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Here & There January 2009

Here & There January 2009
By James Kullander

I know someone whose marriage is falling apart. He’s been calling me a lot to talk. He doesn’t want the marriage to end. His sentences seem to have no end, as if that’s going to keep it all together. There’s no break between one word and the next. His life one long run-on sentence that’s unraveling. So I listen.

It’s not been easy. Sometimes I get a call in the middle of the day at the office when I’m really busy. Other times, I get a call at home while I am eating dinner. Recently, I’ve been thinking that it might be best if I called him on my cell phone during my half-hour commute. That way I’d be accomplishing two things at once. While I’m driving to my house I could be listening to him go through his hell. Multitasking.

The other night when I was at home, he called. I was nearly cross-eyed after a hectic day at work. I had not called him from my car because I just wanted to listen to some music. Now, I wanted to get off the phone but I didn’t have the heart to cut him off. After about 10 minutes he said, “You’ve been divorced. How did you get through it?” No sooner had I taken the breath to answer when his phone went dead. A part of me felt relieved. But I wondered what happened. I clicked off and dialed his number. A rope thrown to a man who’s gone overboard. He didn’t pick up. I left a voicemail asking him to call back.

How did I get through it? I could feel the words of my answer coming from a place in my mind that seems like a distant country that I might never have visited, an experience I might never have had. A bad dream. My divorce began with a separation agreement in 1993 and was final the year after. I can’t say that the years have exactly flown by. I can say that a lot has happened in my life since then. Maybe it’s not so much the years that have made the distance between then and now seem like eons; it could be that the person I was then is not the person I am now.

Later that night, I began to wonder what it means to “get through” something like a divorce. Or anything else for that matter. Does it mean we emerge on the other side unchanged by what has happened? Or “un” something or other? Unrepentant? Unforgiven? And is any quality like that such a good thing? If we want to “get through” something, might that imply that we want to remain the person we were before the beginning of the event or situation we’re trying to get through? Or if we want to change, can we even dictate how we are going change? Can we determine who we want to become as simply as we key in a destination on a GPS system? Can we expect to get there without getting lost?

If I’d had the opportunity to respond, I probably would have suggested that he just take things day by day. Don’t project into the future and imagine what might be, or what might not be. Don’t look back and wonder what might have been, or could have been—or really was. Accept the loss you are experiencing now as an opportunity for something else that you cannot even imagine. The family you feel slipping from you now might be better, stronger at the end of this current struggle. You don’t know, I would have said. You just don’t know. Life goes on.

These simple things are easy for me to say now. Yet they are informed by the kind of wisdom that comes from personal experience and the experiences of others I know who have divorced or almost divorced and got back together. I know part of what’s frightening and dreadful about a divorce is that it is kind of like a death. The death of a relationship you’d once held dear. The death of the person you thought you married. The death of the person you thought you were. The death of a way of life that you’d grown accustomed to and want to hang on to, even if it’s nothing more—or nothing less—than a bad habit to which you are enslaved. The death of a great lie that obscures an even greater truth. And that truth may be something you don’t want to see.

I got a call back the following evening. The cell phone he’d been talking on had died and his cell phone is the only phone he has these days. The question he’d asked me the night before had been forgotten. In the 24 hours we’d not spoken, many things had happened in his life that he wanted to tell me about. I listened. That’s what I figured he wanted, so I didn’t even bring up his question. He didn’t want advice. Not even the story of my divorce. Just an open ear and a little of my time. Ok, a lot of my time. But if that’s all that I can give right now, then I will give it as best I can.

After all, there is really no answer to the question he put to me that would have had anything to do with his own life. I know something of what he’s going through—how it helps to talk about it—and maybe if someone calls him someday about what he’s calling me about now, then he’ll do for that person what I am doing for him now. To me there is no better lesson than that.

Here & There December 2008

By admin

Here & There December 2008
By James Kullander

When the French writer Andre Gide traveled to the Belgian Congo in the 1920s, he wrote of an experience he had there involving what he called “our native bearers,” who during an expedition in the jungle carried the group’s food and equipment. One morning these bearers were found “sitting about without any preparations made for the start of the day,” Gide writes. He continues:

Upon being questioned, they said, quite simply, that they had been traveling so fast in these last days that they had gotten ahead of their souls and were going to stay quietly in camp for the day in order for their souls to catch up with them.

So they came to a complete stop.

And so did I.

During the last week of October I took a two-day drive to Gampo Abbey, a remote Buddhist monastery at the northern tip of Nova Scotia. I had been there several times before over the past few years. I knew I could come to a stop there and let my soul catch up to me. I felt that was what I needed more than anything I could possibly do with myself, the place where I wanted to be more than anywhere else on the map of the world.

This past September I joined the ranks of the 76 million baby boomers who are losing nearly 5,000 of their parents every day. In the weeks after my father died, I was so besieged by the things I had to do that I felt I had no time to even think about anything other than making sure all the people who needed to know that my father had died were contacted. I was calling banks, insurance companies, government agencies, friends and other family members—all while, back at the office, a pile of work was waiting for me. A part of me felt like I was watching a wall of televisions, each with a different program, and trying to figure out which one to focus on. Another part of me felt I had to be completely on task with things that had nothing to do with the televisions. At the same time I was trying to feel something about my father’s passing. I felt next to nothing. I knew something was wrong. Knew, too, that I could not keep going without one day falling asleep at the wheel during my drive home from the office.

At the abbey, I stay alone in small retreat cabin high on a cliff overlooking the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The cabin has electricity for lights, a two-burner stove, a small refrigerator, and heat. There’s a tiny sink with (very) cold running water. And not much else. No phone (and no cell phone connection for miles around), no radio, no television, no Internet. And that, for me, is the beauty of it. I usually spend so much of my time so connected I hardly know what to do without a phone to talk on, a computer to check my e-mail on, a radio to listen to, a television to watch movies on. But not knowing what to do is precisely the antidote I seek there; for me it’s often in the long stretches of silence and solitude when not knowing what to do helps me get in touch with really knowing what I want to do, with who I am, and with what I want out of life. By disconnecting from the world I connect with myself.

Having nothing to do is not easy. Even the mind wants to be doing something. Thoughts and feelings are restless, like bees in a jar, I’d once read on the abbey’s bulletin board. But during this time in my life, it was a welcomed respite. Yes, there are people to be saved, the Earth to protect, projects to be completed, money to be made, bills to be paid. “But, oh that magic feeling,” The Beatles once sang. “Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go….”

I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, got settled, and limped into bed at eight o’clock that evening. I slept till 10 o’clock the next morning. Throughout that first day I read a little, wrote some, meditated, took a walk along the long dirt road that passes by the abbey, and napped. I took so many naps my first two days there I lost count. Horizontal was the only position that seemed right, and motionless the right sort of activity. As I lay there, a ragged bundle, listening to the ocean waves washing up on the Canadian Shield 200 feet below me, there were moments when I felt absolute contentment. Felt that I, too, had washed up there, a castaway from a shipwreck. Then, I’d drift off to sleep.

While in Florida to help my father die, I was reading J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I’d never read the 1961 novel in high school or college, and one day last summer at the local Barnes and Noble, I saw it on the shelf, picked it up, and thought, well, it might be time to give it a try. While in Florida, before falling asleep each night, I’d read a few pages. Franny and Zooey are siblings who once starred as child geniuses in a famous radio quiz show. Their mother, Bessie, is doing what she can to comfort Franny, who has come home from college to the family’s New York City apartment having what she thinks is a “nervous breakdown.” She’s tired all the time. And lost. Franny and Zooey had grown into self-conscious, slightly embittered adults. Zooey is Franny’s older brother and throughout much of the book he teases and belittles her. But in the end he calls Franny on the phone (while in the same apartment and pretending to be another brother, Buddy) and has a long conversation with Franny, revealing his brotherly love for her buried beneath his cynicism and sarcasm.

I’ll tell you one thing, Franny. One thing I know. And don’t get upset. It isn’t anything bad. But if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have the sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy. Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master—some guru, some holy man—to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose? Can you tell me that?

As I lay in the narrow bed in that cabin listening to the waves, I thought about Zooey’s words. I thought about them when I sat outside at night wrapped in a blanket and gazed up at the stars for hours as if emptying the psychic junk in my mind, and allowing something else in that felt clean and pure. I thought about them as I watched the tiny flashing lights of transatlantic jets bound for Paris, London, Madrid—and thought about how I’d almost decided to go to Venice, where I imagined I would find solace in beautiful art, wonderful food, and delicious wine like Franny looking for a holy man. But I knew I’d come to the right place. The waves, the dark night sky, the wind in the trees. All of it Bessie’s consecrated chicken soup.

Some critics consider Franny and Zooey to be an account of a sort of spiritual journey, a Zen tale with Franny progressing from ignorance to the deep wisdom of enlightenment. I felt my trek to the abbey was a little like that. I’m learning that enlightenment is not so much a destination but the way we live our lives every day; it’s about making good choices, being kind to others and yourself, existing comfortably in your own skin (your precious human birth), letting the world touch you, and paying forward your awakened heart as best you can.

I reflected on my dad’s passing, felt him gone. But not entirely. Not yet. I think it’s going to take a while for it to catch up to me, like it took some time for the souls of Gide’s bearers to catch up to them. I’ve a feeling it’s going to come in waves, like those consecrated waves I heard outside the cabin window. The bottom of my life probably won’t drop out from under me at this point; the scaffolding of my inner self seems to have born the full brunt of his death, and survived. The sadness is going to come when I want to call him on the phone to say hi but can’t. It will come when I want to ask him a question about something I’d read in the Wall Street Journal, but can’t. It will come when I go visit my mother in Colorado, and he’s not there.

***
For further exploration:

Andre Gide Journals, Vol. 2: 1914-1927

Andre Gide Journals, Vol. 3: 1928-1939

J.D. Salinger Franny and Zooey

Here & There November 2008

By admin

Here & There November 2008
By James Kullander

Scrawled in blunt-pointed pencil in my At-a-Glance weekly appointment book, my list of things to do on Friday, September 26, includes items like get coffee, pay my American Express bill, and call my home post office to let the people there know I’ll be gone longer than I had expected when I’d dropped off a hold-mail notice as I’d left for Jacksonville, Florida two weeks before. Squeezed in at the very bottom of the long list is a small notation: Dad died. 11:05 p.m.

On Wednesday, October 8, I have items listed that include pay day, sell tickets to the k.d. lang concert I can’t get to, call a friend of mine in Queens, and in the middle of all this: Dad cremated.

Is this what the death of someone I love has come down to? A couple of items in an appointment book?

Since September 26, I have spent unaccountable hours on the phone with lawyers, bankers, insurance companies, and every other official body that needs to know my father is no longer among the living. One morning in my parents’ apartment, three days after my father died, I was on hold with the subscription department of the Wall Street Journal while talking to a hospice nurse on another line. I felt like a stock broker, frantically selling on one phone and buying on the other.

While this was going on, I was maneuvering around boxes from a moving company, which had sent three men in jeans and T-shirts to pack up the apartment and move it Colorado so my mother, whose grief and confusion in the sudden whirlwind needed tending, could be near the only one of my three siblings who is married with children, and where we figured she would feel most at home now that her husband of 60 years had passed. My life at the office, although a welcome respite from my other life, has been no less demanding. Things all around me—and in me—have been happening so quickly and my memory feels so compromised and stupid with unprocessed grief, that I felt I had to write my father’s death and cremation dates into my appointment book so I wouldn’t forget a week or two later.

Events are passing me by like rows of billboards I am whizzing past in the fast lane of the business of death and survival. In the blur I can barely read what’s on them, see the images enough to make sense of them. Maybe one of them is advertising what I’m really looking for: Time to do nothing. But in the car I’m driving—or in the car that’s driving me—I can’t find the brakes and I’m running every red light I see. Normally, I like long road trips for their soothing, highway monotony. But the drive home from Florida in my father’s car was far from soothing or monotonous. The traffic between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore was epic. While I listened to NPR about all the frightening news about the crashing economy, it looked like everyone was evacuating and heading to the hills. The highway choked with Joads, only this time each one driving alone in a gleaming BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus, the American dream suddenly one huge, incomprehensible nightmare. Sort of like my own life, I thought.

I am not one to run from difficult emotions and I want to stop and let the sadness catch up to me. Instead, it feels like a low-grade fever I am trying to shake because I have to keep moving. Yet, on these increasingly chilly and dark autumnal mornings, the simple task of getting myself out of bed feels like I’m lifting a sack of potatoes. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis mourns the death of his wife: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of death. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter if my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.”

From today’s standpoint, mourning seems quaint and old-fashioned, like a widow wearing black for a year after the death of her husband. Even our inherent responses to the death of someone we love—not only sadness, but also lethargy and confusion—seem like an indulgence we can no longer afford. When I e-mailed one my favorite Buddhist teachers, Sylvia Boorstein, to tell her about my father’s death, I was comforted to know she felt much the same. “I wish we had a society in which people could take a long break from work and other pressures just to be quiet and reflect for a while about a family death,” she e-mailed back. “The world is different after someone leaves it.”

If death has been with us forever and if the affects of death lay us low as much as they always have, then why should we allow ourselves to be so quickly pulled back into the tumultuous current of our lives like, well, nothing happened? Something did happen. Something big. These days I feel like a shell-shocked refugee from a country at war, where death is fast, brutal, and must be fled to survive. And I’ve found myself in a country where I feel out of place and lost, my normal points of reference back in the land I’ve left behind, which no longer exists as a sovereign state and which I would not be able to recognize if I could return, or even find my way back to, the path filling in with the undergrowth of endless tasks that threaten to overtake me.

One of the lessons I’ve learned in my years of study and practice of Buddhism is that we are the cause of our own suffering if what we desire is different from what we have, if we wish something or someone to be other than what they are. I’ve found these teachings to be a great solace sometimes. I am doing what I can to apply them to the events now going on my life; I am trying not to resist what I need to do to take care of the business of my father’s death and to do what I need to do to pay my bills, keep my house, feed myself—to get up out of bed in the morning and make my way to the office.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder sometimes to what degree does this approach snub my father’s passing and take a toll on my own well-being on account of that disregard?

What to do? At the moment, I don’t know but to keep on doing what I’m doing, like I’ve tripped over something and have to stumble along to keep myself from falling. In the weeks before my father died, he mumbled from his hospital bed that “the mountain is insurmountable.” I knew what he meant. He was ready to fall.

For me right now, I’m looking for something to break my fall, a place where I can stop, catch my breath, and for a moment look over my shoulder to take in the vast landscape of a life that is gone forever.

***

For further exploration:

C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

Here & There October 2008

By admin

Here & There October 2008
By James Kullander

I am standing by my father’s hospital bed, slowly spooning applesauce into his mouth. His body is laid out in a position of quarter to two; the head is high enough to eat without sending waves of toe-curling pain throughout the rest of body. I am thinking of nothing else besides making sure that the dollop of applesauce I put on the white plastic spoon is not too large or too small, and that I get each spoonful into his mouth without making a mess of it. Between spoonfuls my father compliments my technique, his sense of humor still alive and well. “Even though you never had children you’re pretty good at this,” he said, a bit mumbled with his dentures removed.

Several years ago the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh would regularly fill the Omega campus for a week each October with almost 1,000 people. During the retreat, everyone was asked to remain silent. Even those of us on Omega’s staff were asked to reduce our speaking to about things that were absolutely necessary for our work. No gossiping at the water cooler. Not even a friendly good morning. It was a sort of mediation in motion, a way of becoming conscious of the banter that knocks about in our minds like engine tappets at full throttle, and of reflecting on the ways we make plans, act out, criticize ourselves, size up people just by looking at them.

During meals one of the half dozen or so monks or nuns who’d come to help lead the retreat would ring one of those little brass bowls on a cushion, summoning all of us to stop whatever we were doing—spooning rice into our mouth, bussing our dishes, pouring coffee, chewing—sort like a game of Red Light, Green Light. And we all remained motionless till the sound of the bell faded, after which we’d continue whatever we were doing. The object of this was to bring instant awareness to the moment, to look into the mind to see where it might have gone. Who were you silently talking to? A woman at the next table? Your brother in San Francisco? What sort of fight were you having and with whom? What lost opportunity to forgive someone—or to apologize to someone—were you regretting?

The mind, I’ve found out over the years, spins like this all the time, but we hardly notice. A few years ago I once compared sitting meditation to being the only person in a shopping mall at the peak of the business day. When the mall is full of people, you can’t really hear the piped-in music very well. That piped-in music is the constant flow of thoughts passing in and out of the mind. Clear the mall of people and suddenly that music is really loud. And annoying. That’s what sitting in meditation is like. All your thoughts stand out in bold relief because you’re doing nothing else.

I remember at the start of my first long 9-day retreat a the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts back in the mid-1990s, I was looking forward to having some sort of spontaneous moment of enlightenment, whatever that was. I didn’t. Or maybe I did, if seeing the daft pattern on my thoughts was such a moment. For nine days, I thought of little but food, sex, and work.

But during that same week there too were moments when something quite different and extraordinary happened. I became more adept at focusing more on the inhaling and exhaling of my breath, and thereby quieting my mind which, in turn, calmed my emotions and opened my heart, if only a crack. At the end of the retreat I drove home in a sort of spell of tranquility, driving well below the speed limit, which is something my lead foot had never let me do before (and rarely has since).

Today, I am remembering those early days in my blossoming (and still often faltering) Buddhist meditation practice with Thich Nhat Hanh and the handful of other teachers I sought out. They come to mind at moments when I am unselfconsciously focused, like when feeding my father his applesauce. Buddhists call this sort of intense concentration samadhi, a state in which the mind sees into the ultimate nature of reality. Those few moments of spooning applesauce to my father was a little like that. He needed to be fed, I could feed him, and all was well with the world just as it was. I was nowhere else and thinking of nothing else, and perhaps he was enjoying the moment so much he was right there with me, temporarily freed from his chronic pain and worries about his and his family’s fate.

A few days after I returned home I was rearranging my small library and found a book I’d read years ago and loved, Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days by Frederick Buechner. I leafed through the pages, glimpsing at all the passages I’d underlined. I came upon one passage that reminded me of those samadhi moments when ultimately reality is plain as the day. Just before the passage, Buechner writes of a busy time in his life when everyone he knew was “caught up with you in the swift and tumbling torrent of it.” For him, though, there were also moments of stillness. “But no matter how swiftly the torrent tumbles, there come moments when, rounding a bend of where the streambed deepens, it flattens out suddenly to a surface so slow and smooth that you can almost see down to the bottom of it.”

At 85, my father is the critical care unit for a variety if ailments; a fracture hip, pneumonia, a staph infection, fluid in the lungs, and such severe chronic pain that make it seem sometimes that his own body has become a medieval torture chamber. During the eight days I visited him there was a lot of activity and angst. Doctors and nurses came and went, checking his vital signs and administering antibiotics, pain killers, and, the times when he could not eat because of stomach cramps, an IV drip. He was hooked up to so many things the wires looked like the back of an old radio. Above his head a video monitor revealed a strong and steady heart, but sometimes I sensed it was breaking. One of my brothers was there and we spelled each other; one would stay with my father while the other would be with my mother at home. There was a lot of running back and forth, a tumbling torrent of going hither and yon.

But in those few moments when I was feeding my father, I saw down to the bottom of the river of life, the simple act of giving and receiving that constitutes the fundamental condition for human existence. And below that, the fact that we all die. And in my shimmering reflection I saw that the best we can do for people closer to death than we are is to treat them how we all would have liked to be treated throughout our lives: With undivided attention and unconditional love.

***

For further exploration:

Frederick Buechner The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days

Here & There September 2008

By admin

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

By admin

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.

***

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