Woman

I love, love, love this photo of me and my brother. It makes me laugh every time I look at it. It now hangs in a corner of our living room that we designated for our favorite kid photos, so I get to laugh a lot! I thank God every day that I have a sense of humor. Well, God and also my dad who passed along the Pottorf sense of humor to me. If I didn’t have one, the complete disgruntledness with life that I have perfectly expressed in this photo might be my predominant experience. But it isn’t. Right below that photo is one that expresses perfectly what I really think about life. Here it is:

This photo makes me laugh out loud too. That’s the patriarch of the Pottorf sense of humor, my grandfather, on the right. While he looks stern in the picture (and often was), I like to think that he is secretly approving of my laughter. That’s my grandmother in the middle. She was always my ally, and you can tell here. The juxtaposition of these two photos completely cracks me up. Anybody who knows me well knows these two sides of me. They also know that I routinely crack myself up. If you catch me laughing for seemingly no particular reason, you can be sure that something like the scene portrayed in these two photos is going down in my head. My sense of humor is just laughing at the false seriousness of it all (and sometimes, yes, quite inappropriately).

That gives you a little background as to why I laughed out loud and felt like I won the jackpot when Vermont issued me my new license plates. Yes, it’s official. I’m a Vermonter! Not. I’ll never be a Vermonter, these people will never let me be. That’s o.k., because truth be told I’ll always be a Texan. Bless their hearts. If you don’t know this yet, that’s Southern code for something like “Don’t mess with Texas.” Which is to say I think Vermonters will find they’ve met their match. At least one did! Oh, but before I go further into this, here is my new license plate:

Ha! “Hmph” is one of my favorite responses to life. That’s the side of me in that first photo. So you can imagine that I laughed very out loud when the nice DMV lady pulled out my new plates. For the first time in my life, I won’t have any trouble remembering my license plate number! The other thing that has made both Shannon and I laugh out loud recently is this realization that while I will never be a Vermonter, I have officially achieved Vermonter-in-Training status. I am a V.I.T.! Trust me, that’s way better than being a masshole. Mind you, for reasons mentioned above, I will never graduate from this status, but still. How did I achieve this momentous feat you ask?

Let me start by saying that when Shannon and I started dating I was civilized. Yes, I’m going to completely blame this all on her. For example, I have always been very shy about my body. I would never change in a car for instance, nor go to the bathroom in the woods. These days we often find ourselves in a situation where we are going for a hike and then to do something else afterward which requires a modicum of civilization (hygiene). A few weeks ago we got back to the car and right there in the parking lot I stripped down and changed in front of God and everyone. Shannon just looked at me like “Who are you????” Then last week when we were on our way to Lake Placid, we stopped to take a hike in the Adirondacks. The hike was next to a stream with a few good swimming holes. Shannon was scoping out which one she was going to dip into on the way down. When we got to it, she’s like “you coming?” Yes, yes, I am. We stripped down, waded in, and dunked. Stark naked. Mountain streams are always freezing in case you were wondering. Yes, there were other hikers on this trail and somebody could have come along at any time. Oh well. Shannon just laughed out loud and noted that she could not believe how different I am from 12 years ago. That’s when she gave me my official V.I.T. designation. I then laughed when I noted that that’s what I could tell people about my goatee- it’s part of my V.I.T. initiation! Not really, but it’s funny anyway.

So quick goatee update. It is still growing strong! I have to say that my discomfort level is too. I’ve been out in public more with it as well, and I am noticing my reaction is to try to shrink myself down and hide it (and myself). That’s what I’ve most always done in life. If I had a super power it would be invisibility. I’m an expert at rendering myself invisible. Case in point. When I was in elementary school the most popular kid in school always had a massive slumber party for her birthday. I couldn’t hang with the all night revelry (such things are absolutely exhausting for an introvert), so I was usually the first person to crash in my sleeping bag. Nobody would notice. They didn’t notice so much that often as the other girls were still running around, they would step right on me… without even noticing. Rather than making myself known, I just kept hiding in my sleeping bag as if nothing had happened… even though it hurt.

Of course life is full of every which kind of experience, so here is a different one. I was also a complete tomboy growing up. I promised in my last post that I would talk about why I align with being a woman at this moment in human history, so let’s go there. In fact, let’s talk sports. Sports is as good a vehicle as any to have this discussion. I was that girl. The only one who the boys on the block would allow to play no matter what they were playing- kickball, baseball, street hockey, basketball, tackle football. When I was in third grade, one day I found myself playing flag football with the guys during recess. We were in the huddle and the quarterback tells me to go long. My best guess is that boy was Brett. Here is a photo of him from our senior year just to give you a visual:

Brett tells me to just run like the dickens. He says nobody will follow me and that he is going to throw it to me for the touchdown. So when the ball was hiked, I did. I ran like the dickens. Brett was right. Nobody paid any attention to me. I felt a little silly running like mad away from everyone, but then true to his word, Brett threw the ball. To me. It was a Hail Mary. It was a perfect throw and I made a perfect catch before breezing into the end zone to dance the funky chicken. Sometimes invisibility is a powerful thing. Sometimes not. Saturday night- stepped on. Monday at recess- end zone hero. Go figure. Here’s another go figure. Brett and I both went on to become cheerleaders together our senior year of high school. I know you won’t get this unless you are a Southerner, but being a cheerleader was actually a macho, popular thing for guys to be back then. At my high school our squad was always half male, half female. What’s more shocking isn’t that Brett was a cheerleader, but that I was!

To recap, I was ever the athlete. Hockey was my first love, but I wasn’t allowed to play growing up because I was a girl. I didn’t like figure skating (my mom’s sport), so she made it her mission to find a suitable sport for me. Gymnastics ended up winning and I spent my childhood as a competitive gymnast (ages 5-16). When my gymnastics career was brought to an end by a knee injury, I took up tennis and played varsity at my high school and then JV my first year in college. But hockey was still my first love, so I finagled my way onto the Princeton women’s varsity team my freshman year, proceeded to become a starting goalie by my sophomore year, won an Ivy League Championship by my senior year, and was invited to national team tryouts the following year. Then there is the coaching. I started coaching gymnastics after my knee injury at age 15 and coached for the next 4 years. I was good at it. Similarly, when I retired from my competitive hockey career to focus on my architecture career, I took up coaching hockey and did so for the next 15 years. I was one of the earliest women to receive a master level coaching certification from USA Hockey. This is all just background information to say that when it comes to sports, I have some experience.

Rewinding back to my senior year of high school, my boyfriend was the class genius. Literally, he is a genius. His name is John. Photo timeout. This is John:

See what I mean? He’s a little nerdy, right? But a cutie, for sure. You might need a little more of a breather before I keep going (that was your warning), so here is another photo for you:

These are all from my high school yearbook incidentally. The caption for this one read “Shelly and John get dressed up to go to the library on their first date.” Hysterical! Now, yes, I was a complete nerd too, but also simultaneously a jock. John and I spent most of our time together deep in conversation. For the most part I can’t remember what we talked about (God only knows). But I do remember this one conversation. It was about sports. And it got heated, just a little. John was not an athlete. His perspective on sports was that by stressing competition and winning, it was essentially training us all to be war mongers. Can you say triggered? I was.

I utterly refuted his position. I’ll come back to that. But first I want to tell you that when I was reading about highly evolved beings in Conversations With God a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of this conversation with John. I was reminded because, in essence, God says the same thing in CWG. Highly evolved beings, he says, don’t participate in sports or competition, and for all of the reasons that John had pointed out. I am hereby going to say that they make a very good point. Let’s be honest, if it wasn’t a very good point it would not have triggered me all those years ago. Yet I am going to continue to respectfully say that there is another way to look at it. If you are a sports lover, don’t panic. But do get cozy, because we are going to have to cross some terrain to get there.

In fact in order for me to make my case, I am going to have to talk about God, specifically what I mean when I use that name. I am not- I repeat NOT- talking about a white bearded old white guy. I am going to have to back way up to throw this Hail Mary though. So hang on to your hats and start running like the dickens. Did you know that bacteria lives in my gut? Your’s too. We call this our gut flora. These microbiota are living beings in and of their own right. I am, quite literally, the environment that supports these life forms. You may be thinking “yuck.” We don’t tend to think very fondly of bacteria, after all. We might in fact be inclined to want to rid ourselves of such bacteria. We might want to cleanse our gut until it’s squeaky clean. You want to know what would happen then? We would die. That’s because our gut microbiota – the living beings that live in our gut- actually do all of our digestion for us. I don’t digest my food. They do. They are metabolizing on my behalf, and by them doing so they also get to live.

What on earth does this have to do with God? Hang on. One more step. I have spoken quite a lot lately about how in my worldview everything is sentient. This is true across all scales. My gut microbiota are sentient as distinct, if interdependent, beings. I am sentient as a distinct and interdependent being. You know what else is sentient? The environment that plays host to me. And just like my gut microbiota metabolize for me, I am also metabolizing for my environment. I’m going to leap out across a few scales to talk about my host environment as a whole- planet earth. Planet earth, in my worldview (and this is scientifically supported) is sentient. We have even given this sentient being a name.

Her name is Gaia. She is as conscious as I am, even though from our current world paradigm I may have a hard time relating to her as such. As you have seen from previous posts, I am working to build my communication skills on this front. But let’s not stop there. Gaia also exists within an environment. Her environment is the universe. The universe, too, has an environment. At each and every scale, life is conscious, distinct, identifiable, and… interdependent. Life itself is a living being. At the grandest scale possible, when talking about all that exists, I give that living being a name. Her name is God. So now you know who I am talking about when I use that name. I am talking about the All That Is. If you want to take one step further here, realize that just as my gut microbiota are a fully integrated part of me, so it is between me and God.

Now we are ready to go. I want to focus now on two characteristics that we have ascribed to God. God is all-powerful on the one hand and all-loving on the other. In our current collective worldview, we relate the all-powerful side to the masculine, and the all-loving side to the feminine. Now let me just say right here that there are biological (natural) reasons to tend toward these associations. Yet let me also say right here that we do our very best to fit males and females into the appropriate boxes. That is to say that how we show up is both a function of nature and of nurture. It’s not just one or the other. I would say that we need to stop forcing either characteristic onto a male or a female independent of the other. I would instead argue that we need to cultivate both within each and every human at the same time, and regardless of gender. I would say that both characteristics are in fact invariably present in each and every human, regardless of gender.

I would finally argue that our survival as a species is dependent upon our ability to balance these two characteristics of God within each and every human, which will then balance them within our species as a whole. The reason I say this is because we have been way, way, way out of balance for way, way too long. This is to say that we have been fixated on developing the all-powerful side, and intent on suppressing the all-loving side which we consider vulnerable. This is manifest in every attempt that we make to control things. Most fundamentally, we have sought to control nature and each other. This is what we envision power is, and we call the society that has resulted “patriarchal.” Well, guess what folks. God is not a male. God is neither masculine or feminine, but the perfect balance of these two natures.

Now to bring it down to earth via something as American as apple pie- sports. John was right. The way we have been doing sports has also been to emphasize, train, and develop the masculine side of the equation. Competing and winning are about power. And a focus on power in this way is in full alignment with a war mongering mentality. We have applied this equation to males and females alike, so it isn’t even a gender issue. It is no accident that females who participate in sports are much more likely to be successful in the world according to males. Of course they are! They have been trained to compete. They have developed the muscles, so to speak, of their own all-powerful natures. Now please hear me when I say that the rise of women’s sports has been extremely useful and necessary in the process of our evolution, because we can’t even begin to elevate this conversation to the next level until we have women in the room. We just can’t. But it is now time to step it up a notch.

So let me start that process by sharing what I said to John all those years ago. I objected vehemently, because frankly, that wasn’t my primary experience of sports. If it had been all about competing and winning, I would have never survived as a gymnast because frankly I stunk at that part of it. I knew, based on my experience, that there was something inherently missing in this masculine framing of sports. What my experience told me was that the value of my participation in sports wasn’t so much about conquering the world as it was about conquering me. The way I expressed that to John was to say that sports challenged me to overcome my own boundaries. It wasn’t about me besting somebody else, it was about me becoming my best self. I have since come to understand a great deal more about what I intuitively understood then. I was right too. Transcending boundaries is where it is at. That is what we need to be focusing on. Sports, like any other human endeavor, is a vehicle to work on those muscles. At least it is when we use it for its highest purpose.

Want proof? Ask any athlete (or musician, or artist, or mathematician, etc.) when they are at their best and they will describe being in “the zone.” What is being in the zone? It is having transcended our self-defining and self-limiting boundaries to enter into a state of, you guessed it, Interbeing. Being in the zone is becoming one with our environment. In the case of sports, that environment is a game played on a field of some sort. My best moments in sports were not the moments in which I won. My best moments in sports were when I was playing in the zone. The outcome of that in some cases was winning and in some cases not. Yet it didn’t matter either way because the experience of the zone was so much more than the experience of either winning or losing. In fact, there is no winning or losing in the zone. Win against what? Lose to who? There is no winning or losing when there is only one thing present.

It’s time to talk about our all-loving nature. What is love? Connection. That is what it is. To love is to be one with. Yes, I just did. I just made the case for the true feminization of sports. I also just explained to you why I align with being a woman at this point in human history. Admittedly, this work is easier for women than it is for men both because of our naturing and because of our nurturing. Yet we all must engage in it, regardless of gender. That is the only way we are going to stop ourselves from burning down the house, and you all know what I am talking about.

If you are an athlete, I dare you to give up on winning and instead focus on connecting, on being in the zone as much as you can possibly muster. See what happens. If you are a coach, I implore you to change your definition of success from winning to how much time your athletes spend in the zone. See what happens. If you are the parent of an athlete, well, I have way too much to say to you so I am just going to say leave it to the athletes and their coaches for now! Settle down!!

Here’s the thing, everyone. Life is just a game. And this is what the game is all about. It’s about forgetting that we are One so that we may rediscover our own all-powerful natures. Then it is about remembering that we were One all along via our all-loving nature. But you want to know a secret? True power is found not in flexing the muscles of our separate selves. True power is found in Oneness. This is to say that it is found in love, in connection, in being in the zone. The irony of all ironies is that when we play out our all-loving nature to its full extent to enter into Oneness, what we discover there is that we were all-powerful all along. We will never fully achieve our all-powerful nature by focusing solely on being powerful. We will only get there from the other side.

You are probably exhausted, so feel free to stop here. If you can push yourself one step further, this will be a bonus insight. One of my favorite books is The Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman. I relate to it, of course, because he is a gymnast. If you have never read it, I won’t spoil it for you. I’ll just say it is based on Dan’s own life and in particular his training by an enlightened master, Socrates. At one point during Dan’s college gymnastics career, Socrates comes to watch him during practice. Dan puts chalk on his hands and then mounts the rings to execute an absolutely perfect ring routine. He was in the zone. If it had been a competition and there had been judges present, he would have scored a perfect 10 and won.

He was quite proud of himself as he walked over to Socrates afterward. But Socrates was shaking his head in disapproval. Dan couldn’t believe it. What???!!!! That was perfect! But Socrates just told Dan that he was completely sloppy when applying the chalk to his hands. Here’s the thing. Learning to be in the zone only becomes truly useful when we learn to do it “off the mats,” as they say in yoga. It’s relatively easy to work on and learn to inhabit the zone during an athletic or creative endeavor. But can you do it when performing the most mundane activities of your life? Can you do it when you are washing the dishes?

I can’t. Not yet. I keep trying to be mindful when washing the dishes, but you know mostly I am still irritated that there are dishes in the first place! Damn dishes. Just go away. Socrates would seriously be shaking his head at me. So there you have it. The ultimate challenge is to inhabit the zone all the time. That is what a state of Interbeing would feel like. Until we are ready for that, any old vehicle to practice being in the zone will do. Sports happens to be a great vehicle for this. I- a woman, mind you- just saved sports (even though I am not supposed to be saving anything these days!). You are welcome, sports fans. Have fun with it and feel free to laugh out loud any ole time.