I have a story to tell, one more, before the big one. The one that has me shaking in my space boots, whatever it is because I do things in chunks, I run relay with myself, but I used to run cross country. Maybe I can remember how again.
I listen to Fordham University's public radio in the morning and on the way home. They play great stuff, I give them money. I am so old they are my only new source of music, except for Cletus and thank God she's over Britney. Today, in honor of Samhain (OK, they said Halloween but I know what I know) they were unmasking instead of masking. They were playing 'Guilty Pleasures', music you only play in the privacy of your own home or car and never admit to listening. So I will remove another mask as well.
Just before I got off my exit, the morning DJ played a Kenny Loggins piece from the early nineties. A time when Mr. Loggins was going through some significant personal change. This song is a trigger for me, it was meant to be a trigger, and all these years later immediately removes six layers of psychic skin. The song is called Conviction of the Heart and when I hear it I am rendered vulnerable and naked. I am laid bare. I am also infused with a sense of power and conviction, which was the point of the trigger.
When I was nineteen years old, I attended a workshop called The Basic. The Basic was the preface to The Advanced which came before LP - Leadership Program. It's transformational education at it's best, invented in a garage that produced Lifespring and EST and a whole host of others but in the seventies and early eighties it was rampant. It was also a lot like a pyramid scheme in that enrollment, revenues, what have you, were entirely generated by the graduate base. It made for some pretty intense conversations. In the early eighties it was so intense I ran away after The Basic and didn't come back for eleven years.
When I was thirty years old and leaving my first husband and my two children I dialed a NYC number that I'd had stashed away for all those years and a woman named Robin Lynn answered the phone. And she did enroll me in the second to next Advanced course because I was still too reasonable to change my work schedule and get in the next one and she was smart enough to hear the fear. I went there because my marriage was over and I heard that in the Advanced course they'd strip you bare and you'd have to look at exactly who you were and face it. That's all I knew but I was in enough pain that I was willing to walk through any kind of fire at all just to find some solid ground on which to rest my spinning head.
Well. Let me tell you, I willingly participated in having ALL of my skin removed. And some flesh too. I know I've written about this in the past but it does bear repeating - I am an ice queen. I am a bitch. I am a shut down barbie doll. I drive my body as hard as I drive my car (it was an '83 RX-7 at the time). I report things like my rape like I'm reading the weather. I use sex for power and avoid intimacy. My feelings are so shut down I would sell my own mother.
In an exercise called Lifeboat, I saved a stick for myself. I know, makes no sense but I suspect at a gut level you know exactly what I'm talking about. I saved a stick for myself, which was a first, and I didn't save one for my buddy, which was not a first. I stayed up all night crying and the next day I had an opportunity, in the nakedness of my own bare flesh, to reinvent myself.
People don't change but people can change how they choose and from where they choose and People, Transformation will NOT tolerate mediocrity.
I staffed five Basics, five Advanced courses, and seniored three leadership programs to completion. I bailed on the fourth half way through. I think it was the right thing to do but I'll never really know. I have served on at least a dozen service teams (cook, clean and look after 30 strangers in the middle of nowhere with limited supplies and make sure they have the best weekend of their lives - I specialize in cooking wholesome food for large groups of emotionally raw people with little or no notice but am also a knock out whiz on Music, which is an integral and constant part of any training).
And the song Conviction of the Heart played a pivotal part in all of this.
We are standing, a group of people, who would never have spent ninety days together, much less five minutes under any other circumstances, in the archway by the fountain in Central Park. It is 5:45 AM on a weekday morning. I am wearing my underware on my head (OK, listen, we were ALL wearing my underwear on my head - I believe in equal opportunity weirdness and it was CLEAN). It's what I do, the outrageous and unexpected. It gets your attention whether you want it to or not. I am holding Nina's hand and there are fifteen or so other people and we have made a circle. The cheap boom box is in the center and we are cold and damp. We are unprepared, Nina and I, as usual. We have spent the last ninety days, as a group and by ourselves, accomplishing the impossible. Each of us has written and completed a Letter of Accomplishment touching seven major areas of our lives. Each of us has acted outside ourselves and part of a larger and selfless whole to effect mass change in our environments (our legacy project included collecting funds for a playground in the Bronx and a steady supply of free food to two homeless shelters as well as a legacy of 'drive by food and coatings' that is still practiced in NYC today).
Our legacy has included a serious amount of personal pain and struggle and the loss of 40% of our starting team.
I know what to say. I always know what to say whether I or Nina like it or are comfortable with it or not.
I talk about the last ninety days. I talk about our differences and what we have accomplished and not accomplished individually and as a group. I talk mostly about the members who are not standing here with us, who did not make the ninety days, who bailed or were tossed. I talk about taking what we've learned into the world and applying these concepts of leadership and risk to our lives outside the structure of daily coaching calls and weekend meetings and insane 6 AM meetings in Central Park.
And then I bend down and reach forward and pull the trigger, one of many, resuscitated by me from the past and played by many. I hit play and the first notes of Conviction of the Heart echo off the walls of the archway, building into the crescendo of passion, faith and desire for connection and truth and the need to matter in the world that Mr. Loggins clung to, like many of us, in the darkest hour of dark. And this public urinal that has been the witness to a multitude of murders, rapes, and other assorted assaults too numerous to catalog is transformed into a momentary epiphany about the human condition and our not so singular place in it.
We are team. This is our torch run. We, the graduating leadership program will light and carry an olympic torch around the fountain and hand it off to the LP just behind us. This is a Thursday, we will receive our third weekend instructions to begin on Friday and we will complete on Sunday.
I led three groups of people plus myself through this process. I was laid bare each and every time. My life altered considerably with every passing of the torch. I can still smell and taste the dampness of that tunnel and the smoke from the fire. I have run that circle four times.
I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Jeffrey is going to die in six to twelve months (horribly, I suspect). There is a community of bloggers that come off and on this site and others that have almost nothing in common and yet connect and find the truth of their own humanity. I would not trade if for anything.
Someday is not a day of the week. And Transformation does NOT tolerate mediocrity.
I am going to write a book starting tomorrow. It might suck dead monkey pud and it might be the greatest thing since wet dreams and sliced bread or it might fall somewhere in between. But I've wanted to do it almost my entire life and wanting, well, wanting, is just not good enough.
And so ends the month of NaBloWriMo and begins NaNoWriMo. I will see you on the other side and post whatever I post (I'll be interested in the results of that!)
I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo. Really. I am. If you go over to Sudie's place you can find out about NaBloWriMo, which, by the way, I cannot say with a straight face. NaBloWriMo sounds damn reasonable too (unless you have a look in my head and then it's just plain dirty). In any event, I told two people about this today. Telling people is like when you quit smoking. The more people you tell the more pressure. This can be good or bad. In my case it's motivation. It makes it more real for me.
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