Acts of Surrender 15: Declarations of Independence

I've been revisiting many things in recent days. One of them is my relationship with my email list. While I won't be sending every blog post out to my list, I will send selected pieces...including this one. One thing I won't be doing, though, is manually updating the list. So if your address changes, please resubscribe with the new address.

Every time I think I'm done, for now, with Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress, an other installment shows up. Here's the most recent...
penned two declarations of independence last week: one to my ex-wife and one to the world.

"I will never stop loving you or Guinevere," I wrote Aalia after an emotionally charged phone call on Tuesday. "But I can only express that love genuinely by loving myself and by honoring what I know in my heart to be true, regardless of fallout or consequences."

Six years almost to the day after Aalia had left me, I finally left her.

To the world, I wrote: "[I'm] digging deeper and deeper and deeper to identify the life that's worth living, the life that expresses my soul's deepest yearning. And I'm saying that I'm no longer prepared to let fear pull me from its pursuit, as I have over the years, despite the great strides I know I've made. Nor am I prepared to let anyone or anything outside of me pull me from that pursuit, regardless of the consequences."

IThese were more than declarations. They were personal manifestos: empowered expressions of who I have become and of how I see myself moving through life. And if I felt omnipotent sending them out into the world, I spent the next days drowning in a backwash of anxiety.

What had I done? By declaring myself sovereign, I had risked alienating my family and had stripped myself of a lifetime of structures and foundations. Suddenly, I was grounded but rootless, detached from an old life, yet with no clear sign of the new one. It felt as though I had passed through a door that had slammed shut behind me. There could be no take-back. I was scared.

What if I lost everything? What if the other side of nothing was more nothing? What if nature actually adores not abhors a vacuum? Was I really ready to give up everything for writing, for my passion?

Was I insane?

One of the dictionary definitions of "insanity" is "extreme foolishness or irrationality." By that definition, perhaps I was insane.

Long ago I chose to live as The Fool does in the tarot — always stepping off the cliff on a faith-filled journey of infinite possibility. Longer ago still, I subscribed to the one newspaper horoscope I've ever read that transcended the trivial. It urged Librans to "follow your heart and lose your mind."

"Is it crazier to choose to be poor or to spend forty years of your life hating forty hours a week?" I came across that question last week on a social network. When I saw how many respondents chose poverty, I did the math: Four decades of forty-hour weeks equals 83,200 hours, or nearly a decade. For anyone living eighty years, that's one-eighth of a life spent hating that life. That's got to be crazy!

Or am I still the one that's crazy?

When I got to Santa Fe on Friday, I hadn't decided. All I knew was that I felt more hopeless, helpless and despairing than I'd felt in over a decade. A world that would choose spiritual poverty over passion made no sense to me. Nor did a world built on an illusion of security, a world where fear trumped everything. Funny, I thought, how the word "conventional" begins with the word "convent," a closed community where innovation is discouraged and conformity is enforced, well, religiously.

When Christ spoke of living in but not of the world, he couldn't have been calling on us to exchange one brand of conventional wisdom for another. To my mind, he was urging us to see the conventional for the prison that it was and to step out of that controlled, falsely secure environment into the chaos of freedom and creativity, into the sovereignty that is the Kingdom of Heaven within.

On Friday, the Kingdom of Heaven was looking pretty hellish.

When I got to my friend Shoshana's, where I would be spending the weekend, I wondered if I'd ever get to the other side of this rebirthing process.

"You're already on the other side of it," she said. "You've never been so yourself."

In the days after Aalia left me in November 2004, when I was feeling the shittiest I had ever felt, everyone I ran into kept telling me how great I looked. It was true. Despite the emotional earthquake, I had shed, with the marriage, more baggage than I even knew I'd been carrying. When I looked in the mirror on Friday at Shoshana's, I was startled. I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked this clear...and this young.

I was clear. With my "declarations of independence," I had unburdened myself of levels and layers of accreted emotional sludge. And I had done it. It hadn't been done to me.

"Now that you're this clear," Shoshana continued, "have you considered re-starting your coaching practice? You're an incredible coach, and therapist."

I started to argue that I had so committed to my writing that I couldn't go back to a place where writing had to fit itself in the available cracks and crevices of a my life.

She shook her head. "You don't get it. You've already declared your commitment. Your passion comes first. Your creativity comes first. It never won't again. Who you are now will never let that happen again."

She watched me as I let her words sink in. She was right. I was basing my attitude toward coaching on who I had been, not on who I now was.

"Can you make space to allow coaching back into your life?"

Could I?

"The new level of commitment you've come to would give your coaching practice a whole new depth."

She was right. I'd written The MoonQuest under duress. It was a story I knew I had to let out of me, but the level of surrender it required was so foreign that it had been a painful, stress-filled experience. After two false starts on The StarQuest, its sequel, I had sworn that I would resume work on it only when I could do so from a place of joy. Obligation could have no place in the process. Two years ago, I was the closest to that place that I'd ever been. Nine months later, I completed a draft of the book.

In recent months, I've finally come to a place of a passion for writing that's no longer intellectually based. Now, my commitment to my stories is my rootedeness. Now, I know — from the depths of an emotional core I could never before access — that writing is the only thing that makes sense. Not head-sense. Heart-sense.

The night before I wrote the first of my manifestos, I was in Albuquerque, billeting with Kathleen Messmer, another friend. Kathleen is the film producer who's committed to making The MoonQuest into a movie, and she'd been urging me to get started on a StarQuest screenplay. A trilogy, she'd explained, would be far more attractive to potential investors. So that afternoon, instead of revising the book manuscript, I'd finally launched the film adaptation...and I'd had a blast. The writing was easy, effortless and magical.

After I shared the opening scenes with Kathleen, our conversation veered toward family history and dysfunctional family stories from our respective pasts.

"That would make a great story," she said after I shared how I'd had three fathers but had never been fathered.

"I've tried to write it," I said, "but I could never find a story line that worked." A few minutes later, I interrupted her. "I've got it!" I exclaimed, and proceeded to tell her the fictionalized version that had just come to me, complete with opening scene.

Opening movie scene, because as certain as I was of the story, I was equally certain that it had to be a screenplay, not a novel. It was my first-ever idea for an original screenplay and, in that moment, I knew that it was my commitment to my passion that had delivered it to me. Also in that moment, I suddenly realized that I had six writing projects on the boards, seven if you included another round of revisions to my MoonQuest screenplay. Never had I had so many heart projects on the go at once.

Clearly, in ways I'd never before been, I was a writer.

From that place, my declarations of independence had to come. From that place, I had to experience the grief and despair of letting go who I had been in order to become all that my soul yearned to express.

Friday night, just for fun, Shoshana and I pulled cards from the Osho Tarot deck. The first card I pulled, related to self, was "Moment to Moment." The second, related to work and/or relationship was "Ice-olation."

What I interpreted from the initial card was the need, in this time of personal upheaval and stripping away, to be more in the moment than I'd ever been before. Instead of stressing about what might happen in the next moment or next week (would I have grocery money? what would happen to my car? where would I sleep?), I would have to find the discipline to practice radical presence. What is true in this moment? In this second? In this breath? The rest I would have to banish from my mind and turn over to whatever higher intelligence was running the show. My commitment to my passion and my path demanded it.

The second card suggested that, in the midst of the natural isolation of my creative pursuits, I needed to make room for community. How perfect that my financial situation was pushing me into the homes of like-spirited friends...was, in effect creating community! It also suggested that a return to coaching could also be a community-builder and could bring a new depth to my work as the newly impassioned and committed writer I had become.

I slept well that night, and woke the next morning more optimistic than I'd felt in days.

Wow! I said to myself when I opened my eyes...and suddenly these lines from the musical Sweet Charity's "If They Could See Me Now" rang through my consciousness: All I can say is, "Wow!" / Look at where I am. / Tonight I landed, Pow! / Right in a pot of jam.

My pot of jam may not yet be lined with gold leaf, but it's still a pot of joy, regardless of outward appearance. I don't believe I'm choosing poverty over a decade of misery. I believe I'm choosing sovereignty. I believe I'm stepping into the Kingdom of Heaven.

I've declared my independence, and like those courageous colonial rebels back during the American Revolution, it can only be unconditional. There is no take-back. There is only forward motion.

And I'm launched.

Sunflower photo by Mark David Gerson.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20