Day: May 6, 2018

I think I first truly understood and internalized radical acceptance the morning of my open heart surgery, four years ago.

I knew it was a serious operation, I knew it would hurt afterwards. I can’t do anything about the operation, I thought, or  the pain afterwards.  I had no control over whether I would live or die.

Pain is inevitable, I thought. Suffering is my choice. It was a powerful revelation for me, and it has shaped and guided my life and choices and feelings ever since. Radical Acceptance was not my idea, it is a philosophy that has been deepening and growing in recent years, a way of look at the world that I love and embrace.

Radical acceptance grounds me every day. I cannot control what I see on the news, or what  politicians are doing to our country, but how I respond to it is up to me. I respond by seeking to go good every day, to commit small acts of kindness so faithfully and continuously that I feel peaceful and content within myself.

Radical acceptance is often misunderstood, I think.

Radical acceptance does not mean agreement or passivity or surrender.

Radical acceptance  at its simplest is the acknowledgement and acceptance of reality. The news might be awful. Dogs die before we do. All of us will get sick and die of something. Some of us will need surgery to live. A friend gets sick, I can’t cure him, I accept his illness and turn to understanding how I can help, or not help.

Publishing has changed, it seems there is no longer any place for me in my old book world. I accept this change, and move forward to find new ways to find my audience and write. I can’t do anything about the nature of publishing. Not suffering is my choice. I lost my dog, I loved m dog, I accept his death, I will get another dog.

I resign myself to bad news every day now, I resign myself to disappointment, to the existence of anger and cruelty, and to death.

Fighting reality only increases my pain. Suffering is optional. “…suffering is what happens when we refuse to accept the pain in our lives,” writes psychologist and author Van Dijk (Calming the Emotional Storm: Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Manage Your Emotions & Balance Your life.) 

In a spiritual sense, radical acceptance asks that I look at myself and others in a new and different way. I try to learn to let go of what I should be and accept the way that I am. This is a very difficult thing for me to do, I progress in small and sometimes painful steps.

In a practical sense, it is a way to understand the reality of human beings in this world – they are sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes selfless, sometimes greedy and violent. That is the reality of being human. My response is to do good, for now, that is all i can do.

Human beings have struggled over ideas about good and evil since the beginning of time, this struggle will not end in my lifetime, perhaps ever. This is where I descent into my own heart and make my stand through my life, not my arguments.

But it is a lot. I can’t be responsible for the world, only myself. I can only try to live a loving life.

First, I accept  reality, then I am free to deal with it: Okay, this is what is happening, How do I want to deal with it?

This idea helped me again after the November, 2016 elections, when the very air seemed to be filled with anger and argument.

I took a long walk in the woods that  day, and I came home and told Maria that I would not speak the next four years or longer in anger and resentment and argument. I could not change the election. I could not vanquish the anger and resentment of so many people.

But I could change me, I could descend to my heart, the center of my being and ask myself what would make me feel good and make my life meaningful. It was not, I decided, to hate and to argue.

I set out ways to do good, the Army of Good appeared mystically in my life, and we have together done good almost every day since that day in November. I can’t even calculate all the good we have done, all the small acts of great kindness.

No matter what storms are raging around me, I feel mostly good and grounded, my center is intact and  strong. I cannot control what other people do, I can only control what i do. When I stumble and fall, I do more good. I regain my footing. I come through my Emotional Storms, and I accept them as well. They are a part of me, I am no saint.

The beautiful thing about listening to my heart is that the heart is the place where I am most myself. After my surgery, I came closer than ever to my heart. It is the very core of my being, my spiritual center of my being.  Silence and solitude are the pathways to my heart, where i hear the voices that call me to life.

After the surgery, I came to love my heart and listen to it. If felt like I came to see with new eyes and ears.

There, I meet the whole world and learn what it is I need to accept and what it is I need to do to live my life.

I don’t feel the least bit radical, but I suppose acceptance really is a radical idea, given the suffering, regret, denial, anger, argument and emotional storms I see raging all around me. I have not found the secrets of life, mine or yours, but radical acceptance has been a great gift to me.

I refuse to be miserable, I reject wallowing and suffering. Unlike pain and disappointment, those things are not inevitable.

Last night, I went out to the front porch to watch the thunderstorm, and suddenly, the sky went black and I heard this roaring, howling wind – a sound I don’t remember every hearing before. Our cable went out suddenly and after a few minutes, the sky began to lighten and the rain stopped, but the wind and darkness and sound was so intense I came inside.

This was no thunderstorm.

I had the sense something bad was about to happen. And it did, but not to us.

Our farm was largely untouched, but when Maria and I drove into town Saturday morning, we were both stunned by what we saw – hundreds, if not thousands of big and beautiful old trees and smaller pine trees had been knocked down, some of them hit houses, some trailer parks were devastated, debris was everywhere – trees against houses, in the street, blown down in the woods.

There was so much damage.

Then I saw the black SUV’s and TV crews line up. Someone important had come to town, reporters and local officials and emergency crews don’t drive big armored SUV’s.

Then I saw our Governor, Governor Cuomo, standing in front of this very house surrounded by a gaggle of reporters and talking with shell-shocked home owners and speaking to the reporters. Many homes were damaged and countless trees blown down, almost everywhere we looked.

Lots of people had huge trees crash into their houses, destroying rooftops and rooms and even knocking some old homes off of their foundations. A lot of close calls.

In small towns like this, we all feel responsible for one another, and the streets were flooded with pickup and utility trucks, neighbors rushing to help with saws, volunteers from towns all around, bit men in trucks, first responders. So many stories of people rushing to help other people, chopping trees down, cutting them into logs, stacking them along the curbs. There was a lot of shock.

It wasn’t a tornado, as people first believed, it was,  said meteorologists and state officials, a Microburst. 

Microbursts, we discover are rare, and are worse than most tornadoes. A microburst is a small column of exceptionally intense and localized sinking air that results in a violent and sudden “outrush” of air on the ground. It can produce – did produce – straight-line winds of more than 100 miles per hour that are similar to tornadoes, but without the rotation.

A microburst often has winds that can knock over large and fully grown trees.

The size of a microburst is typically less than three miles across, and it can last anywhere from a few  seconds to several minutes. On the weather charts, it looks like an upside-down nuclear blast.  It did unimaginable amounts of damage here. My beautiful little down is banged up and hurting.

From what we can see, it stopped just short of our farm.

The damage we see down the road is just numbing. Yet the spirit of small towns and neighbors is remarkable. By tonight, all of the roads are clear, logs and brush cut and lined up for miles.

No one was seriously hurt, power is back on for all but a few people.

The people whose homes were crushed or  damaged are all in apartments or with relatives, insurance agents and  state trucks and power repair crews were swarming all over town, there are flashing lights everywhere. It will take a good long while to clean up and repair all those homes.

Some of the most beautiful old trees were just blown over, their huge roots sticking up in the air

We are very grateful the microburst stopped short of us – that was the rushing and roaring nose I  heard last night. I am very grateful to live in a place where strangers rush to take care of one another. The governor wasn’t here long, we probably won’t see him again, but the streets were just crammed with people doing good and helping each other out.

And every body I spoke with tonight said the same thing. We were lucky, it could have been worse. In America, it seems that many people – millions – have suffered from natural disaster – hurricanes, fires, drought, mudslides. It all seemed remote to us, but it doesn’t seem remote now.

We are lucky, and yes, it could have been a lot worse.

I am sorry for the struggles of my neighbors, but I am very proud to live here.

I love the yellow barn in Spring, yellow barns are rare around here, most barns are painted  red because it was the cheapest paint to buy two hundred years ago. We are having a wet Spring, the fresh grass is as green as I can remember it, a soft backdrop against my favorite barn. Yellow barns are rare around here.

We visited Ed and Carol Gulley yesterday, it was time to say goodbye the Bob the possum. Ed found Bob out int he barn starving and nearly frozen during the winter, he thinks Bob was eyeing one of the chickens for a meal. Ed picked Bob up, put him in a crate, kept him dry and warm and began feeding him carrots, turkey, carrots and other vegetables. He and Carol nursed Bob back to health.

Ed is an Animal Whisperer, he was able to stroke and touch Bob while getting  hissed at but never bitten. Bob has fully recovered and Ed’s son Jeremy came over with  his family (most of them on four-wheelers) to put Bob in a fish net and take him out to the woods, where he will be freed.

Over the years, Ed and Carol have rescued countless animals from hawks to barn cats to possums, wild Turkeys and various birds. Animals are at the center of their lives, as they are for so many farmers. Ed said goodbye to Bob and then he was gone.

Thanks to the Amazon Mansion Wish List And The Army Of Good, the Mansion residents are getting to see their favorite movies and also planning to plant a spectacular flower and vegetable garden. We’re going from Guys N’Dolls to Daffodils, Crocuses and Hoftras, Tulips, and Bleeding Hearts ,along with a half dozen other kinds of flowers.

This will be the most spectacular garden in the history of the Mansion, at least a dozen Mansion residents have eagerly signed up for this work, outdoors and physical and creative. The flowers will grace the huge garden being dug behind the Mansion, and also go to the residents’ rooms and dining room tables.

There are 17 new items on the Mansion list, ranging from $4.95 to $35 dollars. Thanks for buying the lawn chairs, they have arrived but aren not yet unpacked.

I will be there to photograph the garden as it is planted and grows. Thanks so much for supporting this wish list, it is making a significant difference in the lives of the residents. You can support the Mansion Wish List here.

If you wish to support my work at the Mansion, you can send a contribution to The Gus Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12186 or via Paypal, [email protected]

–Bumper Stickers

My “Army Of Good” bumper sticker project is well underway, I expect to have proofs and  estimates by the middle of the week. I will almost surely need new envelopes and the stickers are reasonable but not cheap, of course. This is America, nothing is really cheap.

I will, as I suspected, have to charge for the printing and the envelopes, I can’t give them away for free as I had hoped, and I won’t use donations for that purpose. But it will be inexpensive. Many people have written to me wanting one, so I think this is a good project to pursue. And I love to think of the bumper stickers rising around all across America. Wow. The Army Of Good goes viral in its own way.