Could it be a feeling of control over the situation? I wonder, because of how negatively many men have reacted to my desire made explicit, and because the ones I’ve had most success with sexually were either former or current habitual drug users who repeatedly sought out a certain kind of surrender. (Now there’s a sentence my mother would love.)

This is just one more reason why I’m grateful for my weed-redolent young friend Rick, actually. He’s an outsider in many ways already, and he responds unconventionally to my unconventional talk. Our wildly divergent habits make spending time together a challenge, but we’re still in the midst of a very honest conversation, with a great deal of genuine regard on both sides.

“Do you love him?” asked my coach friend last week. “Yeah, a little,” I answered with a sheepish grin. I’m surprised how much this unlikely character has come to mean to me in so short a time. He scares me a little, but I think I scare him too. Who knows what will happen next? He has resolved to at least refrain from drinking around me; I’ve disclosed how intense my sexual feelings for him have become. It may not be long before we act on them…I feel vaguely like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, hooking up with this funny, sexy young outlaw (and while Rick is a far cry from Brad Pitt, as far as I’m concerned he is rapidly becoming the Sexiest Man Alive). Then sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of Say Anything with the hilarious and sincere underachiever Lloyd Dobler, while at still other times I think I’ve wound up in Buffalo ‘66 with a volatile but heartbreaking Billy Brown.

Yes, Rick is definitely lovable. And yet I don’t get the impression that he’s received a great deal of love thus far in life. I don’t mind giving him mine. I may have to stay mindful of my boundaries and keep my expectations at a minimum, but so far I’ve had almost unprecedented success with speaking my mind (and heart), a need of mine that seems to typically cost me relationship. Rick actually seems to appreciate that level of candor. For this alone, the endeavor has been worth the trouble.

But now I’ll give you what will likely be the last installment of my Italy diary, due to low hits and nearly nonexistent comments. I’m afraid I’ve killed my blog!!! What happened over in Italy with James seems entirely relevant, however, because it’s a perfect example of how my habits have worked so perfectly against me, at least with the majority of men I’ve known (Sonny excepted). I really was crazy about James. I sensed that he felt something similar. But I was left, as usual, swinging in the wind ass-out for confronting the situation the way I did.

__________

PART THREE: MORE THAN THIS

So. I’m finally over the raging cold I had for over a week, thanks to the hot days, cool nights, and the drinking of wine on those cool nights that makes one unaware that one is getting overly cool oneself. Fortunately Elke, my gracious German roommate, who speaks only slightly more English than I do German, brought along some homeopathic remedies, which she generously shared. Günter prescribed fresh ginger, which I took in hot water with lemon and honey. What would I do without the Germans? Ah, mein annen. (My ancestors.) I love to listen to them talking to each other in that singularly expectorating way, with all those patched-together words comprised of shorter words. Elke is delighted that my catchphrase has become Alles ist gut. It’s all good.

This cold kept me from going on a field trip with the others last Saturday. All the paying guests were gone, and the working guests went with some of the staff to Lago Maggiore, the big lake nearby that’s much better known than our little Lago D’Orta. Everyone raved about how lovely it was and what great gelato they had, but, as Bettina is fond of saying in English — what to do? I slept most of the day away. James came to find me in the morning, wondering loudly outside my door where that lazy American might be. When he poked his head in, I croaked from under my quilt that I wasn’t going to make it. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Did I mention that I managed to fall madly, utterly in love with James?

I really didn’t come to Italy for that. No, really, I didn’t. I know people do, but I didn’t. The whole thing was completely unintentional.

You may have noticed that I was well on my way by the last episode. Alessandro, dear to me as he is, may as well be my actual nephew in his childlike and almost scandalous innocence. I’ve never met a young man in his twenties who was so utterly guileless and so oblivous to his own best attributes. You’d think his family had kept him in a shed in back of the house all these years. With Alessandro, what you see is what you get. Which should actually recommend him…there’s a lot to be said for someone whose thoughts flow unhampered to his mouth. If he thinks I’m a worthless piece of shit, he says “I’m a worthless piece of shit.” He doesn’t have to act it out so that you’ll believe it too.

But back to the matter at hand. I’ve read that an atom has recently been photographed as being in two places at once, so I imagine it’s not a theoretical impossibility for the human heart, either.

Life at Centro and Bisetti is definitely exceptional and intense, like summer camp in the land of Oz. You spend a great deal of time talking with your working guest comrades in this circumscribed but technicolor environment, amid green mountains and peacocks. Being a stranger in a strange land is a vulnerable position, and can make you more open more quickly than you might have been at home. My joke with James was that he and Alessandro were my Scarecrow and Tin Man. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which. I suppose it’s not the nicest joke.) I recognize that this is all in fact like a dream, that I will probably never see any of these people again, and that my time here is precious. Ever since my little meltdown on the kitchen steps, I’ve held nothing back. What’s the point? I’m either fully here or I may as well not be here. Which means that I’ll also fully grieve leaving, along with all the departures and necessary losses that happen before.

James happens to be the first loss.

In “Lost in Translation,” a film James and I both loved, there is a poignant scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are out singing karaoke with some Japanese acquaintances. Murray’s character gazes at Johansson as he sings the words to Roxy Music’s haunting “More Than This.” More than this/there is nothing/more than this. These two English-speaking characters, afloat in a foreign land, separated by age and circumstance, act out a unique and unconsummated love story, and in that particular scene their unspoken yearning is palpable. At the time, it gave me goosebumps.

**

Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to be charmed by someone who has Denis Leary’s wicked sense of humor (as well as his potty mouth) and resembles Ewan MacGregor, even if I never considered Ewan my type (I’m more of a Johnny Depp girl). James and I spent so much time together, much of it involving me laughing uncontrollably, that I’m certain all of the other working guests thought I was getting colonized by the Empire. Eventually I had to put forth that possibility myself, seeing as I was technically bound by nothing at home other than the one-sided loyalty of my own heart. I had nothing more serious in mind than some good old-fashioned fooling around, because the cheeky limey was just so fookin irresistible, and the chemistry was so potent…

But as soon as I made the suggestion, I hit a wall.

Apparently James files women into two categories: viable relationship material, and shit. Actually, he called them one-night stand types, but really, they’re worthless. They must be reasonably hot, fairly stupid, and fail to amount to more to him than a stain on his shirt. I told him that I don’t really have categories anymore, I have priorities, and that beauty and joy have become more important to me than self-protection or sure things.

Thus began a two or three hour conversation in Bisetti’s kitchen, with James drinking more and more (he’s a real Englishman all right, I can’t believe how much he can hold). I’m sure he divulged more that night than he had intended. Essentially, without going into too much detail, I heard this young man’s court case against himself. He seemed to want very much to convince me that he was a sick, miserable, cold-hearted bastard, but all he did was convince me of the depth of his despair and the reality of his suffering. (Fathers and teachers, wrote Dostoevsky’s character Father Zossima, I ponder: what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.)

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the more we understand such things about someone, the more deeply we begin to love him. So James’s tactic backfired quite spectacularly. What he said didn’t scare me; it didn’t suck me in; it didn’t shake my faith in the beauty of life, or even in the beauty of James. It was too familiar. I had been here before. Dostoevsky had distilled all of this anguish into the character of the Underground Man, and I had known this man. I had loved this man. I had even, in a sense, been this man. I’ll call his malady the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death: a classic and distinctly macho nihilism communicated by the likes of Friedrich Nietszche, Blaise Pascal, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Norman Mailer. It’s what happens when you prescribe for yourself the most impossible and inhuman precepts for attaining manhood, and utterly reject everything that smacks of what Jung characterized as the Eternal Feminine. For the more spiritually oriented, what you might call the Source, the Great Mother, the God who is Love. In other words, everything in life that makes tenderness and connection possible.

If you cut yourself off like this, banishing half of your humanity, it will not only make your soul sick, you may wind up putting a gun in your mouth. James seems to see Hemingway as an ideal role model. Certainly, the man could write, but he’s an awfully shitty role model. (A man would be much better off looking up to someone like Nelson Mandela. Dignity, strength, courage, compassion…now that guy’s got class.)

To put it another way, if James were drowning (and I dare say he is, in several litres of alcohol every night) and the Feminine were a life preserver, he’d go under the waves yelling “Fook off, ya pussy shit, and let me die like a mahn!”

The next morning as I hiked up the mountainside to Centro, I felt full to overflowing with a love and a joy I wished I could bottle and pour directly into James’s beer. When did I cease to be an Underground Woman myself, and surface into the light of day? How did it happen, and how could I explain it? I thought of Esther, a wonderful yoga teacher I know who is fond of saying “It’s all grace,” and I felt as if I’d been bodily lifted from misery by unseen hands. I began to sing the chorus of “Amazing Grace” as I walked, emotion making my voice crack.

When I saw him at lunchtime, I was amazed that he was still talking to me. I fully expected him to despise me out of shame, but over the course of the day he warmed up even more. After dinner, at Bisetti, a group of us watched “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which, one has to admit (whatever one’s orientation toward that goofy Ramtha woman) has some compelling things to say about the way we talk to ourselves. James, having smoked some weed with his alcohol, seemed affected (surprisingly, calling the film “brilliant”), and I wondered if any of these things would stick.

(Editorial note: in retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had slid onto the couch next to James after the movie, and taken a hit myself, and lain my arm across the back of the couch behind his neck…but hindsight is 20/20! I probably missed my only chance.)

It was the next afternoon, when he was acting strange and distant again, that I divulged that I no longer felt I needed anything from him, and that I loved him, that it was fierce and unconditional. His response was an icy “How dare you say such a thing to me,” and, of course, “fook you!”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” I replied with a resigned sigh. He smiled a little then, almost in spite of himself, musing on my choice of words and liking the use of the term “fierce.” At least the guy appreciates my diction. In a moment we were talking about something else as if we had only just been discussing the weather. (In a little while, we would go with the others to a bar in Pettenasco, and he would demonstrate the extent of his panic by immediately beginning to seduce a friend of Raffe’s.)

Ah, the dreaded L-word. Tell me, friends, what is the big fookin deal??? It should be the most natural thing in the world for human beings to say to one another, but thanks to this macho bullshit crap, it’s this outrageous declaration, laden with all manner of weighty prerequisites (in order to even utter it), and bales of shame. What happened between James and me, the sparkling rapport, the give-and-take of mirroring and response, that deeply satisfying pleasure of relatedness, it was all real, it was all true. Everyone around us felt it, the chemistry of our connection. There are witnesses, although I no longer need them in order to believe in its veracity.

**

My own father is not unlike Pascal — he filled the hole in his soul with religion, but he has little respect for anything other than the intellect. I don’t believe, like some psychoanalysts, that everyone we fall in love with is strictly some projection of our original caregivers, but there is a degree of truth to this theory. Anyone could reasonably say I have tried to win his approval in the persons of these unhappiest of men…but in that case I have also attempted to redeem him, to save him somehow. Call it pathological, but I don’t believe the attempt is without merit. James Baldwin, the passionate, gay black antithesis of the spiritually ailing Straight White Western Male, believed that only a human being can save another human being, and that we create one another’s consciousness.

Still, what struck me the other day, sitting in a ristorante in Pettenasco eating an insalata with fresh mozzarella (and keeping away from Bisetti), is that I have lately stopped courting my father by proxy — this episode has been something of a retread of old, painful ground — and that I am the one who has been redeemed. My equanimity in the face of James’s rejecting cruelty would never have been possible if an old pattern had not already been decisively broken. They say that to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result, is insanity…but what if you meet that one rare gentleman who can hear everything you’re saying, and not panic? It’s difficult in Western culture to encounter intelligent heterosexual men not somehow hobbled by the legacy of Hemingway. Speaking from the heart is seen as foolish (if not outrageous), and even we women are regularly shamed out of it.

But I have been redeemed: by the warm and affirmative response of a decidedly straight man who is not afraid of me, or for that matter of feeling, or connection, or the Feminine. Even if we were never together again, even if he chooses to be with someone else, or things just don’t work out, what has been done cannot be undone. I finally believe that It’s Not About Me. I am not crazy, repugnant, or fundamentally flawed. If you’re reading this, my dearest hipster daddy, let me just say this from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. My deja-vu experience has deepened my appreciation for you, and for what a miracle of a man you are. You think I exaggerate…but a sincere seeker, who has already been to hell and back, and who flings himself at life with an open heart and without the distortions of pride, is a much rarer thing in my experience than fanatically self-censoring, contemptuous misanthropes who won’t allow themselves the pleasure of a natural emotion. And I have known them already, known them all…

**

In the sunlit and car-free square of Orta, breathing in the aroma of what smelled like a local cousin of the linden flower and facing the magnificent medieval monastery on the island of San Giulio, I ate a cup of freshly made, creamy gelato, but after the first bite I could taste nothing but grief. It’s like what I told Alessandro that day in the square: you buy now, you pay later…but at least it works the other way around as well.

I felt that James was already gone; everything was over, it was in the past, even with him still physically present, shagging the Italian girl he had charmed the other night at the local watering hole. His room was located diagonally above mine, and late at night I could hear her giggling like a schoolgirl on dope.

With “Lost in Translation,” the audience, at least, knows how much Bill Murray’s character cares for Scarlett Johansson’s, even when he picks up the blowsy lounge singer from the hotel bar for a tawdry one-night stand. There was slightly vicious comfort in knowing that James would only “stuff” a woman he finds stupid and doesn’t respect…but listening to the whole business wasn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. I lay there feeling absolutely sick to my stomach, taking deep yoga breaths and trying to empty my mind. If I could have vomited, it might have brought some relief. I pretended that it was only a window on London, where he had flown already, picking up giggly blondes in dimly lit pubs. James was gone. It was time to let go, and to feel the loss of something that had been beautiful, if ephemeral as a mayfly.

Nietzsche, the proudest all-star in the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death gallery, was in Orta once, with the highly educated and independent woman of letters Lou Salome. She ultimately rejected him, whereupon he promptly became despondent (and allegedly suicidal) and went off to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” This explains a lot to me, as far as the man’s nihilism and raging misogyny are concerned. Later Lou would become the lover and confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke, a luminous man so unlike poor Friedrich that one waggish writer called him “the world’s greatest lesbian poet.”

I ate my dinner at Leon d’Oro, the hotel where Friedrich and Lou stayed: pasta with aubergine and pomodoro in a cream sauce, accompanied by a half bottle of Valpolicella. The waiter, to my astonishment, resembled Rilke. I kid you not.

Gazing at the beautiful island of San Guilio, I paraphrased James in my head, copping his attitude. That evil harpy of a woman! How dare she have the unapologetic gall to love me, and the unmitigated temerity to say it out loud? She must be put to DEATH!!!! Wine-warm laughter bubbled up from within me as I realized the ridiculous, Pythonesque absurdity of his position. What the fook, James?

And then I thought, Good God, but I like myself. It’s taken thirty-eight years, but I honestly do. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to apologize for. I have been honorable and true with an open and loving heart.

On the long walk back to Pettenasco at sunset, I bought myself a chocolate gelato in the shop by the rotary.

It tasted delicious.

**

I made myself as scarce as possible at Bisetti until the morning of his last day. Leaving for Centro early in the morning (I had breakfast dishwashing duty) I slipped a note under his door. It explained my absence, briefly, as the unwillingness to subject myself to watching what he was doing. I loved myself too. I wished him luck and goodbye. Expecting that to be the end of it, I went about my workday in a vague funk of bereavement.

He came up to Centro at lunchtime to say goodbye to everyone. When I first saw him walking up the drive, my heart leapt into my throat. While I was back in the work area behind the kitchen, squeezing fresh orange juice, he came to shake Bruno’s hand. I didn’t expect to speak to him myself, and after he left the kitchen I let myself cry all over the oranges. I was washing the juicer parts when I heard him say my name.

I turned to see him coming at me with a politely outstetched hand, as if to bid farewell with an impersonal handshake. Seeing my wet face and eyes must have been what made him open his arms. I flung my arms around his neck and clung to him, most impolitely, and for a long time, as he said something about Robert having his email address. I said that I’d send him my travel diary (boy will he love this one). Finally he let go of me with an abrupt English “right,” and I released him, turning my head to kiss his cheek at the jawline where his beard grew soft and thick. After he had walked away (never looking at me directly) I finished cleaning up, and then locked myself in the handicapped restroom and sobbed violently and inconsolably for about ten minutes.

When I emerged, I felt as fresh and clean as Colorado air after a hailstorm.

**

You may ask me: what the fook, C? He told you to fuck off and then went about poking someone else right under (or above) your nose, and you still feel this way about him?

That night in Bisetti’s kitchen, I told James that no matter how shittily the men in my life have behaved, in the end what stays with me are the wonderful things, and how much I loved them, whether it was for five years or five minutes.

I won’t keep the sick-to-my-stomach feeling. What I’ll keep are things like this: the raffishly saucy look in his eye as he bit a cluster of shrimp off of my proffered fork in Novara (my pizza had come with shrimp through a misunderstanding); the way he would say simply “quality,” with a grin, when something pleased or amused him; the night we watched Günter’s DVD of “Shaft” on my iBook in his room, and I wanted so badly to kiss him; the private universe we could be at a table full of people; and the soft-focus, almost melancholy look he had at Centro’s bar one of those last nights, when Robert played a torchy Tom Waits song for us from his laptop. So close he was, so close and yet so far away, my beautiful English so-called bastard. There is nothing/more than this…but to quote another Tom Waits tune, I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

**

I almost didn’t participate in the yard sale. Two women on my floor let me know they were going to do it — one has just moved out — but I wasn’t sure I was ready to take that leap, to act as-if. As if I were really leaving, that is. Besides which, the forecast was for rain all day. I got a bunch of items ready and priced the night before, but in the morning I was reluctant to get out of bed. At eight-thirty I shuffled to the window and opened the curtain, expecting to see clouds and drizzle, but the sky was an uninterrupted blue. Throwing on some old clothes, I started carting things down the three flights of stairs. My housemates were already set up on the lawn, their secondhand wares spread out on blankets. I enlisted one to help me with my heavier items.

While I was still bringing armfuls of miscellanea downstairs, Meg Ferris showed up.

Margaret Ferris is a writing coach and blogger my age who leads writing tours in France and Italy, and who just came back into town after living in Portugal for a year with her sexy younger Portuguese boyfriend. In other words: my heroine.

Now here she was on my lawn, asking about my baker’s rack and my printer.

When I reminded her of who I was — citing emails we’d exchanged recently, in which I asked her for advice — she remembered, and said she’d been thinking about me. “I think I might have an idea for you,” she said. She had sent me her 29-step process to “taking a creative leap,” one she had gone through herself on her own recent journey, and she thought it might be interesting to have me be the first outside guinea pig, following her steps myself and publicly blogging about them.

I felt a thrill go through me. It was as if she had appeared out of nowhere and said, “I was thinking about how we could have you do precisely the sort of thing you want to be doing.” (She calls these kinds of happy synchronicities “juju,” when our intentions and actions seem to magically draw in serendipitous people and opportunities.) Meg said she had a full plate at the moment, getting situated in her new apartment, but we exchanged phone numbers before she carted off my former belongings.

Later that morning, a former work acquaintance came walking by. I started chatting with him about my European aspirations, and he mentioned that he had been intent upon going to Ireland last year. Amazed, I told him that that was actually my first choice of destinations. “I have a great book I could give you!” he exclaimed. This excited me even further. It was like getting two green lights in a row from the Forces of the Universe — not something, as you know, that I’ve experienced much, so I’ve been skeptical about trendy personal development concepts like the Law of Attraction.

**

I haven’t had any follow-up contact since then, although my former co-worker promised to drop off that book. I don’t want to be guilty of pestering Meg, especially since she asked for a little time…so, nervous and impatient as I am, I haven’t been in touch with her for a week. At least at the moment, I’m earning some income, so I’m not in quite as anxious a situation as I was last time around.

But this strange new employment opportunity has turned out to be the unexpected occasion for some additional lessons in (non)attachment.

**

For those of you who weren’t following my last comment thread, that progressive telephone fundraising employer did hire me on, after a probationary period in which I did well enough to merit over two dollars more per hour than the base wage. Amazingly, even though I tend to watch the clock, I don’t hate calling donors like I thought I would, because enough of the people turn out to be friendly, intelligent, and chatty once I get past the initial self-identification and the script’s bottom line. I also enjoy scoring substantial donations for good causes and watching my percentages rise. Plus the people who run the place are smart, ethical, and well-informed. So there’s one prejudice shattered.

Another was shattered when I started developing a crush on a younger coworker who isn’t at all what I consider my “type” other than coloring-wise (a brunette with dark eyes). Unlike the aforementioned Dexter, he’s by no means a “brain,” and physically he resembles a thin version of Kevin Smith in his Silent Bob incarnation (right down to the backward baseball cap). But he seemed — at least initially — somehow fascinated by me, asking me lots of questions about myself and gazing furtively at some of my better attributes (which flattered this horny old broad’s ego). So shortly thereafter I started matching his attentions, and what appeared to be mutual electricity crackled in the air between us like kindling. When he disappeared for the better part of a week I found myself suffering from disproportionately severe withdrawal symptoms.

After having been in a place of freedom from attachment for once, finally able to think clearly about my future, I was a little annoyed to be thrown back into the uproar I’ve been in for most of my life, but I decided to simply observe it — neither encouraging it or pushing it away. I tried just sitting with the butterflies and the all-too-familiar impatience and craving.

It was a new exercise for me. Usually I invent a delicious story to fit the more pleasurable feelings, project hopefully into the future, and lose myself in obsessive fantasies. Interestingly, the intensity of the feelings subsided after a couple of days, and I resigned myself to the probability that Rick had quit or been let go.

**

What a sped-up version of my old story! Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl loses boy, girl moves on. The whole process in just one week. I had to laugh. Maybe I am making progress. I tend to cling like polyester in Arizona.

**

He did return, eventually, but when (with that predictable rush of fight-or-flight hormones) I tried to resume the flirtation, I felt a change and a distance in his energy. The spell had been broken. Perhaps it’s my personal Heisenberg/Schrodinger observer effect in action — that the moment I focus on a man, his behavior instantly changes — but I didn’t habitually spiral into the usual self-questioning and overanalysis and brainstorming about how to get the magic back.

I made the firm choice, too, to refuse to feel ashamed of myself. Normally the little kid in me immediately believes — the way little kids do — that a rejection is somehow due to my inherent rejectability, and that I’ve been humiliated for showing (so baldly) my unreciprocated feelings.

Screw that. If I’m open, it’s to my credit, especially given what I say my values are.

**

Which reminds me…I mentioned, the other week, a much-loved teacher who impressed upon my adolescent brain the integral importance of authenticity in all things. He indisputably changed my life, with his mini-lectures on Zen and his Thomas Merton handouts and his in-class readings of Pablo Neruda. This past week, I received word that he had died (from I know not what) at the relatively young age of 61. I read a beautiful tribute written in a local paper by one of his recent students, and wept. I loved that man like a father.

If the woo-woos are right about each of us having a cheering section of personal spiritual guides and disembodied advisors, I sure hope he’ll be on my team.

I’d like to think, at least, that he’d be proud of me.

**

If I’ve learned anything from this latest tempest in a teacup, it’s how much our inventions can cause us to suffer (or not). Asking the perennial question, What The Hell Is This? was truly invaluable in this case. I became a total stranger’s creature in a matter of hours. So what was all that about?

As it so happens, I’ve lately been reading the literate and intimate autobiographical work The World is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved by Trebbe Johnson. I think the title appealed to me because on some level I already knew that the voice I had been hearing — in the guise of Damien’s incomparable tenor — was the voice of the Beloved calling me back to my own truth, away from my “small-b” beloved. This has got to die. This has got to stop. This has got to lie down with someone else on top. He knew what I needed to do before I was ready to even acknowledge it, and the anguish in his lovely representative’s voice didn’t gloss over how much it would hurt.

It’s definitely more of a classicist-Platonist-Jungian-spiritual concept than a existentialist-Romantic-materialist-literalist one (and I’ve been on both sides of that fence): the idea that what we’re longing for and seeking is really much bigger than the one human person. Even six months ago, I would not have found this book all that useful or apropos. Today, I’m practically on the same page. Although I still refuse to conclude whether the Other is really a mirror or a parent or a portal or a body double for the Divine — all of which have been postulated by various psychologies, mythologies, philosophies, and religions, and are dutifully reported by Ms. Johnson. I’m partial to Rumi, myself, who experienced unsayable ecstasies through the medium of Shams Al-Tabriz, but who liked to leave things mysterious.

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,
if this is the time.
Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.
Every morning I wait at dawn. That’s when
it’s happened before. Or do it suddenly
like an execution. How else
can I get ready for death?

If I’m that ripe to be dissolved, Silent Bob can come along with just the right look or the right touch and melt me in the middle of a night shift between ACLU calls. And it will have very little to do with Silent Bob and everything to do with my ripeness.

But that’s where I didn’t run away with inventions this time. And I’m proud of this: that I didn’t gallop full speed ahead and write the whole thing into a romance (or porn) novel the way I usually do, and then become inconsolable when things didn’t proceed as scripted.

As it turns out, if you don’t indulge a habit, it can cease to be one. Who knew?

**

But I still don’t have a plan for following that soul-call I heard through my darling Irish brother. I was discouraged to find out that a “green card” permit for Ireland would require at least $1000 and a year wait. (I still check job listings every day for sponsoring employers and organizations, but if you don’t have IT or foreign language skills, there aren’t many.) Residency for non-EU members is as tough to achieve there as it is anywhere else in Europe. (An artist friend of mine, a terrific, anarchic soul of considerable talent, said in response to this “You should just go!!!”) I did manage to get pictures taken and send off my passport for renewal, as it’s due to expire in six months.

My life coach friend has former in-laws in Holland, and might be able to find me temporary accommodations in the Amsterdam area. I’m still waiting to hear back from my best friend from high school regarding her cousin in London and her college friend’s brother-in-law in Dublin. My friend Karl, whom I mentioned last time, just emailed that old friend of his who lives in Dublin, so no word there yet.

Last week I joined Couchsurfing.org, an organization I found out about through Meg’s blog that lets world travelers help each other out by (you guessed it) providing their couches, guest beds, or floors as an alternative to hotels and hostels. I also attended a Peace Corps orientation meeting on Wednesday, but they don’t go anywhere I want to be. I even checked out The World by Road, a documentary film crew on a 2-year world tour who were passing through on their way up to Alaska, but nothing about the last leg of their trip or the people involved particularly struck me. I’m interested in seeing Alaska and Canada sometime, just not right now.

My dream, after all, is to be in Europe. I’ve never been quite this clear about anything. What I did during that summer in Italy, living my adventure and writing about it the way I write here, felt like what I was meant to do. (Incidentally, would you guys like to read parts — or all — of that journey?) Ever since I rode the buoyant current of that experience, nothing else has felt right. Maybe I’m hopelessly “self-indulgent,” something of which Elizabeth Gilbert has been accused (and I fear she stole all the available thunder, too), but so help me God, this is what I want to do.

It would be great if Meg could help me find the means, because as you know, I lack funds. I’ve certainly worked hard these last twenty years, but like so many people have nothing in the bank to show for it. This is my largest obstacle. I’d be more than happy to write under the auspices of her Web site or blog if it meant getting financial assistance or sponsorship on my mad journey.

**

But then again, it may take something entirely mad. About ten days ago, I had the delight and privilege of going to hear the wonderful, internationally loved poet David Whyte talk about his latest book The Three Marriages at a local bookstore. Born in Yorkshire to an Irish mother, David speaks with gorgeous lyrical intonation on subjects like longing and vocation and what the soul really needs in a world based on logistics and expediency.

During the course of his talk, he told us the story of how Robert Louis Stevenson first met the love of his life, Fanny Osborne. A young man of slender means, Robert was out walking one night at dusk when he passed a large window, on the other side of which an elegant dinner party of about a dozen people was taking place. The window was slightly ajar. Peering inside, Robert saw a radiant woman sitting at the head of the table (who happened to be eleven years his senior, and married), and he was at once captivated and smitten.

“Now, perhaps, if he were like most of us,” said David, “he might go around to the front or the back door and make some inquiries about whose house this was, and so forth, or made a mental note to ask around in the following days, among people he might know in the area, regarding who that woman might be…generally going about things in the orthodox and polite way to which we are all accustomed.” But this is not what Robert did. Instead, he opened up that window and stepped right through, bursting in upon the party like a sudden apparition. Amazingly, rather than getting himself arrested, he made quite a hit at the party that night, and a strong impression upon the lady in question. Many years later (after Robert nearly died of consumption pursuing her across the American continent), they were married.

The point of David’s story being, as he told us, that sometimes you have to forego The Way Things Are Always Done and burst in through the window.

I laughed, and I cried. This is exactly what I feel I have to do, somehow. Break the rules. Do something crazy. Come crashing through the window by committing some original and unexpected act. And then the doors will start opening.

I just don’t know what the thing is. Will I have the courage to do it when and if I do?

**

Well, I practiced a little courage yesterday.

I saw Dexter Sunday afternoon, unexpectedly. He was working for someone else when I came into his cafe to write after finishing my weekend shift. Conversing with him over the espresso machine, I found that he still makes me flush hot in some pretty cool places. (And I know I’m not menopausal quite yet.) Such a bite-my-finger gorgeous boy…he has incredible bone structure, glossy golden skin, and enormous liquid eyes the color of seawater. Even the moles on his face are perfectly placed. Are the girls at his school blind, or just stupid?

Before leaving, I stopped by the counter again and asked in a casual joking tone if he needed to see my ticket to Amsterdam before he’d agree to have a beer with me. This made him laugh (and I think took him aback a little) but he was unhesitatingly open to meeting, possibly even this week. He asked me for my email address, in case we didn’t see each other there at the cafe. It was all very friendly and painless, and I walked away believing I’ll actually have a drink with Dexter very soon.

Beyond that, I’m not going to write a novel — porn or otherwise. I could be wrong, but I think he was actually pleased to be asked. For my part, I felt like a champ…or at least like a seasoned adult woman who knows what she’s doing.

**

And end note: this may strike you all as cheesy, but as long as WordPress provides me the means, I may as well do it. I’m going to add a PayPal ‘donate’ button so that readers can make a contribution toward the What The Hell Is This? European Dream Fund if they are so inclined. If some shameless blogger paid off her exorbitant debt through online begging, why should I feel bad about putting the option out there for people to give to something slightly more constructive?

Far be it from me to leave any stone unturned. Shoot, I’m even buying a lottery ticket every week.

**

Even though I’ve lived here for almost nineteen years, I never exactly put down roots or committed to one narrow career path. Nor did I make it my goal to marry and have children simply for the sake of marrying and having children. But in my little teapot rebellion against middle-class expectations, I also never dared to do much of anything that involved serious risk, the way some of my backpacking, globe-trotting, adventurous, entrepreneurial contemporaries did in their twenties and thirties.

Now here I am, at 41, every day reading the jaded, overeducated souls on Salon.com letter threads expounding upon what a tremendous disappointment life is, and how rarely dreams come true…and I wonder if it’s truly harder for very smart people to be happy. They think of absolutely everything, after all, that can go wrong, and then use those worst-case scenarios as an excuse to stay in their safe or uninvolved zones (and convince you to do the same).

I think of Great Dead White Dudes like Pascal and Nietzsche, among the most brilliant men who ever lived, who seem to me at least to have also been rather miserable up-their-hole sonsabitches. (To be fair, they were both ill for much of their adult lives, and died quite wretchedly…though advocates of mind-body medicine might have an opinion about that.) Their contempt, including for the female sex and for anything they considered “soft,” knew no bounds, and they were forever deriding everyone and everything around them from their lofty perches like doctoral-level Holden Caulfields. (As you might imagine, I greatly admired them in college.) What a burden it is, to be smarter and better than everyone else!! Anyway, those rejecting attitudes that may have once been a daring assault on a complacent bourgeoisie are now more of just a yawn to postmodern millennial intellectuals who can tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing, and why it’s stupid to care.

Given the choice, I’d rather be relatively square and make a fool of myself once in a while. One nice thing about being out of certain circles now is that I no longer have to worry about being “cool,” about whether my views or my tastes are hip enough among the liberal intelligentsia, or the college-radio crowd, or the technologically savvy. I can go back to being a classicist dork, listening to my bleeding-heart Irish homeboy on a ten-year-old boom box and reading Rilke from an actual book.

**

Ever since I left the evangelical church (and had one wonderful English teacher who exposed us to the beautiful exhortations of writers like Saint-Exupéry and Thomas Merton to remain genuine into numbing adulthood), “keeping it real” has been a top priority and a core value for me. The commitment to be authentic in all areas of life has trumped things like money or success (at the price of conscience), acceptance by various groups or people, and superficial if convenient relationships. (If I hadn’t kept this commitment to myself, I’d probably still be at my old job.)

At the risk of sounding like a tweener who can’t stop gushing about Zac Efron…this is yet another reason why I’m so grateful to my latest inspiration, that folky Celt whose full-throated call jerked me back from the brink of self-abandonment. He’s one unapologetic poster child for emotional frankness and what I referred to before as “ragged authenticity.” I must mention that the cynical hipsters at pitchfork.com (who apparently have no appreciation for traditional Irish music either) naturally ripped him a new one for being such an sincere, touchy-feely girly-man. He dared, after all, to write lines like the ticking of the Western man’s need to cry. Which I found fucking brilliant, and which is what I’m talking about when I say that the so-called “patriarchy” harms men as well as women.

But my admiration goes far beyond that, now that I’m floating in space. I was thinking about how he broke with his early band, Juniper, just as they were picked up by a major label. The record company started pressuring them, as record companies are wont to do, to compromise their artistic integrity for a more “radio-friendly” sound. Disillusioned with the music business, Damien turned his back on possible fame and fortune and escaped to rural Tuscany to try his hand at growing tomatoes (which sounds like heaven on earth to me)…and then, when the money ran out, went busking around Europe like some traveling minstrel. Now, of course, years later and on his own terms, he’s an internationally renowned musician who gets to perform coveted gigs like the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and Leonard Cohen’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What I find most inspirational here is that “lilies of the field” attitude, that optimistic willingness to throw oneself upon the mercy of the world and make choices that sound insane to more “sensible” people. My friend Talia Rosenberg landed in Paris after college with a few words of French in her mouth and a few dollars in her pocket, and went on to get her doctorate there and have a love child with an acclaimed Hungarian novelist. I love stories like that. That’s what I call balls. That’s what I call courage. That’s what I call living the dream. And I want to be more like that. Before it’s too late.

**

In his book The Bridge Across Forever, New Age guru Richard Bach astutely wrote “Anyone desperate enough for suicide…should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.” Floating ‘round my tin can, far above the world, I’m just about that desperate.

I’m almost out of money, with no promising prospects, no home community. I had been clinging, fiercely and for dear life, to a dream I dreamed up years ago, to which I was attached on an almost cellular level — there was such beauty and such depth of passion in it, and moments touching on agape — but my grip has finally loosened. For months, I quietly if irrationally hoped I’d somehow be restored to my former “household” like the Bible’s biggest loser, Job…or that my avoidant friend might call me and confess how confused and upset he is, and that he isn’t sure what he wants, but that he still cares about me, and wants to see me.

No, I’ve done enough fruitless, fruitless pursuing in this lifetime. For the first time, I accept, however intolerably, that it’s all gone…the way one accepts with that awful bottomless hole in the heart that someone has really died. I let go of it all, and at times it feels like the vise grip, the iron claws of agony clenched like a fist in my chest, will kill me, and maybe they will, mercifully — but I accept that I’ve lost.

In that acceptance, I feel like I’ve died, too, or that at least some version of me has…and what’s left is practically screaming at me about wasted time. What the hell is this, AlienBaby? You don’t have that many more years to be readily employable, or fuckable, or to start over. As Dylan sang, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

**

Most of the people I know around here talk conservativism and scarcity without even considering a different paradigm. I have an unemployed friend with a debilitating autoimmune disease who calls me up regularly to chew over alarmist economic scenarios and fret about her diminishing funds. She lives on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, along with Coca-Cola and crackers, and laughs at the idea of alternative medicine and nutrition therapy — which have, in some cases, restored other people with her condition. A septagenarian friend of mine shot down my tentative musings about a radical geographical move the other day by saying “The ‘geographic cure’ doesn’t work: wherever you go, you’re still there”…as if adventure played no role in making such a change, as if we don’t alter ourselves at all by altering our habitual and safe modus operandi.

But chatting with some Dutch students at the coffeehouse last weekend reminded me of the personal expansion a person can experience upon discovering other landscapes, other systems, and other customs in the world, as well as untapped capacities in oneself. I know for sure that while I was in Italy, my perspective was enlarged by the multiplicity of cultures I encountered among my fellow travelers, and my self-confidence grew exponentially with each successful navigation of foreign trains and towns and streets. Frankly, I kind of miss the feeling of being a global (not just an American) citizen.

Pessimism is, of course, the path of least resistance when risk appears stupid (which it probably does for most Americans right now), when the assumption is that we’re completely on our own and that it’s all too easy to fall through the cracks of society and perish (which it probably is for most Americans right now).

Scarcity and peril as the paradigm: this is so familiar. This is how I was raised, to fear the world like a minefield, and to pinch whatever limited pennies might come my way. I felt the fear even more keenly when I lost my home church and my interventionist Daddy-God. It was all on me, suddenly…I felt the terrifying burden of sole and solitary responsibility for my life, responsibility for struggling to eke out a survival in a random, indifferent, perhaps even cruel universe, and I wasn’t at all sure I was up to the task.

If every last one of the dreary assumptions above is inarguably true, then it’s no wonder. I’m not sure I’m up to it today.

**

Cold, cold water surrounds me now…and all I’ve got is your hand.

I was walking down the street toward downtown the other day, feeling nothing but the ache of the blasted-out cavern in my ribs where my heart used to be, when those lines popped into my head. Hot tears blurred my eyes as I realized what the song means to me now. Namely, that I’m going through this lonely, painful, scary ordeal I’m not even sure I can survive, and I’m grasping like a life preserver the hand extended to me from another creator’s body — of work. Yea, I could say, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Damo art with me.

I may sound like I’ve gone off the superfan deep end, but I’m talking about an intensely personal experience even hyper-rationalist David Foster Wallace discussed in the context of how an author can affect a reader. In my case, I have been, in a sense, “rescued” by another artist’s emotional courage, sensitivity, and uncompromising integrity — as well as encouraged by his example to take more chances, perhaps even to trust more in the ultimate benevolence of the universe.

What some snarky (dare I say cowardly?) critics have called self-indulgent and embarrassing earnestness, I currently call my lifeline. Maybe one day I’ll be that “hand,” that lifeline, for someone else in crisis, because of what I’ve been through and choose to write about. Maybe I, like some gifted songwriters, can also help someone feel a little less alone, and a little better understood.

**

When I got downtown that same day, I went to check out the vegetarian expo at the Marriott, and promptly ran into Annemarie.

Annemarie is a ceramics artist and yoga instructor who worked with me many years ago at the bookstore, and who was once seriously involved with Tony the Surly Music Critic (from my Valentine’s Day post). She greeted me with great warmth and kindness, which nearly made me, in my shaky condition, crumble as I divulged my general state of fear and heartbreak. Hugging me impulsively, she proceeded to tell me — a trace of her own pain knitting her brows — about how she had just kicked her out-of-control teenage son out of the house. (Talk about tough love…and I had said nothing!) Tolerating disrespect benefits no one, I think she said. She encouraged me to stay in uncertainty, reminding me that life is more open when we sit patiently with our unknowing. We embraced tightly as I choked back tears of gratitude. I felt heartened by this exchange — shown another unbidden example of hardass caring, and recognizing the gentle wisdom of Annemarie’s advice. It’s not hard to grow, when you know that you just don’t know.

One of the speakers I went to hear there was a former gangbanger who founded a conservation nonprofit in Texas that teaches inner-city kids about taking care of animals and the environment. He was a beautiful, inspirational man (if a rambling and somewhat incoherent speaker), and I talked with him afterwards, trying to pry from him the secret of how his thug-life despair morphed into creative empowerment. If sheltered middle-class white people are too scared to try to substantially change their lives (and change the world), how is it possible that an impoverished Latino surrounded by scarcity and hopelessness could become a visionary leader?

He merely repeated his presentation point that in rejecting the culture of violence by feeding only plant-based foods to his body (restoring his “bodily integrity”), he got healthy, got clarity about refusing to perpetuate suffering, and became empowered to change the way he lived.

I quit eating animals thirteen years ago, but I’m still a chicken. I guess there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for busting out of your own cage.

**

I dream of closing up my old bookstore with Samira. We straighten furniture and sweep the floors. I think about how she and Ken prepared for their departure by getting rid of most of their belongings, and wonder if my psyche is telling me to close up shop myself. (The night before, in a sort of trance, I dreamt I was listening to a long voice message from Sonny. He wasn’t angry, defensive, or accusing…he was simply telling me where he was in his life, with a trace of regret. It made me sad; it made me miss him.)

Over and over again I’ve heard stories about how doors magically open for people once they decide to make a major change, but that generally hasn’t been my experience. Against my own experience and common sense, then, I’m hoping for some serendipitous opportunities now. I’m practically praying for a miracle.

Because I don’t know what to do. All I know is that I want to start living, at my advanced age, instead of just barely existing — more like dying — in this sunbaked little desert town where I can’t hear the sea, and no one can hear me. I want to eat tomatoes off the vine in Tuscany. I want to drink a toast to Damo in Dublin. I want to live in a place where they actually consider it necessary, not “cosmetic,” to treat your lady problems and your painful leg veins in their socialist medicine clinics. I want to hang out with people who know how to live like lilies of the field, and I want to write like a fiend and get paid for it. I want to make excessive orgasmic love with men I find irresistible without the use of topical analgesics.

Am I dreaming too big? Can you hear me, universe? Do you take special orders, like those Secret people say you do? Because I don’t know the first thing about how to make any of it happen.

Surprise me. Prove the naysaying bastards wrong.

The Birth of Pleasure brings to light the experience of young boys and adolescent girls who, in adapting to the rigid and rationalistic framework of patriarchy, are effectively silenced about what they “see, feel and know” through those supposedly more “feminine” capacities of intuition, empathy, and emotional attunement. When I first read the book, I wept; it was like reading the history of my struggle with my father, many, many men, and in some ways the whole world.

So much of what I perceive filters in through these unofficial channels, unsupported by fact, “indefensible.” Confronted with my Harvard-educated, emotionally disconnected father’s capital-K Knowing, I frequently came off as weak, foolish, or hopelessly fanciful; my information was illegitimate, received through a faulty and “irrational” navigational system that often contradicted the Official Story. To compensate, I strove to become a master of the rational, strove to become legitimate, even going so far as to get a degree in philosophy at a school populated and run by more atheistic versions of my father. I tried very hard to belong there, but it always felt as if I were…well, an alien, forced to communicate in a dry, poetry-free language that didn’t even admit concepts central to my experience.

Something in me always resisted, however, always felt there was a baby in the scornfully discarded bathwater.

**

Carol Gilligan weaves her stories of couples in therapy and children in the classroom together with the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid. It’s a tale that comes very close to tragedy, with a heroine who has to make her way through confusion, fear, the fear-based stories of others, abandonment, suicidal impulses, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She is beaten by Venus’s handmaidens, Sadness, Habit, and Trouble, until she is unable to speak. All because she refuses to adhere to a role others have chosen for her, and because she insists on seeing Cupid in the light. (I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that this is what can happen to women within patriarchal culture who violate the rules by trusting themselves and saying what they see, feel, and know.) Seeing Cupid is what is not allowed; he leaves her crying in the dust when she violates his rule and lights the lamp to look at him.

The author introduces us to Eileen, a client in her private practice who feels crazy for picking up on an intensity of feeling between herself and the husband who is thinking of separating from her. Initially she says “He’s no more right than I am about it…it’s his reality, and then my reality.” Gilligan, asking further questions that aim to access Eileen’s non-rational knowing regarding the situation, concludes “If he is saying that your relationship lacks intensity and intimacy and you are picking up the vibes of fire and chemistry between you, then it’s not his reality and your reality, but reality and not-reality.” Eileen sits up and becomes animated; she proceeds to voice her feeling that the opposite of what her husband is saying is true. The intensity is precisely why he is withdrawing from her.

“I don’t know how to talk about this kind of knowing,” says Gilligan, “since it so readily seems suspect. It is the way animals know. Through vibrations. Something that passes between people. We pore over novels and poems because this is what writers put into words. Truths that have until recently escaped the nets put out by science.” A recent article in Salon by Laura Miller (about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, of all things) actually touched upon this same phenomenon by comparing the world of pre-verbal infants and toddlers with that of our animal friends.

**

It’s frankly heartbreaking to read Gilligan’s accounts of four-year-old boys — who have not yet been initiated into the stoic silences of traditional masculinity — and their vociferous intimacy with their preschool friends and their parents. They say things to their mothers like “Mommy, you have a happy voice, but I also hear a little worried voice.” They are tremendously tuned in emotionally, contrary to the popular belief about boys’ obtuseness. They like to talk about their “buddies” with their daddies, and the fathers, in a particularly poignant passage in the book, worry about what will happen to their sons’ “spunk” and their “sensitive side.” They seem to be at a loss as to what to do; their sons bring up in them the uncomfortable memory of their own dissociation, their own tragic narrative.

Adolescent girls, at least, have the advantage of having acquired greater language skills; they are better able to speak about and remember having to choose between being in relationship (being their authentic selves) and having relationships (fitting an image of womanhood that won’t challenge the status quo). “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking,” says seventeen-year-old Iris, “no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud. But you have to have relationships.” And as thirteen-year-old Tracy puts it, “When we were nine, we were stupid…we were honest.”

This developmental difference is perhaps why the greater burden of speaking about these unspeakable things, of restoring love, authentic connection, and the lost pieces of our humanness, falls upon women — much as Rilke predicted it would in his Letters to a Young Poet:

This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it…This advance…will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.

Over and over again Gilligan hears from women how insane and out of touch they feel when they are abruptly dropped like a hot potato, following what they felt as shared joy, connection, and chemistry with a man. “While she may have seemed crazy or pathetic,” Gilligan says of one client, “like Psyche holding on to Cupid, in danger of losing herself, she was holding onto a core sense of self, her ability to register her experience.” Equally distressing as the loss of love itself is the self-doubt it engenders, the fear that one’s inner compass is hopelessly broken. “It’s a fight,” says Eileen, “at the foundation, in the arenas that are most important to me, my relationships with other people…how I read people and how I read where we are in terms of intimacy. I value that more than anything…to fight there, I mean, it’s fighting for your life.”

For the men’s part, as Gilligan writes in a section about the Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient — whose protagonist is quite literally a man burned beyond recognition — “The pattern of men turning away from love, leaving without saying a word, suggests that they have already been burned. It is a history that bears the hallmarks of trauma: a heightened vigilance, a loss of voice, the inability to tell one’s story.”

**

Sitting at the dinner table adjacent to my father, I often felt a profound and nameless frustration that ended in despair. I know now that it was precisely my own loss of voice, my inability to tell my own story, that sank me into many hopeless and resentful silences. I would probably have never have worked so hard on my writing if I had felt in any way understood and honored by this all-important man. Later I would feel crazy, shamed, and devastated when, time and again, men would either cut me off completely or tell me my reading of their feelings was flat-out wrong. That is not what I meant at all, as the T.S. Eliot poem goes, that is not it, at all…

This is probably why Max Vujevic’s undeniably thunderous heartbeat (mentioned in my last post) was so validating. The body, at least, doesn’t lie. Although I’ve actually been told an erection was nothing personal. No, the violence with which Max pushed me away matched the violence with which he embraced me. There was definitely more going on there than I’ll ever fully know. But something was clearly going on.

In recent weeks I’ve found myself lapsing into crestfallen silence at the table of a surrogate father figure, and struggling once more to translate my experience into the foreign language of my Dead White Men’s college with a former classmate. Like Psyche allowed a visit with her sisters, I’ve listened to another woman’s fearful story about reality that challenged my self-trust, and I’ve wondered about my own sanity, reviewing my experiences of being left crying in the dust. The feelings aroused are the same frustration and despair the young girl sitting beside her father experienced thirty years ago, that mute hopeless surrender to a louder and more powerful voice.

**

How does the story end? You may ask. What happens to Psyche? After completing several seemingly impossible labors with the intervention of a helpful natural world, she is required by Venus (the goddess of love) to travel to Hades, and to ask a favor of Persephone, queen of the underworld. Like the heroes of patriarchal civilization, Odysseus and Aeneas, she has to find the courage to make her way through the land of the dead while alive. Existential psychotherapist and Renaissance man Rollo May once wrote in The Cry for Myth that one has to go through hell to get to heaven, and this is no less true for Psyche. It’s only after she has completed this tricky journey (and nearly been killed by her own curiosity) that Cupid returns to her. Granted immortality by Jupiter, Psyche gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure.

I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to read about a Hero’s Journey for chicks.

What I suppose I take from all that is this: Keep walking through fear. Do the thing, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, that you think you cannot do. If you refuse to be silenced and defeated, the forces of nature will find gentle ways to support you.

**

Gilligan begins her book with the image of water, likening it to love. It is the softest thing in the world, but it can wear through stone. Vulnerability, in a world built on power politics and competition, is viewed as a fatal weakness; emotional sensitivity is a liability. Yet we can see every day where the paradigm of power politics, the values of a patriarchal culture, have left us. It may be that the transformation of the world begins with women — and men — who dare to recover their lost voices, the voices of those tuned-in girls and boys who knew instinctively how to read the vibrations of interrelatedness, how to be authentic in relationship, how to love.

What I found was a large dragonfly, maybe four inches long and a glittering silvery-blue color, flinging itself against one of the window panes in a vain attempt to get out. I propped open the room’s door to the outside, and with a sheet of paper gently guided the exotic critter to the opening. It took flight immediately and disappeared.

This occurrence was extraordinary enough that it made me go straight to the computer and Google “dragonfly spirit,” as if the dragonfly’s appearance were some kind of augury. On a personal website that depicts certain Medicine Cards, I found this about The Dragonfly:

Look within and feel the sense-of-self energy within yourself. Notice if it is ebbing, and find the point in time when you were deluded into believing that you would be happier if you changed because someone else wanted you to. Misery is a prime clue that you lost your will and personal validity when you bought into someone else’s idea of who or what you should be. The illusion was that you would be happier if you did it their way. In forfeiting what you know is right and true for you personally, you give away your power. It is time for you to take it back.

A few other sites yielded strikingly similar themes.

The thing that hit me like a truckload of bricks today is: I have always been unacceptable to somebody. And it was usually someone pretty darn important, starting with the big guy in the sky himself. The Ultimate Father Figure.

Sure, evangelical Christians will fall all over themselves telling you how God is love, love, love, baby, so much love you won’t even be able to stand it, but if you actually read the Bible and pay attention to the theology you get quite a different picture. That some chick 4000 years ago ate the wrong kind of fruit now means that, on your own, you are totally unreliable, and a worthless turd to boot, unless you prostrate yourself, beg forgiveness, and get neurotic about doing (or not doing) all the stuff this book tells you to. And in this book you get to read about what befell all the people who displeased God by bringing the wrong offering or showing up at the wrong time or even thinking the wrong thing. Shoot, Job didn’t even do anything wrong, and look what happened to him! So you just better watch it.

Yeah, as soon as I could understand concepts, I learned the concept that I was fundamentally flawed, lacking, unacceptable, and that if I was going to please the almighty Creator of the universe, I was going to have to change. My very survival depended upon it.

It’s not unlike the way a young child’s survival depends upon his or her parents. A young child can’t afford to be critical; a young child can’t step back and say, hey, wait a minute, this is whack. Mommy and Daddy are inconsistent, unkind, and possibly downright abusive to me. No, the child has to adapt — to anticipate, to obsess over cues, and to try to be whatever he or she thinks the parent wants.

This was the extent of my so-called “relationship with God.” And it was also, to a lesser degree, my relationship with my parents, who are to this day neck-deep in that faith, and lived out its assumptions in their James-Dobson-style childrearing. So it was actually communicated to me that to the three most important figures in my early life, I was unacceptable at my core.

When high school rolled around I immersed myself enthusiastically in my church’s thriving youth group. But again, there was something lacking in me. I watched both of the guys I had monster crushes on (as well as my beloved brother) go out with my victorious Christian girlfriend. She was breezy and bouncy and good at sports, but when I asked her what her secret was, she pretty much ontologically flattened me by offering up the made-for-Sunday-school answer “My identity is Christ!” Well, then! Not only was I not cutting it as a female, I wasn’t cutting it as a Christian, either. (Personally, I suspected it had more to do with her pouty bottom lip and her elegant jump shot, but whatever.)

Still, that didn’t stop me from mimicking her style of dress, her expressions and manner of speaking, her opinions on the faith, and her makeup preferences. I even went out for junior varsity volleyball, as she was captain of her varsity team. I was like some larger, lamer mini-me.

And it didn’t work. I was still me. I was still unacceptable to those by whom I most wanted to be accepted.

Here’s the simple truth, that I still haven’t seemed to learn after four decades: you can pretend to be someone you’re not, or you can be authentic, but either way there are absolutely no guarantees you will make anyone, no matter how “important,” accept you. So are you going to toe the line and squeeze your butt-cheeks, or are you going to break out and dance like the unabashed dork you are?

Timely dragonfly. There is still that young child very much alive in me, who truly believes that she will literally die, die, if someone important to her disapproves of her, if she says or does the “wrong” thing, if her unscripted actions manage to prove her unworthy of love. The reaction no longer fits the situation; I can cry for hours, like a baby left in her crib to starve. This vulnerability itself seems like a liability; who wants to be around that when you could be around shiny happy people holding hands? Although I suspect a lot of them are on Paxil.

But there it is again, that wish to be different in order to be acceptable. As if five gay guys could come in and make over my soul. In the end, it just ain’t up to me or the Bravo network. I’ll fumble along on my meandering path, and try to tell the truth, and maybe stick my foot in my mouth, sometimes, and if you love me, you’ll love me, and if you don’t, you won’t.

But damn if saying that doesn’t still make me cry.

Curious about the game that was about to start, I ventured up to the umpire, a freckled boy older than my brother, and not from our neighborhood. He whirled around and hissed at me (squinting, in Disney-movie-mean-boy fashion) to get outta here, get lost.

“You’re too little,” he spat contemptuously.

For no other reason than my complete vulnerability (I was three or four), this stranger’s scornful assessment filled me with overwhelming, all-consuming shame. He had exposed my inadequacy to everyone; inadequacy that I had been until then unaware of, which was only more proof of my stupidity. I ran home, hiccuping with violent sobs, and threw myself into the green vinyl chair in our TV room. I can still remember the feel of the garish 1970s afghan that covered it, the rough texture scratching against my wet cheek.

This minor interaction really shouldn’t matter anymore. Except that it took root in my body, like a tangle of vines growing inside my ribcage, squeezing my heart. The cells themselves seemed to form a memory of this powerful sensation, and every time I experienced myself as defective or less-than, it became stronger. How could I be so stupid? How could I have ever considered myself an equal, when I was (for reasons that were not always clear to me) so thoroughly inferior? It was as if the Big Kids were still on the desired side, and incompetent little AlienBaby was always on the other.

I vividly remember this happening again when I walked into the youth minister’s office at my church and found the boy with whom I was completely infatuated (and with whom I had hoped to go to prom) holding hands with my good friend Katy. She had somehow neglected to mention to me their newfound puppy love. The feeling of humiliation was total and sweeping, and this time there was nowhere to run — no green chair to hide in.

…

I wouldn’t have believed that other people experienced this feeling so intensely also, or that it could make others likewise want to disappear into nothingness, if it hadn’t been for certain authors, notably Dostoevsky. Few writers have approached his ability to comprehend and recreate the squirm-inducing scenarios that attend and feed the shame of perceiving oneself as less-than, laughable, ridiculous. And even fewer do it with his depth of understanding or his compassion. Part of the author’s greatness, I believe, is his great love for the flawed and flailing human being, a love that treats his characters more kindly than they treat themselves (or one another, quite frequently).

…

One example is the dialogue between fourteen-year-old Kolya Krassotkin and monastery novice Alyosha Karamazov in the “Precocity” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Kolya was immediately painfully familiar to me as a wannabe intellectual, lying about his familiarity with Voltaire and other philosophical novelists, talking a big talk, trying to bluff his way into respectability. (For my part, I’ve pretended to know what the hell Jacques Derrida was all about — having only seen a movie about his life! — and faked knowledge of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel or the Magnetic Fields, just to appear cooler and “in the know.”) Here’s a rather obnoxious excerpt from Kolya’s convoluted and pretentious ramblings:

But please don’t suppose I am such a revolutionist…Though I mention (Byelinsky’s character) Tatyana, I am not at all for the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and must obey. Les femmes tricottent, as Napoleon said…and on that question at least I am quite of one mind with that pseudo-great man. I think, too, that to leave one’s country and fly to America is mean, worse than mean — silly. Why go to America when one may be of great service to humanity here? There’s a perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us…I must own, they’ve been at me to go (to America), but I declined. That’s between ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge,

‘Long will you remember
The house at the Chain bridge.’

Do you remember? It’s splendid. Why are you laughing? You don’t suppose I am fibbing, do you?

Here the author parenthetically gives us a window into Kolya’s mind:

(“What if he should find out that I’ve only that one number of The Bell in father’s bookcase, and haven’t read any more of it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)

He is deathly afraid of being exposed as an incompetent child, a fraud. (Aren’t we all?)

Alyosha gently calls Kolya on his transparent ploy, noting that Kolya has a “charming nature” that has been “distorted,” saying that he is in fact “very sensitive.” In recognizing this, he unleashes an emotional torrent from the anxious boy:

…When I was fancying you had a great contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off…for a moment I quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied — just now, here — when I said that if there were no God he would have to be invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge, especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn’t showing off out of vanity, although I really don’t know why…Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.

“Tell me,” he asks, “am I very ridiculous now?”

Alyosha responds passionately:

Don’t think about that, don’t think of it at all! And what does ridiculous mean? Isn’t everyone constantly being or seeming ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is that you should be feeling that so early, though I’ve observed it for some time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to suffer from it. It’s almost a sort of insanity…

He goes on to reassure Kolya and commend him for his candor.

You are like every one else…that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like everybody else, that’s all…you be the only one not like it. You really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these days?

…

Apparently even in nineteenth-century Russia, amid political and social turmoil and widespread poverty, people were driven by the same psychological needs and fears as we are in affluent twenty-first century America. How could I be so stupid? The shame and the fear of exposure as ultimately inferior and laughable is perhaps universal to human beings, and not just a luxury for the idle rich.

The way Alyosha effectively disarms this powerful motivating force is by identifying it, not with sharp criticism or venom, but with lovingkindness. He gives Kolya a safe space in which to let down his already considerable defenses. And the walls come a-tumblin’ down.

At the end of this exchange a bashful Kolya observes, “Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love.” He no longer has to fear being or seeming ridiculous, at least not with Alyosha.

What a different world we might live in, if we could all give one another that safe space.