Out on a Limb

Chapter 1
 
“The dreams of ancient and modern man are written in the same language as the myths whose authors lived in the dawn of history.… I believe that symbolic language is the one foreign language that each of us must learn. Its understanding brings us in touch with one of the most significant sources of wisdom.… Indeed, both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves.”
 
—ERICH FROMM
The Forgotten Language
 
 
The sand was cold and soft as I jogged along the beach. The tide came in steadily and by sundown it would reach the pilings that supported the houses along Malibu Road. I loved to jog just before the sun set because watching the magenta clouds above the surf helped divert my attention from how much my legs hurt. Some health instructor had once told me that jogging three miles in soft sand was the same as jogging six miles on a hard surface. And I wanted to stay healthy no matter how painful it was. When I wasn’t dancing, running kept me in shape.
 
But what was the story I had heard the day before—about the two brothers? One was a health nut who jogged along the boulevard five miles early every morning of his life regardless of how he felt. The other never did any exercise. One morning the health nut brother was out jogging along the road and turned around to shake a fìnger at his lazy brother when—bam! He just didn’t see the truck …
 
Maybe it didn’t really matter what we did to preserve ourselves. There was always some truck somewhere. The thing was not to let that stop you, not to let it direct your life.
 
I remembered sitting at the dinner table with my mother and father in Virginia, where I grew up. I was about twelve and the thought struck me that regardless of how much happiness I might feel at any given moment, I was aware of the struggle underneath. The “trouble” I called it then … everything had some brand of trouble attached to it. I remembered my Dad had said I had inadvertently struck on an old Greek principle—Pythagorean, I think he said. Dad was a kind of country philosopher and had almost gotten his degree in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He loved to speculate on philosophical meaning. I guess I inherited the same trait. I remembered he said my thought had a deep and principled meaning which was true of all “life. No matter how good something might seem to be, there was always the negative compensating factor to consider. Vice versa was true too, of course—he said—but Dad seemed to focus on the negative. For me, it made me aware of the duality in life. In a blinding flash over the Birdseye peas, I had felt I understood something, without knowing quite what I understood.
 
 
The wind came up sloshing the waves into white-caps further out to sea. Sandpipers scurried in and out of the ripples, savoring what food might be washed up with the tide while their graceful wide-winged pelican brothers swooped and then dove, like mad kamikaze pilots, headlong into schools of fish swimming further out in deeper water.
 
I wondered what it would feel like to be a bird with nothing on my mind but flying and eating. I remembered reading that the smallest bird could travel thousands of miles across the Pacific unencumbered and alone, needing only one piece of baggage; one possession … a twig. He could carry the twig in his beak and when he got tired he simply descended to the sea and floated on it until he was ready to move on again. He fished from the twig, ate from the twig, and slept on the twig. Who needed the Queen Mary? He flapped his wings, clamped his life raft in his mouth and set out to see more of the world.
 
What a life. I wondered if that bird ever got lonely. But even if he was alone he seemed to perceive the proper direction for his life. Birds seemed to have innate compasses that guided them wherever they wanted to go. They seemed to know just exactly what they were, how to live, why they were alive. But did they have feelings? Did they fall in love? Did they cocoon themselves off with only one other bird as though it was the two of them against everything? Birds seemed part of everything. Space, time, air. No, how could they shut out the world if they wanted to fly over it?
 
I remembered an experience I had had once. I call it an experience and not a dream, even though it happened when I was asleep, because it felt more real than a dream. I felt I was suspended over the Earth and I dipped and flowed with the air currents just like the birds. I floated over countries and mountains and streams and trees. As I drifted, the tops of trees brushed gently across me. I was careful not to pluck even one loose leaf from the branch to which it belonged because I, too, belonged to everything there was. I wanted to go further and faster and higher and wider—and the higher I went the more I became connected, my being concentrated and expanded at the same time. I had the sensation that this was actually happening, that my body was irrelevant and that that was part of the experience. The real me was floating free and clear, filled with the peace of connection to everything that was.
 
It was not the usual sexually oriented flying dream which psychologists describe. This was more. There was another dimension to it. The word I’m looking for, I thought to myself as I ran, is “extra.” That was why I had remembered it so vividly, and whenever I felt displeased or lonely or out of sorts or strung up and nervous, I thought of that experience and of how peaceful I had felt when I floated outside of my physical body feeling involved with all there was above and below me.
 
That feeling of belonging to “everything” gave me more pleasure than anything. More pleasure than working, than simply making love, than being successful or any of the other human endeavors people devoted themselves to in order to achieve happiness. I loved to think. I loved to concentrate. I loved to be involved with concerns outside myself because, to be honest, I believed that was actually my path to understanding myself. Somewhere way underneath me were the answers to everything that caused anxiety and confusion in the world. What an arrogant thought! But, if I could touch me, really touch me, I could touch the world … maybe even the universe. That was why I was a political activist, a feminist, a traveler, a kind of curious human reporter; and probably it was why I was an actress and performer. I needed to reach inside and touch me if I was going to understand the world and also if I was going to be any good in my work. That was probably why I began my life as a dancer. When I moved, I was in touch with who I was. Whatever … to me the journey most worthwhile taking was the journey through myself.
 
A chill wind scattered sand around my legs as I ran. I slowed down to a walk, remembering that after hard exercise it’s good to ease off gradually so the lactic acid in the muscles doesn’t congeal. “That’s what makes your muscles sore,” the gym instructor had said. “Never stop cold after hard exercise. Come down slowly. You’ll hurt less later.”
 
I listened with attentiveness to anything to do with physical culture because I understood that it put me more in touch with myself. I respected my body because it was the only one I had. I wanted to make it last. But, my God, it could be painful, especially when I had let fifteen years pass with no exercise at all to speak of. That was really dumb, I thought as I walked. All those years of acting, I thought my body wasn’t that important. I had had good formal training as a dancer when I was young; that would be enough, I thought. I was wrong. People have to take care of their bodies every day or they can wake up one morning and find it won’t do what they want it to. Then they’ll say they are old. I always felt old when I was not in touch with my body. And the process of connecting with my body put me more in touch with the real me inside of that body. And what was the real me? What was it that made me question and search and think and feel? Was it just the physical brain, the little gray cells, or was it the mind which was something more than brain? Did “mind,” or perhaps “personality,” include what people called the “soul”? Were they all separate, or was being human a recognition that one was the sum of all these parts, and if so, how did they fit together?
 
That is what this book is about … it’s about the experience of getting in touch with myself when I was in my early forties; it’s about what the experience did to my mind, to my forbearance, to my spirit, and for my patience and belief. It’s about the connection between mind, body, and spirit. And what I learned as a result has enabled me to get on with the rest of my life as an almost transformed human being.
 
So this book is about a quest for my self—a quest which took me on a long journey that was gradually revealing and at all times simply amazing. I tried to keep an open mind as I went because I found myself gently but firmly exposed to dimensions of time and space that heretofore, for me, belonged in science fiction or what I would describe as the occult. But it happened to me. It happened slowly. It happened at a pace that apparently was peculiarly my own, as I believe all people experience such events. People progress according to what they’re ready for. I must have been ready for what I learned because it was the right time.