Three Kinds of Buzz

Living Simultaneous Realities

One. The Happiness Hijacking Pre-fix

Buzz-itation. Buzz-ination. Buzz-abaloo. Buzz-inacious. Buzz-itution. Buzz-ilation. Doesn’t really matter what comes after it– everything seems to begin with it. That underlying buzz… of doubt, distraction and drama.

I’ve been thinking about the word buzz a lot lately. In the aftermath of Hurricane Isaias, the literal onomatopoeia filled my ears for days. Chainsaws ripped through tree branches every ten minutes disentangling limbs twisted up in electrical wires, breaking down disembodied branches strewn across yards– attempting to repair a disastrous amount of damage.

Neighbors generators droned on. Ninety-three percent of our town was without power for five days. No estimate for its return. The Eversource monopoly that runs our electricity has a CEO that makes eleven million dollars in salary and there wasn’t a single truck on the road.

Anywhere.

Ditto for Optimum. The incessant buzzing came entirely from homeowners and landscape companies taking care of personal property. The sound held no hope our collective power would be restored. No hope our connectivity would be repaired. No hope our lives would be returned to normal. It left me feeling edgy, defeated, angry and sad.

It felt sickeningly familiar.

The underlying drone of drowning in uncertainty. 

The ongoing buzz of our perfect storm– the COVID pandemic, racial injustice, rampant unemployment, impending economic doom, upcoming election– general dystopian OZ-like reality. We’ve been bracing ourselves for catastrophe for some time now. Plotting and planning for Plan B, C and Z.

Pivoting on a dime to shifting school scenarios, loss of business, mask culture. See-sawing between resignation and resilience. Reinventing our five-year, five-day and five-minute plan. Being endlessly resourceful and just a bit resentful. The emotional fatigue leaves us short on patience. The assault on our spirit leaves us less giddy-up and go. There is an overarching and underlying cumulative attrition of our collective sanity .

We rise up, push on– it’s the American way.

But we are tired. It’s a lot.

Two. The Badass Miracle of Mind-Bending Metamorphosis

Yes, against all odds, it is possible to practice meditation with teenage boys after a power outage with sporadic buzz saws blazing in the background. Ten minutes. That’s what we do.

We drop in– to our inner mind. Sometimes we just observe our thoughts like logs floating by on the river of consciousness. When we find we have attached to one we go back to the shore and send the log on its way.

Other times we do guided meditations with anchor words or creative journeying. It depends on what the morning, mood and situational realties call for but essentially the goal is to nourish our inner life so we can navigate external challenges with more wisdom, grace and perspective.

Usually, we arrive at Zen, but we most certainly don’t start there. 

Especially not this past week after little sleep, no power and no internet for several days. I sat us all down and we began. Goal: Let’s try to clear our heads and find a little room in all this chaos. Right then, as if on cue, the chain saws began buzzing. I almost said let’s do this later, and if it had been just been me, I absolutely would have.

But, quitting at the first sign of difficulty felt kind of like the opposite of what I’m trying to inspire– even given the circumstances. It’s exhausting trying to model resilience. Kind of like bullying yourself into being a better person.

In my best attempt at calm, I said, Sometimes, life requires we pivot, so instead of trying to ignore the buzzing, let’s embrace it– ask it for guidance. What message does it have for us? I did not have high hopes but figured we’d give it a shot.

It turned out to be wildly wonderful.

When we finish meditating, we go around in a circle and share our experience. Sometimes there’s not a lot. But more often, it’s amazing to me how both boys are able to tune in to the frequency of their intuitional inner eye and see. Not what’s right in front of… but what’s right inside of them.

They tap into that third eye vision and download the higher wisdom of whatever they are given.

It’s crazy how quickly this kind of radically receptive inner listening transforms the seemingly solid reality around us. It skips over the logic-based tactical strategies– the right and wrong, the pros and cons. It bypasses binary problem-solving. It frees us from what seems absolutely, positively paramount to our personal well-being and shows us another way– an alternate reality where if-then scenarios become what-if possibilities.

The unwieldy weight of circumstance floats– away.It fades… like a blimp… into a blip… falling off the horizon… out of the picture. The picture itself becomes merely a postcard from an alternate reality.

It’s not that our chock-a-block, Tik-Tok, over-the-top, media mania world disappears, but rather that we just get some space, some room, some access to a feeling of peace and freedom that our thinking brain can’t provide.

Like having a built-in therapist.

I asked the buzz-saws what message they had. They showed me a series of tree-trunk-thick ropes trapping my hot air balloon on the ground preventing me from flying, from seeing the world, from feeling free. So, I used the buzz-saws to cut away the ropes one by one until the last threads of the last rope frayed and I ascended into the sky. Every time another chain saw buzzed, I pictured another kindred spirit being freed.

Finn found a fantastically opposite kind of freedom.

He started off feeling scattered, spread across the sky– fragmented in all different directions, blowing around in the wind attached to a hundred different balloons. So, one by one, he cut himself free of all the floating until he was able to land all his different pieces and come together as one self. Settled. Connected. Attached and grounded.

Leo was given the force within him.

He said he was holding a chainsaw trying to cut through a thick jungle of difficulties to find his way out. But every time he cut through the vines, more grew back, thicker and thornier than before. He was about to give up. He reached his hand out to push a thicket of vines out of the way and they disappeared. He did the same thing with his other hand and all the vines cleared. There was no more jungle. Nothing in his way.

Three: The Power of Cross-Pollinating Consciousness 

It’s not about finding silver linings or looking at the bright side or keeping your chin up.

It’s certainly not some Pollyanna aphorism about just sprinkling a little intuitional room on the circumstantial doom for flowers to bloom. It’s not one plus one makes three. It’s something other– some kind of a kaleidoscopic shift that shakes loose all the rigidly held geometric shapes and allows them to form something new.

Even more than the creation of the new something is the process of shaking loose what seems fixed and pre-determined.

Not forcing them into some more ideal shape or trying to assess their optimum value or ultimate purpose or any other ‘useful’ strategy. The trick, which I fail at pretty close to 98% of the time, is in the allowing. The giving up space rather than manhandling every last detail.

The power is NOT in the DOING.

Not even doing under the guise of helping.

I hate this. I have an endless cadre of back-up reasons why this particular form of doing IS actually okay. It’s not. It’s all just me being terrified of taking the back seat, feeling lazy, like a follower.

But the act of allowing is anything but lazy. It’s the willingness to be actively passive. To trust in what we can’t see more than what we can. In the mysterious harmonic vibrations of what we cannot hear. In our brain’s brilliant ability to cross-pollinate billions of bits of information beyond our awareness… and our soul’s knowing what we need.

It is a willingness to be guided into the unknown by forces that can see but not be seen. Like the buzz of the bees and hummingbirds. A strong cup of coffee or glass of wine. Bold love and quiet peace.