The whale blubber and the hammer

A love song for addiction

Part one, Whale Fat

I’d just dropped off my son at school and was about to head to cowork in a little bungalow on the West side, but found myself instead, doing something very very difficult to do. I paused.

To be fair, it was accidental. I accidentally took in how cute the tree in front of me was, sway flirting in her heavy snow stoles, then throwing pine needles in the air like she just don’t care, snowfetti everywhere.

And suddenly, bam wush, wheee. I was here. In life. Happening now. Warm gush of heat from a cozy car, now a thousand times cozier. Moonroof holding the entire sky of infinite storm at bay, a warmth of personal gratitude buzzes my veins. My hand puts the gear in park, seemingly of its own accord and I can acknowledge a weariness I’d been trying to coffee away. The droopiness that wants a nap. So I do the very radical thing of putting my seat down and the tree does the very radical thing while of continuing her snow show to everyone and no one. I close my tired eyes and let the sigh happen.

You know the sigh. The nearly involuntary release pin that trap door flies you into a kind of non space, a Way Less Trying space, like ducking off the path during a marathon and letting the thundering herd, well, thunder-herd wherever they always perpetually thundering to. The heat, the soft roundness of the snow, gentling everything into the possibility of snowman white smiles, the agenda-freeness of this sliver of time, the sweet sweet draught of non-trying, all spelunk me into a relaxed state that feels very close to where my joy emerges from. Such an infinite softness here, and here also is the soil where all the seeds of my future delight lie, becoming. Also here, is my current best hack for addiction.

Not a conscious hack (I have those too) but a hack the way whales having blubber is a hack for them staying warm and floating. It’s a return to innocent wholeness, and a re-rhythming to some wave pattern more innate to human Beingness.

A kinder wave-pattern, one that accepts, with curiosity, innate human expression rather than driving over that innate expression with the studded tires of mental agenda, (that comes from hooby knows where TF or who TF). Approaching my own beingness with a mental dictatorship has been the fastest way to create an atmosphere that is PERFECT for addictive avoidant patterns to bloom up, like a hot moldy closet for the cultivation of many excellent molds.

One of the ways I survive the pain of forcing myself to be or do something that I am not is to get addicted to some response or thing or thot pattern (really, in a pinch, anything will do for getting addicted! Cheese! Vacuum commercials! Gluing buttons to other buttons!). The addiction serves a dual strategy that is both avoidant and self-soothing. 1. Avoiding. Ducking the call to express Life Force ever more genuinely thru this human vessel (and all the painful change and feelings feels and trauma heals and all the allness and messyfuckinghumanmessyshittyshit of the deconditioning process) and 2. self soothing. There is an innate anxiety that is always calling me back to true expression (call this the Cosmic GPS). It’s an indicator and gets louder and harder to ignore the further off path I get.

Lying there on my Subaru seat, watching the moonroof become all whites, then slowly melt into gooey glimpses of the puddling sky, I began to feel fat. Fat with presence. Whale blubber returning, breath by unfettered breath.

Part two, The Hammer

But after a time, using the thing (whatever it is) to avoid and soothe, becomes a pattern, something I do, not even in response to a rough moment. I just do it because the mind is efficient and reduces friction and uses repetitive for both those aims. Therefore, creative, tuned in responses are inefficient and take a lot of life energy to engage and maintain, and the mind won’t really help you do it. So I find myself in a rut that equates not being present and not listening to GPS.

The perpetual avoidant/soothe path creates an innate frailty, a thinness, an utter lack of fat blubber in the important places of our Beingness. You’ll know someone is heavy on addiction and lite on presence when they snap easily, have little sustained presence, run away from life more than they run towards it.

But in the using we are also utterly fucking up our relationship to those things/relationships/experiences that we use to avoid or soothe. When we use a thing to do something, we are inevitably in a tool/user relationship with the thing.

When I use a hammer I have very little curiosity or wonderment about its capabilities. I arrive with a fairly certain sense of what it can or cannot do. I do never attempt to have it make a phone call for me or to warm my soup. I exclusively use it to bang things or to remove things, which I have banged. I put it away when I am thru with the banging activities. I don’t think about it after I have utilized its services. There’s a closed door energy to interaction with the hammer, show, drug, relationship, cheese, whatever. We have it niched into it’s avoidant/soothing niche and don’t get to know or truly interact with its true itsness. Whatever that might be!

I am currently listening to an audiobook that I listened to years ago. During this relistening I am frequently so moved that I have to turn the book off and weep for all the feels I’m feelsing. My experience of it this time around is like a new book. I only vaguely remember the plot line and often realize that what I had remembered of it before was wrong. As I pondered why this was, I remember that my son and I tore thru this audiobook on our travels during a period of time when my heart was working on getting ready to enter the pilgrimage of devoted marriage, so, of course, all my fear patterns and corrupt beliefs were UP and terrifying me so I was devouring this long epic fantasy as a way to avoid drowning in the terror overwhelm. I was using the book to avoid and stave off the emotional torrent of liberation that was trying to break through me.

Now, I’m not. I listen to it in down times, or in baths. I soak up the nuances, the long character development, the moments that are so resonant with my own shero’s journey. I am with the book. I am in a relationship with the moment. Because I’m not desperately using it to avoid my deeper life I hear when I have had enough. I can easily feel when I full of food, or when I crave silence, or alone time. These are recovered knowingnesses hard won by first engaging a lot of things as ways to avoid and soothe. Then to recover my original innocence with a thing! Ah! The pleasures of reading and fucking and drinking and feasting! And communicating and frolicking online and playing with connection and network building and leaning into experience without the addictive slant. What purity of heart is fed by this way of experiencing

Here’s the play by play. A difficult feeling emerges or tries to, and my nervous system interprets the discomfort as an intruder and tries to send me into fight or flight. I struggle to avoid the freak out melt down. Messiness is so unattractive. So I scan my immediate environment for the most effective way to avoid facing and exploring the chaos pain circus that’s trying to get my attention. I just do. Despite all the nice things I just wrote about not doing it, I am human. Avoiding discomfort is hardwired. Sometimes I am able to avoid directly addressing the hard thing, once, or twice. But I know now, it’ll keep coming until I greet, meet, and learn to accept and allow its wisdom that’s locked inside it. So, in this view, addiction is becoming way less fucking useful. It becomes inefficient to avoid the invitations of the cosmic GPS, unloving and boring to use something to avoid experience. More and more I remember this is what I am here for. It is only in the fullness of presence to now that I am With Life, and not against it.

Somehow, and who knows how, I have been gifted by a true goal. I’ve ever had such a heart-swelling one before: I want to be a genuine human. Living a full life cycle. Hopping over no essential steps. With transparency and love for the whole damn game. This means I’m excited to move up the levels, to become an adult, an elder, a cosmic elder holding the stars inside my heart’s eyes to help guide the next sprens and sprites coming up the pilgrimage path.

The burning fire of that one genuine goal holds me when my soft and lazy mind wants to avoid seeing and experiencing pain, or admitting I was wrong and hurtful, or that I need to give energy to transmuting and loving open ancestral wounds that I came in with.

It creates pauses. The gravitas of the goal draws from The Field, the space it needs to come alive and affords me those brief, whale fattening moments, to buoy and pad my fearful mind before the urgent pressure to avoid comes along and brains me senseless. The goal lends me the gift of fairy sight. I can see myself racing along the shunt/scaffolding path, not seeing or touching or interacting with or healing any of the difficult things and then I see myself turning the fuck around and having to come back through the room, again and again until I’ve opened every window, dusted every dusty difficult thing.

The deliciousness of this distinction is that those things that were once used as shunts or avoidance tools now get to be whatever kind of hammer or pillow or funny strange object they actually are or can be.

Some of them have absolutely no life or true gift beyond being a shunt or avoidance technique, like heroin, or white sugar or using and hurting other people. But others will right themselves and stop wobbling and become sources of delight. Like this book, so full of metaphor and meaning, none of which I was able to grok or be moved by before when I was using it instead of experiencing it. Or the beer I had with my sister, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, and which we cried over, which I didn’t finish, which wasn’t a scaffolding or an avoidance measure, but one nourishment molecule amidst all the other perfectly arriving molecules, like her being paralyzed with laughter to the point where she wasn’t clear any oxygen was getting to her legs and had to lay face down on the carpet in my my mom’s house as midnight and fin kick her legs silently while she laughed so hard we were both fairly certain she may actually particalize out into laughter.