to the criminal early in the film and feels responsible for the crimes that are being committed.  Many more similarities between police man and criminal are presented further into the story.  But, there is one thing that differentiates the men and that is choice.

It is existential choice that defines us as human beings.  No matter how bad the circumstances (and the circumstances are terrible in Post WWII Japan!) we still have the ability to make choices and it is through our choices that our destiny is created.

Excellent film.   Somewhat reminiscent of Crime and Punishment - the heat is excruciating and the mental anguish experienced by Yusa is similar to that of Raskolinikov’s.

Tags: akira kurosawa, existentialism, film-noir

The Virgin Spring (1960)

I’m still plugging away at Bergman and Kurosawa films.  Not sure how I ended up watching both directors at once, but it’s been fun!  They are roughly from around the same time period and both have heavy existential themes in their films.  I’ve started with the earliest works (at least those available on Netflix) and am watching them in chronological order.  (At least trying to watch them in chronological order.)

I recently watched Bergman’s Seventh Seal - again!  I seriously never get tired of that movie!!  (I wrote about it previously.) The next film up is Virgin Spring which takes us into the 1960s.  It’s another great movie that I watched several times before sending it back to Netflix. (And, apparently, Bergman borrowed from Kurosawa’s use of silence for Virgin Spring.)

Virgin Spring is set in 14th Century Sweden.   I think that’s probably roughly the same time Seventh Seal is set because Bergman said he got the idea of a man playing chess with death from a Medieval Church painting from the 1480s.  It’s based on a medieval Swedish Ballad called “Töres dotter i Wänge“.   Virgin Spring is every bit as dark as Seventh Seal and then some!

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Karin is the main character.  She is the “light” child.  She has a half-sister named Ingeri who is the “dark” child and worships the Norse God, Odin.  Karin is somewhat spoiled - definitely catered to by her parents while Ingeri is Karin’s father’s child from a servant so is treated as a servant.  Ingeri suffers the indifference of her father and curses Karin.  The curse becomes a reality that greatly tests the Christian faith of the father when Karin is brutally raped (a scene which is extremely difficult to watch, even by today’s standards), and is killed.  There is an innocent young boy who watches, unable to do anything about what his brothers are doing to Karin.  Furious, the father kills the boy.  He has destroyed innocence just as his innocent daughter was destroyed.

As in the Seventh Seal, God is, of course, indifferent to human suffering and right and wrong.    The father has to relinquish the power he thought he had through his belief in a God that favored the good and punished the bad.  He must accept God’s indifference just as Ingeri has to accept his indifference.  “You saw it, God. You saw it. The innocent child’s death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness.”

The part that got me was when the herdsman try to sell Karin’s clothing to her mother.  She immediately recognizes them and without any emotion whatsoever says, “I must ask my husband what a fitting price would be for such a valuable garment.”   That gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.  Could you imagine?  What must that mother have been feeling?   You can’t help but sympathize with the brutality of the father, but even the mother tries to save the little boy from that brutality.

It’s a gruesome movie and I’m not 100% sure I understand why the spring flows from the spot where Karin is killed other than that it’s part of the legend.  Ingeri, who is more like an animal than a human being, clearly feels guilt for what she has done because she cleanses herself in the spring.  And I think, like Seventh Seal and Bergman’s other films, there remains a sense of hope and faith in the face of human helplessness and rage.  It’s not just violence for violence sake.

Tags: ingmar bergman

The Quiet Duel (1949)

The Quiet Duel kept me on edge! I liked it much better than Scandal. I suppose I’d agree that it is extraordinarily sentimental, but it’s a great story…

A young, virgin (pure) doctor contracts syphilis through a cut finger while operating on an infected patient during the war. He has to deal with the stigma associated with syphilis and the fact that he could pass it on to the woman he loves. He tells her he won’t marry her but never tells her why because he’s afraid that if he tells her, she’ll stay with him anyway but that staying with him will compromise her future.

I’d like to believe there are people around like Kyoji Fujisaki (played by Toshiro Mifune - very attractive in this film even if his character is far more uptight than the character he plays in Scandal.) But it still completely pisses me off when a man withholds the truth because he thinks he’s protecting a woman! Of course, we’re talking 1949 so I suppose we must be at least a little bit forgiving.

Tags: akira kurosawa

Scandal (1950)

Scandal by Akira Kurosawa was quite enjoyable even if a little hokey. I loved Toshirô Mifune’s character as a rebellious motorcycle riding artist and thought Yoskio Yamaguchi was very convincing as the scandalized singer. Takashi Shimura was fantastic in Ikiru but his character in Scandal was extremely irritating. Excellent acting all around, however. Even by the minor characters.

Maybe this isn’t one of Kurosawa’s better works, but I enjoyed it.

Tags: akira kurosawa