about continuing to believe in one person's power

What if everyone who wanted to change the world got discouraged and gave up? What if the forces of greed and disdain and cynicism held complete sway? What would happen if no one wanted to improve themselves, to become a better person, to be more loving and kind? Imagine a world without compassion, without service or generosity, without caring? What if no one gave and no one received? What kind of life would we live if we were really all in it for ourselves and no one else? What if there was no hope? Would we be happy? Would there be unadulterated joy? Would we be satisfied, content, at peace, serene, "in the flow" or "at one with the universe?" Would the concepts of nirvana and heaven exist?

Or would we live a hell on earth and pray only for release from tortured existence?

I can't give up my ideals or my striving or my efforts to be of service and improve the world for me and for others. I may be the only person swimming against this tide, but it is my only choice. And I am not alone. Others understand the power of one person. It's inner work that will make the difference, that will change the external.

about making change

Changing oneself is an incredible challenge. And that may be the issue. It seems like such an incredible challenge, like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. So break it down. Make it smaller. Take one step at a time. Begin at the beginning, not even having the end in mind. Who knows what the end is anyway? We can have a sense, a vision, a general direction of where we want to end up. But our journey will shape the ending. An amorphous goal becomes solid, real, tangible by the end. The information I gather along my journey helps me clarify and zero in on the goal. And the journey itself helps me incorporate information, assess it, pay attention to my visceral reactions and responses to situations and opportunities (very different things, reactions and responses), heed my emotional signals, and shift course ever so slightly to get to the end that is my "right fit.

"God Grant me the Serenity to accept the ones I cannot change, Courage to change the one I can, and the Wisdom to know that one is me."

about changing the world

Of late, many e-mails and magazine articles that cross my transom emphasize my role in transforming first my own world and then the rest of it. The key is self-love and spreading love. And the reward is happiness, inner peace and harmony - and world peace.

There are myriad suggestions for how to demonstrate self-love and how to manifest happiness, many of which I've either incorporated into my daily routine and inner being or tried and found wanting for my own path and process. They include thinking positive thoughts of myself and others, seeking opportunity in what may seem like a disaster, learning one new thing every day, being open to new experience, asking questions rather than making assumptions, assuming the best, starting my day over, praying often and being constantly mindful of God, approaching life with the eyes and heart of a child, forgiving myself and forgiving others, letting go and letting God, writing, talking to a good friend, listening, meditating, chanting, going on retreats, sitting quietly, being in nature, gardening, playing with children, petting a cat, doing art work, giving of my time to help others, putting people first, looking inward to see what I am contributing to a situation rather than blaming someone else, not "shoulding" on myself, accepting where I am, turning my will and life over to the care of my Higher Power, going to church, walking on the beach, getting enough sleep, eating healthy food, exercising, aligning my will with God's will. I know I've done other things, but the list already is pretty exhausting.

And it all works! I am happier, more content and more at peace with myself than ever before. Or maybe it's a different way, because I've often been at peace and happy. I have felt the "flow" of balance and harmony when I'm engaged in love and service. It has a different quality today, deeper and solid. I know it will never go away unless I try really hard - and I'd probably have to start drinking again. That I hope never to do again, a day at a time.

It's like a sand bar, this solid core of peace within me. Sometimes it's low tide and the sand bar is very visible. My outward and inner peace are aligned, all is harmonious, and I'm feeling whole and complete in all aspects of my life. At other times, it's high tide and there are rougher waves passing over and completely covering that core. It's still there, but the externals are rougher, less harmonious, more painful, darker. It's easy to imagine that the core is gone, too, because it's not visible. Yet if I put my feet down, even if I have to completely immerse myself underwater to reach far enough down, I will touch that sand bar, that core of certainty and confidence in my highest good and faith in god. I really hate going under water so far because I'm afraid I'll drown, that the undertow will carry me away and kill me. So far, I've come up and out intact. And more and more, I don't need to venture below the surface to make sure that sand bar is there. I just trust that it is. I have faith that I'm OK no matter what.

Many times over the past couple of years my faith has been sorely tested, and I have wondered if all the "think positive" stuff is so much mumbo-jumbo designed to occupy we powerless wimps in the face of cruel raw power. The power of death, for example. How on earth or heaven can one remain centered when a six year old boy is taken from us? I haven't been able to very well. I talked to him at the cemetary on the 18 month anniversary of his death, and realized that he very much would want me to embrace life and forgive God and even the cancer. No, I don't know if he'd want me to forgive the cancer. I don't think he could have. But he would have wanted me to live fully and with the same kind of joy he exhibited. And Julia deserves my love and joy and happiness and inner strength.

Of course, one of the cruelest passages of my recent life was being fired from City Harvest. I would like to move on from it and believe I have made great strides in the past eight months. It shocked me so deeply because I worked hard to create a work environment based on love and service. I thought it was such an environment. So to be fired in such an unloving way with absolutely no appreciation for my years of service was and continues to be stunningly incongruent and unreal. I'm forced to accept that there was a point at which the environment stopped being loving and compassionate, well before I was fired. So many possible points - when I stopped going to as many meetings, after my friends left town, when I changed communities and became so isolated that I depended more heavily on work for human interaction to a possibly unhealthy extent, after 9/11 and my trauma and egocentric attitude, when I succumbed to paranoia and stopped trusting Liza, when I laid off 20% of the staff in a pretty inhumane way, when I allowed Naomi to be caretaker and guardian, when I started thinking I could write a book about my approach to management, when I identified myself with City Harvest exclusively. I don't know exactly when, or maybe it was all of the above, and more. The important thing is that I do realize that somehow I stopped living the life of love and service and instead began living a life of ego and dissatisfaction.

It got even worse for me when I took the job with NYRP. That was so much about ego and a big "so there!" to the City Harvest Board. And I was incredibly envious and jealous and feeling "less than" and "not good enough" and fat and stupid and just not enough.

That's when I began wondering if it was indeed possible to make any impact on the world at large. Here I've been sober and working on myself for almost a quarter century, and I am still at the mercy of my ego. I still want what I don't have. I want to have more, I want to be more, I want to do more, I want everything more, more, more. Even when I was at my most centered, my impact on others was short-lived. Their impact on me was much more powerful. I succumbed to the power dynamics of stardom and money almost immediately. It's taken me many months to dismantle the illusions and see what happened to me.

How then am I to have any effect on the world? How are any of us who walk the path of ego deflation toward love and service to do anything but work on ourselves? Leading by example is a great concept, yet so limited in effect.

All the articles, books, e-mails, TV and radio shows, albums, sermons and religious treatises are being read by millions of people. Obviously, reading them is not enough. People have to actually put the suggestions into practice. They have to practice ego-deflation in order to become faith-full, right-sized, able to give and receive love and service. That's hard work, a lifetime's work. I don't know anyone who does it perfectly. And I don't know if all of this individual work will really shift the world. Or if it will, I just don't know when the tipping point will be.

So many of us do try our best, and sometimes I catch a glimpse of that perfect serenity and feel it flow through me. Then I go to the CVS and there are no parking spots and I have to practice faith and letting go and asking "how important is it" as thoughts like "what are all these people doing here?" fly through my mind. Or I arrive at work with my heart open only to hear the boss lace into me for being wasteful and not thinking. And she thinks she's perfectly OK. To her and to so many other rich and/or famous people, it's OK to be selfish and cruel to the "little people." Yet they study Kabbala or Buddhism or yoga or any of the other traditions that seemingly emphasize selflessness and self-forgetting. always read that as meaning "egoless" but I must be wrong. I also thought that love for others meant kindness and compassion. I must be wrong.

Maybe I'm just underestimating how very hard it is to be on a path toward ego-lessness, love, compassion and service. I find it difficult, and I've been on the path for 25 years. I've had some pretty major ego-deflating experiences - blessings in very good disguises. If it's hard for me, it's hard for other people. If I succumb to the blandishments of material success, how much harder it is for someone to resist them when they have so much material success already? I think I see now why so many prophets and saints and gurus and boddhisattvas have gone into the woods or the desert or caves, and adopted poverty. It's only when the material is irrelevant that the spiritual can become all.

There isn't any agreement that it's better to embrace love and service. Religions seem to encourage this, yet there is so much infighting and power politics within every church and religious institution that it's clear the words are having little impact on the ego and the behavior. The rich and powerful agree that they are special, better than most of the rest of the world. They even have different AA meetings, a pretty blatant manifestation of ego and fear in a program specifically designed for ego deflation. Love and service require some sacrifice. How willing are people to make sacrifices?

When it comes down to it, I need to focus on myself and being a person I want to live with. For me, it does mean love, service, compassion, kindness, an open heart, generosity, and self-love. I wish it were contagious, I wish what I do would help change the world for the better. I am still too much of a cynic to think that will happen. Who knows, though? The thing is for me to focus on what I can do, which is work on myself. If everyone in the world started seriously working on themselves and agreed that love and service were the goals, we'd have no wars if only because no one would have any time to fight them.

about grief

I got three magnetic picture frames for Christmas so I put a picture of Simon and Beatrice in one, a picture of me holding David when he was less than a year old in another, and a picture of David on his last Memorial Day at Ron, Laura and Ana's in the backyard. He was holding a Spiderman hover balloon, his favorite baseball cap, striped red shirt, and looking down with a sweet smile on his face. I put it on the refrigerator near the picture of him looking right at me while Rick holds him, and near the picture of Julia in her beautiful flowery dress and golden curls, looking so gorgeous and loving.

And it struck me yet again that David's not coming back. He will never see his sweet sister grow older. And as Alana says, I will never have any new memories of David. He's truly gone. The sobs come then. I've been waiting for them this Christmas. He loved Christmas. He loved presents and decorations and candy canes and bows and baking cookies and seeing all the Christmas lights. When I'm with Julia, sometimes I think of how like him she is and how I behave with her like I did with him, pointing out the houses with the lights and buying fun decorations for her. Is it fair that she reminds me of him? She's her own self. But sometimes she sounds just like him - when she growls especially.

I suppose Julia will always remind us of David, because she is his sister. Once she's past six, though, the memories will be in our minds only for she will be older than he ever had a chance to be. Alana's reminder that he had two years after diagnosis is what it is. I continue to wish he'd been cured. It's hard to be grateful for two years when I wish he had eighty-two more years at least. He should be here now. It's so incredibly sad.

So I think about grief. I've learned that grief is indescribable. It just is. There is no rhyme or reason or explanation or control for grief. It has its own path and timetable. It lives deep within until it creeps into consciousness and overtakes my heart to make tears. These tears are like steam escaping from a pressure cooker - they have to come out or I will explode. But there's no relief as I have known tears to give. It's just grief in another form. Sometimes it lurks as depression and no motivation. Or it's irritability and dropping things. Other times I withdraw from people and can barely talk to anyone. All I want to do is be with Julia. Or Ana, if she'd let me. I just want to be with the living, the loving people I already know and love.

One thing I'm learning about the depth of my grief: I have enough of it for a lifetime. I can't add much more. I have spent the past two years grieving constantly. On January 14, it will be two years since those shits at City Harvest stabbed me in the heart and betrayed me, cutting me off from my passion and lifework. I am still angry, yet somehow I'm too tired to be very angry anymore. The grief is exhausting. And then David got leukemia. And then David died. And then I got fired again. And David was still dead. And I still can't emerge from being frozen. How can I open my heart to anyone else when it's irreparably broken already? I am so damn sad every day. I don't cry every day anymore, but most days I have tears come to my eyes. And every day I look at David's picture and wonder why he is gone and I am still here. Why? Why? The question that has absolutely no answer. Never will have.

I get a little sick of all this grief. Is it possible to emerge from it? Or rather to live with it, meaning to live and go on, with it? I don't know how to do it.

That's the other thing I've learned about grief: it has its own timetable, its own rhythm and its own way of directing me. This has been the biggest lesson in letting go ever possible. How do I know what each day will bring? I don't.

I want to be grateful for every day I am alive, in David's honor. I'm not yet there. I can't imagine living without Julia, and I can't imagine Julia and Ana having to lose me. I know I am a very important person to both of them, a very important person. If I am having such a hard time with loss, they are having even harder times.

Julia was very sad tonight. I think she is sad that Mommy had a dream about David. I think she wishes she had a dream about him. She misses him a lot. I also think she hates hearing about Grandma and Grandpa moving. More loss for that little girl. And more loss for Ana. She misses Ana, too. I just want to spare them these feelings.

I remember being so carefree in my loving, so open and happy with people after I got sober. 1982. And then AIDS hit, and my friends died. One by one, my circle of friends got smaller. Bill Pflugradt died. Jose died. Steven Pender. The twins. Dennis. I pulled back. Stopped being able to be friends with gay men, because they would die. Then it got easier again, but when my friends moved out of NYC - Cynthia and Sydney, Barbara, Susan, Anna, Sue, Julie - I lost my capacity to love again. 9/11 really knocked it out for me, as did the whole A2H experience.

I am not who I thought I was, I am not as strong as I thought I was. I have not the resilience I thought I had. Nor yet the resilience others think I have.

So much is written to help people get stronger, to move past their insecurities and frailties, to seize the day and be their best selves, to follow their dreams and take positive action. I've read so much of it, and I've given much advice like it. I still do. Maybe it's necessary because otherwise it's hard to put one foot in front of the other and keep going every day. What's the point? Make a point, give life meaning by taking those steps, doing those things, changing those thoughts, trying those new things on, chasing and catching that dream. If life weren't so hard, we wouldn't need so much encouragement to live it fully. Or is it that it's hard to be conscious and life gets less hard when we are conscious? Blind I cannot feel, heart open I see clearly. Being at ease.

It's exhausting to always try my hardest. That's not being at ease. Being at ease, my being is at ease. And that means being as I am in each moment. If I am grieving and withdrawn, so be it. No urging or shoulds will change my inner being. My inner being will be harmed if I force my outside into a form of "should" or "ought to" or "make an effort."

So I want to say to people, let yourselves be! You are perfect as you are right now. Pay attention to how you feel, to what you think, to your random thoughts and stray wishes, to what you want, to your deepest truth. And speak it out loud, or write it to yourself. Witness your inner being. Allow it air to breathe, light to reveal, voice to be heard. Sad, glad, mad - it's all good for it's all you. No pretzels allowed. Just be.