James Kullander

Writing and Inspiration

Archives for January 2009

Here & There September 2008

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Here & There September 2008
By James Kullander

So there I was driving to the office the other day when I saw the tips of a few sugar maples beginning to turn, which means summer is coming to an end just when I thought the party was getting started. I found myself feeling suddenly and unaccountably sad about the passage of time, life. Feeling, too, a “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, even though it was a bright mid-August morning, the road dappled with quick bursts of sun that skated across my car.

The mood had come on so quickly I thought it would go away just as quickly, like around the next corner. No such luck. I felt stuck on the same rough, muddy road going nowhere for more than two weeks, my former self—a more or less affable guy, my moods usually not so highly-calibrated—nowhere in sight, a hitcher I dropped off miles back. I did not know when it first struck that I’d made a turn into the dark belly of the whale. Had I known this was going to happen, I would have taken a different route to the office.

I tried to pull myself out of it, but my wheels just spun. Although this does not happen to me often, it was not the first time, so I resorted to my usual arsenal of antidotes. Writing sometimes helps. But every time I tried to work on something, I felt about as inspired as a brick. Struck dumb. Reading didn’t help, either, because the books I like to read are written by people more creative and brilliant than I am even when I am being completely delusional, and setting my eyes on their beautiful words and perfect sentences made me feel the paralyzing loss of never being able to measure up to what I want to be. I suppose a drink or two would have helped get me through the day. A lovely glass of wine always puts me in a good mood. But I thought that substituting my cup of coffee for a generous pour of Côtes du Rhône with my morning eggs and toast seemed like a really, really bad idea.

Of course, there are good reasons for being sad and withdrawn. Grief is probably the best and most excusable reason I can think of. One winter a few years ago when I came back to the office after being away while my former wife died of cancer, I didn’t really want talk to anyone about anything if I could help it. I think I must have been radioactive with pain and confusion because hardly anyone came near me. Who could blame them? I was even avoiding eye contact. But then for no explicable reason, I’d soften up from time to time, and feel like such a hateful lout for being so cold, especially when my colleagues dared to tiptoe into my office and offer me some of their lunch or Christmas sweets. My eye contact friendly fire now, aimed at something beyond them, some dark menacing force that makes you feel you’ve been unspeakably betrayed.

Maybe I have been grieving. And maybe it was not just the turning of the leaves that got me down. Relationship quandaries. Writer’s block. Aging parents. My own aging. Perhaps the turning leaves just set things off like a finger pulled from a dike. It seemed like I was living with a constant low-grade anxiety, like there was a television always on in another room that I couldn’t turn off. But what I really heard were the wires of poignant disquiet humming inside my own head. And I knew that the place I wanted to get back to—that former self—was not somewhere outside of me. It was inside me. I just wished I could have changed the channel and gotten back there. Immediately. No one came to my office door with chocolates because there was nothing so plainly obvious going on in my life—like a death in the family—that could have possibly served as a cue to the others for the way I was behaving. No distress signal beaming from a lifejacket while I floated in some oceanic grief. I couldn’t even figure it out.

What I sometimes thought would have done the trick was for me to volunteer to help someone in far worse shape than me—the sick, the dying, the poor, or whomever else of God’s children needed some sort of assistance that I might have been able to offer. But what I also knew would have helped was even simpler than that: I just needed to flow with whatever I was feeling and not get so caught up in a frenzy of trying to make anything better, pull out of it, change the channel. And just by doing that I knew could help others, too.

When I was in seminary I interned as a chaplain in a psychiatric ward at a hospital in New York City. One afternoon each week my fellow interns and the director of the chaplaincy program met to discuss not only how we handled particular patients, but also why we did what we did, said what we said, felt what we felt. The fundamental lesson always came down to this: the more clearly and honestly we acknowledge our own pain, suffering, and fears, the better we can help others deal with their own.

No one I met recovering from a suicide attempt, a bout of hard drinking, post-partum depression, or a convulsive, eye-crossing shock treatment wanted to talk to a statue quoting from the 23rd Psalm or anything else, for that matter, someone somehow exempt from human frailty and all the faltering that happens in the course of a human life. Neither did the people I saw in their dying days, all pretense removed from their fading consciousness. The sick and dying know when a poser walks into the room. They want to talk to someone who knows that life is wonderful and difficult, that pain is horrible, that death is scary—but sometimes better than life. That you, like them, have regrets, moments of doubt, and bad days. That you have taken roads that led nowhere, gotten stuck, lost your way.

The way out is in. And I did pull out of my funk. For now. Until the brooding with its contemplative and sometimes incomprehensible hymns to the vagaries of life comes again and changes my plans for the day. Or for several days, for that matter. When it does, I’d love a piece of chocolate. But please don’t offer me the stern rebuke of the modern age to cheer up. I’ll be okay.

Here & There August 2008

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Here & There August 2008
By James Kullander

I’ve a confession to make: I love Enya. I can hardly leave home without her. Whenever I go on the road, I take her along. Over the years, she’s come with me to Nepal, Thailand, Italy, Ireland (where she lives), and on long drives up and down the highways that line the eastern seaboard like veins on the back of a hand, from Florida to Nova Scotia, past shopping malls and the sea, cornfields and landfills, freight yards and backyards, factories and farms.

For me, traveling is just as much about seeing the sites as it is looking within. The open road is a path to the soul. I listen to Enya to bring me there. Of all the hundreds of CDs I have—from Smashing Pumpkins to Arvo Pärt—I often listen to the same Enya CD over and over again. Sometimes the same song over and over again. And never tire of it. I feel she knows me better than I know myself. She says in so many ways what I long to say but don’t know how to say. Or to feel but not always allow myself to feel. Like she can read my mind and heart, and play it back to me, even if no words are involved. Sometimes, the more I listen to her, the more I hear, the words and notes like ladder rungs, leading me into the depths of myself, bringing ever more meaning to my experiences year after year after year.

Will you find the answer
in all you say and do?
Will you find the answer
in you?

I was introduced to Enya one wintry day in December of 1990 when I heard the 1988 CD Watermark, her first big hit (she produced a previous album, Enya, whose sales were relatively small). I’d just begun working for Omega that winter, and from the moment the melodious melodies of Watermark tiptoed like a warm breath into my ears from an office down the hall, I was in love. I was a little lost in my life then. I remember sometimes feeling like I’d found myself bored at a party full of people I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, and I had no ride home. At the same time I was lifting the veil on some spiritual yearnings I’d been sensing. Enya became a sort of guide in this new world I longed for but could hardly identify. And she attuned me to the idea that life can be rich and beautiful no matter where I am or what I am doing, even if—or especially if—I am lost and having a tough time. Stuck in my life or stuck in traffic. Even the slippery slopes of self-loathing, regret, loss, fear, and dark moods are easier rides with the music of Enya coursing through me.

I’ve been reading a 2006 book, This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. In it he writes: “To a certain extent, we surrender to music when we listen to it—we allow ourselves to trust the composers and musicians with a part of our hearts and our spirits; we let the music take us somewhere outside of ourselves. Many of us feel that great music connects us to something larger than our own existence, to other people, or to God.” This is what I feel when I listen to Enya. Is it “great” music? That’s a matter of opinion. As Duke Ellington once said: “If it sounds good and feels good, then it is good.” Enya sounds and feels good to me.

I remember in the summer of 1999, when I was traveling solo through Israel, I had accommodations in a hostel in Jerusalem’s Old City. One night I snuck out onto the flat roof overlooking in the distance the gigantic Church of the Holy Sepulcher (one of the most revered buildings are earth since it is built on the grounds of where most of Christendom believes Jesus was crucified and buried), al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third most holy site), and the Western Wall (the last remaining remnant of Solomon’s Temple and sacred to Jews for more than 2,000 years). Here were three of the most holy sites of three of the West’s greatest religions, all of them just about bumping up against one another and locked in bitter disputes over the years, like badly behaved siblings. After a long day of seeing those sites on the ground in the punishing Judean heat, exhausted and despairing over the centuries of religious hatred that has blighted the city, I slipped on my headphones, clicked on my Walkman, and listened to Enya’s “Book of Days.” The music sounded like it was coming from inside my head. And I found myself dancing, momentarily reconciled with this bewildering world all around me, arms out, face turned to the clear desert sky so thick with stars they too could have come from inside my head. Perhaps I was seeing the synapses in my brain sparking. I was euphoric about something I could not even name. A famous Buddhist chant, the Heart Sutra, ends with the lines describing the moment of awakening: “Gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond.” That’s what I felt like I’d gotten a glimpse of. Sometime after that trip I realized that the rhythm of a section of Enya’s “Book of Days” bears a haunting resemblance to that of the Heart Sutra.

No day, no night, no moment,
Can hold me back from trying.
I’ll fly, I’ll fall, I’ll falter,
I’ll find my day may be,
Far and away,
Far and away.

I like Enya best when I am in my car, even if I am only heading across town to the local Hannaford’s. To me, her lilting voice and seamless synthesizer orchestrations are emblematic of motion, and it’s when I am driving around that her songs resonate most deeply within me. The enigmatic aspect of life and its vast possibilities I feel from listening to her correspond to the ever-changing view of what’s in front of me. And I never know what’s around the corner even just down the road. It might be difficult. But it’s all right, because I’ll be a better, wiser person for remaining open to whatever is ahead. And there’s always something ahead (even if it feels like it’s sneaked up from behind). That’s what Enya says to me. She sings of the enigma of arrival. I sometimes think that Enya’s music has such wide appeal because wandering, longing, and searching is what we all do throughout much of our lives no matter where we are, even if we’re just staring out the kitchen window and going somewhere in the movie of our mind. One writer on the e-zine Slate writes: “To call Enya’s music ‘cinematic’ is an understatement—nearly every song plays like the soundtrack for a majestic film montage, with the camera swooping from lush green valleys to craggy coastlines and upward, zipping past mountain peaks, punching through cloud cover, soaring into the blue and beyond, to touch the face of God, or Gandalf.”

Of the many Enya CDs I have, my favorite is Shepherd Moons, Enya’s second international hit. An Entertainment Weekly reviewer once wrote that “Shepherd Moons just won’t leave you alone.” It holds a place in my memory like my first kiss. I remember that kiss well, and sometimes go way back there in my mind if for no other reason than for the memory of the pure, simple pleasure of being young and naïve and happy. I was on the verge of entering adolescence and the adult world, which would for me become more complicated and laborious than anything I could have imagined as a shy boy of 13. Years later when I first heard Enya, I was no longer young or naïve or all that happy, and I believe it was in part for my lost happiness that her music appealed to me then. Enya made me feel happy again. I suppose a part of me likes Enya because she takes me back in my mind to a simpler time when traveling light—that is, without much emotional baggage—was possible. Or perhaps it’s not so much about not having any emotional baggage but feeling lighter despite it. Enya helps to show me the way to embrace and establish harmony with the deepest currents of my fate. The Entertainment Weekly reviewer writes: “Her music may be escapist, but sorrow, loss, and displacement are lurking around the corner—often just like in life itself.”

Looking back at my youth
I was content
Without dead knowledge
I was young, without time….

When I like musicians or writers or artists, I like to follow their careers, get to know a little about them. I have noted all the Grammy Awards Enya has been piling up, the movie soundtracks she’s been hired to do (she turned down the opportunity to do the soundtrack for The Titanic), and even the college honorary degrees she has received. I’ve learned that her voice, which lured me from the start, is classified as a mezzo-soprano with an alto range, which she records in layers as many as eighty times for one song. One reviewer calls her a “sonic architect.” Her signature sound is produced with the help a Roland D-50 synthesizer, made by the Japanese company that also produced one of the first programmable drum machines. She sings many of her songs in Irish or Latin. On Amarantine, she even sings in Japanese and Loxian, a language invented by her lyricist Roma Ryan. Enya has also sung songs written entirely or partially in Welsh, Spanish, French, and even two languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his novels, including “May It Be” (in Quenya with some English), and “Aníron” (in Sindarin), both of which she composed for and performed on the soundtrack of Peter Jackson’s movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. She was born Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin on May 17, 1961 in Gaoth Dobhair, County Donegal, Ireland, and is now Ireland’s best-selling solo artist and the country’s second biggest musical export, second only to U2. A fan-based website, enyafans.net, offers information in fourteen languages, including Chinese, Lithuanian, and Persian.

When anyone is in my car with me and Enya is on or I find myself talking about her, I feel a little conflicted, like I’m not supposed to admit how much I like her music. I would never hide the fact that I love Led Zeppelin or Third Eye Blind to the point where I’ve given myself a permanent case of tinnitus listening to them. I just feel a little embarrassed, like a soft touch, liking Enya so much. Yet, I know that I am not alone among men. Not long ago a Harvard University astronomer named a minor planet (number 6433) after her. If that’s not a gesture of adoration from an astronomer, I don’t know what is. Last year, AskMen.com featured Enya as “Singer of the Week.” Answering the question: “Why we like her?” the site offers: “Her musical compositions are soothing for the soul and powerful enough to set the mood. Her music can be uplifting or depressing, however you are feeling at that particular moment in time. Laugh, cry, smile, frown—whatever the case may be—Enya’s got your back.” A male reader comments: “Enya is my favorite artist of all time. She has woken me up in the mornings and sang me to sleep on many nights. She’s been my friend through a lot of things. I truly love her music. And by the way, she isn’t New Age. She’s Enya!”

From time to time I surf the Web and watch an Enya video, and I am reminded of who I was when I first heard her and of who I am now, and of how far I have traveled—around the world and within myself—over the years. The short dramas that unfold may be a tad trite but that does not make them less true. Her videos often feature bored or over-studious boys or girls or hard-hearted men who, upon seeing Enya float into their lives singing, see through her to the visions about which she is singing, visions that seem to have lain dormant in their own hearts. The characters are then swept away by what was already in them: their dreams of love, beauty, flight. Amidst the soft focus and digitized water-coloring, there is movement and escape from the prisons of their own making with the help boats, kites, red balloons, galloping horses, paper airplanes. And no one ever comes back because their lives are now changed for the better and for good.

We are growing older together, Enya and me. Like any couple that has been together for years and through it all—births, deaths, financial struggles, shattered dreams, broken hearts, betrayals—I can often anticipate what she’s going to say before she says it, and the sound of her voice and some of the things she says are indelibly etched into my mind. Like a supportive companion, and as a result of my being a somewhat taciturn man, I let her do most of the talking because I find what she has to say interesting and pleasant to listen to, even if it is getting a little repetitive. And I never interrupt; if I arrive where I have set out to go in the middle of her song, I tarry to let it finish before I get out of the car. That is my way to thank her and to show her how much I respect her.

I have no idea what Enya is like when she is not playing music. She may be bad-tempered, for all I know. That makes no difference to me. I’ve heard swans are bad-tempered, but their beauty can still stop you in your tracks and carry you away.

***

For further exploration:

Shepherd Moons

The Memory of Trees

Watermark

The Celts

A Day Without Rain

Amarantine

Here & There July 2008

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Here & There
By James Kullander

What do you want? I ask myself that question a lot and expect the answer, like some magic password, to open the gate to eternal happiness. Sometimes I do find the happiness I seek. But sometimes (ok, often) I find myself dissatisfied with what I imagined would make me happy, and the question comes round again.

Sometimes a third thing happens: I don’t know what I want. This is more unpredictable and more frustrating—not just for me, but for others, too. Perhaps it’s not always the answer that’s so important, especially with the big things in life, like love and work, but finding out who inside me is asking the questions. And that can take some time to figure out.

Over the past several years, I have been speaking with my supervisors to dramatically change the way I’ve worked at the office for nearly 18 years. I was not unhappy at work, but I did want to change something, to try something new beyond the corridors of the office, the narrow miner’s light of my own routine. At first, I didn’t quite know what to do or how to go about doing it. I’ve been doing what I do for so long—writing and editing Omega’s catalogs and brochures—that I found breaking the routine was like jumping up on a wall to climb out, but the wall was greased, and I just slid back down. Sisyphus and his rock.

With modern telecommunications and the nature of my job as an editor, writer, and program researcher, I spend most of my working day online or on the phone. I can do most of what I do in my office at Omega, in my living room at home, or in a hotel lobby in Tahiti. I began experimenting with telecommuting 10 years ago with a laptop and dial-up service when I was dividing my time between Omega and Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where I was a part-time student. On and off for the past couple of years, I began telecommuting from my home one day a week. More recently, I’ve been telecommuting two days a week. On the days I work at home, I try not to get in my car to save gas and do my tiny part to save our ailing planet. And telecommuting suits a part of my temperament; writers and editors often work alone, and like it that way.

What I have decided I want is a chance to telecommute even more. I want more time to develop some long-neglected writing projects for Omega, to reduce the money I spend on gas and decrease the carbon emissions the times when I work from my home, and the freedom to live and work in two places, which is something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult life but could never figure out how to pull off, both because of my daily responsibilities at the office and my own nagging fear of trying something so new and bold. I talked about it with people but never asked. Finally, in April I made a formal request to work two weeks out of the office followed by a month in the office. Nothing like this had ever been done before at Omega, but in my mind it had become now or never.

***
A few months ago, I noticed a small brown spot on my upper right arm. It was late at night and I was exhausted after a stressful day at work—I’d nearly fallen asleep in the bath before going to bed—but this startled me. I leaned into the mirror for a closer look. I had no idea what melanoma looked like but what I saw looked like something I needed to pay attention to. And I did. I looked at it every morning and every night. I wanted it to go away. But it didn’t. One day, I went online to look at some photos of melanoma moles. Mine bore a frightening resemblance to what I was seeing in those photos. Damn. About two months after I’d first seen that small brown spot, I decided to have a doctor check it out.

It’s Friday morning before the start of the long Memorial Day weekend. In the cold dermatologist’s office, I am sitting on the patient table, shirt off, the white sheet of paper crinkling under me as the doctor looks at my arm, once with the naked eye and once with a magnifying glass. I am thinking about how I am going to treat myself to a chai latte after this. I love chai latte and on my way to the doctor’s office I’d noticed a fancy coffee shop that I’m sure has this on the menu, and that’s where I’ll be heading in just a few minutes. Then the doctor sits in a black plastic chair across from me, puts his thick hands together up in front of this lips in an attitude of prayer and says, “Jim, melanoma is a very serious disease. And I think you have melanoma. In fact, I’m quite sure of it.”

When I arrived at the doctor’s office, I had expected to be sent home without a care in the world. It’s nothing. Go home. Have a nice life. A half-hour later I have melanoma. Jesus. He explains to me the nature of the cancer, how it works its poison into your body. I try to pay attention while at the same time I see myself not sipping blissfully on a chai latte. I see myself dead. This is where the end begins, I am thinking. My maiden voyage into a world I’ve dreaded for years and no amount of back paddling is going to stop it. I’ve been with two friends when they learned they had cancer and both of them were dead six months later. One of them I saw dead; the image is seared into my brain, and I don’t want to look like that anytime soon. Okay, focus. Be here now. The deeper it is, the more lethal it is. I remember the doctor saying that much. Since mine was small and new, the doctor says, it is likely the melanoma on my arm is not deep or lethal. A moment of relief, a change in the wind. I take a breath. Still, he wants the mole off me and tells me to come back at the end of the day so he can remove it and have it biopsied. Dazed and frightened, I drive home, call my father, cry probably for the first time with him. Then back to the doctor’s office, then home with an arm full of stitches, sans the mole.

Here in Upstate New York, Memorial Day weekend was one of the most extraordinarily beautiful three-day stretches we have had in months. I have a cheap chaise lounge under a floppy leafed catalpa tree in my back yard, where I read and write and nap when I get drowsy. Nursing my wound, I spent Memorial Day weekend doing just that. And worrying. It would be a week before I would learn the results of the biopsy. I had no idea if the cancer I had was isolated in that small mole or if my body was riddled with it.

There were moments I stopped doing whatever I was doing. I stopped reading or writing or even worrying, if only for a moment, and looked around me at the beautiful day, the birds flying, the rabbits hopping, the deer running, the chipmunks scurrying. In those moments, I felt good just to be alive, ever more appreciative of the life I’d been given. And I did my level best to finally accept the impermanence of my life. It’s been a nice ride. Now it’s over. With so little emotional armor, there were times when I had a light, fragile feeling that was inexplicably pleasant. Then the pleasant feeling would pass and I’d find myself brooding upon the hard realities of human existence, imagining that I was going to die a slow, painful death; my long, happy life hemorrhaging like a full can of paint that’s been kicked over. And when I thought of that I lifted up like objects of adoration all the places I would rather be to live out my last days. Italy, Greece, Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, Ireland’s Connemara—beautiful places I’ve been and suddenly wanted to get back to again—all came to mind like travel stickers on an old suitcase. The incongruity of these two states produced an awakening of sorts. The Buddha said: “It is better to spend one day contemplating the birth and death of all things than a hundred years never contemplating beginnings and endings.”
***
The following week, I e-mailed a friend, who has also looked at death squarely in the face, to tell her about my weekend. She wrote back confirming what I had been contemplating those three difficult days: “All you got is this moment, bud. So instead of wanting to be somewhere else, just feel into that good heart of yours, feel the life force pounding away, forget about writing or a certain place where you want to be writing, and just be that life force that needs nothing, nowhere, no one. I know it sounds hokey, but it will help as you go through all of the fear states. Feel your pounding heart and dwell as peacefully as you can in the mystery of it all. Wanting to be somewhere else, thinking you SHOULD be somewhere else, hating where you are—especially right now, is just going to add more pain to the fear.”

My experience that weekend taught me something I already knew but always forget: Life is short so don’t waste one more precious moment not doing what you really want to do. Since I needed to work, telecommuting suddenly rose to the top of my bucket list. This might not seem like a big deal, I said to myself. But, I thought, is it any less a big deal than jumping out of an airplane like Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman do in the movie, The Bucket List? Telecommuting now appeared in my life as the personal fulfillment of a long-cherished dream.

The melanoma turned out to be minor; I’d caught it early enough, before it had gotten too deep and the cancer cells into the rest of my body. And at work, my request was approved. I am writing this in my living room at home.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the lesson here. Perhaps when we are aligned with our true self, then the rest of the world mysteriously conspires with us to make things happen. What we want and what God asks of us are “one and the same damned thing,” as a Union professor once paraphrased St. Augustine, a 4th-century philosopher and theologian, because for St. Augustine our true self is written in God’s memory. As we plumb the mind of God, we get ever closer to finding the person God wants us to be and our place in the great scheme of things.

When one person makes a step for change, and that change is what’s wanted most not just for our own individual fulfillment but also for the greater good, suddenly there can be a shift in the old patterns, a breaking of habits. The greased wall comes tumbling down and the gods release you from having to push that rock up the hill. The same can be said for organizations and institutions. While my request was being considered, Omega’s directors were already looking at ways to further its commitment to sustainability—not just with a nod to reducing our carbon emissions, but also as a way of recognizing the quality of an employee’s life when we can align our passions with our work and the way we work.

Instead of relegating the search for self to the list of things we will do later—or perhaps, because our culture makes it seem so selfish and silly, never do at all—it’s really something we are born to do each and every moment of our life. There is, in fact, no higher calling. Finding out who is doing the calling is, says St. Augustine, the deep calling to the deep.

Books

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The Dark Night of the Soul

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Long before the idea of “mid-life crises” became part of our modern nomenclature, there have been men and women throughout the ages who have undergone some tough, emotional and psychological—and spiritual—crises. Sixteenth-Century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, called this period “the dark night of the soul.” Evelyn Underhill, in her 1911 book, Mysticism, said this period of time “is a deeply human process.” In this passage, Underhill describes the process.

The self, in its necessary movement towards higher levels of reality, loses and leaves behind certain elements of its world, long loved but now outgrown: as children must make the hard transition from nursery to school. Destruction and construction here go together: the exhaustion and ruin of the illuminated consciousness is the signal for the onward movement of the self towards other centres: the feeling of deprivation and inadequacy which comes from the loss of that consciousness is an indirect stimulus to new growth. The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second or adult life.

For further exploration: Mysticism