Robert Colpitts

And, by that, I do not mean that she sends me a postcard.

Faith, because I need her, tucks me into bed and says, “Good night.”  She’s really not as cruel as I make her out to be.  I just think her catty mannerisms are fun.

This I put in the place of a traumatic evening that only a few who care shall know.  Faith is one of them, and I am blessed to have her here.

Faith, due to an unfortunate collision with fate, is growing in size and cannot stop.  When asked why by a reporter, she says the following things:

1)  I eat too much.
2)  I don’t exercise.
3)  And then I eat too much again.
4)  And then I don’t exercise again.

Faith, knowing that others are in her position, says this, “Some of you out there, you know, might want to kill this obesity bug.  You might!  I want to.  I am growing, and I cannot stop.  And you wish you could just cut out the cookies, and go for a walk.  But, if you run at full speed for over a mile, you’ll hardly burn 200 calories, while that Ceasar Salad with grilled chicken (no dressing) you ate for lunch contained 220 calories!  Yes, I know, it’s unfair, because for some people, those extra calories don’t do a thing, but for you, they stick to your body like a frightened child, and you are always hungry.  And, who the hell goes running and then eats only a salad for lunch!  If I exercise, it is time to put on the bib, right?

“The point I am trying to make here is that you have to CHANGE YOUR LIFE if you want to CHANGE YOUR WEIGHT.  You are going to have to put in a heavy dose of exercise, if you want to enjoy food the way you do.  I mean like an hour or more a day, and walking is not going to cut it.  And this is not about your shape, boys and girls.  Don’t use a fucking mirror.  Just get yourself to a healthy body weight and stay there.  And your metabolism will increase.  Then 250 calories in a salad will disappear before it hits your lips.  It’ll make you happy.

“And then you can buy my book.”

That’s right.  Faith wrote a book.  It is called “101 Ways to Get Out Aggression While Pretending You Aren’t Hurting Anyone.” 

It’s not out yet because I didn’t write it, but she’s sold a million copies already.

There it lie, oozing like summer reluctance, the obvious.  All those gathered kept their hands tethered to their radiant bodies–it allowed for uncomfortable proximity.  Faith, gallant solider that she is, took a step forward toward it, and the crowd around her gasped loudly and disappeared.  Everyone, that is, except me.  I stand on a bench far away because on this bench there is a one-hundred percent guarantee I can see the obvious, but in the crowd, only the tall and the brave get to see anything at all.  Yet, when Faith turns around and sees that everyone has disappeared except me, I feel shame:  I am both tall and brave.  “What is the real reason you are standing all the way over there mon cher?” she asks.

I leap off the bench, and launch into a plaintive description of my hermetic choice, but nothing can make up for the choices I make when I think the world hates me, so Faith listens passively and remains aloof.  As I flop over to Faith, she is poking at the obvious with her left hand, though she favors to poke things with her right on most occasions.

“Being a good storyteller means stating the obvious.  Being a good friend means stating the obvious.  Being a good teacher means stating the obvious.  Being a good employee means stating the obvious.  Being a good person means stating the obvious.  Being a good spiritual being means stating the obvious,” Faith says while speeding up the frequency of her thrusts.

I want to jump in the way of her finger so she pokes me instead of the obvious, but I don’t, because that would be too obvious.  Instead I couch my derision for her in this statement:  “Nothing obvious is worth stating.”

She responds:  “And yet you, sir, for lack of practice, cannot state it at all.”

Does she mean that she loves me and wants to have my children?

Faith, when faced with the burning sun, pours vegetable oil on her skin.  She has no remorse, no shame, and no mechanism for judging her actions.  She knows only one thing–that damnable search for excitement.  Born into a frame mollified by beauty, she quiets her steps by announcing her arrival with a swift step and a catchy, Twitter-esque greeting.  Today she is writing a letter to me. 

Her letter (in its entirety) is this: 

Dear Idiot,

That’s about the nicest thing she has ever said to me. 

It eases my heart to know you are here with me, [(hating)] Faith.

Faith sits at a ubiquitous coffee shop sipping the blood of a vampire.  The look on her face — a slightly upended nose, a mouth spirally twisted, a neck broken in three places — is one of plaintive subtlety.  Despite this obvious arraignment of spirit, Faith swears she is wondering.

What is she wondering?  She is strangely silent, which means she is either waiting for you to ask, or holding the neck of a rubber chicken under the table.

She wonders why these spiritual junkies get so hooked on one thing.  Why are there naked female yoga teachers who still claim God as breath?

Faith does a split, and her entire intestinal track spills out onto the floor of the coffee shop. 

Starcraft 2 is a real-time strategy game that tasks you with building an economy to support an army, while destroying your opponent by disrupting their economy and killing their army.  The multiplayer aspect of the game is largely balanced around one versus one play, and I play it from time to time.

If you are like me, then there are moments in your life where you face an experiential crossroad that causes extreme thoughts, emotions, etc, but the situation is so far from life or death that if anyone saw you get upset about it that they would think you were crazy.  For me, one of those things is Starcraft 2.

Meditation is a great time to observe the nature of thoughts, emotions, forms, concepts, and sensations, but how often do you sit down to meditate when the shit hits the fan?  How great it would be to look at the nature of anger, but unfortunately the person who has made you angry is still talking to you, and to be generous, you have to respond to them, and let your self-observation go for a while.  Sometimes when our mind is racing with thought, our senses are inundated with noise, our emotions are running wild, our biggest concepts are being formulated, or our attention is rapt categorizing and planning, we find it difficult to stop and look.  In fact, when things feel like they are life and death, you might not feel skilled enough to operate any other way than your habits have helped you in the past.  Our habits are not all bad, but what if we wanted to skillfully adjust our tendencies?   Practicing in a life or death situation is a tough place to do that. 

I won’t bore you with the details of the game, but I highly recommend it–Starcraft 2 is a magnificent work of art, and the community of players is very friendly and engaged.  I must mention, however, that I get very, very angry when I lose–scream at the top of my lungs angry.  While screaming, I run over to my bed, and beat the living hell out of it.  This behavior scares people around me.

I realized a while ago that this was a safe moment to observe my anger.  When I lose a Starcraft 2 match, the situation is not life and death–it is barely worth mentioning.  Yet the anger, the thoughts, the energy, and the experience, for me, is quite real.  Luckily for me, I can easily recreate the process that leads to my extreme reaction.

I’ve noticed from this that anger is not the first thing that appears in the process.  It is much closer to some kind of rising energy in my gut that leads to my face.  The anger and my actions appear after that feeling, which, I have seen, is a habitual way of releasing that energy.  It is the initial energy that I push away with the response.  I have found that what precedes many of my reactions is a similar type of energy.  Strong energy is tough to sit with.  I am guessing that most emotions we label are reactions to an earlier energy that we run away from with the habits and behaviors we associate with various emotions.

I offer to you this practice.  Is there something in your life that  really bothers the hell out of you every time you do it, but you recognize that it is not life or death and that you could recreate it? 
Go ahead and do that thing.  It won’t kill you or anyone else.  Remember:  your reaction should be way out of proportion to the importance of the situation.  When the energy rises, watch, and see where and how you shape, form, and express your experience.  What is the nature of thought, emotion, form…? 

This is not the only way to look into these things–obviously, we can meditate at any time, we are already capable of seeing things.  Yet, should we find ourselves unskilled in the management of some kind of energy, by reaching a experiential cross road we can learn a lot.  If we practice on unimportant things, then we can prepare ourselves to handle important things.  We might be able to skillfully manage our strong energies at an important time instead of riding on the wave of our habitual reactions to those energies.

Fishing, one of Faith’s least appreciated past times, is one of Faith’s least appreciated past times.  Faith stands by the river watching the water go by.  She doesn’t love the purity of the flow, the nature of water, or the effervescent bubbles.  She definitely is not begging for God (again with that moniker)!  She stares at the water, and tries to invent some way of lifting the water like Moses, after which she will pluck the unsuspecting fish out of the dry river bed, and throw them into the battlecruiser that is being built half a mile down river.  She wants to be known as She-Who-Got-Dead-Fish-Onto-the-Boat, but she doesn’t want the feathers.  She’ll invite all the men who keep their button-down shirts open on hot days to dine on the fish, but she will not allow them to speak unless they give up a button.  At the end of the post-rapture, entirely on the battlecruiser, she will recreate the infamous film “Waterworld,” on a budget of dead fish.

She knows you like her.

Motioning to liver, as you can expect from one whose awakening is motioned by upwards title, is something Faith never knew how to do.  She woke up this morning doing it though, and a professional space pilot could not have been prouder.  Faith’s large spring chicken came hopping into her bedroom at the exact time of the motion and when her spine, erect, meandered its way out of bed.  The confluence of motioning to liver and meandering out spine sent the chicken into a jealous rage, and Faith barely avoided getting her eyes plucked out.  Suddenly she realized why she got a chicken and not a snake.

The story does not end there, no, because, like all cultured humans, Faith had to get dressed.  Though she was missing the head, she chose to wear her bear fur suit, and put on her size 11 extra wide shiny red heels to accommodate her large bear feet.  The chicken redoubled its efforts to pluck our Faith’s eyes but was thwarted by the entrance of breakfast. 

“Bears eat chickens for breakfast.  Sorry chicken.  I thank you for your contribution to my future bowel movements,” said Faith with blood dripping out of her.

Thus began the greatest day of Faith’s fictional life.