Grousing about being awakened at the crack of dawn on a Sunday aside, I’m still a pretty happy person. Somewhat neurotic, sure. Some things never go away, especially for ex-New Yorkers like me. But as this amazing year has taught me, there’s a lot more to me than I ever realized–or at least than I ever felt brave enough to let out. I have a lot to be thankful for, and lately I’ve been pretty publicly grateful. I know that’s been off-putting to a few people. To those folks I say: how do you think I feel?

No one would label me a morning person, so it’s no surprise that I drove my morning-joyful Rockford friend up a wall Sunday morning by grousing at being shifted to a north-central Illinois Starbucks while he went to work before, I’m sure, even God had gotten out of bed. He’s Christian clergy, so I suppose it comes with the territory, though seen in that frame it makes perfect sense I feel most at home in a Jewish denomination with post-evening-rush-hour services.

Notwithstanding sitting groggy-eyed in that Rockford Starbucks where this post began, I remain uncharacteristically unflappably content–at least compared to how I felt about life at the beginning of this year. It’s hard to describe how titanic yet simple it felt the morning four months ago when I decided to stop fighting against my life and start embracing it instead.

I had always been afraid of letting go of my fear of the world. I fought against it my whole life, not knowing what I was really trying to protect myself from were the toxic adult family members who helped raise me. I eventually gave in and stopped going to war with my life because (thanks to three years in these rooms) I finally came to see the unnecessary devastation I was leaving behind. My heart couldn’t take any more if it. I was sure I was going to drop dead once I gave in, but there wasn’t much choice anymore. Instead, by the end of the day, the sense of growing ease and peace in my life was palpable.

That led to a lot of amends and healing, and that led to my Jewish journey. All of it led straight into places inside of me I never knew existed. It’s not as if suddenly here’s this pain-in-the-ass blogger talking about love, and joy, and God. These things have always been in me, and I’ve always known it. I’ve just been too afraid to act on it, to let it out, to let my actions be guided by it. I was afraid it wouldn’t make much difference. I didn’t want anybody to know (drumroll)…who I really was.

To borrow a line from Robert Frost, as it turns outs, that has made all the difference. I’m not suddenly some new Michael Doyle. (Though you may have noticed, I’m taking my name back–Mike was shorter to write in a blog sidebar, but to friends I have always been Michael.) I’m just, finally, the Michael Doyle I’ve never let you see before. He’s actually a pretty nice guy.

Yeah I know. The whole thing sounds kind of trite, and I admit from time to time in the past few months having to just stand back and ask myself, “Who in the hell are you and what have you done with Mike Doyle?” On the other hand, it has been a lot easier to deal with life–problems and setbacks and stresses especially–by taking a decidedly different approach to them.

I’m happy. There it is. My life is full of confusion and stress and uncertainty at the moment, and I could complain about it all. But so is everyone else’s. That, I really don’t need to tell you, is life. But I’m still happy. There’s a gratitude I’m in touch with now about, really, all of it, that leaves me in awe on an hour-by-hour basis. It took a long time to get here. I intend to revel in it.

I’m reminded of a saying featured in the movie, Akeelah and the Bee. It was mis-attributed to Nelson Mandela, but it really comes from Marianne Williamson. It reads in full:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And if you didn’t drown on the sickening sweetness of that quote, get used to it. Because I’m living in the middle of it.

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

(Photo: Ten years ago, I thought I had seen it all… Credit: Photos4Travel.com.)

In Buddhist circles, Chogyam Trungpa, the seminal Tibetan Buddhist teacher on American soil, is often said to have remarked, “Nostalgia for samsara is bullshit.” Yearning for the return of bygone glory days in a universe that’s ever-changing is a great way to lose forward momentum. Yet, I can’t help but ponder the first day of the last decade as I resolve myself to go a bit more gently into this one.

The morning after the world didn’t die from the Y2K bug and the official Brooklyn celebration at Grand Army Plaza managed to miss midnight by about 60 seconds, I clearly remember taking a walk up Flatbush Avenue towards downtown Brooklyn. The day was crisp and overcast, but I was filled with wonder that the new millennium had finally arrived. As far as any child of 1970 was concerned, 2000 was a big deal. Every car that passed, every storefront that I passed by, every person who crossed in front of me, I thought, “Wow, that’s what cars, and stores, and people look like in the future!”

I also remember feeling disappointed that, by the look of it, the January 1, 2000 version of the world wasn’t any different from the version I woke up to on December 31, 1999. As January wore on, I began to wonder what I wanted to do with my life in the newly arrived future. As a lifelong New Yorker (at the time, I still considered the city something of a center of the universe), working at my dream job as a nonprofit public-transit advocate, and having traveled everywhere I thought I’d ever want to see, I got a little depressed that I couldn’t figure out what should come next.

I was on the toilet when I decided to visit Paris. Considering how poorly I took to Parisians when I made the trip that April, there’s surely a metaphor in that. In Paris and sulking, my Lusitanian friend, José, began teaching me words in Portuguese. By summer, I had taught myself the rest of Portugal’s language and began the first two of what would eventually be eight weeks spent exploring that country over the next two years.

The job soon changed, too. I loved the nonprofit world, but I needed benefits. The jump to a dispiriting, cut-throat commercial engineering firm helped me gain better perspective about the sector in which I should have remained. Though I doubt I had much of a chance at the new firm to begin with. I never felt like more than an outsider. How could I? It was a shell-shocked office–the company was forced to move uptown from lower Manhattan when part of the the World Trade Center collapsed onto its former building. While I was safely evacuating over the Queensboro Bridge on 9/11, their staff were dodging bodies on West Street.

Besides, they wanted me to learn how to drive.

And, of course, the love affair with New York came to a close when disaster sent me looking for a less angst-ridden urban idyll, which I found here in Chicago in 2003. It’s been a wonderful seven years, too.

I hardly noticed how much I ossified.

Much like that first day of 2000, I began 2010 wondering what on earth I was going to do with my life in a new decade. It was my own fault. I spent most of the preceding one in Chicago creating and settling back into a carefully crafted idea of who I was and what I was here on this planet to do. You think I’d have learned already.

I enter 2010 as a communications consultant ravaged by a lack of nonprofit clients themselves ravaged by the New Depression. As a downtown resident whose entire social life takes place in neighborhoods far beyond downtown, yet who remains in a neighborhood for which he’s paying a premium that can no longer be justified. And as a Buddhist who realizes it’s time to let go already. I made a good go of the work-at-home thing, and have some nice successes to show from it. I did it at the second-worst possible time in our nation’s economic history. Who knew?

And much as I still love downtown Chicago, at this point I remain a resident of the neighborhood mostly out of inertia. I stayed down here after my former long-term partner, Devyn, and I  broke up in 2007–and after my failed attempt to follow him to New York–to prove to myself I was still a Chicagoan. Funny thing, Chicago being my home is a moot point by now. I have nothing left to prove. (And for full disclosure, Devyn and I have long since mended fences as friends.)

So many of us live on autopilot, ensconced in a rigid yet comfortable idea of who and what we are. Some of us manage to at least recognize that, occasionally break out of our stale molds, and then–like me–fall right back into believing seemingly secure, foregone conclusions about ourselves without realizing it. Trungpa’s star student, popular Buddhist author Pema Chodron, points out that life has a habit of trying to pop the bubbles of security we try to wrap ourselves in:

“As a result of that new place, of course, I wanted to nest there, but then the next challenge came along, and the next challenge and the next challenge. And each one pops a bubble. And you become more and more able to groove with bubblelessness. And you can quote me on that.”

Oprah Winfrey’s favorite new-age author, Eckhart Tolle, would spin it more succinctly. He suggests that it’s better to wonder about who you are than to think you already know–because if you already know, then how will you ever be any greater than you already are?

So file me bubbleless for 2010. I no longer want to define myself as the sum of stale assumptions. At least as long as my ADD brain can remember not to. I’m letting some key ideas about myself go that no longer work for me:

• I’m giving up consulting and going back to the rat race–I’m looking for a wonderful new day job. I’ve had enough of shaking the tree. I’d prefer health benefits and a prescription plan. (This does not mean I’m giving up blogging. See: Firewall.)
• I’m planning to say good-bye riddance to Marina City and (here’s the buried lede, folks) to move out of downtown Chicago. I want a real neighborhood back, with mom-and-pop stores and local restaurants that aren’t drowned by tourists every day at dinner, like I had back in Brooklyn. And I want to be closer to my large and loved network of friends, most of whom live on the North Side.

Yes, in a way this means I am throwing in the towel about life in downtown Chicago. I still think it’s the best urban environment between New York and San Francisco and highly livable. I may be back. But priorities change, and at the moment being able to walk to the Art Institute has become less important than being able to walk to visit close friends. Not to mention the cheaper rent that will help me pay my bills better. (See: New Depression.)

In January 2000, I looked for diversions to keep me from facing ideas about myself that were no longer true. This January, it feels a lot more liberating to change the storyline, instead. Out with the old. Looking forward to the new. And I wonder who I’ll turn out to be in this telling.

Happy New Year.

(Photo: Xanadu: hysterical musical kitsch; or guidepost to the meaning of earthly existence?)

On Sunday, Mr. New Guy and I were in the audience at the Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place (there’s a name that could be shorter) for the final performance of the touring production of Xanadu. The musical was hysterical fun, but I was struck most by the line uttered by ancient-Greek-god Zeus to the former-muse Clio/now-mortal Kira that launches the show into the finale:

“To love another person and create art––that is Xanadu!”

Hearing that line, my inner Buddhist instantly perked up his Scooby-Doo ears. Buddhist dharma (and the teachings of every other religion I can think of) would suggest we all have an intrinsic nature of being beyond the mundane world we take for granted as reality. But as the price for coming to hang out on Earth for awhile, we forget our ineffable–or if you will, Divine–natures. We spend our lives never recognizing the true sum of what we are.

Heading down Michigan Avenue after the show, we stopped into a Starbucks where a bit of my nature was definitely recognized.

“Wait! I know you! Do you write a blog?” asked the barista, a young Asian woman, as soon as I walked up to the counter.

“Yes,” I offered, somewhat cautiously. After all, I was standing in a coffee bar and you may remember the controversy that erupted the last time I chatted with a barista. “I’m Chicago Carless.”

“Yeah!” the enthusiastic Starbucker replied. “I knew it! I’m Marian, I follow you on Twitter, and I’m on the Chicago Reporter Reader’s Bureau with you.” Had I attended my first Reader’s Bureau meeting, I probably would have recognized Marian right back.

She continued. “I just read the piece you wrote about the Mold-A-Ramas from the Brookfield Zoo. Hey! Wait a minute…”

Oh God. I knew what was coming.

“Is this Mister New Guy?!”

But by the way his eyes bugged out when she asked, he apparently didn’t.“She’s lucky you weren’t out with someone else,” he would tell me later.

Which leads me back to the ineffable nature of humankind.

If only our true identities were as familiar to us as headshots in the sidebar of a web page, we wouldn’t keep asking questions like: Where do we come from? Why are we are? And why do we do what we do?

God knows (I know I wish I did) why I feel driven to blog my way into the meaning of my life on an ongoing basis. For that matter, what drove those Xanadu performers into careers of nightly make-believe? What is the point of artistic expression, anyway? Simply, as the hackeneyed phrase would have it, to “imitate life”?

Buddhism offers one simple answer to most age-old questions like these: to wake up. If we truly are greater beings than we take ourselves to be, cut off from knowledge of our real natures while we live out our days in this world of SUVs, Suzie Orman, and ozone depletion, then maybe we’re driven to create art as a way to represent the memory of an esoteric origin we all share but cannot know for certain? Creating works of emotional or aesthetic resonance as a means of scratching a seminal spiritual itch, as it were.

And if that’s so, could it be that the point of life, itself, is simply to try and remember who we are? Could our task here on earth be nothing more or less than recapturing the sense of the Divine through the manner in which we live our lives? In which we love one another?

Some traditions would say we’re not motivated to fall in love solely by the personality of our loved one, but because of the sense of the Universe/God/the Divine (take your pick) that we feel when we look into our beloved’s eyes. In a sense, an idea that coming to love another is really coming to remember your connection to All That Is.

And if the reason we live and love is the same as the reason we create art, then how could anyone ever accuse art of imitating life? Because if you accept those terms, life is art.

As Oscar Wilde–and Ovid long before him–might argue, maybe, just maybe, the quality of the lives we lead really does matter. We can sleepwalk through life, or we can strive for the awareness to act, create, and love in ways that inspire one another and aspire to the Divine.

Clues to the meaning of life in a cheekily fabulous jukebox stage show? Just another question to add on to the list. But I do know at least one other person in whose eyes I am constantly reminded of all the playful, creative forces in God’s toolbox.

And that feels a lot like Xanadu to me.

(Photo: I wish I had his equanimity.)

[A warm welcome today to my new visitors from StumbleUpon!]

One of the hardest things for anyone with Attention Deficit Disorder like me to do is acknowledge a difference of opinion. Not because we’re too wrapped up in our own opinions to notice (although there is a variant of ADD that elicits a knee-jerk opposition to the input of others).

More likely, we recognize someone else’s potentially dearly held alternative opinion. But by the time that sinks in, our focus is often off and running after some other, shinier tangent. We don’t mean to run roughshod over the requests, suggestions, and outright protests of our friends and loved ones. But a lot of the time, that’s what we do without realizing it.

That’s not exactly true. Usually we figure out what we’ve done a few hours–or days–later. After our miffed BFF or snubbed significant other has stewed for awhile and then (from our ADD perspective) unexpectedly let us have it. In most cases with verbal fits, although from time to time airborne fruit and/or furniture have been known to be involved.

If I had a nickel for the number of times numerous ex-boyfriends accused me of throwing to the wind their carefully worded suggestions, intensifying complaints, or screamingly angry death-match-level protests, I’d be writing this Chicago blog from a renovated two-bedroom atop the Hancock with a Lake Shore Drive vista, not a ghetto-rific studio halfway up the low-rent, blocked-view side of Marina City.

It’s enough to make an ADDer yearn for a gated community full of short-attention-spanned compadres. A welcoming place of sanctuary where every forgotten appointment, lost set of keys, and accidentally ignored promise or protest would be met with a sly grin and a knowing nod. A Whoville of sorts–only one where half the community would have to hum the Christmas Day lyrics around the Who tree because they never manage to remember the words.

If only our friends and lovers could roll out the same patience we ADDers have to unfurl for them. Talk slower? Write things down? What do you mean we said that already? So what? We’re just trying to make a point! You understand us, don’t you? You are aware our behavior is due to uncommon neurological pathways in our brains and not because we don’t “try hard enough,” right? Didn’t you know all of this came with the territory when you signed on to have an ADDer in your life?

Well, ok. Maybe you didn’t. But if you really care about us like you say you do, how about throwing us some slack? Do you really think your ADD loved one is trying to drive you up a wall intentionally? Especially considering how annoying it is from our perspective to have to hear all the time how we are quite possibly engaging in a nefarious plot bankrolled by big pharma to force you into therapy and a high daily dose of overly expensive anti-anxiety medication?

Actually, sometimes we do goad you just for sport, but in our defense, half the time we think you deserve it, too. If only for your lack of patience with us.

As with all things, there are two sides to every story. In any difference of perspective between people, no one has a license to claim theirs is the right one. All opinions are valid ones. I think that’s what gets ADDers and their loved ones into battle in the first place.

The Buddha Dharma would say one of the surest ways to get yourself in trouble with anyone is to go around defending your own opinion. In a perfect world, we’d all be secure enough in our own viewpoints that we wouldn’t feel a need to have them validated by others. (You did remember I’m a Buddhist, didn’t you?)

This is especially key advice for ADDers and anyone in their collateral damage zone. If every ADDer could just take it for granted that when their loved ones tell them they’ve forgotten to do something–like listen, especially–it’s the truth, and if every blast-zone denizen in their lives could get it through their heads that their beloved ADDers really don’t mean anything by their forgetfulness, there would be many fewer tumblers of eggnog flying across living rooms this Holiday season.

My plan–at least through New Year’s or as long as I remember, whichever period expires first–is to do likewise. Actually, it’s always been my plan to apply this particular Dharma to my personal affairs. At all costs. It’s amazing how often I forget to do so.

But it’s not surprising. I am an ADDer after all. And if you want to hang with me, it’s best to school yourself on the lay of the land. You’ll understand that in the heat of the moment I’ll likely be little help in that regard, so you better do your homework.

On behalf of my fellow ADDers, we promise to do our best to take our loved ones at their word and defuse disastrous differences of opinion before they arise. But we warn you, you better be as diligent in your efforts as we. Otherwise, next time you find yourself on the receiving end of our annoyingly forgetful behavior, it might be on purpose.

That might not be the Dharmic thing for us to do, but hey, no one’s perfect.

(Photo: Who or what plays the leading role in your spiritual life? Credit: Mojoey.)

I’ve certainly confused a few people since overhauling CHICAGO CARLESS. Not from blogging about my spiritual journey, but from the lack of of a traditional cast of characters playing a role in it.

I can understand that Scooby-Doo “Hruhh?” response some faithful readers have had.  I think it begs the question: how do you define “spiritual” in the first place?

Traditional Judeo-Christian perspectives center around the idea of an external, omnipotent God, clearly separated from man and everyday life.  We are viewed as being from God and carrying God with us. Yet we are also considered to be at the mercy of the Divine, and held accountable to God for our actions.

When my traditional Christian and Jewish friends speak of spirit, they frequently cite the names of cherished personages who appear in the cosmology of their particular faiths, and invoke those names in times of crisis.

There is great power in relying upon the Divine in this manner.  But for some people, it can make it hard to see that there are other, equally valid paths to awakening spirit and touching the Divine.  Much Eastern spiritual thought does not name the Divine, or invokes the names of deities and spiritual leaders with the full understanding that doing so is merely symbolic.  (Buddha, for example, is very much understood to have been an ordinary person by adherents of Buddhism, not a deity).

My spiritual worldview is based in such Eastern thought.  It is similar to my Judeo-Christian friends’ worldviews in that I believe in an all-encompassing, loving consciousness, from which we spring and that we carry with us throughout our lives.

However, if I were to name God, I wouldn’t point the finger out there.  I would point it back to each and every one of us, instead.  In my tradition, there is no separation between God and us and everyday life. Everything is Divine.  Everyone is Divine.  Every moment is holy.  For me, the sum of us, small as it is but added to the incomprehensibly greater sum of All That Is, literally is universal consciousness–i.e. God.

Or try it this way.  I do believe we carry around a “holy spirit” with is.  But I don’t believe it is in addition to who we are.  I believe it is who and what we are: a very literal part of what others might call God.

For anyone confused about the cast of characters I cite in my spiritual awakening, this is the main point, from which everything else springs for me.  Radical personal responsibility about our lives, an inherent ability to make miraculous transformations happen, the absolute powerlessness of past-based fears and limitations, and innate and limitless wells of love and compassion?  For me, they all spring from the Source. In my perhaps hard-core view, we are just more a part of that Source than more traditionally spiritual Westerners might claim.

And that’s a fine difference–a fabulous difference, even.  I don’t pretend to think that my way or anyone else’s is the one and only way to ultimate truth.  I can’t imagine the Divine would be so limited as to give us a single way to get there. I honor everyone else’s spiritual leaders and traditions, and I recognize that we are all aiming at the same target.  The more we let our ideas about God turn into concrete and immovabe forms, the more trouble we get into as a human race.

I think it’s a shame that so many people go through their lives professing beliefs about God and faith that they haven’t examined and personally validated from deep inside.  I love my Universe, deep down I know why, and I mean it when I say it. It’s a blessing to find your tradition and live it like that.

But to my mind, it’s a curse to espouse religious views as an adult just because your parents told you to do so when you were a child.  Many people say they adhere to one traditional (or non-traditional) viewpoint or another about God.  But I think far fewer have actually ever considered those beliefs enough to tell you why they hold them.  That strikes me as hollow spirituality.

I don’t know what that kind of unexamined faith gets you.   I do know that if someone told me they loved me, from the bottom of my heart I would hope that they meant it.

How do you think Jesus would feel?

(Photo: Remain seated, with your arms, hands, and legs on top of the cushion at all times. Enjoy your ride.)

This entry marks the (belated) third anniversary of CHICAGO CARLESS. As is obvious, year four is getting started with a lot of changes. The most obvious are the totally re-designed layout and features of the blog.

But they’re only reflections of the most important change of all: my renewed outlook on my life and the world around me. Something had to give. After 37 years, what ultimately gave was me.

God knows I’ve chronicled a lot of changes over the past year and a bit on the blog. Last spring, as I continued my second career as a communications consultant, many old, dear friends came back into my life from what has now become the Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York Almuni Group (GLYNY AGAIN).

That made me want to move back to New York City, and even after my tumultuous breakup with the now NYC-based urban photoblogger, Devyn, I nearly did. As last summer went on, I spent time back in Gotham, (at long last) figured out my codependent nature and started recovering in Codependents Anonymous (CoDA), came to believe in God, and ultimately decided not to trade Lake Michigan shores for Atlantic ones.

I stayed, met and quickly fell for the sugarific pastry-chef, Chris, jumped headfirst into the Chicago Children’s Museum controversy, and also at long last found out I had Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

And then the changes really began, so settle in.

Eight weeks ago, I had a spiritual awakening.

Buddhists say if you can practice while you are distracted, you are practicing well.  But in my experience, it’s when you feel things are going well that it is easiest to lose your way.  That’s a better explanation for why, after a dramatic six months of dating, Chris called it quits, laying bare the level to which I had fallen off the wagon with my codependence.  A year after Devyn, I had managed to bring myself right back around emotionally to the same forlorn place as before.

It was one hell of a shock, but looking back on my behavior, I now see it was also inevitable.  At the time, though, all I knew was that I was about to fall apart.  I thought about the above Buddhist saying.  I realized I had a choice: I could descend into yet another mournful summer; or I could follow the gist of almost every spiritual teaching I’ve ever read, Buddhist or otherwise, and for once face directly into my pain–and into myself–and take a leap of faith.

I cried for hours, sat down, and meditated. I opened my heart to the sorrow of keeping someone I loved in my life, but not in the way that I wanted. I just let it be and didn’t turn away from whatever welled up in side.  Then I went to sleep.

I woke up in a frenzy, consumed by a single suspicion.  I had to test it out.  Before breakfast, I got out an old flipchart, sat on the floor with a marker, and tried to write down the essence of every teaching and rotten experience I could remember having encountered in my journey through life.

I worked fast.  One sheet for Buddhism.  One sheet for CoDA.  One sheet for failed relationships and career hell.  One sheet for ADD.  One sheet for the years of advice from friends.  One sheet for what I already knew inside.

They say many paths lead to one truth.  There it was, inescapable, literally right in front of me.  Thirty-seven years, one message repeated across a slew of pages: let go.  Let go of yourself, your crutches, your fears, and, simply, be here now.

It was an obvious message.  It always had been.  My life was not parted out into discrete areas that were to be dealt with one by one, in isolation, as I had long thought.  No.  My life and everything in it spoke with one voice.  As I realized that, I wept.

And like a trickle of water through a faulty dam finally becoming a flood, all at once it hit me that what for my entire life I had considered love, and compassion, and even joy were nothing more than limited echoes of their true, boundless natures.  And, more to the point, that they all came from inside. After three years of CHICAGO CARLESS, I also finally knew why I came to Chicago in the first place.

To wake up.

Much as you may have just done, trust me, I rolled my eyes, too.  Years of denigrating concepts like love, joy, and compassion in a society that recognizes little intrinsic value in them will do that to you.  That’s a choice of course.  The trick is realizing you even have a choice.  It took me 37 years to realize I had one.

Eight weeks ago I chose to re-examine the basis of my beliefs about myself and the world.  They came up lacking and I decided that from here on out a more loving, joyful, and compassionate basis is in order. After rolling my eyes, I rolled myself back to CoDA and into therapy for ADD, and decided to reopen my spiritual quest as wide as my surprised heart and agape friends could manage.  I feel more free now than I have ever felt in my life.

This all begs the question, what does a snarky ex-New Yorker do with himself once he realizes all that?  Well…he lets it in and changes.  But I know this isn’t an endpoint. This spiritual awakening has been simmering away inside of me for years.  Neither has it ever required me to lose my essential nature in order to wake up.  It only ever required me to lose my fear of the journey.

From the beginning, I have intended for CHICAGO CARLESS to chronicle that journey and put out there for all to see the questions that I struggle with in my life.  I’ve almost always found that the deeper I explore my life’s questions, the more resonant this blog becomes for those who care to read it.

So beginning on the Fourth of July, I took the blog down for a week, spent 50 hours migrating from Moveable Type to Wordpress, and renovated CHICAGO CARLESS.  Moving forward, the tone of the blog will be informed by my new perspective on things.  But have no fear, I intend to remain as frank as ever.  Spiritual awakenings aside, there are no sacred cows here.

Among the new blog features, commenting that finally works, the ability to edit your own comments, a list of recent entries and commenters in the sidebar, an “Around This Date” look at posts from previous years, a Twitter widget so you can follow me around in my madness throughout my day, a much-updated blogroll that more adequately reflects where I browse, and potentially coming soon, an IM Online widget to chat with me when I’m connected, and the very first CHICAGO CARLESS forum.

I invite you to take the new site out for a test walk and let me know what you think. You can also read more about the Journey that led me to my renewed Worldview and find out the full answer to Why the Overhaul? of the blog on the respective new pages.

In the end, the only person responsible for me not getting to this point sooner is me.  I’m reminded of a poem by Edwin Markham that’s often quoted by Unitarian Universalists (a free faith I much admire).  You can Google the original version, but I’ll paraphrase it here:

I had drawn a circle that shut me out;
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love alone had the wit to win…
It drew a circle that took me in.

Sign me happily outwitted, for once.  I’ll spare you the secret oral teachings of Tibetan Buddhism until next year.

Thanks for reading.

Surprise ending’s here.
“I love you but you’ve lost me.”
He spoke. Words fail me.