brave on the rocks
or, choosing to open when you want to shut but you know it would really be better if you opened
horizontal in Baltimore, Maryland on the sidewalk outside The Charmery in Hampden / October 2017
When I was 15, and the only place for me to hang out in suburban Florida was my local Barnes & Noble, I found a book called spilling open.
Sabrina Ward Harrison, at the age of 21, published these excerpts from her sketchbook, a compressed collage full of self-portraits and painted photographs and tender wonderings and frank doubts.
I carried this book with me through (I counted them on my fingers at some point) twelve moves. From high school to dorm room to second dorm room to weird Jersey high rise to first Brooklyn apartment … across the country to Portland house to apartment to house, back across the country to storage in Dad’s upstate garage to Bushwick loft to apartment to intentional community, where it enjoyed a place of honor in my teensy room for five years, and then there was Covid and I was in Bali and Mirelle & Margherita packed up my things and the men from storage picked them up and put them away.
It wasn’t until my 30s I discovered her second book.
I’m 41 now.
It’s called brave on the rocks.
The narrative begins after the success of her first book, which surprises and overwhelms, more than delights her. The unexpected attention filled her with increasing self-doubt and the pressure to live up to her own image … to the point that it all compressed itself into an ulcer.
At the top of the book she reprints a letter from her father. He reminisces about their barefoot walks together along secret trails when Sabrina was six.
“The thing about bare feet,” he writes, “is that they move easily and quickly over mud and dirt and sand and grass but tend to hesitate before a barrier of pointy, sharp-edged gravel.”
That summer, her grandfather re-paved his driveway. The first time they approached the edge of it, barefoot, Sabrina held her arms up for a “special carry.”
“But in this situation something told me not to pick you up.” […] “In my mind’s eye I see myself hunker down in front of you and explain the rules of barefoot travel. I told you paths are not always smooth and familiar like the Indian Trail or the good ones out on Pine Ridge. Sometimes there are rocks on the trail and the only way to cross them is to be brave. As I sit here so many years later, I smile when I remember how proudly you walked over the gravel that summer. Whenever we came back to the cottage by way of the Frog Bridge, you would get breathless and boldly announce how you were going to be ‘brave on the rocks.’ Love, Dad.”
I’ve had so many opportunities to open when I wanted to shut. So many opportunities to practice. To paraphrase Ursula: And did I take them? Yes indeed.
And did I take them?
Sometimes.
I don’t use the word “friend” lightly.
Friends are people you show up for, and who show up for you. Friends visit at the hospital. Friends call in the middle of the night when they need to. When they don’t know what else to do. Friends bring ice cream and pictures of cats when you’re heartsick. (Or the essence of pictures of cats. They bring in the style of pictures of cats.)
Those are my friends.
The ones you’re willing to have difficult conversations with. My friend Julene calls these talks “come to Jesus meetings.”
They are not Jesus-related. (I don’t know why she calls them that. You’d have to ask her.)
They’re when the words don’t come easy. When you risk saying something like, “I don’t think this is the man for you to marry,” or, “I think you need a meeting,” or, “Your behavior with your lovers looks like emotional abuse,” or “I know you’re angry, but you didn’t actually make a clear request,” or, “Is it possible … that you may have been the asshole in this scenario?”
And sometimes, sometimes, friends are those for whom I open up and share, when I really, really want to shut down and avoid.
I’ll bet most of us can count those friends on two hands.
We’re really not trained for uncomfortable conversations anymore. Maybe we never were. But it’s worse now. It’s got to be. Three years of Zoom. We barely make eye contact these days. We’re out of practice in both social niceties and face-to-face honesty, so every sticky conversation has the gravitas of an intervention.
And I’ve got to really, really care to stage an intervention.
In college, I was kind in love with a guy who was sort of my boss. He was three years ahead of me in school. I did my work study gig at his thing. He thought he was my boss. I thought he was my peer. Anyway!
I remember him telling me once, that someone he admired told him once, that one’s success in life is directly related to one’s ability to have uncomfortable conversations.
I believed it.
I still believe it.
I think about it all the time.
Especially while avoiding difficult conversations.
Three years back, I knew I had to have a CTJM with my friend. In person. In Portland. I was visiting. I wanted to see her as soon as I arrived, but she delayed. Then postponed. Then delayed again. Our friendship had been shaky at best and distant at least for a couple of months, and I felt in my digestives a rumble of worry and an undercurrent of anxiety over it all.
She was two hours late.
At first she said she’d be a little bit late because her morning hike took longer than expected. Okay. Then she pushed it back an hour. Sigh. Then she said a lot of resistance was coming up in regards to our meeting, and that made her unable to show up on time.
I asked, “Is that your way of cancelling?”
She said “No, no, I’m coming.” Then it took her another hour to get there.
I sat. In what can only be described as the town square. Downtown. A little sketchy. I didn’t want to sit in one place for too long.
During that second hour, I had a CTJM with myself as my emotions hijacked my system. Phrases like “flaky!” and “devaluing our friendship!” shook their fists in my brain. Livid fantasies roiled.
I’m gonna send her a text that says, I’m done.
I’ll erase her number and leave.
When she gets here, I won’t tell her my exact location so she gets a taste of her own medicine.
It’s fine. No one person’s absence from my life will ruin it.
I don’t have anything to lose. Our friends will still be my friends.
And then this winner: I’ll UNFRIEND her on FACEBOOK.
The livid fantasies were all about how I could make her feel what I was feeling. How I would shut down. How I could make her hurt, in the hopes that I would hurt less. She was hurting too, of course. I didn’t actually believe that her pain would diminish my pain.
That’s not how math works.
Underneath the snaking hisses, there was a quieter, calmer response. This said, Remember that time she took care of you when you were depressed? Let you stay at her place for weeks? Took you to a naturopath? So she’s a little flaky. You don’t like it. So what. You knew that. But this human showed up for you when you needed her. Her ex didn’t want you there. They got in a fight over it. You made them quiche! You’re gonna abandon her now? What kind of friend are you? Also, remember your motto for the year. Stay. Stay, Lila. Show up. Keep paying attention.
And yet still underneath that there was a third thing — beneath the sniping and the reason, the whole maelstrom of my system in tumult and calibration, was the steady undercarriage of my spirit … it felt the first touch of sun on my bare spring arms. It breathed the air of so many trees, and did not take their oxygen for granted. This part — because it was this part — counseled love, and choices made from love. This part of me knew that things were ultimately ok.
I have been excavating this part of me for years.
And so I stayed.
I am not a natural meditator.
Right around the time I found spilling open, I started taking yoga classes. I thought my mom was the one who took me to yoga, but she tells me I was the one who asked her to take me. I’m not even sure how I knew that yoga was a thing.
Clyde (was that really his name?) was the only instructor for miles around. Mom drove us all the way to Clearwater, Florida to take his class. Thirty minutes each way.
Dude. The guy was like the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And he talked for the first full 10-15 minutes of class. Bueller. I don’t know what he talked about (probably breathing) because I was So. Damn. Bored. And then we had to sit in SILENCE?! For another 10 minutes?!
I carried this disinclination to meditate through my entire yoga teacher training and the first 9ish years of my career.
And then I took meditation class with a punk.
A Buddhist (former Buddhist?) former punk named Ralph de la Rosa1. The anarchist vs. the purist. He pulled meditation techniques from different traditions and encouraged us, 12 step-style, to ‘take what we like and leave the rest.’
Between the anarchist and the purist, we won.
Ralph, circa 2017
Ralph made me not hate meditation. I developed an almost-daily — yet brief and un-timed (shocking! lawless!) morning meditation practice that I kept up for a few years. I’ve lost the habit now. Might be ready to pick it back up. I’m just gonna get myself a chair first. Don’t judge me.
Instead of shrinking our awareness down to a laser pointer and focusing the point on our breathing, Ralph invited us to expand our awareness wide, wider, widest, to notice anything there was to notice. The physical sensations (tension in the legs, warmth in the belly), the sounds in the room (grumble of the heater, toots from the cars, a couple of errant birds) — concrete things like that, and also more esoteric things, our hamster wheel thoughts, our energy and the timbre of it, our emotional topography. And our breath, yes, that too. As a part of the whole. We could also turn up the volume of awareness on any one of those things by pointing a mental arrow towards it.
Your mind is a circus, he said, I paraphrase. Trained monkeys over there, bejazzled elephants over here, trapeze up overhead, a clown up in the stands, someone always selling peanuts, big crowd energy, the lights flaring, singers singing, all manner of focus-pulling. And if your mind is a circus, then there, at center stage, in the very center ring with a spotlight on it, is your breath. You’re not always looking directly at the center ring, necessarily, but you know it’s there.
Such a relief. I didn’t have to subtract anything! Subtraction is hostile.
DON’T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT!
See? Hostile.
[Also, I love the circus.]
Whenever I tried a more austere mode of meditation, I felt like a curmudgeonly card player with a slew of bum cards. My slew of bum cards were called “thinking.” I had to label them “thinking,” and put them on the discard pile. And I had to discard. Every second. Multiple times a second. Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking. I’m failing at this. Thinking. It’s exhausting. Thinking. I did not [thinking] cultivate [thinking] the requisite [thinking] gentleness [thinking] to temper [thinking] the precision [thinking], as Pema Chodron [thinking] advised. It made my mind a disciplinarian with a birch branch.
Perhaps it is simply too rigorous me.
I am also willing to entertain the idea that I am lazy.
You might say I wanted the benefits without the discipline. You’d be accurate-ish. But also, I don’t think there’s a One Size Fits All for anything on the planet, so why there be one technique to rule them all for meditation?
Meditation people are always talking about the “monkey mind.” But the center stage analogy really did something for me. I’m not just some monkey. I’m the whole fucking circus. I’m The Moste Incredible Menagerie! I’m the circus and the striped tent it rode in on!
I prefer this more benevolent way of regarding my mind. A beautifully-choreographed mess. Dangerous and smelly things happening, yes. Also: ravishing feats of grace and muscle memory, charisma and prowess, and the phenomena of being caught, firmly, at what seems like the last possible moment.
I’m proud of all the sights to be seen on the inside of my brain. I don’t want to tame them away. I never want to refuse the muse.
Isn’t the muse the menagerie anyway?
But do I want to be able to focus on stuff? Yes, Yes I do.
So. I won’t ignore the elephants. But. Breath in the center ring.
In the middle of downtown Portland, I checked in with myself.
Anxiety. I inquired deeper. What’s the anxiety made of? If I didn’t have a story attached to the feeling, would it still be unpleasant?
It wouldn’t be unpleasant, it would feel almost like … excitement.
I identified my anxiety as curdled excitement. Acidic anticipation.
I curled up on a ledge in the park. I waited. And I began to meditate. And write. Meditate and write. Breath in the center ring. I would close my eyes and feel the sweetness of being breathed and before too long, a sentence I could not deny would well up inside me and demand expression on paper and I would give it form and then close my eyes again. I felt like Dumbledore removing silvery strands of memory and placing them in the Pensieve so that Harry could see. I wrote:
Decide that she’s worth it. That friendship is worth it. That turning towards love is worth the effort. It’s the only true nobility in the world, turning towards love. Livid and bruised and in pain. It’s so easy to say “fuck you.” It’s so much harder and more beautiful to say, “I see that you’re in pain. I am too.”
She arrived. I felt my reptile brain coil, prepare to strike. To demand an apology! To say that I’d been there for a whole hour waiting! I knew though. I knew that letting the hiss out would not be conducive. I knew it wouldn’t give me what I really wanted.
My smile didn’t come right away, so, I did not smile. But we embraced. And then we began to walk. There’s a way that a walk-and-talk is like a road trip. It carves a path for the difficult conversations. Mostly we look straight ahead. Occasionally we glance over, but not too long, so we don’t crash into anything. And we’re moving. With a sense of getting somewhere, we talk.
I think this is why I like writing on trains and planes and buses so much.
We found a place to sit. I gave her a gift. She gave me an apology, which was also a gift. We spent the following day together, nourishing our friendship by/and telling the truth.
After we spoke. / Portland, Oregon // March 2015
Later in the trip, alone in an airbnb booked for two, teeth-chatteringly angry and nauseatingly sad, I resisted a come-to-Jesus meeting for another relationship. With my lover. Her…suitor?
He made both of the meetings necessary.
On the day she and I spent together, nourishing our friendship and/by telling the truth, she showed me a message from him. Something like I got so turned on when I saw you today. When Lila and I wrap up our relationship and she goes back to New York, I’d really like to explore us.
I took the rental car and went to the coast by myself.
I was supposed to pick him up. We were planning to have a romantic weekend at the beach. I didn’t pick up him. I didn’t even tell him I was going. Or not going. He can find his own way back, I fumed. I cannot recall another time when I have been this livid. Were I a cartoon character, there would be steam from every orifice.
I met his text messages with aggressive silence. I could barely eat. My fine groceries went untouched in the fridge. When my stomach got ferocious, I ate a handful of berries. I walked on the beach. I meditated on the rocks. I watched a movie on the VCR. It had a VCR. I ate a handful of berries.
About to sit with my anger on the rocks. Literally. / The Oregon Coast // March 2015
Pacing at 11pm on the second floor of the house, a-writhe with rage, I called my friend Matthew Stillman. I called Matt because I was sure that he would counsel me to open instead of to close. He is exceptional at that. I stood in the only crevice of that house where I could get cell service — pressed up against the floor-to-ceiling window — and the phone rang long. He answered in the voice of the half-asleep and I realized all at once that it was 2am in New York and I cried with anger and cried with the pain of not being chosen and cried to have woken my friend in the middle of the night. He shook himself awake in seconds when he heard my voice crack.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here.”
“I’m so sorry I woke you up,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here.”
I took this bathroom portrait in that Airbnb. I’ve never shown it to anyone before.
I vomited up the story, still pressed against the glass, relentless snot and tears mixing and dripping down my hand.
He heard it all.
Then he said, “You have to give him the gift of your anger.”
“How it that a gift?”
“It’s sacred rage.”
“It’s so hard to see it as a gift,” I said.
“I know. But it is. Your deep feeling, your sensitivity, is the gift.”
“What’s sacred about it?”
“It’s pure. Like a 12 year-old in their room, raging at God and screaming ‘It’s not fair!’”
I didn’t really understand it then.
I barely understand it now.
But I felt it. And after a sleep, I answered one of the messages.
The next day I drove the rental back to Portland and raged sacred at him in the passenger seat of his parked car.
He thanked me.
I stopped on the road on the way back, before I spoke to him, and took this self-portrait. / Oregon // March 2015
About an hour after that, all three of us had a come to Jesus meeting.
My friend suggested that we do an exercise called “Beginning Anew.” She learned it from the followers of Thich Nhat Hanh. It is a series of four deceptively simple, ingeniously curated prompts:
What I appreciate about you…
Where I fell short…
When I felt hurt…
How you can help…
We sat at Harlow, my favorite Portland restaurant, and actively opened when we wanted to close but knew it would really be better if we opened.
It’s not that it wasn’t painful.
It’s that it was worth it.
Our relationships have never been the same, but relationships we have.
Sometimes, when I tune in, and most every time I close my eyes to meditate, I notice that a pop song has been playing in my head, on repeat.
“Was that just playing?” I’ll ask my friends.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes not.
That day it was “Do It Again,” by Nada Surf.
These lines, mainly:
maybe this weight was a gift / like I had to see what I could lift
As I like to tell my yoga students: “You can pretend it’s not happening, but it won’t help. You might as well show up inside it, pay attention, and breathe as deeply as you can. This pose is not a life skill. But breathing deeply in difficult situations, that is.”
The sensation may be intense. The rocks may be pointy. We’ll need to pay a lot of attention. Sometimes we’ll have to bail out quick. Reflexes. And even then, with our best efforts, all the premium quality attentiveness we have to bear on the matter, we still might get cut. Or bruised. Or chafed.
If choosing to open does’t bypass the hurt, why the hell would we do it?
For the opportunity to digest. So the emotions don’t congeal into an ulcer.
The alternative — to disengage, by means of alcohol, junk food sex, sugar, television, or any of the myriad drugs we use to numb out — when we hold our arms up for that “special carry,” we relinquish growth.
Sometimes it’s worth the trade.
Sometimes I’m gonna numb out, and so are you. In fact, I’m going to numb out today. Escapism has been my most effective survival tactic for four decades. Daydreaming, reading, binging Netflix. And my mom isn’t well. And soon I’ll have to make the hardest decision of my life. I’ll need to martial all my forces.
Sometimes you have to numb out so you can prepare to be brave.
I can’t grow all the time. And not everyone is worth it.
But they were.
Kiara & I / Portland, OR // September 2023
I saw an image of myself: as both flower and gardener.
It was dusk, impending night, and my petals wanted to close. That’s what petals do. It’s natural.
The human me placed my own fingers on the inside of the petals, and, with insistent gentleness, did not allow them to shut.
May I be brave. May you be brave. May we choose to be brave.
On the rocks.
- Originally drafted August 2018. Revised January 2023
Ralph’s evolving relationship to his sexuality — including his first sex talk, first time, and the celibacy practice of the Hare Krishna — is the subject of this quickie episode of horizontal, 6. divine pleasure: quickie with a meditation teacher.
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