When the Journey Begins

Hi,Boomers,

I talked about you all weekend at the Tucson Book Festival. It was the first time I appeared in public with my book, Sixty, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer, except for my book signings. This was a big venue - the fourth largest book festival in the U.S. I had a booth all to myself, next to the CareMore Unit with a group of the most fun guys (they took blood pressure and established glucose levels) and a couple of ragtag men left over from the Stanley and Livingston scientific expedition in the Congo. I didn't quite get what kind of books they were selling but I loved their authentic costumes.

My booth was bare with just a table and a chair. But they had put a sign above the booth with the title of my book. I loved that sign. I had no cover for my ugly table so I went hunting for a table cloth. As I weaved my way around the booths that were setting up at 7:30 Saturday morning, I saw in the distance the end of a sign above a booth: Venice, CA. I got terribly excited and ran over to the booth to meet a fellow yogi from Santa Monica who wrote children's books. It was an incredible beginning to my two day adventure. Etan was a light that shone bright during the weekend. While were talking, a very nice man came by wheeling his boxes of books. He told us that for some political reasons he lost his booth. Something about a conflict with other people who were selling cookbooks, and he wondered if Etan wanted to share his booth. His cookbook was a visual feast of mouthwatering pies.

Here was a moment out of so many memorable moments that touched my heart. There was a silent pause as I waited for Etan's response. Etan wrote a series of children's books that were sensational and he had energy and salesmanship that rocked the festival. Etan was thinking.

He worked mostly alone, but I was a newbie an I didn't know the territory or the politics of book festivals.

"Let me think about it," Etan said. "Come back in a few minutes."

Stan, the baker of pies, was totally cool. He smiled and walked away with dignity. Etan and I continued to talk about yoga and I bought a few of his children's books for my grandsons. And then Stan came back to us. Etan looked up as he approached. I was just about to tell Stan that I'd be glad to have company in my booth. It seemed awful bare in there. Then Etan said it was fine if he took the corner table. In a way, I was disappointed because I felt I wanted to be generous, but Etan looked happy and so did Stan. So all was good.

I asked Stan if he had an extra table cloth. He gave me some blue plastic, and I went on my merry way to my empty booth. I gazed at my box of books with tape still across the top and decided to set the books on a table. The morning sun was heating up and bearing down forcefully on our row of booths. Out of some nervousness, I kept futzing with the arrangment of books because I had no signage, no flowers, no decorations. I took out my IHome speakers and played tango music. The day was beginning.

I met one of my neighbors. Penny published books and she was a competent and confident single woman who had an incredible handle on the publishing business. She became one of the most important people I met during the weekend. And there were many women who came up to me to introduce themselves and to take me by the hand to other people at the festival who were going to play a significant role in my future goals.

And the books sold, and the people came up to talk to me about the boomer generation, what was it like to live during the beatnik generation in San Francisco during the early 60s. There was dialogue about existentialism, Sartre, Camus, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Vietnam, the greed, hubris, and total disregard for those who were hurt by the U.S. financial markets. They were also very concerned about the lack of urgency to preserve our natural environment.

What I found interesting was that there was an equal number of men and women who approached my booth to discuss my book. I'm sure that at the outset they were attracted because of the title. It certainly wasn't the decor that attracted people to my booth. They found sixty, sex, & tango three words that required some discussion.

I began to think that the speech I was working on, the unbundling of the boomer mythology, was a topic that was very interesting to our generation. Everyone 60 and over wanted to dissect the various movements and social currents and psychological effects that the boomer generation had experienced and are still experiencing today. I found women to be more optimistic than men. But I found men to be more vocal about the economic nuances of what happened to our economy and how our generation would play out the next couple of decades. "What happens to us?" they asked.

What also surprised me was how many young men and women came to my booth to ask questions that related to the historical context of the boomer generation. Some were even curious about the meaning of being "beat." Of course, the sex part of the title was titillating to most everyone, but there wasn't much discourse on that. There was tango conversation to be sure, but most of the talk tended to be more pointed toward the quality of life in later years and what they should expect.

The question of what happens to us boomer now is an area that I want to try to answer in this speech I was writing. It turns out that the connectivity I had at the book festival with its most interesting and intelligent attendees were the key to my conceptualizing the answer. And I'm still working on it.

But what I take with me from this book festival is a sense that a representative population of Tucson are caring and generous and outgoing. It was a wonderful experience and I learned a great deal about the tone and style of boomers in a particular section of our country.

Namaste

Joan

The Mind/Body Politic

Hi, Boomers,

Watch out. I'm on a rant - of sorts.

But let's first start with the zen of yoga. Yoga is a spiritual practice that connects the mind and body through the breath. In Hatha Yoga - aka Vinyasa Yoga or Flow Yoga - every movement that a practioner takes on a yoga mat is accompanied by a breath, either an inhale or an exhale. In this manner, mind and body function as an organic whole. This is the zen of yoga.

Have you ever noticed that some people are not very adept at body movement or physical activity? The body is doing one thing - moving, shaking, eyes going every which way. The mind is essentially disconnected from the body. In other words, the mind cannot stop the body from its disassociated movements. It's plain and simple helter skelter. We always say in yoga: quiet eyes; quiet mind. When the the body is functioning on its own and the mind is going in another direction, we might notice that the person is clearly not present. Then what? There will be very little real communication and that's when the going gets very, very difficult.

My Jungian therapist once told me that when two people have a conversation there are really four people speaking. The Man: he is speaking from his anima (his female aspect) and from his animus (the male aspect). The Woman: she is speaking from her anima (her female aspect) and her animus (her male aspect). How complicated is that? No wonder conversation between the male and female is fraught with difficulty! Connect that concept to our national dialogue and it's no wonder than we have a nation at sixes and sevens.

So we've got people who have issues with mind/body connection and we have people who are speaking either more from their masculine or feminine side and there is miscommunication all over the place.

I'm not in favor of dismissing this situation with a clever bon mot, as in "it is what it is." Yes, it is what it is but unconscious communication this default system produces can be emotionally and psychologically damaging to a heathy mindset - to the body politic. Besides, it produces mounds of dysfunction in the form of lies and innuendos, self-deceit and egomaniacal behavior. I don't think politicians have ever heard the yogic phrase: Park your ego at the door.

The lack of a mind/body connection reminds me of America's Realpolitik at the present moment. The recession has brought out the very worst in people. As Maureen Dowd wrote in her op-ed piece in the New York Times, October 17, 2010, American's got a few too many mean girls extracting more than a pound of flesh from those "socialists" democrats as they campaign to become members of the legislative branch of government. "Man up, Harry Reid." It gives the term "mean girls" a new context.

As a result, our political landscape is subjecting itself to heaps of dysfunctional (unconscious) conversation among various individuals who represent particular groupings of like ideologies. They are much like talking heads. Their rants are is very disturbing. We are subjected to a wealth of opinions fabricated out of thin air and definitely not based on an intelligent understanding of economic facts and how these facts might play out in the future. Friday night I saw the head of the Tea Party from one of our states going "head to head" with a prize winning economic journalist from The Wall Street Journal. She couldn't be wrong on facts because she had committed them to memory and he obviously had no research behind his remarks because he, well, Neil Walker was just a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.

The spread of dis-information becomes emotionally pervasive and produces reactive and negative responses that, in turn, produces more of the same. No way to get off this treadmill. Closing the eyes won't help because you'll just fall off and get a huge black eye and a broken ankle.

Heaps of anger produces rage. And the rage is accompanied by irrational words that take the form of emotions; subsequently, the mind and the body become less and less connected. If one is full of rage, it's difficult to remember that the cataclysm began with the economy's collapse and Obama's election. And when things go bad, people demand a fall guy because none of the bad guys went to jail or paid any meaningful price for their crimes of greed. Greed upon greed... The name calling began in earnest on election day because for many hope was a word without meaning and a platitude without substance. And the real body politic fell away.

We boomers had our Cuban Missile crisis, our Vietnam, our Pentagon Papers, our Watergate, our Iranian hostage situation, our Iran Contra, and our skirmish in Grenada. We had plenty to be angry about in those decades, but our mind/body connection stayed relatively in tact.

Anger solves nothing, produces nothing but chaos. Then the mind descends into irrationality and paranoia. The empathic nature of man is nowhere to be found. And fools appear everywhere. There is gay bashing and witch hunting, as in "don't ask, don't tell," and bogeymen Madoffs, and Islamophobia, and identity disorder. All the while we are given the privilege of wearing guns at Starbucks and at political rallies and we bail out executives who lost our money and our homes while we suffer the results of deregulated financial institutions. And we are told in anger that we came out on the losing end. And it's always someone else's fault because we weren't paying attention to our government.

This economic recovery is agonizingly slow and no one has precise answers to make our future better. Those who are in positions to make decisions are sometimes as lost in their morass of facts and graphs and charts and sleepless nights and frustrating days as are ordinary citizens. Our nemesis is our need for instant gratification and the inability to see the macro - the larger picture of how to obtain a positive outcome to our economic malaise. The larger spiritual problem is that our minds and bodies do not act in consort. Until they unite in a compatible construct, we will stay in a state of suspended in unconsciousness instead in a state of grace.

I suggest the body politic take a pill and meditate.

Namaste

Joan

Digital Drag

Hi, Boomers,

Yes, we're boomers and we are living in the digital/computer age. Aren't we lucky.

Just this morning I was listening to my fav, Howard Stern, (don't condemn me to life imprisonment without possibility of parole) rant about living in this age of technology and, oh, yes, war. Let's not forget the a little over nine years of war initially in Iraq and now in full bloom in Afghanistan. News flash: the war in the Middle East has now surpassed the Vietnam War in length. Remember that war? Every night on the 6 o'clock news Eric Sevaried or Huntely an Brinkley brought us up close and personal a brutal war that played out in our kitchens while we ate dinner, or in our living rooms while we drank our nightly martini, or in our bedrooms as we dozed through the 11 o'clock news hour with our plastic local TV newscaster.

Stern remarked about what a bummer it is to live in this time. It's full of catastrophes and deaths (June has been the most brutal month for US casualties and 2010 has been a year in which will are expected to lose more American lives than in any other year of this protracted conflict - WAR!!!!!!). He bemoaned the BP spill, the corporate corruption of our government - a government bought and paid for by oil companies, and the US Chamber of Commerce, and Wall Street institutions and on and on and on until we have only limp-dicked puppets in Congress. To reflect how impotent our government has become is completely oxymoronic: it can't pass bills on any scale; party politics is moribund; the scale of childhood poverty is now registering about one fifth of our population; and we rank dead last in medical care out of all the western European countries. So much for our health care bill and what was wrong with universal heath care, I might ask? People are losing their homes or walking away from their homes because they owe more than the property is worth. It's more difficult to get a mortgage than it has ever been because the banks like to keep their cash in their safety deposit accounts or under their matresses until they see their way clear to process a loan or two. What's wrong with now, buddy? Wall Street is back in full stride making money with no apparent product to sell with no apparent ethics in place. I still don't know what a hedge fun it, by the way. Still no regulation. Still no coherent foreign policy. Russia is mad at us. China is tolerating us. Iran gives us the finger everything they think about us. The Afghan government thinks they are better off without the presence of the US. Hello, Taliban, good-bye freedom. Welcome Al Qaeda, let's kill whatever population is left of Afghanistan.

And does anybody in government ever read history? No country - no country - has every conquered Afghanistan. Not in the past, not in the present will it happen and not in the future will it occur. Why the British joined us in this fiasco is beyond me. They had already been their in the 19th century and lost! What about Russia? They were their for ten years (matching our time there next July when we are supposed to pull out) and they limped home with their tail between their legs after losing so many men that had no army left.

But, hey, wait!! We live in the internet age. That makes it all better. We've got Goggle controlling all communication, all print, all entertainment. They own You Tube. They own all content - well, mostly all content. We can know what is happening before it is happening in this electronic age. We don't need print news anymore because the internet sends it out before we can read it in the morning's newspaper. Poor Rolling Stone this week. They preceded themselves on the internet with their McCrystal story. Oh, sorry, you don't get the newspaper anymore. What's the point? Every paper or magazine can be read online.

On Tuesday someone hacked into subscriber's the email lists and sent out a link to a Canadian Pharmacy advertising, what else? Viagra. I was one of those people hacked even thought I don't use AOL anymore because it sucks, and my list included fellow yogis, old friends, and my ex-husband. He was the first to respond on Wednesday morning in an email. "What's this you sent me? I think this is meant for someone else." Unfortunately, he failed to see the humor in the situation. One of my friends took me off his email list. How dare I send him this spam. He emailed me back telling he me gets this stuff sent to him all the time. So much for digital drag. P.S. AOL never owned up to the incident. Not their problem, I guess.

While not bemoaning the internet age, while not trying not to look hip and with it, Howard Stern longed for the past - when things were simpler, when life was more carefree, when around every corner we didn't see the homeless, the dispossessed, the hungry faces of children on every blighted block in our urban sprawl. We used to have a middle class, buddy!

What Stern said was: we used to know things that were true in our society and expect things to be a certain way, and now they are not. Do we know the truth anymore? The truth is manifests itself according to the gospel of the media: Fox, MSMBC, CNN.

Is that good or bad? Is that right or wrong? Institutions used to function and move an agenda that benefited both rich and poor. A blue chip stock actually had real value. We bought a home and lived in it for life. We settled in our communities and had responsibilities that we fulfilled. We went to school, graduated from high school, maybe went on to higher education, but if not, we got a job in industry and became a productive member of society. And then we retired at sixty-five and then we lived about twenty more years and then we died after having lived a good life. Everything had a place and everyone knew how to live in that place.

But that was the pre civil rights era when economic disparity, black segregation, and society's outcasts hid behind closed curtains. People of color were out there somewhere in America and that they didn't have have equal rights or equal school didn't really matter. No one saw them up close and personal. That wasn't good. Women couldn't climb a house ladder let alone a corporate ladder an get reduced pay for just about everything. The glass ceiling wasn't good, either. And we still had lobbyists in Washington. Remember: "What's good for GM is good for the country." We'll always have lobbyists. Our government was set up that way. It's called "peddling influence" and it's our way of life.

Then we boomers came into the picture and we changed all that. Voting rights and equal rights was our mantra and we went to war, too, and we fought honorably but for a cause that was called "the Domino theory" instead of "weapons of mass destruction." We were told the Reds were out to get us and we believed it without bothering to examine the evidence or analyze the enemy, and we didn't win and we brought our boomers home and everyone else turned their heads in another direction and said, "Not my war; not my commitment; not my emotional or psychological problems; not my lost limbs." We were too busy making money and getting fat on the easy life and buying things that amounted to nothing. Can you really take a Jaguar to bed? Can you cuddle a sailboat? We were getting addicted to oil and cars and not paying attention to making our country a better place to live and helping others less fortunate.

And did the boomers give back to their country? Did they make America a better place to live, to work, to die? You can answer that question if you like.

So what was special about the old days? Maybe after WWII, when we fought the good fight against National Socialism, when we brought our troops home and honored them, and sent them to college or had jobs waiting for them in industry. That was a pretty picture. That was before the digital drag, before greed is good, before September 2001, before our leaders in the first decade of the 21th century failed to do an honorable job for America. That was before America drowned in the oil sludge of the Gulf along with the fishing industry and its hard working fisherman, along with the dead wildlife and an sluggish economy and the arrogance of BP.

Living life is never simple, never clear, never certain, never on a level playing field.

Our founding Fathers slugged it out in 1775 and 1776 and 1777 (remember those Articles of Confederation added later to our cherished Constitution?) and we will continue to slug it out in America, in the digital drag, which makes us look smarter and more hip and with it and lots more human. After all, we can social discourse whenever we want on Facebook. And we can Twitter until hell freezes over.

I'm coming up for air now.

Namaste

Joan