drawing reflected
myself back to me
right before heading
back into the cage
the other morning.

one more
harried hurried
hunted hunch-shouldered
hungry running rabbit
trapped in the
flying to pieces
stressed for success
balls out
non-stop
all or nothing
everything
all the time
twenty-four-seven
faster and faster
more and more
mandatory
retaliatory
predatory
purgatory
world-eating
gut-busting
soul-crushing
american dream.

now it’s just about
time to start another
week of it.

I feel
like a rat
on a wheel.

(PDF version)

The other guys in my weekly men’s group suggested during our last meeting that I make some art or write some poetry at work when I feel overwhelmed and stressed as a way of helping me retain my sense of creative identity while in the cage. The challenge has been finding time to do it.

Today I happened to wind up with about ten minutes to spare at the end of my lunch break. I also happened to have my sharpies and pad with me, which I typically don’t. I’d brought them with me because I hadn’t had time to draw this morning before work and was hoping I could find an opportunity to do at least a little something to keep my commitment to my therapist to make some art every day.

The series of three drawings above is selected from a set of five I made in that little ten-minute window at the end of lunch today. They are ordered in the same sequence in which they were created. Taken together, they make for a pretty accurate representation/summary of my reality at work. I continue to be amazed by the information that expresses itself when I simply let my hand move the pens around on the paper.

Another Monday morning marks the start of another week in the cage. Perhaps I can put this congregation of diligent abstractions to work on my behalf. They all appear to be pretty sure of themselves with the exception of the red one on the far left shaped like a question mark. Perhaps he’s the philosopher of the group.

One more day, under the wheel. This fellow looks like he’s trying to sprout some wings and fly away, but those big heavy feet are keeping him earthbound, or close to it (he seems to be floating a bit), at least for the time being.

so how’s that new job going?

god I just
want to run
out of here
as fast as
my legs can
take me.

(PDF version)

Today’s poem on video, “present time”, was written back in late November and recorded in early February, both of which feel like a lifetime ago as I’m writing today.

I suppose it’s appropriate that I post this video today as this is my last day of “strange freedom”, as I put it a little over nine months ago, before starting a new job tomorrow. I’d love to say I’m excited about it, but I’m not. Relieved that I’m not going to go completely broke, yes. Grateful that I have a way to support myself when so many do not, yes. Happy that I’m going to survive, yes. Excited, no.

These last nine months have been a wonderfully productive time for me. I’ve grown by leaps and bounds. It was absolutely necessary that I take this time with myself, for myself and my own work, and I have no doubt about that. Even so, it’s been a huge drain financially to go without an income for nine months. And once again I have failed, for whatever reason, to translate my most heartfelt passion into livelihood.

I still believe there is a need for what I have to offer. My life would actually be a lot easier if I didn’t believe it. But need and demand are not the same thing. There may be a need. I may be right about that. However, there doesn’t seem to be much of a demand. Or perhaps I just haven’t figured out how to deliver what I have to offer to those who would find it valuable. Or maybe I haven’t fully defined it yet.

When I left my last job nine months ago, in all the uncertainty I felt about what my future might hold, I was sure of one thing: by the time I either found another job or ran out of money, my second book would be out. But Scapegoat’s Cross remains as it has been ever since September 2009, a completed manuscript with no artwork and no path to publication. This is one of the most difficult realities I have to accept as I prepare to move back into cubicleland.

A couple of years ago, I wrote:

Writing, for me, has always had the qualities of a trance, a charm, a spell. It requires a suspension of disbelief on my part: the suspension of my disbelief in myself. It requires me to believe that what I have to say, and how I’m going to say it, will be meaningful and interesting to others. This is a fragile state, magical and mysterious, that can last for moments or months, in which every word matters and every thought or feeling might last forever, if only I’m quick enough to catch it.

At some point, the trance always ends; the charm fades; the spell is broken. My words, thoughts, and feelings seem ordinary again, and there’s nothing left to write.

I feel like that wonderful trance I’ve been in since Iron Man Family Outing began to resurrect itself in September 2007 may be coming to its end, not because I have nothing left to say or nothing left to give, but because the material realities of my life are beginning, once again, to overwhelm my inner vision. I’m simply not going to have the time, the energy, and the opportunity for writing, and for the deep self-work that is the foundation of the writing, and I know it.

Furthermore, I seem to have maxed out all of the channels I’ve been using to draw new folks to my work. Readership for Iron Man Family Outing seems to have peaked and, as I said previously, Scapegoat’s Cross is still dead in the water. The outer side of my work seems to have stagnated and now I can feel the inner side beginning to shut down as well.

Musician Joe Strummer once said, “Songs don’t tend to come to you if there’s no outlet for them.” This has certainly been true in my experience. When I feel I don’t have an appropriate outlet for my work, my creative flow just stops dead. Maybe that’s not happening now, but it sure feels that way to me.

In any case, today is my last day of freedom, freedom that no longer feels strange, but natural. Tomorrow will be different.

If, as I suspect, my well is running dry, I may not post again for a while. In the event that I’m correct about that, I’d like to leave everyone with these three thoughts:

* Men are hungry for ways to access their emotions safely. No man wants to open up and be shamed or scared into shutting back down again.

* Poetry is both undervalued and underutilized as a means to move into the heart of our experience, especially for men.

* The other men I’ve met (and I met some amazing men at Mike Lew’s male survivors workshop yesterday) who are working to recover from childhood abuse are some of the bravest men on the planet.

I hope I’ve done something to bring the truth of these three statements home to some other people. Men need understanding and encouragement if they are to do better. They need to be seen as they truly are. We all need that. We all deserve it.

I still believe there is a different life, a better life, a wholly and completely natural and heartfelt life that serves my needs as it serves the needs of others, waiting inside me to be lived. But I won’t be living it tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. Perhaps that life is still out there somewhere in my future, but now there is only now.

Today’s poem on video, “tired of being a bullet”, is from my upcoming book Scapegoat’s Cross: Poems about Finding and Reclaiming the Lost Man Within. It was inspired by a little butterfly that fluttered across the interstate in front of me one morning as I zoomed along in my metal shell on my way to yet another day of “aim and speed and straight lines” at work.

For more poetry on video, visit my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/rickbeldenpoet.

I’ve also decided that it’s time to wind down my efforts to promote Iron Man Family Outing. As I wrote in a previous post, “Twenty years is a long time to stick with anything.” I decided three years ago that I was going to do whatever it took to get the unused copies of the book out to people who would find it personally meaningful, and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of it. Most of those copies are out there in the world now. Based on some of the feedback I’ve received over the last three years, quite a few of them have done or are still doing some good.

The amount of time and effort I’ve put into Iron Man Family Outing over the past 38 months has been staggering and would probably shock me if I’d actually kept track of it. I have kept track of the amount of money I’ve spent and it’s been substantial. Shipping free books all over the United States and internationally has not been cheap. I have a deep commitment to the work I do, but I also have to acknowledge that there are some very real limits to how much of myself I can give to an extremely demanding form of work that provides me with no material support whatsoever. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but personally I think that most criminals make a much better living than most poets do.

This brings me to the subject and the status of my second, still unpublished book, Scapegoat’s Cross, which has been essentially dead in the water for over a year now since I completed the final manuscript in September 2009. I’ve had no success finding an artist to work with me on illustrations and graphic design, which is something I know I can’t do on my own. I don’t have a publisher either, and don’t even have any leads on getting one. I’ve known all along that the chances of finding someone who’d publish the book were slim, and I’ve been willing for some time now to publish it myself and give the work away (again) for the sake of getting it out there, but without the artwork I can’t even do that.

Lately I’ve been wondering if maybe I shouldn’t publish it at all. Maybe all the blocks and difficulties I’ve encountered since completing the manuscript (breaking my wrist and shoulder, leaving my job and losing my income, being unable to find an artist) are signs that I shouldn’t go forward with it, that I’m not meant to do that. I just don’t know anymore.

I had similar struggles and doubts during the process that ultimately led to the publication of Iron Man Family Outing, so I know that none of this sturm und drang necessarily means that Scapegoat’s Cross shouldn’t or won’t see the light of day. But I also know that there are certain doors that have to open in order for me to move forward with it, and they’re just not opening.

Doubts and concerns notwithstanding, I was very naive and idealistic when I was working to get Iron Man Family Outing published. I didn’t realize what the experience was going to cost me personally or understand the seismic effect it was going to have on my life and my relationships, and I certainly didn’t anticipate that I was committing myself to a project that would consume a twenty-year chunk of my life. I’m not saying that I regret doing it. I don’t. I honestly can’t imagine myself having gone any other way. Telling the truth, in the way I told it, was a matter of life and death for me. But I know now that there’s a price to be paid for taking that path, and I wonder if I’m up to it a second time.

Perhaps more than anything, I wonder if there’s really any substantial interest in what I have to say. As was the case with Iron Man Family Outing, the work I’ve done with Scapegoat’s Cross doesn’t seem to fit with anything else I see anywhere. It’s out of step with a good deal of what I see going on these days in the arena of what is commonly characterized as men’s work (too much of which seems, to my eyes, obsessed with a bizarrely adolescent fixation on getting chicks and getting laid, as if that’s the highest life purpose to which a man can aspire). Nor is Scapegoat’s Cross like anything I’ve seen in the adult survivor literature or the self-help / personal growth genre, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years that the work I’m doing is seen as some sort of strange, illegitimate aberration (at best) in the MFA-strangled universe of contemporary American poetry.

It’s been said that Iron Man Family Outing was ahead of its time, and there might be something to that. It’s certainly been far better received in the last three years than it was when it was published in 1990, although there are still some rather high-profile gatekeepers of the men’s movement (whatever that term even means now) on the web who continue to exclude it from their lists of books for men and poetry for men, and not for any lack of effort on my part to make them aware of it. I guess, for these guys anyway, if it ain’t Bly, it don’t fly.

Maybe Scapegoat’s Cross is ahead of its time as well. I don’t know. I’m too close to it to say. But it sure is stuck, and it’s been that way for over a year, and I wonder if maybe that’s telling me something.

The larger question for me at this point is whether I should continue the work I’ve been doing as a writer at all. I often feel like I’m doing a ton of work in the dark here, the majority of which seems to go largely unseen by anyone but me. Maybe I’m not very good at promoting myself. Hell, I know I’m not. I don’t even like doing it, and my explorative forays into utilizing social media have been, quite frankly, a bust so far. On the other hand, maybe the work I’m doing is simply so far out on the edge that there’s not much interest to be had, whether I’m good at promoting it or not. Again, I’m too close to the situation to know.

What I do know is that one of the best aspects of the work I’ve done over the last three years has been making new friends and allies all around the world who are actively committed to helping men grow and heal. Becoming acquainted with these men and women has been a great source of inspiration and encouragement for me. There’s a lot of great work being done behind the scenes with and for men, and I’m honored to have been a part of it in whatever way I could.

Nevertheless, I feel like I’m at a sort of crossroads here. With my efforts on behalf of Iron Man Family Outing winding down and with Scapegoat’s Cross in hibernation or stasis or permanent sleep, whatever it is, I’m asking myself some serious questions about my next step, which has to include some way to make a living. Unfortunately, I only know one way to do that, and the prospect of committing myself to it yet again makes my guts shrivel and shrink. What do you do when doing what you love pays you nothing, and doing what pays you breaks you down?

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing for public consumption here on the blog in the near future. To be completely honest, I’ve been disappointed in the lack of response to what I think have been several pretty good posts published in the last month or so (here, here, here, and here), and another piece I submitted to one of the big men’s websites a couple of months ago has apparently been rejected. I say “apparently” because their stated editorial review period expired weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anyone as to the status of my submission since then.

I have one other post nearly completed, and I’ll probably publish it here in the next week or so, along with the one mentioned above that’s been in limbo for the last couple of months. After that … I dunno. Yet to be determined. Maybe it’ll be easier for me to think clearly if I stop banging my head against walls for a while. Or maybe I just can’t help myself, and the banging will continue.

“Don’t try.”

- inscription on Charles Bukowski’s gravestone

A couple of weeks ago, a day or so before I left my job, one of my coworkers asked me, “So, what are you gonna do now?” I replied, “I’m gonna do nothing until I get bored, then see what happens.”

But doing nothing is harder than it might sound.

I’m now deep into my second week of freedom, and it’s already feeling substantially less strange than it did at first. I’m trying to do nothing as often as I can … trying not to try. Some days I feel like I’ve forgotten more than I remember about myself, and I wonder just how long it’s going to take me to bring myself back. I feel horribly and profoundly scattered a lot of the time, like pieces of me are floating around my nucleus waiting to coalesce into some new whole that I can’t yet comprehend.

I still have moments of almost paralyzing anxiety about my financial situation. When I think about working again, I can’t imagine going back to living in a cubicle with a computer, but I can’t imagine going forward into something else either, ’cause I still don’t know how to make a living doing what moves me. I seem to be more prone to mental thrashing than I have been in a long time, although thankfully I have a lot of skills and strategies now that help me recognize when I’m doing it and ease myself out of that state.

A couple of friends I trust have told me I need to get outta town, and I think they’re right, but so far it’s been more important for me to settle into myself, slow down to my own pace again, and get back to some of the basics that keep me centered and grounded: eating well, resting as needed, coming back into my body, breathing. In short, caring for myself as if I cared about myself. When I’m not doing that, I know I’m in trouble. It’s my foundation, and my foundation had been crumbling. I had my home cleaned last week and that’s made an enormous difference in how I feel and in my ability to focus and rest. Next on my list is taking care of some long-deferred vehicle maintenance and getting my daily walks going again.

I’m very glad now that I didn’t try to rush myself out of town before I felt ready. I think a little trip could be great for me, but I’ve got to get all four wheels back on the pavement again first.

There was an enormous amount of disintegration going on in my life during the last 2-3 months, far more than I consciously realized. As my situation at work deteriorated, the rest of my life was following suit. I was too immersed in the day-to-day struggle to survive to notice all the details, but I could feel the slide, even if I couldn’t do much to stop it.

Now, as I’m beginning to separate energetically and psychically from a job and a work environment that had become increasingly toxic for me, I’m beginning to come back to myself, beginning to reset and recover. It’s also getting easier, day by day, for me to “do nothing,” to surrender to the moment, to my feelings and my body, and see what happens. I’m gradually moving from “trying not to try” to “not trying to try.” And that’s a good sign that I’m on the right track.

I’ve been struggling for some time now with the ongoing conflict between my need to make a living and my need to follow that which moves me most deeply. I’ve written about that struggle numerous times, in posts like “go crazy or starve” and in poems like “soul versus survival” and “rush to nowhere” and “dot” (as well as several others). It’s been a theme in my work going all the way back to Iron Man Family Outing, a tormenting puzzle that I’ve simply been unable to solve. In the last few years I’ve begun to wonder if it can be solved.

In any case, now I’m free again, for a while anyway, for the first time in almost six years, and it feels strange. I’m so used to running against the clock, so used to cramming all of my meaningful creative activity into a whatever time I had left on evenings and weekends, that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to slow down, to breathe, to be with my body and my feelings. It’s actually a bit intimidating. I’m surprised at how much anxiety and disorientation I’ve felt these last few days. I’m finding it a lot harder to settle down and trust this strange new freedom than I expected it would be.

Part of it, I’m sure, is that I’m pretty exhausted, both mentally and physically, from trying to survive in a work environment that had become increasingly oppressive and psychologically toxic. One of the reasons for my decision to leave was my realization that being in that environment was beginning to burn me down, and that I’d wind up in cinders if I tried to stay. But the damage had already begun, and now I have to deal with it.

I’m also finding myself feeling a lot more fear than I’d expected about having an interruption in income, and about how long that scenario might last. I’d become very accustomed to a certain level of financial stability and now I may have put it at risk. But the risks I was facing if I stayed put were worse, they were certain, and they’d already begun to transform from risks to realities to consequences for me. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating right, and I wasn’t taking proper care of myself, and previous experience tells me exactly where that path leads me. As I told one of my coworkers before I left, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me to destroy my health in order to keep my health insurance.

So here I am, free, tired, and a little (sometimes a lot) scared. I expect I’ll begin to settle down over the next week or so, but it’s going to take some more focused awareness and some better self-care than I’ve been giving myself for a while now. I have a strong sense of why I need this time (aside from punching out of a bad situation) and what I want to do with it. The Scapegoat’s Cross manuscript has been sitting almost completely idle since I broke my wrist and shoulder last October, waiting for me to get the artwork together and develop a scenario for publication. There’s still more to do with Iron Man Family Outing, too. I’ve got some other projects in mind as well, actually lots of them. But my first order of business is to settle down and allow myself to get back into my own rhythm.

Maybe then this new freedom won’t feel so strange anymore.

sitting with me
going nowhere
momentary heat connection
somewhat real and
somewhat fake
intersecting intersections
flashing lights in
frozen lake.

party girl
needs a husband
party boy
needs to last
both of us are underwater
both of us are
fading fast.

(PDF version)

I drag myself off to work
one more time
so I can drag myself back home
one more time.

I wonder how much smaller
my world can get.

can I live
on a dot.

(PDF version)

A couple of months ago, I was real sick for about a week with some sort of horrible cold/flu/whatever. After a few days, I began to realize that being sick as a dog, while not pleasant, was giving me a much-needed opportunity to slow down so I could remember and relearn how to be with myself again. And that aspect of being sick, once the realization kicked in for me, was sweet. A big part of that sweetness was remembering and re-experiencing what it was like to be with my body, moment to moment, without any agenda or any schedule. I’d had a similar experience in the last few months of 2009 when I was in the acute stages of dealing with my broken wrist and shoulder, but the nature of that experience was different. It was extreme. What I rediscovered while I was sick for a week was more of an everyday mode, the mundane “being with myself” that is needed for common experiences, like a bad cold. Or a bad day.

I’m having a lot of bad days lately, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a good way to deal with that issue. While driving to the pizza place recently one night after work (pizza and a brownie being my most favored self-medication and after-work sedative for the past few years), I was thinking about what else I could do to numb the painful after effects of these meaningless, seemingly endless, unrelentingly dreadful days at work. And I realized almost immediately that no amount of pizza or sex or TV or porn or drinking or drugs or overeating, nothing I’ve ever done in the past or could ever do in the future to try to numb myself and escape, would make that awful pain I feel at the end of every wasted day go away, because what I’m feeling is the pain of another lost day in my unlived life.

That was, and is, a sobering realization, one that has left me with a problem that is not easy to solve and a question that is not easy to answer:

How do I live with my pain?

I know I’m not alone in wrestling with this issue. I know that a lot of folks feel stuck in lives they didn’t see coming. They begin each day filled with dread and end each day filled with regret. They want to change their circumstances, but can’t, for all kinds of reasons. When I was younger, I used to tell others, “If you don’t like your life, change it.” I believed that, and I lived by it. I’m not saying I don’t believe it now, but I can also see now that life isn’t always so simple, or the path to change so direct. Sometimes life just piles up on people and boxes them in, sometimes as a result of their own choices, sometimes as a result of the system and the times in which they live, and sometimes as a result of chance, or fate, or karma, or whatever term you prefer for the mysterious and often apparently random hand of cosmic force in our lives.

I am where I am in my life as a result of all of the factors and influences listed above. I feel trapped in a losing game, and every instinct I have tells me to free myself and run for the life I want. But the way to freedom remains unclear, and the gap between my inner vision and my material reality is the distance between the life I want and the life I seem able to have. So I string my meaningless workdays together like a set of bad pearls and hope I can use them to buy myself some time somewhere down the road. Good strategy going forward, perhaps, but it does almost nothing in the now to diminish the pain of losing another day, and another, and another …

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “The cure for pain is in the pain.” My experience tells me that this is true. I also know that embedded within every painful time and experience in my life has been the seed of great transformation and healing, not just of circumstances, but of self. And yet I resist. I want no more pain. I want to be done with it.

Sadness scares me. Grief, the experience of grief and grieving, scares me. I’ve written about this in the past (“falling through”). But I also know that grieving, that being with grief and sadness, is one of the most powerful and effective ways of being with and transforming pain. When I let my grief and my sadness speak, when I allow those energies to stir in my belly and my chest, to move up through my heart and my throat, to enter the world as tears and moans and sobbing and wailing, I am cleansed. I am lifted. I can see again. I feel real again. Human.

But entering that process is challenging for me. It’s tricky. Sensitive. I almost have to be taken by surprise. Like so many men, I’ve been conditioned not to feel such things (not directly anyway) and certainly not to express them, not even privately. The messages are clear: “Be a real man. Take charge. Control yourself. Don’t cry. Be tough. Don’t be a wimp.” If you are a man who is suffering, keep it to yourself. If you have to feel something, feel angry. Anger is manly and therefore safe to feel. Grief and sadness are not.

Grief work is hard for many of us as men, and so much has to be learned (and unlearned) in order to do it. You have to be tough and soft at the same time, and you have to be present with what you’re feeling without losing yourself in the intensity of it. It’s not easy. Healing is not for wimps. The real tough guys are the ones who can do the work, and if you don’t do your work when you’re called to do it, something bigger will come along and crack you wide open. None of us is immune to these processes.

I know, I can feel, that there is a lake of grief dammed up inside me now about the life I haven’t lived, and that I won’t be living tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. It frightens me, but I hope I can find a way to let it begin to move through me soon, because that’s the best way I know to be with, and live with, my pain.

a treasury agent sets out to nail a mobster for tax evasion
a boxer known as killer mccoy falls for a bookie’s daughter
a soldier rescues a colonel’s daughter and fights ninjas in the philippines.

a carnival operator tries to end his sister’s fling with a rookie lion tamer
a retired gunfighter sides with homesteaders against a cattle baron
an army major leads convict soldiers into france on a suicide mission.

a dashing british privateer raids spanish ships with his queen’s permission
an fbi agent tracks giant mutant ants from new mexico to los angeles
a straight-shooting cowboy goes after his friend’s murderer.

so
what do you do for a living?

(PDF version)

Hello,
I’m writing to offer you a complimentary copy of my book, Iron Man Family Outing. I believe this book may be of interest to you. I would be very happy to provide you with a copy at no cost to you, shipping and handling included.

There’s no catch here and no hidden agenda. The simple fact is that I printed more copies than I’ve been able to sell, and I don’t want the remaining copies to go to waste.

Over the years, I’ve received many positive, enthusiastic responses from folks who’ve read and enjoyed this book. I’ve also discovered just how difficult it is to promote and distribute work of this nature. My primary interest now is to get the remaining copies of my book to people who would find it personally meaningful.

I’m enclosing some introductory information about the book, including a brief excerpt. Please contact me if you would like to receive a copy or if you need any additional information.

Regards,

Rick Belden
Author, Iron Man Family Outing

With that, Iron Man Family Outing, published in the fall of 1990 and then forgotten and presumed dead for the next seventeen years, was reborn.

I didn’t have a website two years ago today. I didn’t have a blog. I didn’t have even one reader review for Iron Man Family Outing at Amazon, or anywhere else on the web for that matter. All I had was a closetful of unsold books and a renewed conviction that it was important that I get them out to people who could make use of them.

In the two years since that day, I’ve contacted over 1800 individuals and organizations around the world, and sent out nearly 900 copies of Iron Man Family Outing to recipients in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It’s now being used worldwide by therapists, counselors, men’s groups, and organizations that work with men as an aid in the exploration of masculine psychology and men’s issues, and as a resource for men who grew up in dysfunctional, abusive, or neglectful family systems. It’s been ranked in the top 20 poetry books and the top 35 books on father-son relationships at Amazon.com, based on reader reviews. I’ve made new friends and allies all around the world who are working to help men grow and heal. And I have the most unexpected result of all, the completed manuscript for a brand-new book: Scapegoat’s Cross, my first new work in nearly twenty years.

It’s clear to me now, in retrospect, that events in my life had been leading me back to my unfinished business with the Iron Man Family Outing project since 2004, but I didn’t know that two years ago today. All I knew was that I woke up on a Sunday morning with a letter in my mind and an undeniable imperative to finish what I’d started all those years ago, to see my original vision for the book through to its completion, even if I had to give away every copy I had to do it.

I don’t know where this process will lead me in the future. Two years ago, I never expected to be where I am with this work today. I hadn’t written a line of poetry in over fifteen years. I was haunted by my failure to find an audience for Iron Man Family Outing and considered myself dead as a writer. Fortunately, things have changed.

Well, not everything has changed. I’m still fighting the battle of “soul versus survival” daily. Some days are harder than others. As I wrote almost a year ago in a blog entry entitled “go crazy or starve”:

Every morning when I wake up and don’t have time to write because some meaningless job is demanding its daily pound of flesh in exchange for a little more survival time, I feel like I’m terminating a pregnancy. It’s absolutely wrenching. I start the day sad, furious, and hopeless.

It’s still happening. It happened yesterday. I could feel something coming and I made some notes, but there was no time to allow it to develop or complete. It may come back to me. It may not.

But I’m fighting to keep the channel open, even if it means suffering the pain of losing all those things I never get to finish, because the last two years have shown me that it matters that I keep trying and do what I can, and because two years ago today I began to remember, for the first time in over fifteen years, who I am and what my life is about.

A meaningless job is going to eat my morning again today, but I woke up about two hours ago at 4 AM, after a couple of hours of restless semi-sleep, and realized I couldn’t let this anniversary go by without observing it in some way. This is my life now. The work drives me, it nags at me, it makes me miserable and keeps me awake until I tend to it.

It’s hard, it’s demanding, it’s draining, it doesn’t leave me much time for anything else, and sometimes it feels like it’s just too much for me. It also keeps me alive. And I’m okay with that.

I’ve posted some preview material on my web site at rickbelden.com/new_book, including an excerpt from the introduction and some of the poems that appear in the book.

I’m also making preview copies of the complete manuscript available to those who’d like an early look. Please see rickbelden.com/new_book for information about getting a preview copy.

The group will do a small amount of reading each week from writings by David Deida, Rick Belden, Chogyam Trungpa and others as a starting point for seeing our full role in the world. These writings have very different takes on the journey, and we will work with their ideas to find our own path.

Click here to read the full announcement about the group.

This group, which will be held at Sol Associates in Austin, looks like it will be a great opportunity for everyone who attends, and I’m honored that some of my work will be included as a resource for the group.

For additional information, contact group facilitators Steve Milan and Shelley Imholte.

Update (09/04/09): I’ve been informed that the facilitators of this group will also be using material from my new, yet-to-be-published book, Scapegoat’s Cross, in the group. I’m very happy to see this new material being put to such good use so soon.

treat your body like a poet
not a whorehouse.

treat your body like a park
not a war zone.

(PDF version)

today I don’t poison myself for a pension
today I don’t soil my spirit
today I don’t split my soul.

yesterday I was
lightning in a bottle
a watermelon on the vine
a rocket on the pad.

today I’m a rusty old pile of railroad spikes
tossed together in a heap by the tracks
wondering why the trains don’t come anymore.

today I’m quiet
today I don’t speak
today I listen.

today I walk the circle
that leads to the center
from the outside
to the inside
and back again.

today I know that I’m only a sparkle of sunlight
shimmering on the surface of an ageless sea
today I hear the blade cutter in the distance
but I know it’s not for me
today I know the scariest thing I’ve ever known
that I can’t make my life
the life I thought it would be
not today
maybe tomorrow
but not today.

(PDF version)