The Tao of George

There’s a reason why “It’s A Wonderful Life” is such an enduring film—and it’s probably not what you think.

It’s not just that certain copyright and licensing issues led to it airing every night on every station every holiday season for many years, making it as much a part of Christmas as trimming the tree and exchanging gifts.

It’s not just that it’s sweet or sentimental or so called Capracorn.

It’s not just that it’s an exceptionally written, perfectly acted and directed, inspiring and entertaining movie.

It’s the Taoist-like balance it achieves, the yin-yang of its light and darkness, the truth of human existence it captures and conveys.

Birthed out of failure, “It’s a Wonderful Life” began as a short story titled, “The Greatest Gift,” written by Philip Van Doren Stern, who, after failing to find a publisher for it, made it into a Christmas card, which he mailed to two-hundred family members and friends. Originally purchased by RKO Pictures as a vehicle for Cary Grant, three different scripts were written and rejected before the project was shelved and Grant went on to make the “Bishop’s Wife”—all of which led to Frank Capra getting involved and the success the film ultimately became. Of course, success is relative. This seminal, among-the-best-of-all-times movie was a box office failure when first released in 1946.

George Bailey is a small-town man whose life seems so desperate he contemplates suicide. He had always wanted to leave Bedford Falls to see the world, but circumstances and his own good heart have led him to stay. He sacrificed his education for his brother's, kept the family-run savings and loan afloat, protected the town from the avarice of the greedy banker Mr. Potter, and married his childhood sweetheart. As he prepares to jump from a bridge, Clarence, his guardian angel, intercedes; showing him what life would have become for the residents of Bedford Falls if he had never lived—a hellish existence in the greed-driven, dark, depraved Pottersville.

Clarence tells George, “See, you’ve really had a wonderful life.”

But has he?

As “wonderful” as George’s life is—particularly in its positive impact on others, it’s not all wonderful—or even good. There’s a price to pay for living in a small town—or any size place where you don’t fit in. There’s a price to pay for honesty and integrity, for a life lived in service to others and high ideals, a high price for not having a price. The biggest price George pays is an internal one, intellectual and spiritual, the anguish and frustration that comes from being awake, surrounded by those who slumber.

Appropriately black and white, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is profoundly Taoist in its push-pull of yin and yang. These two forces, and the interplay between them, arise out of emptiness—symbolized by the empty circle they are drawn into. George embodies, and is surrounded by, and is acutely aware of, light and dark, soft and hard, masculine and feminine, receptive and aggressive, but mostly the empty that is around and in and between all things. And it’s this balance of the lighter and darker sides of existence that elevate this film to greatness. Without the one, you’d have silly, sweet, sentimental swill. Without the other, you’d have only meaninglessness and darkness. But the two together achieve a complexity and profundity that so mirrors reality it gives rise to the notion that life can actually imitate art.

Many viewers seem to miss how truly dark the film actually is, but it’s this ingredient, this rich yinish quality that enables “It’s a Wonderful Life” to earn its inspiration and ending.

The film’s shadow side doesn’t just appear when Bedford Falls transforms into Pottersville. It’s been there all along—showing through the skein between realities, in the injustice and inequity, in the claustrophobia and frustration, in the way the rich and powerful oppress the poor and disenfranchised.

Perhaps more than an alternate reality, Pottersville is the same reality as Bedford Falls—only seen differently. George Bailey, a truly good, kind, and decent person projects a goodness and decency on the world he inhabits. To him, the town is Bedford Falls. Old Man Potter has always seen it as Pottersville. The rich and powerful always view the world as theirs—their right, their entitlement, their prize, their reward. Instead of Pottersville being the version of reality that resulted from George never being born, maybe it’s what happens when a good man like George finally allows the selfishness and brutishness and meaner aspects of lesser men to cloud his vision, when he gives up and gives in, quits fighting the good fight and turns the whole thing over to them.

The Tao is the way or path (a term used in a lot of the world’s great wisdom traditions). It is ancient. Ineffable. Unnamable (“the Tao that can be named is not the Tao”). And you don’t have to be Taoist to appreciate its universals truths or the wisdom of its most sacred text, the Tao Te Ching.

This way or channel is the flow of the universe. True fulfillment and serenity comes from living in harmony with it, walking the path. Like us, George spends much of his life fighting the path, stubbornly resisting the way, insisting he has a better way. Invariably, when he surrenders and begins to travel the way he glimpses his best self and begins to practice wei wu wei—doing without doing, actionless action, that in-the-zone, alignment with the Tao, where we, like water, flow in a stream of effortless action/in-action, yielding, becoming inseparable, indistinguishable from the creator and all of creation. Truly one.

But George went to some very dark places before aligning himself with the Tao, before giving in and becoming truly free.

Like religion and philosophy, we turn to art for meaning—and few films are as meaningful and as much about meaning as “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That an average George can make a difference, can have meaning by giving meaning to others gives us hope, challenges us to make a difference. Viewing the film is a religious experience for me. Profound. Transcendent. Trasformational. Watching it each year is a rite, a ritual, a memorial and remembrance.

For me, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is both inspirational and cathartic. It moves me like no other movie. I laugh and cry (a lot). I am George Bailey. I am small town. I have a small life. My Bedford Falls existence could easily be Pottersville if not for love, for art, for meaning, for family and friends. I’m on a quest, searching for meaning, attempting to walk the way. I want to make a difference in the world and doubt that I am doing much of anything that matters to much of anybody. George inspires me to give, to take the small gifts I’ve been given, like a few measly loaves and fish, and share them with others. It’s what Philip Van Doren Stern did with his story, “The Greatest Gift.” It’s what I’m attempting to do at this very moment by writing and giving away this column, for I believe what is written beneath the picture of George’s dad in his office: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”

The Most Wonderful Films of the Year

What is it about Christmas movies?

I don’t mean Oscar contenders released during the holidays, but films in which Christmas is actually a character.

Why are the good ones SOOOO good?

What makes movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Love Actually” among my favorite films of all time, and why do I return to “The Holiday,” “The Family Stone,” “The Ice Harvest,” “This Christmas,” and “Home for the Holidays” time and time again—and not just in December?

I think it’s a number of factors really—many of which are the very ones that make this season the most wonderful time of the year.

There is much that is tired and trite, hollow, cynical, and sentimental about the holidays. Much cashing in. Sometimes the entire environment sounds as shallow and tinny as poorly recorded, overplayed Christmas music on small, cheap department store speakers. Too much of the season is about buying, spending, acquiring—and ridiculous reciprocation calculations (Should I get him a present? He’s probably gonna get me one. We’ve got to invite them to our party since they invited us to theirs, right?)

The crass commercialism of the holiday supposedly in honor of the impoverished peasant living among and fighting for the marginalized, subsistence, villagers and day laborers of First Century Palestine is, like so many things related to him, a most tragic irony.

What is bought and sold more than anything else during this season is us—our very souls.

And yet. And yet. In spite, of all these violent assaults on Jesus, all these adulterations and perversions of the meaning of his life, something sacred, something magic, something undeniable survives. This, more than anything else, demonstrates the true power of the man, his message, and the holiday that honors and celebrates his birth. That something of the ineffable, something of the transformational, something of the true spark of divinity survives the full on assault of the American capitalist religion is truly a Christmas miracle.

And the best Christmas movies embody this. They tap into the magic and they quiet all the clamor to capture the love.

Jesus dared to live love. His life (and too soon his death) was the result of his conviction that God is love, that God loves everyone equally and unconditionally. (It’s another tragic irony that the religion that rose up around him has all but lost this). Jesus’ radical, yet only-hope-for-humanity notion that God is not an angry, distant deity, but a present loving parent who loves us no matter what we do (or fail to, including living out love) survives in spite of the religion that bears his name’s insistence on being like every other religion. And it somehow survives Christmas, too.

Love survives.

We ignore, abandon, dilute, and contaminate love, and yet love remains. Mixing our needs and projections and illusions and neuroses and insecurities and attempts to control with love can’t kill love any more than mixing our greed and gluttony and selfishness and tribalism and sentimentality with Christmas can kill its spirit. We alter it to be sure—and what remains often bears little resemblance to love or Christmas—yet we can still glimpse love, still feel the meaning and magic beneath, above, around, and, on occasion, through the small tears in the fabric of the blanket of commercialism smothering Christmas.

The best of Christmas movies provide us with this glimpse of love, which is captured so brilliantly by Richard Curtis in the prologue to his Christmas masterpiece, “Love Actually.”

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion . . . love actually is all around.”

The characters in “Love Actually” or “The Holiday” risk and receive love, and it’s this not particularly dignified or newsworthy phenomenon that is a metaphor in microcosm for the macrocosmic love Christmas is meant to commemorate and celebrate.

Among the best movies ever made, “”It’s A Wonderful Life” is also about love at Christmas—about a good man who truly lives in love by turning his back on greed and selfishness and extending himself on the behalf of others (the textbook definition of love). It captures love on many levels—the love of a couple (George and Mary, “George Bailey I’ll love you to the day I die”), the love of family (both George’s home of origin and the one he and Mary build), the love of others, and community, and ultimately, the divine source of all love (which comes to George through Clarence and eventually others). This last is particularly important, and the meaning of Christmas—we experience God’s love through those others who are willing to be conduits of it for us; others experience God’s love through us when we are willing to undergo ego death, becoming empty of anything but love.

The best of Christmas movies, like the best of art and religion and philosophy, remind us of what really matters. They inspire us toward the best versions of ourselves and provide us with much needed perspective. They say, like all truth, that love, not status or money or power or presents or bills or public opinion, matters most of all, and, as Clarence wrote to George, “No man is failure who has friends.”

The End of the World As We Know It

If the Philistines are at the gate of American culture, it’s on the inside.

We’re witnessing the end of an era, the twilight of American culture.

As a wise person once said, “America has become a storefront for a corporate mob.”

We are a culture of constant consumption, gluttons who mostly stuff ourselves with regurgitated entertainment devoid of anything meaningful or of lasting value. As social critic James Twitchell put it, “There is barely an empty space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages.”

So many things being sold to us. So much noise.

We live in a “systematic suppression of silence,” George Steiner said.

It’s the end of the world as we know it—and how do most of us feel? Just fine. At least we do as long as they keep us distracted, entertained, medicated, and consuming.

Morris Berman says in his book, “The Twilight of American Culture” that there are four factors present in the collapse of a civilization. Name one of them that doesn’t apply to us:

1) Accelerating social and economic inequality.
2) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems.
3) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness.
4) Spiritual death—the emptying out of cultural content and repackaging it into formulas.

In the same book, Berman writes, “We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotion/commercial bullshit that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”

Are we talking about the Roman Empire or the American one?

According to Sallust, Rome in 80 B.C.E. was a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, and a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows.

Sounds like us to me. Our sickeningly greedy culture is of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. Too many are numb to and ignorant of everything that truly matters. And we are a public diverted by NASCAR, sitcoms, reality TV, transient, trashy novels, trite, tiresome, retread movies, extremist political pundits, and the pathetic freak show parade of celebrity culture—and I’m not even talking about the too-easy targets of Palin and Paris, The Situation and the Octomom, and Bush and Beck.

We celebrate ignorance and inanity and incivility—and we like it loud and obnoxious and arrogant.

Are we Philistines? Read the definition and decide for yourself— a smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values.

The problem isn’t the occasional consumption of cultural crap. It’s the steady diet of it—it’s not knowing it’s crap.

You may wonder what’s made me so cheery, why a hopeful, glass-half-full-guy like me has suddenly become a sandwich-boarded sidewalk seer wildly and wide-eyedly proclaiming the end is nigh.

Easy. It’s my front-row seat to the apocalyptic end of art and culture, justice and compassion. But the reason I’m ranting about it right now is an incident that happened last week in (of all places) New York at a place known for enlightening events—the 92nd Street Y.

This particular event was a conversation between Steve Martin, the writer and actor, and Deborah Solomon, who writes a weekly interview column for “The New York Times Magazine.”

About halfway through their conversation, a Y representative handed Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Martin’s career in show business and less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, “An Object of Beauty.”

The following day, the Y sent out an apology for the event and the promise of a refund.

“The Y never told me what they wanted,” Solomon said, adding that Martin, a longtime friend, had asked her to conduct the interview, and that she determined that a conversation focused on the art world and his book seemed most timely and interesting. “Frankly, you would think that an audience in New York, at the 92nd Street Y, would be interested in hearing about art and artists. I had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it’s like to host the Oscars or appear in “It’s Complicated” with Alec Baldwin. I think the Y, which is supposedly a champion of the arts, has behaved very crassly and is reinforcing the most philistine aspects of a culture that values celebrity and award shows over art.”

And I couldn’t agree more.

Entertain us or we’ll whine and want our money back. Make us laugh, not think!

But the event and the response it received points out part of the problem. Steve Martin, who happens to be a good writer and storyteller, is a celebrity. His novels most likely get published and read because he’s a movie star. It seems to me that the very thing that gets him published and reviewed and read (or at least purchased), namely celebrity, is the very thing that came back to bite him in this instance. Celebrity culture sycophants wanted to hear not about art and literature, but mindless movie star trivia.

Celebrity books are a bane for novelists like me. Rare is the day that goes by that I’m not working hard to become a better writer, but because like Emily, I’m nobody, who are you? I send my books out into the loud, crowded world armed with only reviews and word-of-mouth. Recently, I was doing a signing in Tampa at a Barnes and Noble, for which a very modest crowd showed up, when the manager told me that just a few days before, the store couldn’t hold the huge throng that turned out for Tori Spelling’s new book.

Who knew Tori Spelling wrote? Let alone had more than one book out?

How should it make me feel that Tori Spelling, Brittany Spears, and Justin Beiber’s books outsell mine? (By a lot!)

Serious literature, fine film, great art—all still exist, but are too often buried under the loud, crass, kitsch, shallow, hollow, derivative drivel of consumertainment. We’ve blurred the lines between news and entertainment, between art and entertainment, between what truly matters and what matters not at all, and it’s making us trivial, silly people.

We pay for diversion, to be distracted, to keep from truly being moved or inspired or challenged, to fill the void with noise to keep ourselves from meditating on our mortality, from the time and space and silence required for serious thinking and reading and contemplating and the crafting of soul. And we’re doing it everywhere—not just in tiny Deep South towns, but in New York City.

Will you join me in the revolution? Let’s start the avalanche. Just because poison is being served doesn’t mean we have to eat it. When’s the last time you challenged yourself with a work of art? How long has it been since you refused to be bought or distracted or mesmerized into moronity?

Today’s the day. Turn off the TV. Turn your back on the insulting 3D idiocy at the Cineplex. Close the contrivance and crass manipulation of hyper-commercial novels. No longer submit to the artless assault of shallow entertainment. And begin your search for works that challenge and inspire, provoke and nurture, educate and entertain.

What Sven Birkerts said applies to all great art: “If literature survives at all, it is as a retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.”

Refuse to assimilate today! Crack open a good book and join me in a revolution that feels like an inspiriting monastic retreat.

Life is but a Dream

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sweet, sad, sublime, “Jack Goes Boating” is a small film about the biggest of things—things like love and loneliness and relationships and dreams and imagination and fear and betrayal and unforgiveness and life and death. It deals delicately with the beginning of one relationship and the deterioration and death of another.

Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman—who also directs the film) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are two single people who on their own might continue to recede into the anonymous background of the city, but in each other begin to find the courage and desire to pursue their budding relationship. In contrast, the couple that introduced them, Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega), are confronting unresolved issues in their marriage.

Jack is a limo driver with vague dreams of landing a job with the MTA and an obsession with reggae that has prompted him to begin a half-hearted attempt at growing dreadlocks. He spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend and fellow driver Clyde and Clyde’s wife Lucy.

The couple set Jack up with Connie, Lucy’s co-worker at a Brooklyn funeral home. Being with Connie inspires Jack to learn to cook, pursue a new career and take swimming lessons from Clyde so he can give Connie the romantic boat ride she dreams of. But as Jack and Connie cautiously circle commitment, Clyde and Lucy’s marriage begins to disintegrate. From there, we watch as each couple comes face to face with the inevitable path of their relationship.

The four characters who people “Jack Goes Boating” are isolated icebergs, adrift, bumping into one another, the bulk of their beings unseen, floating beneath the surface, each deeper and darker than they appear.

Jack seems simple, even slow, but he is guileless and deliberate. He, no less than Connie, Clyde, and Lucy, is wounded, suffering from insult and injury, but most of all from isolation.

Jack and Connie, at the very beginning of their relationship, bring into it the damage and baggage from their previous lives and relationships. Clyde and Lucy have not only this, but the open wounds they’ve inflicted on one another. Lucy tells Jack, “You’ve never been in a relationship. A lot happens. Lot of good things. Lot of things you wouldn’t wish on your enemy.” Lucy has hurt Clyde in ways she wouldn’t wish on her enemy, and though Clyde says he’s worked through them, there’s real, deep-seated pain just beneath his mask of near constant conviviality, just behind his kind eyes.

Perhaps more than anything else, “Jack Goes Boating” is about dreams. Dreaming—actually imagining a different reality, is the beginning of all things. “Jack Goes Boating” vividly and profoundly demonstrates the connection between imagination and accomplishment, between visualization and manifestation, and shows how closely and intimately related to love they are.

On the shelf beside Connie’s bed, half hidden by a picture frame is a word carved from wooden letters affixed to a stand. Only three letters of the word are visible, but I’m certain the word is dream. It sits there next to where Connie dreams, where Jack and Connie lie as they softly say what they’re looking for in their “dream” partner.

Jack and Connie dream of lives different than the ones they have—lives less lonely, lives lived in love with a loved one.

What is required for such lives? The desire, of course, then the dream—the imagining, the visualizing—and then the leap, the choice to live in love not fear, the action that enables love to conquer, then vanquish, fear.
It all begins with the thing Einstein said was far more important than intellect. Imagination.

In the myth of the Tower of Babel, when the Lord comes down and sees what the humans are up to—building a tower to heaven, building a civilization, making a name for themselves—the Lord says because of their imaginations nothing they dream up and set their collective minds and hands to will be impossible for them, and so confused their language so they couldn’t understand each other. Like Jack, and the people in the story of the Tower of Babel, our greatest limitation is our imagination.

To accomplish what he does, Jack uses visualization—actually, vividly imagining his actions before he takes them—something Hoffman, the director, uses to full affect.

Creative visualization refers to the practice of seeking to affect the outer world via changing our thoughts. It’s the technique of using our imaginations to visualize specific behaviors or events occurring in our lives. The practice is a common spiritual exercise and is often used in sports psychology.

Connie wants to go boating. Jack wants to take her, but can’t swim. Connie wants someone to cook for her, something she’s never had. Jack wants to, but doesn’t know how. Through love—love as an act of imagination, love as an action, love as both the dreaming and doing that conquers all fear—Jack becomes an excellent swimmer and cook, heroic in the way only the truest lovers can be.

“Jack Goes Boating” is witty and funny and charming and likable, but it’s also, by turns, sad, even heartbreaking. Amy Ryan, as ever, is extraordinary. Philip Seymour Hoffman is, as usual, brilliant and beautiful, and in addition to being one of my favorite actors, doing the most interesting and profoundly moving work these days, he may also soon be one of my favorite directors. He’s off to an amazing start. Go boating and swimming and cooking with Jack as soon as you can. Learn from his fearlessness. Be inspired by his love. And like him, visualize the life you want to have.

I drove over a hundred miles to go boating with Jack. The film is so good it’d be worth a trip ten times that. Maybe more. No, definitely more. Infinitely more.

Alone With All That Can Happen

The morning after watching “Solitary Man,” I woke up feeling utterly and completely alone. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with the movie—I often experience an intense sense of isolation—but the timing was interesting and thought-provoking.

Being alone isn’t the same as being lonely. Many times I feel the most connected when I am most alone—something Lord Byron captured so beautifully in his phrase, “In solitude, where we are least alone.”

Being with others isn’t the same as not being lonely. Certain people, certain settings and situations, make me feel more lonely, not less. A social gathering involving small talk, cocktail chatter, mundane, surfaces inanities—and what social gathering doesn’t include such things—usually makes me feel far more isolated and alone than when I’m actually by myself.

Whether we’re alone or with others, in one sense we’re always ultimately alone. As Thomas Wolfe said, “Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every human.”

Even as we appear to be sharing the same experiences—including intensely intimate experiences like making love or sharing a meal or talking about God—we’re always having our own unique experience. Oscar Wilde’s observation that there are as many publics as there are people is true of everything. It’s why I say there are some six and half billion gods. No two of us have identical notions of what the word ‘god’ means. So whatever God is and is not, we’re left with our beliefs and perceptions, and though heavily influenced by culture and family, indoctrination and education, they’re still utterly and uniquely only our own.

Beneath all our labels, beyond all our associations and group identities, it’s just us. Ultimately alone. Solitary us. Yet there is an us. We are part of a planet, a species, an interdependent system. We are able to connect, to touch each others’ souls, be inside one another in profound and meaningful ways. At this very moment, you and I are having a personal, intimate (hopefully) meaningful exchange. I am offering you the water of my words and you are drinking them in.

And yet. And yet.

Even as we have truly deep and intensely intimate connections, we remain, in a very real and certain sense, alone. And it’s out of that aloneness, that sometimes painful experience of isolation, we reach out—out of our solitude—to an other.

Solitary means “being, living, or going alone or without companions; saddened by isolation; keeping a prisoner apart from others; being at once single and isolated; occurring singly and not as part of a group or cluster.”

Occurring singly and not being part of a group is a good thing. Emerson said, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

In one sense, the more evolved and self-actualized, the more true to our quidity, the more we refuse to conform, the more alone we will be—less able to fit, less a part of group think and speak. We will not benefit from the safety found in numbers. But this evolution of our beings will also simultaneously, counter intuitively, lead us to a greater awareness of our connectedness with all people, with all things. Connected at very deep levels; completely unconnected at shallower levels.

These are thoughts I’m having as I think of solitude and my experience in proximity to the film. They are not necessarily in the film except in very implicit ways. Ben Kalmen’s solitude originates from the deepest most profound place—his mortality—but his outward isolation isn’t from self-actualization, but its opposite, not out of love, but fear.

“Solitary Man” tells the story of Ben Kalmen, a fifty-something New Yorker and former successful car dealer, who through his own bad choices lost his entire business.

When the film opens, Ben’s on the verge of a comeback, but some of the same motivations that led to his demise are threatening to take him down again. He’s divorced from Nancy, his college sweetheart and the one person who knows him better than anyone. Although he still finds the time to hang out with his daughter Susan and his adoring grandson, she breaks off contact when she discovers he's seeing one of her friends. His girlfriend Jordan is the daughter of a very influential businessman who's on the board of a major auto manufacturer.

If Ben can just keep his hubris in check for a little while longer, he will be back as big as ever. But circumstances place him in very close proximity with the one girl he shouldn’t touch, throwing everything into jeopardy.

“Solitary Man” is solid story elevated by great performances. Michael Douglas is brilliant as Ben, and the other players hovering around the edges of his solitariness hang right there with him.

Ben’s isolation is more an acting out, a childish, defensive way of actually isolating others that leads him to himself be isolated. He’s a solitary man because of bad behavior, because he’s incapable of intimacy.

The sense of isolation—even the experience itself—is part of the human condition. It is not the same as never connecting, as being unable or unwilling to—which seems the case for Ben.

Even in our ultimate aloneness we can connect with others. In fact, we can connect because of it, through it. Sharing our feelings of isolation with another human who is open about his or her own feelings of separation frees us from our solitary confinement prison cell.

Solitude is a good and necessary part of existence. We are our best selves when we have the time and space to be ourselves, to just be—in the beauty and stillness of silence and solitude. Einstein said, “I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

It comes down to balance. Too much or too little or the wrong kind of solitude negatively impacts our souls. Finding trusted friends who are themselves seeking this same balance and committing to each other to aid in the process is invaluable. As Rilke so wisely put it, “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

Learn from Ben’s mistakes. Identify those in your life who protect your good solitude and make sure you’re protecting theirs. And in those times when you feel all alone, be fully present, and don’t just be alone. Be alone with the promise and possibility of all that can happen.

A Prescription for Society’s Sick Soul

Recently, I ended a column with these words:

Story can be sacred.
Movies can be magic.
Sharing the meaningful ones with our children is nothing short of shamanistic.

I’ve long considered what I do as a novelist, as a storyteller, as a teacher, to be shamanistic. If story is sacred, then to be a storyteller is a sacred calling. It’s how I view what I do, why I take it so seriously.

When I closed my column titled “Film School” with the word “shamanistic,” I knew I’d eventually revisit the concept here, but when, this past weekend at the 11th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference, Connie May Fowler referred to writers as shamans, I knew it would be sooner rather than later.

It was out of my conviction that story is sacred and storytelling is a sacred calling that I started the Gulf Coast Writers Conference over a decade ago, and as I listened to Connie’s keynote address this year, heard her talk about how important story is, how writers hallucinate as they write and readers hallucinate as they read and how spiritual and magic that is, I knew I was in the presence of a kindred spirit, a sister, a fellow shaman.

Interestingly, we initially called the conference the Gulf Coast Writers and Storytellers Conference, and only shortened it over the years out of necessity. Our conference is a celebration and exploration of story, and is, therefore, a gathering of shamans.

Shaman is an anthropological term referring to the spiritual leader of indigenous or native peoples. Shamans are healers and priests and counselors and storytellers.

Shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit world. They treat ailments and illnesses by mending the soul. By alleviating issues affecting the soul, they restore individuals’ entire being to balance and wholeness. They also enter supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans visit other worlds to bring guidance to misguided souls, to alleviate suffering caused by soul sickness, removing elements that were never intended to be there. As priests or intermediaries, shamans stand between two worlds—one seen, the other not—serving as a bridge between the two.

A priest or priestess is a go-between, a person straddling two worlds, having a foot planted in each. He or she is a messenger, a representative, an emissary. The same is true of storytellers. We plumb the depths of the underworld and being back messages. We dig deep beneath the surface and excavate the stories buried there.

I became aware that I was a shaman very early in life, and became active in adolescence—studying story, using story, telling stories, writing stories. My pursuit of my calling has led me to study religion, philosophy, psychology, and story itself. Like Connie, and so many other shamans I know, I’m not a hobbyist, not doing this just for fun. I’m driven to tell stories, obsessed with story itself and continually improving my storytelling techniques.

It’s an odd and interesting time to be a shaman. I’m a shaman in a culture and at a time when serious story and careful, sacred storytelling is devalued, where the novel is increasingly marginalized, yet where, ironically, our need for narrative has never been greater. As a people, as a nation, as a culture, we are soul sick and need the mending, balance, and wholeness only sacred, true story can bring.

There’s so much noise in our world, so much inanity, so much that assaults our senses, hearts, and minds. So much. Just so so much.

If we’re not very careful to filter input, to guard our quite time, to thoughtfully and mindfully select our shamans and stories, then the vast majority of what we’re assaulted with is shallow, silly, empty, and corrosive. Like junk food, much of what’s on offer is wasted calories that neither nourishes or satisfies.

Sacred story is transformative. It speaks to the deepest part of us and calls forth our best selves. The journey of narrative mirrors the journey we’re on, and reminds us that it’s the epic hero’s journey as ancient as time and myth, as old as soul, originating when consciousness did.

For our souls’ sake we should honor true shamans and the sacred stories they tell. We should open ourselves up to the magic of story and let it work its wondrous work in us, welcoming the expanding and challenging, emptying and refilling.

Don’t settle for substitutes. Seek out true shamans and the magic stories they tell today, and began sharing your own true, sacred stories with others. If we all got in touch with the shaman in our souls, it would change not only us, and our children, but the whole world entire.

Once Again and Again and Again

A man and a woman.

A mother and a father.

Divorced.

Having failed in relationships, trying again.

After dating a while, they’re ready to have sex—or think they are.

Nervous.

Scared.

Risking. Pressing through.

Then, suddenly, they go from awkward and uncomfortable to her crying and him unable to continue.

Is it possible you might be who I need you to be? she asks.

It is. He is—and is not. And that’s life—or at least a reflection of it—art that is a recognizable reflection of human experiences more than a few of us are likely to have.

It’s a tender, true, affecting scene—one of many, not from a feature film, but from a network television show.

There are actually “film” people who disdain television, as if those who work in it—writers, directors, actors, producers—are less somehow, as if the screen size isn’t the only thing that’s smaller. But some of the very best filmed fiction is made for television. Shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Six Feet Under,” “Gilmore Girls,” “House,” “Mad Men,” and others are as good as anything on offer at the local movie theater—and these series are doing the equivalent of several feature-length films season after season.

If it’s true that TV is a writer’s medium and film is a director’s, it stands to reason that the best television has to offer will be richer, deeper, more intellectual and emotionally satisfying than all but the very best movies. Television allows for the time it takes to tell a complex tale while truly exploring the characters propelling it forward. It’s why in general, novels adapt better to TV than film. It’s also why so many accomplished and acclaimed writers, producers, actors, and even directors are drawn to television—particularly cable.

Recently, “Entertainment Weekly” listed what it deems as the five best divorce movies ever: “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “The War of the Roses,” “An Unmarried Woman,” and “The Odd Couple,” and maybe they are, but none of them delves as deeply or does so with such sustained exploration as does a too-early canceled TV show.

Divorce is death. A painful end to something at one point you never wanted to end—and maybe still don’t. Failure. Rejection. Disappointment. Embarrassment.

Divorce is death, yet life continues. Not only your life, but that of your onetime spouse. Like an apparition, your ex haunts your life, a continual reminder of what was, of what might have been, of what is, of what can never be.

Divorce opens a family up and invites new people in. Lawyers. Counselors. Friends. Lovers. Strangers.

In the best of situations, divorce is difficult.

And this difficulty is handled deftly in the divorce drama, “Once and Again”—one of the best adult hour-long dramas network television has ever produced.
Lily Manning (played by the breathtakingly beautiful and perfectly cast, Sela Ward) is a 40ish suburban soccer mom living in Deerfield, Illinois. Recently separated from her philandering husband Jake (Jeffrey Nordling), Lily is raising her two daughters, insecure, anxiety-ridden 14-year-old Grace (Julia Whelan), and wide-eyed, innocent 9-year-old Zoe (Meredith Deane). For support, she turns to her more free-spirited younger sister, Judy (Marin Hinkle), with whom she works at their bookstore called My Sister's Bookstore.

Lily’s life changes when she meets Rick Sammler (Billy Campbell) in the principal’s office of Grace’s school. Rick is a single father and co-head of an architectural firm, Sammler/Cassili Associates, which is located in downtown Chicago. Rick has been divorced from the rigid Karen (Susanna Thompson) for three years and has two children, Eli (Shane West), a 16-year-old basketball player with a learning disability, and sensitive 12-year-old Jessie (Evan Rachel Wood), who longs for the days before her family’s disintegration.

Lily and Rick share an immediate mutual attraction and begin dating. Their budding relationship causes problems in both of their respective families. Grace strongly objects to Lily and Rick’s relationship as she still hopes to see her parents get back together. Karen, a public interest attorney at the downtown law firm of Harris, Riegert, and Sammler, is worried about the toll Rick’s new relationship would take on their children, particularly Jessie, who is shy and emotionally fragile. She is also working through her own feelings of jealousy that Rick is in a new serious relationship.

“Once and Again” was created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the same team behind “Thirtysomething,” and both shows demonstrate their brilliance for dramas that capture the nuance of entire epochs of modern American life.

Though the show begins with and centers around the romance and relationship between Lily and Rick, it also deals extensively with their children and to a lesser degree with their exes, Jake and Karen, and their ongoing struggles to find peace, joy, and love in the post-divorce environment.

Like “Thirtysomething,” “Once and Again” is smart, literate, well-written, affecting, timely, timeless, and dramatic without too often being melodramatic.

It’s also at times dizzily, intoxicatingly, wildly romantic. Rick and Lily have an earned and unexpected intensity and intimacy that combines the best of heady, youthful infatuation with the scars and wisdom age and experience and rejection and failure and the disappointment that divorce brings.

Few things are as therapeutic as talking. Few things need the healing therapy talk can bring as much as divorce. Each episode of “Once and Again,” as they’re dealing with divorce and death and life and love and betrayal and fear and loss and hope, has the characters, shot in black and white, sit and talk—to us, the audience, making us their therapist, making us privy to their most hidden thoughts and feelings, making us more complicit in their lies and lives—and more compassionate. This makes TV more like a book—we know what characters are thinking, get to be in their heads, know what the other characters they interacting with cannot.

In “Once and Again,” as in life, the past is prologue. Everything that comes around, comes around, not just once, but again. And again. Every seeming new issue in every seeming new relationship bares an amazing similarity to the issues and relationships that came before. We are products. We are patterns. We have dynamics, issues, wounds, experiences. We carry who we are into each new relationship, including what we’ve learned and lost, gained and changed, which makes the biggest part of our new relationships not new at all.

Divorce is difficult and dramatic and traumatic, and there’s no one who hasn’t been touched by its ripples. Fortunately, through story, we can learn and heal and grow and become more and better, and be our best selves even in brokenness, and, as far as divorce dramas go, “Once and Again” is a good place to start. Give it a try. You might watch it once. Or, like me, you might watch it again and again.