Courage

A Slight Plight In Search of Light

What was he thinking? Bite Dorothy’s beloved Toto?

With a slap in the face, Dorothy awakens the King of Beasts. She calls the him a coward. He recognizes himself, The Cowardly Lion. He believes the fear he feels makes him a fraud. He’s attacked an innocent pup (from Kansas, no less) out of a fear that feeling fear betrays his role as King. He is one confused Lion.

How many of us are betrayed by feelings and thoughts that don’t align with who we ‘believe’ we are supposed to be? The distress of dissonance reverberates often in our culture, where strict identities are common and corrosive.

“Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.”  ~Raymond Lindquist

We learn to live with imposed limits that discourage any creativity that threatens conformity. A well structured and economically potent social system demands a more or less strict order. One that comforts most of us. We know our roles, get rewards, and live what passes for uncomplicated lives. And, that order passes for ‘reality.’ 

My dear departed friend, Frank Zappa (a funny, gifted, wild and wise man), put it well when he said (he may have lifted this): “Reality is a group hunch.” 

We, like The Cowardly Lion, labor under the weight of confusion. We sense there’s much more to our lived experience than the paltry version of ‘reality’ we’ve been sold and have bought whole. Often, conditioned limitations clash with our sense of possibility and disable us to a greater or lesser extent.  

We rarely take a moment to gaze at the sky on our way to work. An eyeful of panoramic sky, when not on vacation, might distract us unduly from our serious mission.

We’ve made a compact with each other and society to conform and do our jobs. For this we get to live indoors, eat, and handle money. That’s roughly the deal.

“I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves.” ~Maria Popova

We don’t know whether we’re coming or going.

When some of us have the temerity to imagine there are other ways to contribute value in exchange for indoor living, a crust of bread and such, and a few bucks to shuffle, we are seen as weird or worse. If we get lucky, in other words, rich and famous, then we are seen as anointed. Rare beings that we do not encourage our impressionable  children to emulate, lest they miss the mark and tumble into ignominy and poverty.

The arts are good hobbies. Any recalcitrant, with strong aspirations, inevitatbly gets this advice: ”You better have something to fall back on.” I remember that throughout my childhood I was waiting for a gust of wind or other unknown wallop to knock me back on my ass. 

It takes courage to live outside established norms. I’m only a bit insane, so I do stop at red lights, look both ways before I cross the street, and I don’t eat eggplant in unfamiliar restaurants. I was a musician on the road. I’ve eaten roadside eggplant. DON’T DO IT! Food poisoning was helluva a price to pay. You’re welcome.

The desire for acceptance and approval of ‘others’ is powerful. It is scary to depart from commonplace conceptions of roles and rules. We experience ’stage fright’ on the stages of our daily lives. They are looking at us. Or are they?

With keen attention paid, we sooner or later see there are no others. There is no they. Nobody is looking. We create they. WHAT?

WE ARE ONE SINGULAR SENSATION

We must learn the distinction between an individual humans and a separate selves.

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” ~Alan Watts

The way we conceptualize and limit ourselves is subject to arbitrary conditions.  This false dichotomy puts us in a world of pain.

We live by virtue of our dynamic connection to the entire Universe. 

Try living without trees and plankton. They give us oxygen. Without oxygen we are kaput. Trees cannot serve up oxygen without soil, sun, and water. They are deep into photosynthesis, sun and water junkies that we send to rehab at our peril.

They are continuous with our lungs. We need them to breathe. For inspiration, on  physical and creative levels.

Their root systems are entangled in a fungal network. They ‘communicate.’ 

We need Oceans and tides. Oceans absorb a significant amount of carbon dioxide, influencing global temperatures and weather patterns, affecting agricultural yields. 

High tides (thank you Moon) allow larger vessels to enter and leave harbors, facilitating maritime trade and transportation. Much of what we wear, drive, and use variously in our daily lives arrives on our bonny shores on ships.

Tides have held cultural and spiritual importance for coastal communities for centuries, influencing folklore, traditions, and calendars.

We live in a connected world in a connected Universe. We are connected. Inseparable from the whole. When we learn to sense this truth, synthesize and integrate it in all we know and do, we start to live truly creative lives. We live life alive as Universal Humans.

In a culture where this sounds woo-woo, it takes enormous courage to nurture our creative connectedness to each other and the whole with which we are One.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~Anais Nin

Courage grows in an atmosphere of trust and honesty. To see clearly and question wholeheartedly sits at the heart of ACTING HUMAN. We question not out of irritation and skepticism, but rather to explore. To inquire. To learn. To substitute living inquiry for judgement and opinion. To expand our courage to create.

Professor Dubin

The routine vetting at the esteemed Newhouse School included meetings with three professors in the television and film department. They wanted to hire me, that was a foregone decision. Nevertheless, they needed to adhere to the long established rules of faculty governance. After eighteen years there, I can assure you this governance gambit is pure, unadulterated pro forma silliness, as is much of what goes on in Academia. (More to come in future dispatches.)

Among those with whom I met was a professor who specialized in audience measurement. Ratings and the like. She asked me a question which I read as fatuous. Maybe it wasn’t, I can’t remember it, who knows? In any case, I answered, “I don’t know.”

(A frequent and fruitful response that figures big in my repertoire of answers to this day. More so than ever, actually)

Fiona (that was her name and probably still is) said: “If you want to be a professor you have to know.” 

The courage to not know is central to life lived alive. We get lost to find ourselves. Knowing is a trap. I’m with Johnny Keats: “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

To quest or not to quest? That is the question. Trust in our mysterious, ever changing Universe. Not knowing is the way to some semblance of sanity, an expanded imagination, and a life lived alive. To know for sure is folly.

Trust yourself. You are one with it all. The questions are “inmotional,” they are alive, characterized by movement, change and felt sense. Answers are temporary stops along the way. (We do need rest.) When answers are examined acutely, with open hearts and minds, they reveal themselves as questions in drag.

In every moment we meet ourselves and each other anew. As if for the first time. Everyplace we meet is new, too. Nothing remains unchanged. Everything changes.

We can create a force field where connections emerge organically. This force field arises from intentional action, though NOT false nor forced. These dynamic (inmotional) bonds feel inevitable, buoyant. They radiate a deep sense of freedom and ease.

All creations start as ‘accidents.’ Unpredictable eruptions emerge from colliding stories, hidden or known.

An unexpected sensation, an impulse or intuition, invites us to nurture an urge to create. 

When we nourish creative gifts with skill and care, embrace them with courage and love, we attract energy, the energy nudges us to see in a fresh way, a sense of vitality, a transformation that gives new shape to our lives. 

As we see the moment to moment cycle of infinite birth, as we open our hearts and pay generous attention, we naturally live life alive.

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” ~Goethe

Trust in an unknown and mysterious Universe cries out for courage. Truth is alive and on the move. We as skilled self creators move in the direction of truth and trust. We have the WHOLE UNIVERSE to guide us, as we are one with it all. 

To let go. To embrace Universal wisdom opens “doors of perception.”  

We can drop our masks. 

We can see truth.

We can play in Universal spirit. We are blessed with life and the capacity to live alive. It takes an appetite for truth, courage and practice to ACT HUMAN. 

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth." ~Pema Chodron

What The Cowardly Lion learned is that courage isn't the absence of fear, it's acting despite it. 

Along the way the Lion trembled and cowered. However, he rose to the occasion when enemies threatened his crew, he protected them. He acted ‘as if’ he had courage.

The Lion started off with the belief he needed the Wizard to grant him courage. Eventually the Lion saw that courage was his all along. 

We often overlook our natural and ever-present courage. Life lived alive excites our creativity which comes with a healthy helping of courage. To remember the forgotten and unseen comprises a vital feature of ACTING HUMAN practice. 

True courage stems from caring for everyone. Courage arises from compassion for others, giving us a greater purpose than fear.

Wisdom Hits

“The whole thing about acting is to give. The actor must above everything be generous.” ~Stella Adler

“Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten.”  ~Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

“And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion.  It is wordless.  It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.  Not that we discover a new unity.  We discover an older unity.  My dear brothers, we are already one.  But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to recover is our original unity.  What we have to be is what we are.” ~Thomas Merton

"A man's desire to hear the intimate cry of another's heart never lessens. Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat."  ~Ben Hecht

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COURAGE

By Richard Dubin

Sweet troubled clouds 

Lay still between us

We’ve only to reach 

Each for who seems a distant other 

apart yet not in hearts

Ask Courage to embrace

and

swaddle false peril

and 

see tumbles and fumbles

as natural child’s play

Courage please 

kindly

Guide our precious way

kindly

Let us see you 

In a mirror reflected 

Beckon with persistence

Hold us near

Make less of fear

Lure with what awaits

On the other side of

Sweet troubled clouds

Invite storms

Hard rains of welcome tears 

Gales of luscious laughter

Let sweet troubled clouds

yield a spacious sky

Spun whipped cream rich  

Joyous lives lived alive

Courage

Courage

Love

Until Wednesday…

Lights Up!