Guarding The Garbage
A Meditation on Leadership, Ego, and Direct Experience
I recently reminisced with a lifelong friend about all the crazy jobs we took on in our youth just to make ends meet. She and I not only grew up together in the same small Texas town, but we also ventured out—both to New York City, then to Los Angeles—as we chased careers in show business.
We laughed about one particular night in Manhattan when we were hired to guard a row of orange cones on the Upper West Side. The cones had been set up to reserve parking for a Woody Allen film shoot. Our job was to make sure no one moved them. In hindsight, we had no idea what we would’ve actually done if someone had belligerently removed the cones and parked anyway.
Topping my personal list of absurdities was the time I was tasked with guarding Lily Tomlin’s garbage.
Technically, I was hired as a production assistant for Lily and her entertainment company while they explored adapting her award-winning one-woman stage masterpiece, *The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe*, into a feature film. Though the final product never quite captured the magic of the play, it was filmed inside her garage in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles, with experimental clay animation components.
My responsibilities ranged from cleaning the office complex and grounds to delivering film canisters to screening rooms around town. But the oddest task by far was monitoring her garbage.
Despite living in a gated community, Lily’s trash cans were being targeted. People were scaling fences and rummaging through them on pickup days—evidently hoping to find discarded correspondence, trinkets, or anything that could fetch a few bucks on eBay. I was instructed not only to take the cans to the curb but to stay with them until the garbage trucks arrived. It was celebrity dumpster diving—except the looters would always leave behind a mess.
More than a decade later, I found myself at the final requirement of my divinity degree: a five-day ministerial intensive held in Monterey, California. A host of long-standing senior colleagues gathered to lead the graduates through rigorous reviews of doctrine, best practices, and ethics.
There were many gems offered during that intensive—principles that I would go on to integrate throughout my 25 years as a spiritual leader and platform minister. Some of those teachings I didn’t fully appreciate until life handed me the very experience they had foreshadowed. One gem, in particular, has remained with me:
"Never start or join an angry church."
The 'angry church' referred to the familiar dynamic that unfolds when a collective of disgruntled members leave a spiritual community and band together to start their own. The deeper wisdom wasn’t a judgment against creativity or autonomy—it was a caution: when conflict and discontent aren’t discussed openly, consciously addressed, and resolved with maturity and care, then the new endeavor is built on a foundation fertilized with dissent. And no matter how inspiring the intention, that energy seeds the new soil.
It’s an ironic twist—spiritual communities formed in the name of oneness and universal harmony, yet built on the lingering residue of unresolved division.
A teaching from the *Abraham-Hicks* material echoes this beautifully:
"Your energy is where you last left it."
If the energy of division and heart-hardening was your exit garment, it will likely be your entry garment, too.
Over the years, I grow more aware in the flaw of my earlier belief that I could teach the development of consciousness. I could teach concepts. I could retell the stories generously passed down by my mentors and colleagues. But I could never teach direct experience. I could tell them that at some point you have to give up the belief that you can sustain the monitoring of garbage but I could not force them to leave their station on the curb.
No presentation style, no matter how engaging, can substitute for the personal hunger that leads one to surrender control, ego, and fear-based living. Dissent, as it does, scales the walls and rifles through the titillating garbage of gossip, perception, and insatiable need—and will, at times, be sold to the highest bidder among those who feed on conflict and juicy chaos.
I often find myself meditating on the question; “Does this feel restrictive or expansive?”
I watched an angry church or two sprout nearby, and I breathed a deep sigh—not of bitterness, but of recognition and gratitude for what was now a lived truth. I had been given the direct experience. And with it, I could choose: Would I continue to sit and monitor the garbage, or allow the looting of perception to unfold without my interference?
Those years—and the ongoing grace of being forever humbled—have taught me to get up from the curb and celebrate how little I have actually tasted in the infinite feast of good. That, in itself, fills my heart with awe. More and more I cease monitoring and lingering at the realm of human garbage, dissolving the need to fix what might happen or waste energy trying to prevent it—or to be the catalyst for anything fertilized with restriction.
All that I can be responsible for is keeping my heart open, for continuing to show up, ready to welcome the direct experience of expansion.
