Tag: learned

What I wish I’d known before I had to learn it.

Of Archetypes and Inevitability

IF YOU BELIEVE IN AN afterlife, then one reason my friend Steve Territo died yesterday is to hold the good tables for the rest of us. And if you knew Steve, you know why that’s apt: I don’t have one memory of him where he’s not laughing, smiling or playfully conspiring. And few people I know, living or dead, are more qualified to slip the maitre d’ something for one with a view.

"A good friend has died. And he has earned a place among the honored dead. It is not a time to mourn." --Worf
Steve-Who-Is-Called-Talon

Steve is the first of my immediate Renaissance Faire tribe to die. Social groups are based on the unstated assumption that its members will remain so; when that proves, inevitably, not to be the case, it rattles everyone’s sense of propriety. Death is wrong, in our stubborn primate way of things; it makes us squint and fumble to adjust the picture. And when that picture is as uproariously life-loving as the Cardiff Rose — each of us as lusty an Elizabethan archetype as we can build for ourselves and each other — Steve’s passing takes on something of Biblical proportions. (Remember when God unmade the universe for forty days and nights? Sort of like that.) As one friend put it, “Steve defined ‘life.'”

But Steve is also the first of my friends to die P.F. — Post-Facebook — and in addition to saving our table he seems to be showing the way toward a new form, or manifestation, of mourning. Our tribe is scattered over most of Northern California and beyond; Steve married and moved to Tennessee a few years ago. Wherever he went, as good men do, he made solid friendships. Watching condolence messages begin to queue is like watching a holographic flower unfold: although we’re all in different rooms, it feels as though we’re all together, remembering and laughing and crying and just sitting in disbelief.

And I hope it feels that way for everyone, at least a little bit. When people die, they leave a soul-shaped hole in the world. Touching the edges through my keyboard doesn’t make the loss any easier. Nothing does. But the electronic handholding helps; at least a little bit.

Zecher tzaddik l’vracha — the remembrance of the righteous is a blessing.

Refining Maslow

THE GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST ABRAHAM MASLOW proposed a pyramid paradigm of human needs, ranking their vitality and importance as physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. One must satisfy the first in order to be able to secure the second, then explore the third and so forth to self-actualization (or to put it more cryptically, I-am-I-ness).

This is all very well as far as it goes, which isn’t very far at all without one particular ingredient: humor.

I would argue that a sense of humor lies among our physiological needs. Our bodies crave laughter — it makes us feel good, for one thing, and promotes the rest of Maslow’s overstructure: safety, love, belonging, and certainly esteem and self-actualization. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our most basic needs are ordered by what we breathe, drink, eat, shelter under and laugh at (or with). The first chuckle may even have occurred when we saw each other naked, huddling in some cave away from the mid-Pleistocene rain. (Certainly humor makes nudity easier to cope with, which to me screams “prerequisite!” I can only assume it also helps with the random smilodon or mammoth.) Humor is so important in fact, that its lack can be attributed to every human war, skirmish, argument or bluster — especially the unresolved ones.

Many years ago, while preparing to hitchhike across the USA, I was describing my road gear to a seasoned friend. “Backpack (soft), spare clothes, paperback book, extra shoes, sleeping bag, boots (new), Swiss Army knife (new) …”

“Where’s your toilet paper?” he asked.

“What do I need that for?” I asked.

He fixed me with a gaze reserved for the feeble. “If you don’t have toilet paper, the rest just don’t matter,” he said.

Humor is like that too: it cleans out the head and refreshes it for the next challenge, which is always a moment away. And without humor, the rest just don’t matter.

How To Make Your Blog Sound Important

1. BEGIN EVERY PARAGRAPH WITH “I.”

2. Repost the same story as other blogs within your target demographic.

3. When commenting in other blogs, slip in the phrase “as I wrote” and flash your URL.

4. Call everyone by their first name whether celebrity, criminal or politician.

5. Make gratuitous jokes equating celebrities, criminals and politicians. Continue reading “How To Make Your Blog Sound Important”

Harlan’s Secret

“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”

— Author and critic HARLAN ELLISON, my first inspiration and sometime/longtime influence, as quoted on http://www.advicetowriters.com, a website worth visiting

“What do YOU like about being a spiritual leader?”

THIS QUESTION WAS POSED TO me by a friend who’s considering the path. Since I have some small experience with the subject, and some readers have some interest in it, I’m posting my reply here and will be absolutely unoffended if you skip it.

Wow. No one’s ever asked me that before, so I needed to take some serious time to think about it before replying. So first, thank you for an interesting think.

Before I reply, you need to know that I’m currently off the rabbi thing; partly because I made an unsuccessful bid earlier this year to serve my synagogue in this capacity, and since I now know I only wanted to “be a rabbi” for this community (and despite that everybody still treats me as a spiritual leader) it seems rather moot to continue my studies. But there are other reasons as well. That said, there were certainly aspects I “liked,” or more accurately, found rewarding.

The best thing to me about “being a spiritual leader” is making a difference for people in a direct, immediate way. People come to services for many reasons — duty, support, inspiration, help, grief, socializing and sometimes even to pray. To at least offer a moment of connection for those who need it is incredibly fulfilling; to have it accepted, even more so. (I always feel like I learned most about leading services by hawking for Greg; it’s important to be able to read the crowd and respond appropriately and immediately.)

But leading is not just services. Depending on the tradition you embrace, you may also be witness to (and help facilitate) some of the most powerful moments in someone’s life. What I like most about this, perhaps selfishly, is that there’s no room for yourself in these moments — you must be a pure conduit for those involved — and for a heavy egotist like me the experience is wonderfully freeing.

This next may be a specifically Jewish thing (on account of the heavy rabbinical teacher’s role), but there is also a particular joy in seeing people get excited about their really, really old heritage: that moment of “Ohhhh … THAT’S why we do this.” It’s fun to share the things which excite us. It’s also very scary to be the one passing along a tradition — you want to get it right, and you want to get it relevant — but I think a proper spiritual leader needs a certain amount of insecurity.

Seeing people smile when you enter a room is also a nice benefit. But be careful of being praised beyond your capacity to accept. Gracefully accepting gratitude is something I’m still trying to master; what I do comes naturally to me, partly perhaps because I /don’t/ see myself as being altogether worthy of doing it. I just allow it all to happen, that’s all. Like the old Grateful Dead lyric about the storyteller: “His job is to shed light, not to master.”

That’s all I can think of at the moment. I hope it helps you in some way.

Be well, good luck, and blessings.

Introductions

SOMETHING HOLY/TENDER/FRAGILE/GIDDY THERE IS ABOUT someone introducing a member of one world to a member of another: as, one’s relatives to one’s colleagues, one’s colleagues to one’s friends, one’s friends to one’s relatives.

It’s more than just a person-to-person connection. We embroider each other with so many memories and associations that it’s sometimes difficult to see who we’re looking at. Introductions help us clear away the clutter. We can’t help but see what and how the introducee sees: someone new to learn, some bigger but unglimpsed circle to explore.

Our worlds have edges. Introductions show us where they are; and, sometimes, melt into more world.

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