Diane’s Blog

As I thought about this topic, I laughed, suddenly recalling a review of Stanley Kubrick’s final movie, “Eyes Wide Shut.”  The reviewer said this movie seems to have been written by someone who hasn’t been out of the house for 35 years, to paraphrase.  These days it sometimes feels like it would be safer to stay in, doesn’t it?  I certainly empathize with people who have agoraphobia. 

Intellectually I know there’s nothing to fear outside the relative haven of my home.  So why do I breathe a sigh of relief almost every time I return home and close the door behind me?  I don’t buy into the propaganda–ish statements made by politicians with agendas.  They tell me it’s not safe out there because the world is now full of people who want to do me harm.  Huh uh.  One thing I know for certain is that we create our own reality according to our beliefs, so if it’s a dangerous world you believe in, a dangerous world is what you’ll experience — it really is that simple. 

How do I know?  Because I’ve tested this universal law over and over in the living laboratory that is Diane’s daily life.  Observation over many years tells me we really do experience what we expect to come our way.  Of course, there are mitigating circumstances, and it can also take time — sometimes a lifetime — to manifest what our beliefs dictate.  But proof is with us daily if we bother to look around, that life is one big, hairy self-fulfilling prophecy.  Or as Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “Believing is seeing.” 

So if I’m not afraid, what has kept me in my house for so much of my adult life?  Yes, I’m a bit of a hermit.  As an only child, aloneness is comfortable for me, not lonely.  But I also know part of me wants to be with people to exchange ideas, feel supported, and just enjoy being social, dammit!  When I lived in Cleveland I went out almost every weekend, but I had a “best friend” then.  For some selfish reason she couldn’t just pick up and move to Asheville in 2000 when I came here. 

And, yes, I got married over a year ago, but hey — I married another only child!  So far we’ve spent most of our time as a cozy twosome, but we’re both starting to suspect there may be a bigger world out there.  There’s a reason that home theaters and computers are so popular — more and more of us are choosing to stay in the house.  We don’t even talk on the phone as often, and don’t try to tell me we’ve “replaced” verbal interaction with e-mail or text messaging.  If you believe that one, maybe you also equate intimacy with having sex? 

The sad thing is, I know in my heart that one of the keys to a world at peace is more of us going out there and mingling.  Now there’s a non-threatening word.  I’m determined to go out there and do some major mingling.  I have a hunch that it could lead to higher-level interaction, even.  Ultimately I want to feel “at home” anywhere I happen to be.  After all, I know our only true “safety” and “security” comes from becoming congruent — that place where finally, our outsides match our insides.  Well, gotta go out for a walk — the rain’s letting up and I’m feeling the need to mingle — if only with a few neighborhood doggies, for starters.

For most of my life I had a fickle relationship with practicality.  Or at least with my beliefs about its meaning to me.  I wasn’t conscious of this and so I got into a lot of trouble along the way, blaming everyone else for my unhappiness and misfortunes. I remember being expected to choose a major for college and being stumped.  If I had allowed myself to believe in following the desires of the heart, I would have chosen theater or dance.  Instead I chose home economics — I hear you snickering out there — in the 60’s this was still considered a viable choice for “young ladies.” 

Within a year it was the “Summer of Love” — 1967 — and my world was flipped on its head.  The rebellious impulses on which I had begun to act rather meekly in my freshman year went into overdrive and my grades suffered accordingly.  I dropped out halfway through my senior year.  Hey — I didn’t need that piece of paper, man!  I was so Mary Tyler Moore meets Janis Joplin — a truly half-assed, reluctant hippie who still had not a clue about who she really was — but now I felt empowered in my cluelessness.  Wasn’t I part of a movement? In other words, I still had a very unhealthy relationship with practicality.  The only difference was that now, instead of completely buying into my parent’s notion of what’s practical I completely rejected that same notion. 

 Hello!  I couldn’t see that I wasn’t following my own blueprint — or rejecting it.  I was rebelling against an image of myself that had been projected onto me by people who thought they knew who I was–or should be.  No one, least of all me, realized how far off we all were. I was 40 years old before I began to suspect that my life was little more then a continual allergic reaction to other people’s vision of me, particularly what was “practical” for me.  How can we make smart choices for ourselves if we aren’t on intimate terms with our own deepest needs?  With our true intentions?  Yet I talk to people every day who never seem to check in with their own gut feeling — or, having checked in, refuse to honor it.  Why?  It always seems to be a variation on “Not practical.”

If we truly are at least as much Spirit as we are matter, can we afford to live our lives as though these vital impulses of our heart are anything less than practical?  If they aren’t, then who IS driving our car?  Have you ever suddenly just KNOWN something is wrong but you ignored that knowing and persisted in acting on what your head told you to do, only to later regret that betrayal of your own inner wisdom?  (Yes–my first marriage, but that’s another story…)

I have a feeling that if we each decided to expand our definition of “practical” to include our gut reactions, within a year we would have successfully steered this planet in a much healthier direction.  I know, I know — that would require a leap of faith because most of us still accept the consensus reality that the ego voice is the ultimate authority.  What if it turns out to be the other way around?  What if our own personal inner guidance system, driven by our intuitive voice is actually the smarter CEO?  What do you think?  Isn’t it time we try something different?

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My parents expected to age as their parents did — retire, find a hobby to help you kill whatever time you have left until your health takes a nose dive; then you croak.  The main difference being that their generation had the new, improved version of aging — it lasts longer — so now you find yourself raising puttering and dawdling to an art form, while stoically avoiding any mention of the “D” word.

For a while there, my parents played out their expectations with a certain flair, if not gusto.  My father, true to his own hermit-like inclination, spent the first 20 years of his early retirement hanging around the house.  He did manage to go outdoors long enough to take my mom on a few vacations, which turned out to be a plus, since it gave her a chance to visit non–Ohio parts of the country before she died in 1994.

My dad entered a difficult period of grieving, but then a strange thing happened: He noticed that he was single.  He decided to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.  He was only 70, and still youthful.  Waitresses everywhere flirted with him.  And so he stepped off the path that had been laid out for him so long ago by HIS parents.  He started to reclaim some of the adolescent verve that had been left on a closet shelf to fade and die. 

He placed an ad in the “personals” of his local newspaper (shaving a few years from his age.)  He jumped into the dating ritual that he had largely missed in his youth and found a couple of agreeable companions along the way.

That was 12 years ago.  At 83, my father has now re-evaluated the beliefs and attitudes of a lifetime and thrown out much of what he now sees wasn’t healthy for him or anyone around him.  In this he has joined me in breaking away from the “Hausler heritage” of holding on to all your grudges for, well — forever.  At any given moment, fully half of the Hausler clan (not my mom’s side — they were all Finnish immigrants whose days were filled with heroic attempts to utter at least every other word of their “English” recognizably) would have banished the offending “others,” and sides tended to shift and morph in ways that confounded logic and left me scrambling for the nearest exit.

Frankly, I am still amazed and downright giddy at the thought of what he accomplished.  My father was a verbal abuser, controller,  and rage-aholic throughout my formative years.  Our relationship had always been strained — a few times even broken.  In the last few years, that rift has healed.  Now we talk and laugh and even forgive each other for the pain we inflicted over the last half-century.

How could he have the beat such odds?  My theory is that sometimes it takes a disaster of gigantic proportions to shake a person free from the private hell they constructed long ago to keep them “safe.”  My mother’s death was that freeing disaster.  Suddenly everything was up for grabs.  And if that wasn’t enough, the Universe threw in a little prostate cancer and an angioplasty for good measure in recent years.

We will all experience losses as we age.  I am so grateful to have a living role model for not only surviving those losses, but transcending them.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  You have been my greatest teacher.

I have a high school reunion coming up in October, and I’m shocked at how eager I am to attend.  It’s not as though I haven’t seen these people since graduation; I went to both the 10th and 20th gatherings.  They decided to hold a 25th, but at the time I was too fragile, having just left my first husband a month earlier.  Did they even hold a 30th?  If so, someone left my name off the list, and I think I know who (just kidding–no I’m not).  And now — it can’t be — but it is: the 40-year reunion of Lakewood High in Lakewood, Ohio, where I was born and grew up. I remember being surprised at all the people who flocked in from all over the country at those earlier reunions; now I’ll be one, having moved to Asheville in 2000. 

The reunion committee sent me a list of events and a questionnaire.  I’m sorry to report that I won’t be attending the Friday night informal get-together at a local bar, although I love the concept; it feels so surreal, like a David Lynch movie: An increasingly snockered and rowdy bunch of 58-year-old pre-retirees finally getting up the nerve to vent all that button-down, savage emotion that until now had been semi-successfully repressed.  Spotty-faced, hormone-driven angst erupting intact from the the aging lips of somebody’s grandparent:  “I always hated you, Susie!”   ”You were so hot, Kenny, and I bet you didn’t even know it!”  Spouses backing out of the place to get some air…

Okay, I admit, part of the reason I am not going to expose myself thus is that I could all too easily be one of those characters, verbalizing what I’ve only fantasized I’d say if I had the nerve.  I already know how that turns out, thank you, having made what turned out to be the stupendously unwise choice of calling a high school boyfriend after my divorce–way too soon after my divorce.  Do you know how these things go from personal experience?  Well, perhaps your attempt at re-ignition went well.  Mine, sad to say, went very, very badly.  Not immediately, mind you, although there were signs early on, such as the fact that he went into a sort of hellfire and brimstone rant in the middle of the pizza parlor on our first, er, “date.” Should I have read my inability to get out of bed most of the next day from exhaustion as a clue?

No, I’ll save my one-night-only appearance for Saturday night — the actual reunion “dinner/dance.”  I finally unearthed the origin of my desire to show up this time: two reasons, apparently.  One — I can think of three people to whom I owe apologies.  Suddenly, at this point in my life, such things carry weight.  Thirty years ago, when another boyfriend asked at our 10th reunion, “Why did you take so-and-so to the dance during prom week instead of me?”  I had nothing.  Nothing but some flippant, dismissive excuse.  They say what goes around comes around, and so I experienced real déjà vu when I found myself asking of the “brimstone” ex-boyfriend years later, “Why did you cheat on me senior year?”  I received the same type of response I had given when asked at that 10th reunion. 

I know now that even though we grow up and move on the old wounds don’t necessarily heal completely.  And so I plan to revise my original answer this time, and apologize to two other classmates as well.  It doesn’t even matter if they brush it off — it’s something I have to do so that I can feel a little lighter. Sometimes personal growth means we do what’s necessary to ease our conscience — and we do it more for ourselves than for anyone else.  That’s not selfish, it’s part of bringing our life back into harmony.  Calling back parts of our lesser-evolved self from whereever we let them stray, and forgiving them, because we now know they did the best they could at the time.

The second reason I’m attending this hoedown is curiosity.  It strikes me as very telling that I went to those earlier reunions to see certain people, but largely to be seen.  “How do I look now?” was my refrain, which I now understand stemmed from my low opinion of who Diane was. The questionnaire says, “What have you been doing with your life?”  Tell me instead, “Where has life taken you?” and “Where have you gone that you didn’t expect to go?”  These are the questions I would ask anyone who has lived for one half a century.  and did ask, often, when I was a social worker specializing in gerontology.  Every last one of us is on a unique journey, no matter how mundane it may look from the outside.  It’s always a journey of the soul.  And, as I have elsewhere quoted Pierre Tielhard de Chardin as saying, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Come back for Part Two sometime in October, after the reunion.  I can hardly wait to see what scenic routes some of those souls have traversed.  I know this–it won’t be boring.

Hi, people!  Welcome to my web log.  When I first thought of creating a web site to offer the spiritual guidance I’ve been providing for years, I felt very excited.  Then the fearful part of Diane’s mind rose up in horror: “Why would I choose to expose myself globally when what I do is still so misunderstood, not to mention so little known that there isn’t even a name for it?  Why would anyone want to do such a thing for that matter?  No, I’ll stay safe and just keep offering my services here in Asheville where my work is accepted.”

This inner dialogue ebbed and flowed over the next few days until suddenly I thought of Ethel and asked myself, “What would Ethel do?”  I knew the answer before I finished asking the question.  Allow me to back up and introduce you to Ethel.  In 1992 she changed my life and will always be a touchstone for me.  That October I was a recently divorced, fortyish social worker just beginning to reawaken my long dormant creative powers.  There was a Halloween party coming up at my workplace.  I knew this was my chance to break out.  I didn’t want to go as someone famous — anyone can do that.  Perhaps a twist on that theme; an unknown, barely talented but ambitious relative of some celebrity.  I kicked this around for awhile.

A couple of weeks before the party it came to me in a dream: Madonna’s cousin!  Oh yeah.  Over the next few days this character unfolded and Ethel walked — no, strutted — into my life.  Ethel Ciccone, Madonna’s cousin from the Bronx (with appropriate dialect): a part-time, freelance dental hygienist whose real talents (according to her) lay on the Broadway stage, although so far her talent had eluded anyone casting anything.  I’ll let Ethel take over: “I am aw-bviously the more talented one in the family.  I wasn’t named afta my idol, Ethel Merman, for nuttin’.  Madonna’s all twalk!”  We now watch as Ethel yanks open her lace jacket to reveal a black bustier (French corset) à la Madonna, and belts out the first verse of “Like A Virgin” with a Merman-esque delivery that knocks ‘em dead every time.

The afternoon of that office party I was, for the (very) first time (oooh!) the life of the party.  I had acted in children’s theater and knew I was a performer at heart, but as sometimes happens to young girls, I became too self-conscious by adolescense to follow it.  The next day my boss, who was a New Yorker, accosted me in the hallway.
“Doi-ane,” she said loudly, unwittingly  reminding me who had actually inspired Ethel’s accent and style.  “Do you think Ethel would be available to sing at my reti-ya-ment pah-ty next week?”  “Yes,” I said.  “I believe she would.”  And so she did.  Before 60 people, Ethel, in g and full regalia, sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” Ethel Merman’s signature tune from “Gypsy.”  After a little initial nervousness, she was a sensation.

What does this have to do with you, dear friends?  In the ensuing weeks I began asking, “What would Ethel do?”  Whenever I felt intimidated or shy, she was always there, being who she is in a big way, with no apologies.  We each have an Ethel within us, urging us to play big instead of staying small and safe.  Ethel gave me permission to allow the boisterous, life-embracing part of Diane (who had learned early on to stuff her anger and please others) to come out and announce “I’m here!” to the back of the auditorium.

Acceptance of the entire cast of characters we each call our own plants both our feet firmly on the road to wholeness and fulfillment.  Who is your Ethel?  She may have something very different than mine to show you about yourself, but chances are you’ll find her in a dark corner where you may have left her long ago, out of fear that was real to you.  You and the world need to hear from her.

“Now’s your inning
Stand the world on its ear.
You’re gonna set it spinning
That’ll be just the beginning…”
              –from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim