Monday Reads: The Heart is Still a Lonely Hunter

Good Morning!

I am in one of those becoming states.  It’s heartening in some way, I suppose, to think that one can be so firmly planted in adulthood and smug only to realize they still have so much work to do on issues that seem to crop up out of no where. I remember clearly where I was when Princess Diana died in Paris in that tragic auto crash 16 years ago.  I was in my French Quarter apartment with the man who brought me to New Orleans.  I thought he would be the love for and of the rest of my life. I have never known such passion right up and beyond the day it ended. It did not end well.

It is sixteen years later and life and love remain ephemeral as they are by design. Those days gave birth to my intense Buddhist practice.  These days I do not feel like I can find the pure wisdom of dakinimind. The day of Diana’s death was a turning point for me because I was about to be left for a woman half my age and everything would fall apart by the end of the year. I had a creeping feeling that summer when he spoke of a certain student but felt that taboos where too big to cross.  They were not.

“We” fell apart.  I fell apart. My job disappeared.  The ink on my divorce decree dried well.  This man actually wrote to me right before my daughter’s wedding last year to reconnect. He congratulated me on the doctorate because he knew that it was a central pursuit of my life and he knew what it was like to get one.  He found me again or had been watching me evidently. The e-missive was ignored because I have grown in many ways and I have no desire to revisit that relationship.  At that point, nearly 15 years after, it seemed impossible for me to believe I would ever mutter the words “I love you” again to another man and I haven’t until last month.  Too much had been lost even though much had been gained like the kathouse, the mighty mustang, the doctorate, and the wonders of New Orleans and my tangential career in music. My life has been an adventure that would have been unknown in Nebraska.  You know that  I have had a rich life here and met many of my goals. But, I tossed the love thing and men in general in the dustbin of expendable items by the time Diana’s death was a year old.  Hence, I have earned the nickname “Cold Pizza” because that’s about how I’ve treated men for the last 16 years of my life.   It never tastes good reheated so might as well toss it out.  I actually sustained several simultaneous relationships for a number of years.  One for nearly 7 years.  Still, no mention of the goal of the lonely hunter.  So now, on this nearing anniversary of Diana and her tragic death and her endless search to just be loved by one person without reservation and without boundary, I  am drawn back to the hunt of her lonely heart.  This path is one I know well no matter how overgrown or recently cleared it may be.

Hers is one of those stories that still draws others in too but for many different reasons. For me, it is because I so desperately understand her need to be loved unequivocally.  You’d have to know the troubled story of my mother to really understand that statement but you are not my psychologist and this post is not directly about the bonds of early attachment. It is about the result of attachment gone unresolved.  It is why I try to let  all the people in my life know they are loved without condition. This includes you.  I have Bodhisattva vows even though I fall sadly short of them and I try to expand love to encompass every being out there.   DIana appeared universally loved but yet that was not enough for her.  There was something compelling her from childhood to find the one sort of love that she felt she had never experienced. I think she loved without bounds too because it was the one thing she felt she never was given in her most basic relationships. To me, she exists beyond the boundaries of time and history like a tragic Shakespeare heroine or a mythical being.  Her central story is still her quest for unconditional love.

Conspiracy theories are back surrounding the deaths of Princess Diana and her companion Dodi al Fayed, after British media reported allegations that the couple may have been murdered by British special forces.

Despite a $7 million joint French and British police investigation that concluded that Diana, al Fayed and their driver Henri Paul’s deaths in 1997 were accidents, a report in The Mirror claims they were allegedly murdered and it was all covered up.

The allegation surfaced at a second court martial of Sgt. Danny Nightingale, who was found guilty of illegal gun possession, The Mirror reported. Among the evidence presented at the trial was a letter from a former soldier’s estranged in-laws that makes the claim that the SAS (Special Air Service) “was behind Princess Diana’s death,” the newspaper reported.

On Saturday, Scotland Yard said that British police were looking into new information that has surfaced in connection with the deaths of Diana and al Fayed, but police declined to say what that new information was.

“The Metropolitan Police Service is scoping information that has recently been received in relation to the deaths and assessing its relevance and credibility,” Scotland Yard officials said in a statement. “The assessment will be carried out by officers from the specialist crime and operations command.

“This is not a re-investigation and does not come under Operation Paget,” the statement said.

These new conspiracy theories are not what has driven me back to the Diana chronicles.  It was her portrait once again shining from my issue of Vanity Fair. This story is about another love in Diana’s life.  It makes me wonder what drove her on this endless search for love and acceptance when the world offered it up to her?

Diana’s closest confidants in her last years did not need an inquest to know the absurdity of Al Fayed’s claims. Not only was she not planning to marry Dodi Al Fayed, or pregnant with his child, they say, but she was in fact still “madly in love,” as one of them describes it, with another man, an unassuming Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan.

Perhaps, her hunt for love will be better memorialized in yet another movie. My hope is that it will not be one more sophomoric soap opera filled with less complex people than you find at any mundane Republican convention. The royals are anything but simple folk.

With the birth of her first grandson she’ll never meet, Princess Diana is again in the headlines. Now she’s gazing out at us from the September cover of Vanity Fair, just as a new and controversial movie about her final love affair is preparing to open.

It is hard to imagine two more unparallel lives than me and my two daughters and the late Diana and her heir and spare.  Yet, I continue to be drawn by her story because her search and mine seem inexorably linked by more than the timing of her death and a betrayal that made me such an Ice Queen for so long. Her post-betrayal life was seriously different.   I am still here in New Orleans and trying to deal once again with outcroppings of our shared pursuit.  Even after all these years of time on the mat and time in my mind, of trying to find a way to love without grasping, love without differentiating between my flesh and blood and the hungry dog on the street, and seeking the ability to understand that love should be beyond just two, I struggle again.

The endless pursuit of humans for all kinds of things seems to be all encompassing at times.   Some of them are higher pursuits, some of them are the tasks and errands of fools.

The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol was one of Sarah Palin’s earliest supporters to be picked as the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and now he says she can “resurrect herself” by running to be a senator from Alaska.

In an interview on Sunday, ABC’s Benjamin Bell asked Kristol if Palin had disappointed him after he pushed so hard for her to be on the 2008 ticket.

“I was for taking the gamble of putting her on the ticket, I don’t think it hurt the ticket in 2008,” Kristol explained. “I think her stepping down as governor of Alaska was a big problem. People don’t like to see a candidate, a governor, an executive — absent some medical reason or whatever — just leave office early. And she had been a good governor — incidentally — of Alaska until then. So, I think that is something, I think, she has to recover from in terms of being a serious leader in the party. Still has a lot of loyalty, still can shape the debate, she still has a great political touch.”

“I think the way Palin would possibly resurrect herself — if that’s the right word or rehabilitate herself, I think is a better way of putting it — run for Senate in Alaska in 2014,” he continued. “I’m not urging that. I’m just saying, if I were her adviser, I would say, ‘Take on the incumbent, you have to win a primary, then you have to beat an incumbent Democrat, it’s not easy.’”

“But if she did that, suddenly — if you can imagine that,” Kristol added, smiling. “Sarah Palin, freshman senator, January 2015 in Washington having beaten an incumbent. That would be pretty interesting.”

Bell also asked Kristol about the presidential ambitions of billionaire mogul Donald Trump.

“I don’t think he’d be a particularly good one, and I don’t think he’s going to be one,” the conservative columnist quipped.

But Kristol did have some ideas about how Republicans nationwide could be in “good shape” by following the lead of conservative lawmakers in North Carolina.

I just have one thing to say to that interview.  WTF?

Unfortunately, many start filling the days of an uneventful hunt with drugs.  What has mandatory drug sentencing done to our society?  Why not treat the disease instead of punishing the outcomes?  The money appears to be in the punishment these days as the profit motive and the Reagan/Nixon Drug Wars creates more US Gulags than Stalin. This is from the keyboard of Adam Gropnik at The New Yorker.

 As I wrote last year, there are more African-American men now incarcerated in America than were held in slavery in 1861, and more Americans under “judicial control” of one kind or another than Stalin held in his Gulag.

But even if this is the first decisive small stone pitched against a national shame, its specific effect on the imprisoned will still be minimal. Most prosecutions are not federal, no one now in prison will be released, and the careful hedge of politic exceptions—no mercy for drug gangs, dealers, etc.—is bound to create many complications. As so often, though, the critics, I suspect, both underestimate the difficulty of big change and the geometric, multiplier effect of small ones. The mandatory-minimum movement was a way, typical of the fear-and-revenge cycle of the eighties, to prevent those damned liberal judges from letting drug offenders loose. It was a way to short-circuit permissiveness—not to mention decency, common sense, and simple mercy—by insisting that an offense that is no worse, really, than being caught with a Martini in a speakeasy should be met with enough prison time to ruin a life. It expressed an ideology. By expressing its opposite, the new rules discredit the old one. As with gay marriage, a signal from on high can often have as much value as a successful bit of comprehensive legislation. The clarity of the sign is plain even if the power of the signal is weak: the thirty years of irrational vengefulness expressed in those mandatory minimums that filled our prisons to no real social purpose is now robbed of its appearance of natural legitimacy, of social consensus. What should follow, surely, is its end.