Hottie, Me and the Smoking Tiger

Or once upon a Tiger Time...

Welcome to this weekʻs essay and to my Substack, They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. I am gobsmacked by how many of my subscribers are new, signed up in the past week or month. Once again I mahalo my fellow writers on Substack who recommend this humble newsletter - especially Always Inspiring Matthew Ferrara. Still, I realize your subscription might be just an artifact produced by a cleverly offered click of a button, designed to reel you in. (If you havenʻt drunk the Kool-Aid and clicked the button, hereʻs your chance)…

Apparently rabbits also smoke pipes. I donʻt know the explanation for that.

Just thanking you, my new subscribers, got me thinking that Iʻm doing the opposite of what I recommended last week when I wrote about the importance of making a connection before expecting someone to accept your offers and make a commitment. This week I was going to begin a deeper dive into my stories about healthy and toxic connections. But this is crazy backwards.

You accepted my offer and we have yet to make a connection. We have barely met and Iʻm about to bare my soul to you and expect that you will care. On the other hand, it is not an entirely unreasonable expectation. After all, I told you I was writing about me, meaning writing memoir, or memoir-in-essay form. I also know that you subscribed, so thatʻs an invitation for me to engage. Both in this writing and in my professional life, I have a presence out there in the metaverse and on websites. Professionally, I want to make it easy to be found. But when you do find me, I hope I donʻt come across too strong, like the random man from whom I received a text message this morning. “Hi my name is Frank and I know I should not be doing this but I found you on the Realtor site and I find you attractive.”

For real? My profile on that site was not an invitation to that kind of intimacy. Delete.

My point is that making the right kind of connection is not only a problem for writers here on Substack. As humans we frequently need to connect, communicate, cooperate, coordinate action, and commit because we live our lives with others. It sucks that much of the time we are only guessing, making assumptions, perhaps widely inaccurate assumptions, about the reader or listener or horse on the other end of our attempts to connect and communicate. If the communicator is as inept as this guy Frank, the attempt to connect backfires. Iʻm being generous. Frank is probably a poorly programmed bot.

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Back to you my reader, my presumably willing reader. If you were referred here, you are something like my new mare Hottie, and unlike the poor rescued Haflinger in last weekʻs essay You find yourself in this metaphorical pasture with me because someone you trusted in turn trusted you with me/me with you. And I believe you must have some innate curiosity, some desire to connect and learn, because not everyone clicks the button to subscribe. Still, it is up to me to introduce myself properly so you can assess whether your curiosity is justified. Your time is precious and you might not want to continue to spend it with me. Or at least thatʻs what Hottie keeps telling me, day after day, three weeks into our relationship.

This is Hottie, by the way. She has dignity, and it is up to me to be worthy of her engagement.

Ironically, my reason for choosing a public way to tell the stories that led friends to say to me “You Should Write Your Memoir” was not that I wanted more people to know about me. I never had something in mind that I wanted from people who might read the stories - not attention, nor admiration, nor money. People asked for the stories because they found them interesting. They said it gave them a fresh perspective. It gave them a feeling of connection. It felt to me like the stories were wanting to be told and so I just put them out there trusting that people who need them will find them.

At the beginning, it also was unexpectedly good fun reliving and writing about my crazy adventures in Tibet and Brazil and Hawaiʻi, the people I met who were spiritual teachers or writers, and the lessons I learned from my time with them as friends, roommates, and/or lovers thirty years ago. I do write privately sometimes to make sense of things for myself, but making it a Substack was about the sharing. I guess thatʻs why when I finished what I thought I was here to write and readers asked me to keep writing, I turned to my equine teachers for more material.

I wonʻt be offended if you do not connect with my topics, or with my poor lost-and-found Voice and the way I express myself. Iʻll be happy if you do, but happy for you not because of you. You are not instrumental to my happiness. Maybe thatʻs the biggest lesson buried in here somewhere. The more we have a place inside where only calm and ok-ness reside, the more we can be generous with our attention and compassion, the more we are motivated to share everything we know rather than hoard it. The more time we spend there, the more we experience that life truly is not a zero-sum game, that there is abundance and love to go around.

I do not find myself there every minute of every day. Some days, many days, I am completely off balance, blown every which way by the winds. But when I find my way back to that place of peace, I discover there a different wind, a gentle, cooling breeze blowing all the confusion and nastiness away.

I have become more patient with myself. Just as I am patient with my young excitable gelding, the one who wants to become more of a character in the next set of stories. My goal is for him to be able to come back to being calm and present quickly whenever his energy rockets. His ability to do that requires and mirrors my own self-improvement in that regard. My characteristic impatience, crankiness and judgmental inclinations, my flashes of hot anger and self-righteousness, these are not such frequent visitors to my home lately. I notice them raising dust as they come up the gravel driveway and I wave goodbye long before they get to the front door.

Maybe those are the most important things I would like my newer readers to know - that I write for you not for me, and that I write what I write and my stories are my stories and it is really up to you what you choose to do with them. Maybe you will find something in them entirely different than my takeaway. That would be cool.

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Photo by Michael Green on Unsplash

Did you already forget about the Tiger in all this philosophical digression? I didnʻt.

In last weekʻs essay I mentioned that my friend who happens to be a very fine lawyer had commented on the previous weekʻs essay.

In a different conversation this week she described a tidbit from her past as having happened “once upon a time or as the Koreans say when tigers smoked pipes.”

Iʻm curious - what was your unconscious assumption, what picture did you have in mind of my friend who happens to be a very fine lawyer, before I used the pronoun “she”?¹ And before I quoted her as someone who would use the phrase Koreans use to begin a story instead of “once upon a time…”

I love it when my horse or my friend shows me a different way to think about things.

I would love to give you that kind of gift. I want my stories to disrupt your assumptions. I want them to be fairy tales that begin with “When tigers smoked pipes…”. I want you to realize that all our history and all our future is a story. Mine to write, yours to write. Sometimes the facts are awful. Sometimes they are glorious. Sometimes the way the story was for others is quite different than the way I remember it or tell it.

Put that in your bamboo pipe and smoke it.

1. Maybe this is not the best week to ask that question given that a particular former prosecutor and state Attorney General has been topping the news, so maybe you were not in fact going to the stereotype of a pin-striped suited Ivy League-educated possibly balding white man?