Views from the Real World on the Ground Floor

First, the good news. 

My mother is in fairly decent shape, all things considered. The reports that she was not eating are accurate, but she’s quite communicative, when she thinks the situation warrants it. 

Yesterday, however, was quite the emotional roller coaster ride.

At noon, a conference for the relatives of residents hosted by the nursing home outlines the challenges such facilities are facing around the world: staff shortages, widespread Covid19 infections, difficulty meeting basic needs for everyone, staff and residents both. Not long after that, they let me know that my mother has not been eating enough, is on an IV, and is only communicating in one-word responses. I ask for permission to visit her; and the Montrose VA home says yes. The concern is that she seems to be deteriorating, and that if we wait too long, she may not be able to recognize me or respond.

Some friends question my judgment in going up there. It is, after all, a decision to enter a very active Covid19 infection zone. I definitely feel, however, that my duty to my mother is to be there for her. No question about it. There's some anxiety about the decision in the background, but it has no power. In the end, I can find no hesitation in me.

There are multiple security checks before getting to the facility. I’m challenged to make sure I’m not displaying any symptoms of infection. The challenge is businesslike and ice cold; by now, what was once unthinkable has become a routine. I get waved through in a perfunctory manner. For me, the visit is a big deal; to the guard, ho-hum.

There are almost no cars in the parking lot. This alone is testimony to how isolated these communities of elderly people have become. Anyone complaining about the measures we have taken so far ought to go see the impact on our senior citizens; I’m not even in the door, and the danger to them is already palpable.

A long wait at the door to the facility itself generates a touching conversation with the security guard on that post, John, who I've run into many times. Usually, our contact is casual and brief; this time, I find out he's had five heart attacks and one Near Death Experience. In it, he saw Elvis, a young Elvis in a leather jacket, seating on a big leather sofa with an acoustic guitar. Elvis was with his mother. They sent him back to earth. "We're not ready for you here yet," they told him.

"I don't get it," John remarks to me. "I'm not even an Elvis fan." 

Verification, I think to myself. The NDE was real. 

In the process, we touch on the human dimension of lives that do not know one another; it confers a special value on what would otherwise be an irritating wait. 

This man — and all the others manning posts like him— is a hero of this epidemic. They are ordinary people, doing ordinary things that transform into the extraordinary simply because of their courage and willingness to be there for others. My respect for them deepens by the minute. It's one thing to read about it; it's another to walk into a facility filled with souls like this, those who are brave enough to get up in the morning for others despite the risk to themselves. It puts the lie to the idea that we've become a nation of cowards that does nothing but whine about every threat that comes along. There are such people, truly, and they do love cameras; but they are tiny creatures, to be ignored in the enormous wave of right attitude and right action sweeping through the places where this crisis is active. This is no media event populated by misstatements and absurd protests. It's a place that enshrines an invisible line between life and death, where one mistake can be terminal.

Elder Jesse—another one of the heroes in this story, the staff member who helped arrange the visit — finally meets me at the front desk. He, as well, treats this quarantine zone as a routine fact, not a special place. 

We set off down the echoing, immaculately clean corridors. Some few staff go about their business, one man sweeping the floor with a nod to me, but the place is eerily empty. There's a sober hush across the halls; even the fish in the massive salt water aquarium in the common room seem subdued. 

As we prepare to enter the wing with the Covid patients, I put on a Tyvek clean room suit, gloves, double mask, and face shield (homemade, but quite functional) when I enter the isolation wing. 

There is no soundtrack. It’s a realm of chilling silence, far from newscasts and Hollywood movies. I find that I’m not afraid or even worried. This must be something like the way the staff feel: it's real life, and I have a responsibility to it. If that responsibility means I have to stand down my concerns for personal safety, it's done without hesitation. Even ego obeys when we awaken to the precarious nature of life. I'm in the midst of facts, not my opinions about things. 

This isn't a story someone wrote.

In a strange way, it's almost a relief; now I enter the fact of this pandemic, the fact of my mother’s infection, the fact of the extraordinary people who are caring for her and others. No matter how brief, the privilege of touching these people and their service sinks deep into me. There is an impression of a kind of love here that we cannot, as humans, attain except in extremes of circumstance; a very matter-of-fact, here-we-are, no-bullshit kind of love that acknowledges relationship, the intelligence of the ordinary when it is attended to with real care, rather than the usual presumption and hubris.

I get into my mom’s room, which is as ordinary as any room. Somehow the banality of the extreme never fails to impress. 

Here I am. Is this all there is to it? 

I'm just here. That's all.

So be here.

I can’t go near her, and feel oddly suspended in a bubble of distance created by danger I can’t see, danger that appears completely theoretical but for all the gear I'm wearing. Mom doesn’t recognize me at first; no one would. I'm covered from head to toe like someone from a science fiction movie. 

The thinking man thinks ahead. I have a sign that I wrote in all-caps with a sharpie in a notebook: Hi mom! It’s Lee. I now fish around for it in the plastic shopping bag and hold it up.

It's a good idea; she immediately understands it’s me when I hold it up. It’s good to get past that moment of confusion, because after her strokes, my mother seesaws between native hyper-intelligence and childlike bewilderment. This visit, she’s far more cognizant than the nurses let on. She begins by cheerfully grumbling that the damn Covid virus has knocked her back; yet it seems more likely, with all the evidence at hand, that she is having congestive heart problems, a possibility being adjusted by on-the-fly changes to her medication.

The conversation is perhaps unimportant; after all, in the sense of actual information exchange, it’s minimal. There are brief but touching FaceTime calls to the grandchildren and her sister; I scold her for not eating enough. Helen keeps telling me I must have pulled a lot of strings to get into the facility, and I reminder that the only thing that got me in was her ongoing refusal to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

She makes one of her comical faces (an essential part of her senior-living communication toolkit) sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes back in her head. 

It tastes terrible, she says. 

I tell her it doesn’t matter what it tastes like, she has to eat it. 

My mom is in many ways a shell of her former self, like a child. Her medical condition has reduced her to a tiny, shrunken person on a bed with limited range of motion and very little to do. Yet her attitude is enormously positive; she smiles all the time, and seems cheery about everything that happens. 

The love I feel for her is too deep, too subliminal, to be of easy access, simply explained. I can't even walk up to it and touch it inwardly. It has a delicate nature I can't quite explain. I skirt it cautiously, not wanting to damage it, but just savor its taste.

It is an undertone, a note that began sounding in my own life before I even knew I existed that is still reverberating. There are many inner notes of this kind in a lifetime, but few contribute so much to the harmony of one’s awareness as the love for one’s mother. It is, in a spiritual sense, where the song begins; it includes the beat in time before the song, as well as the full length of its music. 

It’s impossible, in any single moment, standing in a room anywhere — let alone separated by layers of high-tech plastic — to appreciate the nature of that song in its entirety. One simply knows that it exists; and that all of its depth, its dimension, its flavor, need to be savored over and over again in many different times, many different places, in order to truly appreciate it.

All I know now is that this is my mom. My care for her is deep in a hidden place in my heart.I don’t want to get too sentimental about it; her condition and her attitude towards it are a form of worship, and I tiptoe around them like a visitor to a cathedral in the middle of a service. It feels like we're at the moment of communion. She knows how to officiate here; I'm an interloper. I may be the one that can walk and talk and think and drive, but she exudes the simple, uncomplicated authority of those who suffer and bear it with dignity. 

It reminds me now of Dostoyevsky's comment that his hope in life was that he could prove worthy of his own suffering.

The moment comes when I have to say goodbye. Despite all of the emotional currents swirling in multiple directions, and my relative lack of fear, there's an intellectual part of me, small but incredibly insistent, that is saying length of potential exposure time needs to be minimized. Finally, I cede to it.

I tell her that I won’t be back unless she’s on her last legs. Are you on your last legs? I ask her. She raises her left hand — the only one she has much control over anymore — off the bed and wiggles it around, checking to make sure that it still works. It’s a crippled, arthritic thing, wrapped in a bandage, but it seems to have an enthusiasm for life all its own, independent of the two of us. 

She looks at me with a big grin. No, she says. She’s quite definite about it. 

No. I'm not on my last legs.

Good. I say. 

I'll be back.

On the way out, I exchange briefly with the nurses on the wing, all heroines who ought to be given medals of honor for their work. 

These are not rich, powerful people: they are brave, incredible people. 

Even now I feel a wave of gratitude for them. I owe them — we owe them — a debt that can never be repaid. There is no greater honor than real service to others. This place, I realize, is not just close to heaven. It has heaven right here in it. The kingdom of heaven is within these women, and they bring it to us not floating on clouds with a chorus of angels, but in the most ordinary of activities. How much of life is like this, with us blind to it? Perhaps all of it. It takes the worst situations to teach me this, to remind me of how I live in the midst of miracles and walk past them all day long, taking them for granted.

As I leave the isolation wing, stripping off layers of gear and disposing them at once, nothing has changed except my attitude. 

I’ve entered the belly of the beast; the creature that has swallowed our imaginations, our society, our economy. 

It turns out it is filled with love and incredibly courageous human beings. They are too busy taking care of business to blame, argue, or accuse. They simply get up each morning, and they care for others.

It occurs to me, as I make this diary entry, that I hope history remembers not the blowhards and fools who have strutted across the stage of this pandemic in what they think are the lead roles, but these every day, ordinary men and women. They are the heroes; they are the leaders. The world is safer in their hands than in the hands of those who control all the money and wield all the power; and thank God for it. 

When we survive, it will be because of them.

Bravo.

Go, and sense yourself, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Presence

If our presence is required in life and we don't bring it, we commit a sin difficult to redress.

Views From the Ground Floor, Part IV: Blessed are the Meek

Interior, St. Savin

Blessed are the Meek,

For they shall inherit the earth.

Well, wouldn't you know it. Meek is not a Latin word.  It is from the old Norse, and it means soft or gentle.

To be soft or gentle means several different things by implication.

First of all, it means that if it is touched, it is sensual and pleasing to encounter. This is the physical quality of meekness.

Secondly, it means that as an action of touch — being gentle —it is caring and attentive. This is the emotional quality of meekness.

Thirdly, it implies the opposite of hardness: it yields, it receives. This is the intellectual quality of meekness.

This one word thus contains an entire range of spiritual instruction which needs to be carefully examined in order to appreciate its subtlety and the extraordinary intelligence of the phrase itself.

The word meek embodies a holy trinity of qualities: sensation, feeling, intellect. While it acts as an instruction for character and behavior and all three of these areas, it also serves as an indicator of the three-centered work that is necessary for Being. Let's examine the meaning here in terms of the foundation of relationship that is described at the beginning of the sermon.

In terms of character, what is physically engraved on Being, to be touched means to be intimate. This means that there needs to be, both inwardly and outwardly, an intimate ability to allow relationship to take place, allowing it to touch me, and for me to touch others. To be meek implies a relaxation, both inwardly and outwardly, both in terms of my physical tension, my emotional fear, and my intellectual rejection.

In terms of the feeling-action of this touch, it means that my emotional attitude, my feeling being, needs to be finely tuned to offer care to others. This is an inversion of my usual outwardly selfish state. If I'm meek, there is a humility, a sincerity to the way I approach others emotionally. I don't run around like a bull in a china shop bludgeoning everyone else with my emotional insecurities and disabilities. Rather, I use my feeling capacity to help support others and care about the difficulties they are encountering.

In terms of the intellectual action of meekness, it’s intelligent enough to know its place as a tiny thing, and yield with deference to the arriving impressions of the world so that they can be objectively received and evaluated. This does not imply self-effacement, but rather self-awareness. There has to be a conscious receiving of the world around me, not one engaged in automatically and at the complete mercy of my emotional reactions. My intelligence must not be arrogant and dismissive of others.

Once again, we find entire teachings in a single sentence. Yet we aren’t done here; the second part of the couplet says, for they shall inherit the earth.

One inherits, always and only, from what has been left behind by another, usually by death. To inherit is to stand in the shoes of the last person, to become the next steward in an endless line of succession. Everyone who inherits eventually becomes he or she who gives on to their heirs. The influence of stewardship is, without any doubt, implicit in this phrase. From it we know that the earth we live on and in originally belonged to some other time and force, some other being; and in meekness, we recognize that, instead of thinking that the earth belongs to us, which is what our arrogance usually tells us. It is through meekness that we inherit the earth, that is, we become stewards of it. 

This may seem obvious enough when one reads it, but the denial that is afoot in humanity regarding our aberrant belief that we own everything and can do anything we want with it is both extraordinary and glaringly evident. Christ is telling us the exact opposite.

The earth, here, is shorthand for everything. The whole world we are in, and perhaps even all of creation itself, which is an entity apart from God. Yet it also means the quality of groundedness, a relationship and a rootedness to the reality of Being. It's through the exercise of meekness of character with all three of our parts that we become eligible to inherit the earth. 

When our parts participate together to unify our being at the ground floor of the point where we live within this moment, our roots sink down into the earth – the fertile soil — of our Being, and we have a new opportunity to understand what love means. 

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Views From the Ground Floor, Part III: Those who Mourn

Interior, Saint-Pierre De Chauvigny

Blessed are those who mourn,
For they shall be comforted.

The word mourn means to feel sorrow or sadness; in it is human suffering and all of its many implications.

Mourning takes place as a sense of remorse or loss, especially the loss of loved ones. As such it automatically implies death; yet death is referred to here in a metaphysical sense. It is inflected towards the temporary nature of all creation.

This is, of course, exactly where all of the Blessed find themselves: in creation. Creation is a place where everything is of a temporary nature; and emotional suffering, remorse, arise from the temporary nature of life and the fact that what we love passes out of existence. One can imagine no greater pain.

Yet tremendous hope is imparted here, because the Blessed are comforted. The word comfort derived from the Latin roots -com, expressing an intensity of force, and fortis, which means strong. The inference here is quite clear: we gain strength from our suffering.

This is a rather different inflection from what the words appear to say, which is that God will take care of us and make us feel better. Rather, the act of Being in and of itself – the life-action of relationship and suffering —will help us grow spiritually, give us strength.

This strength is not a physical strength. The comfort – expression of strength and – that is referred to here is an inner, not an outer strength. It is the strength of emotional endurance. This is God’s reassurance that we are designed to endure the trials of life, and that they will help us of themselves, by helping our feeling-parts to develop. Implicit in this passage, once one understands its inner meaning, is that suffering – Gurdjieff called it intentional suffering — and remorse—again, Gurdjieff's remorse of conscience —are essential to our spiritual growth.

This is not a suggestion. It is a promise, as indicated by the words shall be.

What this explains, very deftly and in just two words, is that growth through suffering is a lawful quality of the universe.

As explained in metaphysical humanism, the universe does not just have physical laws and – it has emotional and intellectual laws as well, each one of which is metaphysical and can only be measured by the instruments of consciousness, not by mechanical devices.

This passage thus gives us a brief but tiny insight into our nature as manifestations of God’s consciousness and its action under universal law. The Lord has promised us that through suffering, we’ll be made more whole. That is, we’ll acquire more emotional and intellectual particles of God’s Being and concentrate them within us.


Christ's death on the cross was meant to illustrate this principle as graphically as possible.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Views from the Ground Floor, part II

Angel, from the romanesque church 

St. Savin sur Gartempe

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
For they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

Who are the poor?

The word poor is a term derived from the Latin In forma pauperis, a legal term meaning "in the manner of a pauper". The expression refers to the ability of a person with no means to proceed in court without payment of the fees associated with a lawsuit or appeal.

One who is poor, in other words, is given the gift of being allowed to proceed without being required to pay for it. They have the right to protect themselves and work for their own good, even though they have few or no means of their own.

We live in a world of laws; all of us are under that authority, which is a consistent theme in Christ's teaching. Compared to the riches of God's kingdom, and the laws that govern it, we are all paupers. Yet, as the phrase implies, we are blessed. 

The poor are not poor in spirit; they are poor, and therefore blessed with spirit.

What the poor are blessed with, spirit, is a word derived from the meaning breathe. We are given life; this is another way of understanding the phrase. Once we see these meetings and understand their relationship, we see that Christ's first phrase means something like this:

Humanity is born as a tiny creature, owning nothing, and is yet given life and breath through a blessing — the gift of God's love. This state is inherent in the nature of humanity.

The statement conveys mankind's position relative to God, along with the tremendous blessing of this sacred gift of life which has been bestowed upon us.

The second phrase, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, confers a promise. The word king is of germanic origin, and related to the word kin, which denotes relationship. We need to think quite carefully about the interaction of these various meanings, because a subtlety is implied. To be a king is to be one who rules over others; and yet embedded in that very action is the implication of relationship, because the relationship between a ruler and its subjects is what makes a ruler a ruler and the subject a subject. In other words, although it appears that the ruler and the subjects are the question at hand, the overarching authority in the equation is the relationship, not the king and the subjects.

This way we begin to understand that the word kingdom refers to relationships. A kingdom is a place where relationships are exercised, positions are established, creating an understanding of authority and duty. As such we move from understanding the word kingdom as some kind of physical location, a geographic domain owned by some despot, benign or otherwise, to a domain of relationship.

The kingdom of heaven is a domain of action and relationship.

Now, Jesus does not assign the ownership of this domain of action and relationship to God; which may seem odd. It's gifted to us: it belongs to the poor. That is, it belongs to humanity. And heaven—which means, in its essence, the sky, the cosmos, or what is higher than us —is the origin of that relationship, that kingdom. In other words, in the midst of our poverty, through the breath of spiritual life into us, we are empowered through the gift of relationship to come into contact with something higher the ourselves.

This is a subtle reference to the power of love; so another way of understanding this is that Christ is telling us, although we are poor, we are blessed in spirit with life, and it is within our ability to create a higher experience of being ( Heaven) through relationship. That relationship is a relationship of kingdom, that is, one in which authority is acknowledged. 

Implicit in this is the understanding that that authority is God's authority; yet everything that God has given us, this blessing of life, depends on the way in which we recognize authority, engage in relationship, and thereby lift ourselves from our poverty – our inability, our lack of anything— into a spiritual territory of a higher nature.

Readers will recognize many themes here which are consistent throughout Christ's teachings. Yet the embedding of God's authority in that which is lower ( the poor) and its ability to make an effort (kingdom, relationship) is striking. Also implicit here is the understanding that the universe is one of relationship, a fractal structure where that which is objectively tiny supports and builds even the most comprehensive and cosmologically important beings. 

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Awakening Body Consciousness

I've spent many years working with Patty, who knew Gurdjieff personally as a child. She is an extraordinary person.

Here's her new book. Highly recommended.

Awakening Body Consciousness

Views from the Ground Floor: Where to begin?

March 20.

I'm sitting here Friday morning before 6 AM, as usual examining the condition of my inward energy and its relationship to the outside world and all the events that are taking place.

I am.

The energy in my Being affirms this.

So I begin here, before anything else happens, living in my body and hearing the sound of my voice and sensing the vibration of all the molecules that make up my Being, who collectively support what I am and help me begin where I am, sitting here.

I don't know anything about what this day will be like. There are a lot of general indications I can see in the immediate future, based on the plans I have made and the pattern of other days; but the fact is that this day is new and even though I’ll engage in a range of repetitive and predictable behaviors, I can't say for sure what will happen. One day in October 2011 I woke up with a similar set of impressions, expecting the day to follow the form I’d laid out for it in my mind and the future to look more or less like expected it to. That was the day my sister suddenly died at the age of 51.

 The entire world and everything in it changed forever in that moment. 

And this was a day, I now see, where I thought things were predictable.

"The virus," as we have begun to refer to it, is doing the same thing to the world: it has destroyed every assumption we had about futures. One would think this would fill people with a sobering  respect; but in the midst of this, I see powerful and supposedly intelligent people making absurd decisions, contradicting every supposedly close-held value they claim is at the core of their view of the world and the way they approach things. I'm not just talking about world leaders here; I'm talking about people I know personally. 

It raises the question: if we can't stay close to our own being and discover a real—as opposed to imaginary—consistency in our beliefs, our behavior, in the midst of a crisis this serious, who are we? My own motives and beliefs need to be brought much more sharply into question in the face of this.

I think one of the facts about an inner search, if it’s real, is that I discover I’m never the person I think I am. There's no doubt I’m a person; but much in me is unreliable, especially the parts that think they're reliable. So my observations about other people are, in a sense, meaningless — nothing more than a distraction from my observations about myself, which I ought to be paying much more attention to.

If I don't stay close to my sensation, my breathing, and integrate those as functions of my intelligence—not my automatism –I'm definitely going to engage in nonsense today. Without a grounding in the organic sensation of Being, the ship leaves port by drifting away from the dock without a crew on it.

I am beginning here within my body and within sensation this morning, and I hope to take in life as a whole thing and see it more clearly today, by receiving it without prejudice and simply allowing it to be what it is.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Equanimity

No matter where I go or what I do, I wish to discover the center of gravity of my life with in my Being, not located outwardly in circumstances.

This can seem particularly difficult in these times, when obsessive fears about the virus and its dangers beset everyone. How can I remain more grounded in the face of these fears?

Of course the locus for a grounded being lies in sensation; yet perhaps my thinking parts can help me approach an understanding that my feeling and my body will gradually absorb and correspond to.

I’m a creature that receives impressions. No matter what else I think about my humanity, religion, society, or anything else, this begins as a truth and there is no escaping it. Whether I’m in the midst of a serene Buddha calm or a frenzied, anxious reaction to the sickness around me, I’m still a creature that receives impressions.

In a certain sense, all of the impressions I receive are of exactly equal value. As they arrive at the threshold of my Being, my consciousness, they arrive as discreet types of vibration which the receptive molecules in my being encounter and process. Now, this may sound excessively technical and even scientific, but it's necessary to see it from this point of view in order to understand that everything that takes place as the impressions are received represents various inflections that my conscious being imparts to them. The impressions themselves are all exactly equal. An impression of a glorious Gothic cathedral or a rotting dead body are exactly equal as they arrive in me. The impressions of someone touching me in a loving manner or someone yelling at me in hatred are exactly equal.

This is not to say that the inflections I impart to impressions are invalid; not at all. It’s my responsibility to discover valuation and meaning. The point is that if I begin from the inflections, instead of the receiving of life, they feed on one another in a cacophonous domino effect. I get distracted and the impressions begin to dictate my reactions. 

I need instead to begin from where my life is received, and receive it. There’s a poise available within the experience of my sensation — the living, active experience, not just what I attempt to deliberately inflect into it, and here in lies a crucial difference that must be carefully and intimately studied—that, if it is engaged, bestows upon my awareness an irrevocable and imperturbable center of gravity. The outside world enters into a place that’s silent and calm.

That silent place of stillness receives life, but is not affected by it, because all things in life are equal from the perspective of objective sensation. Of course the parts that are mostly unable to perceive in this way this are still here in me; yet even they become grounded around this axis of silence which receives.

This touches on Meister Eckhart's principle of Gleichgültigkeit, which means, roughly, all things have equal validity in the I of God. I say “I” rather than “eye” or “eyes,” because this perception is not just a question of seeing, but of the experience of self. 

Self can receive life objectively; but not with the thinking part. It comes after.

This objectivity can become an organ in me. That is to say, it becomes an essential part of myself in the same way that my lungs or my heart are a part of myself; but this is a spiritual organ, an organ of the psyche and not the body. If I don't form spiritual organs to receive life in a spiritual way, I remain enslaved by the material. So I need to attend to this with a very finely tuned perception.

This is the only way I know of to retain equanimity in the face of difficult circumstances. It isn't infallible because I’m not infallible. It is, however, a powerful tool for the encounter and digestion of life. The difference is between an awareness where the Self lives, and one where life seizes the Self. I live in the middle between these two possibilities; yet if I plant my roots where the self lives, the trunk of my awareness is strong and grows leaves and branches to receive life. 

If I fail to do this, I'm fertilizer, not a tree.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

I Don't Wish To Be... My Parents

Beehive Bench # 1--checking the spacing between supers.

Sparkill, NY

March 15, 2020

Dinner with friends last night. An especially small gathering.

Sometimes life consists of quietly waiting and being present. One watches all of the impulses that arise and stays there with them, doing absolutely nothing. Except watching.

This exercise can be undertaken anywhere, at any time, when I am with other people. It reveals figures of my personal machine and how it operates.

One of my friends was speaking about how she sees that she needs to have her own being, and not be a creature of her parents impulses and desires – we’re not talking about a young person here, and it's interesting that she, like the rest of us, recognizes that we still have impulses and machinery in us that was installed by our parents and doesn't belong to us at all. Being present helps us to be more ourselves and less such impulses.

On a similar note, yesterday, I was buying lumber for the platform I intend to put beehives on this spring, and the line at Lowe's was very long and somewhat confusing, snaking in several vaguely defined directions—very much like real life. Probably because it was real life. People were using the usual sneaky subterfuges to “innocently” cut in front of others, as if this tiny slice of time mattered that much. 

I immediately saw impatience and anger arising me, an impulse to try and get in front of this or that possibly cheating person. (It may have been a little more tense than usual, because the undertone of CoVID-19 is ever present in gatherings today.) As this impatience arose, I saw how much like my father this was: such a reaction would be entirely in his character. 

I don't want to be my father, I thought to myself. 

This impression was quite clear and definite and taught me something about the nature of heredity and parenthood, and how only personal presence and intelligent choice can have an impact on the direction that takes me in.

 I consciously decided to put these strong egoistic impulses behind me and wait them out. Even, if necessary, let someone who was definitely behind me go in front of me – I didn't, but in order to go against the way I was inside, I would have done so if the possibility was truly there.

The whole time, I had to see the inpatient part of myself pumping out its material like a oil well. There was a thickness to it that had no compassion or intelligence. It's sobering to see such a thing; how often is that well pumping when I don't notice it?

Of course I'm like my father, and also like my mother. 

Yet my responsibility is to be myself, not them, and it's worthwhile to have this question in front of me as I go forward.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.