Unpave Roads and Unexpected Challenges

The roads are not paved in Tanzania. They stretch out like long dirt fingers through the lush green valleys and high rolling mountains, vulnerable to the whims of nature, the brute determination of land rovers, and the fickle attention of politics. They reflect the unpredictability, the fierce and natural openness to whatever the universe offers, and the sense of enoughness that is so evident in the peoples there.

I ventured to this third world African country the same winter that El Nino plowed into it. Torrential rains and knee deep ruts left the roads impassable, our planned destinations improbable, and my  preconceived notions of what I would experience obliterated. What I received instead was a spirit of adventure and a passionate absorption in the moment:  Would the road ahead be washed out? Should we go this way or that? Can we get over this raging stream without our land rover getting stuck? What is ahead for us today?

This take-it-one-day-at-a-time experience mirrored every aspect I encountered of African life. We met the Hadza, that ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers who set out every day with their homemade spears and undaunted spirits in search of what they need to eat and live for just that day. Their grass huts contain only open dirt hearths that shelter nothing except one another and their obvious deep connection with the earth and family. We carried their spirit with us, traveled Africa ourselves, as Hadzas, hunting and gathering whatever nature and the universe offered us each day, happy to be in this open playground of wildlife and nature with all its abundant beauty.

The Hadza, as well as the Maasai — the pastoral, semi-nomadic tribe, draped in dramatic red and purple garb, shepherding their flocks in green, verdant valleys –live daily with the pressures of uncertainty concerning land management, distribution of resources, and over-population. Without the sophistication, education, or privilege we westerners have, these African peoples manage their lives with a resilience, a rootedness, a gratitude and sense of enoughness few of us in the west know.

We think, in America, with our paved roads and concrete cities and privileged lifestyles, we can wall out the uncertainties and unpredictabilities that mark our lives as human beings. We think, in America, with our cushioned dwellings and protected suburbs and police surveillance, we can wall out danger and devastation from our families. We expect too much. We delude ourselves. There will always be an El Nino to disturb our scheduled tranquillity.

There will always be bumps in the road and washed out passages between ourselves and where we want to go. There will always be the challenge of dealing with what today has in store for us as we make our way towards tomorrow. There will always be an Africa in our lives.

And who can speak of the splendor and struggle of Africa without mentioning its wondrous wildlife? We came upon animal kills with buzzards and hyenas ripping the flesh of their newly downed prey, while wildebeests and zebra grazed quietly by. We lay hushed in tents in open wilderness, listening to rain, to the roar of a lion in the valley below, to the snorting of warthogs routing just inches away, to the magical sounds of tropical birds in morning’s first light.

In the Mahale Mountains beside Lake Tanganyika, we sat in wondrous awe mere feet away from chimpanzees lounging, playing, chasing freely, wordlessly connected by our common ancestry, wondrously reminded of our natural need for play and touch.

I left Africa, filled to the heartbrim with images and sounds and feelings I will savor into my old age, accepting of my need to rip myself from the fabric of African life in order to immerse myself again into my own, grateful for the connections to which I return, sad and happy at the same moment.

I was met at the airport by my daughter and eight month old grandson, the rich texture which forms the fabric of my life. She informed me of her plans to move five hours away, to Hilton Head Island, for all the right reasons. I was struck, again, with the unpredictable and unrelenting bump and turn in the road of which we are all vulnerable.

The roads are not paved in Tanzania. They are not paved in our own lives either. Change and unpredictability and new challenges are always just ahead. Gathering what the day offers and delighting in the abundance of the moment is all we dare do.   

Darkness Calls Forth a Helpful Light

In the winter of 1998, I was in Africa, in Tanzania, on safari.
 
The local chief of one village invited us to his home to meet his wife and child.

The dwelling was a small hut made from cow dung. There were no windows — less access for flies and mosquitoes — and a small flap door. The interior was totally black, no lighting, another way of denying flies easy access. We had to hold hands as we bent our way in, moving along the wall until we realized the line had stopped and we were to sit, in darkness. Silence.

In a few moments, the darkness began to clear and faint images appeared. Shadowy body shapes along the wall, colors, shadowy faces; then, objects in the room. As our vision cleared and we began to see, we noticed the woman and child sitting in the corner. She had been there all along, but we could not see her in the darkness.

The darkness calls forth a helpful light: light present in the dark, not visible at first, then astonishingly present. How can we not see it? How can we miss what is there all along?

Light and dark live side by side, included in the other, one reality. We just can’t see it from our biased perspective. We’re uncomfortable with ambiguity. We don’t want to see the darkness lurking in the light; we don’t want our bright times muted by the dark within it. Our either/or thinking categorizes; it’s either light or it’s dark, good or bad. We miss the wholeness in things. 

Sitting in the darkness of that dung hut gave my vision time to clear, to allow in the light that was there all along, initially hidden. I had to sit and wait. I knew I would see what I came to see, but I didn’t know when. I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t even know exactly what I would see. I just knew I would see. And then I did see, exactly what I came for.

I’ve heard it said that hope is remembering in the dark what I know to be true in the light. Hope is remembering that the light is there, that I will see again, feel light again, even though I am now mired in darkness. Like a sacred chord of memory that winds its way back to some forgotten, ancient wisdom within, I re-member, reconnect with resources within and without me. 

Just like the shadowy figures that emerged on the walls as I sat in the dark of that African hut, shadowy insights of what resources are available to me for healing begin to appear on the walls of my emotional darkness. Forgotten at first, due to my dark mood, then visibly clear.

I re-member, reassemble those resources that have been there for me all along – the people who love me, my gifts and passions, the healing presence of nature, the things about my life that restore me to wholeness. The life that nurtures me in the light can do this for me in the dark. If I can remain open to these healing powers already available to me, I can find the energy to allow them to carry me back into the light. 

Besides the resources that bless my life, these shadowy images illuminate in the dark those things about my life I need to change. The darkness pulls the shade over my energy so I am forced to bring my focus inward and get in touch with what isn’t working in my life.

The darkness highlights, singles out what needs to be the focus of my attention, things I need to change, things I cannot see in the glare of everyday living. Perhaps my career is not satisfying, my relationships, my spiritual journey. I can change these once I can identify them.

The light present in our darkness is the same light available to us in the light moments of our life. It is a numinous light, just beyond our conscious mind. We don’t stop to notice the subtle shift of light, the color differentiation in the rainbow color, when we are in the light. We miss what Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst, calls those slender golden threads that guide us and shape our lives. 

We realize only afterwards that there seemed to be some larger power or energy at work in our life that opened up new opportunity, new energy, a new fork in the road. The more we can integrate these shadowy images into our conscious living, the more we can cooperate with them and make them work for us.

Discovering the light present in the darkness, discerning the subtle change of light when we are in the light – these are the tools given us by a God who first called light out of darkness so that we, too, can create a life that can heal.

What I know is that my experience in that humble dwelling in Africa stays with me today as a metaphor for how to sit and wait in the dark until the light present in it makes itself available to me. It teaches me how to become more sensitive to the shifting light in both the dark and light of my life. It reminds me to look for the surprise, the emerging other in all things, the not-yet-recognized of what is trying to catch my attention.

Those shadowy images on the wall become, for me, images of my own becoming.

Lighting The Lamp

Sometimes the lights go out in our visible world. Our rainbow color turns pitch black; we can’t see anything positive. If we are not accustomed, at times like these, to switch to a different frequency, to a different energy source, we’ll feel lost and victimized – like finding ourselves suddenly without electricity in our home, with no candles to light our way.

Energy shifts and plays itself out on different levels. If we are not aware of how sacred energy, energy of the invisible world, intersects with our human energy, we will not know how to call on this energy when our visible world grows dark. If we are unable to shift to a more transcendent view of what is happening – the long view – we will get caught up in the draining, disorienting details of the short view — the particular anxiety-provoking circumstance.

If we have, in the past, sought stillness and nurture with such things as meditation, music, art, nature, yoga, we have already experienced fleeting moments of wholeness – moments of sweet expansiveness, of timeless peace, a knowing that reaches beyond our human perspective. We can use these practices to still our mind and to place ourselves in the healing path of wholeness.  

Living prepares us for dying – with losses, disappointments, unwanted endings. Likewise, sacred energy in us allows us to resonate and identify with the wholeness we already are, from eternity’s perspective. Letting go of life into the dying process is something we have to initiate long before we let go into actual death, or we fight death. Shifting our awareness from the visible world we can see to invisible energy and patterns we can’t is, likewise, something we have to practice before we are faced with crisis or darkness and need this support.

Wholeness is a universal experience, embedded in the human psyche. We see cycles in nature — moon cycles, countless examples of nature’s becoming, becoming, becoming. Symbols that infer wholeness – the mandala, other ancient symbols that portray the union of opposites and the dissolution of duality. We experience wholeness in a beautiful piece of music, in a moment of harmonious union with another person.

Wholeness is available to us, but we need a spiritual practice that invites it into our life in order to integrate it into our person. When we speak of sitting in the darkness until the light present in it begins to come through, we are speaking of calling into consciousness this sacred energy, this stream of light from another realm of being that sustains and directs the world we know. This is not easy to do in the hard times if we don’t practice it in lighter moments.

I once heard an old Protestant hymn, “It’s Because Of Whose I Am.”  It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that I will never be lost, destroyed, or forsaken. It’s because I am one with the wholeness at the Center that everything that happens to me is something the other end of which is in invisible hands that are pulling me towards my wholeness, my full potential.

In our youth, we are not drawn to such energy. We are too focused on raising children, building careers, fulfilling worldly tasks. This is as it should be. Age brings with it the leisure and reflection that welcomes the nearness of wholeness. We can take the longer view – see ourselves as part of the life-death-life cycle, part of the eternal movement of life pouring through us. Becoming a grandmother helped me to experience this in myself. 

Wholeness, the propensity for wholeness, is available at all ages, of course. I nursed from its maternal presence on my waterfall as a small child. All young children have stolen moments of wholeness, but life has a way of dictating other priorities that push this propensity aside.

It is our task, at any age, to learn how to relax and to move with that which moves and informs our visible world, our body, our soul, to move into the other mind of us. This support from the invisible world, this sacred energy that pulses through us, is always close, but it takes a shift in consciousness and presence. It takes discovering the spiritual within our animal nature, looking for the deeper meaning of what it is to be human, even in the worst of circumstances.  

This means not clinging to our favorite rainbow color or life circumstance in the trust that an inner directive knows better than we how to cooperate with the wholeness at our core. It means finding the wholeness, the totality of life, in circumstances that may terrify, derail and even strip us of our comfort and feelings of well being. It is a belief that life is coming back around to carry us forward, even as it feels like we are being pushed back.

In our moment of crisis, life comes back around for us in that still moment of quiet when what we are experiencing flips over into more comfortable energy. We emerge, more resilient, more aware of ourselves as part of something larger than we can say, than we can know, yet not larger than what we experience at our core.

Our breathing shifts from that heavy, tight breathing pattern into a more comfortable, rhythmic flow. As we become more conscious of our breathing, we become more conscious of those invisible hands reaching out for us just beyond awareness.

Youth’s Dashing and Dancing

“At the heart of the nature of all living things,” mused Alfred North Whitehead in his Adventures of Ideas, “there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy.” (294) The underworld ordeal is the vehicle of this “harvest.”

The myths that lure us away from home to seek our journey are usually those things we only heard about from others’ stories or dreams-come-true. Whitehead suggests that “the deepest definition of Youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.” True. It is the universal story of humankind to start out thinking we want one thing and to end up realizing we want something entirely different. As this maturing process unfolds, our youthful dreams are usually dashed.

The dream is important. It ignites and fuels imagination and passion, essential energy for the journey far from home. “Our souls are formed in the idleness of youth,” some wise man said. Dreams are borne in this idle play, choices too. We tell our youth, “Go to what you want and wait. A door will open.” It’s the rest of the story our youth aren’t told.
   
The door is an opening, not a destination. Getting that first job, buying that first home – these are but openings into richer choices. What we really want is not so easy to know in our youth. It takes time and the gaining of things we thought we wanted, until we get them — a high-paying, high-stress career, a large home with a large mortgage – before we can redefine our true hunger.

It takes us by surprise when we discover that, what we wanted after all is, as Saint Exubery says, “invisible to the human eye.” That’s the adventure that is never finished, not fixed in time, that’s always changing, always moving, just ahead of us. This stokes our passion.  Then, imagination teases us on, to discover what we really want at a deep, core level. It takes time, and lots of opening and closing of doors.

Carl Jung said we are pushed from within toward wholeness yet free to choose not to be whole. If our dreams are too narrow, we will settle for living off other people’s dreams without ever finding what makes our own heart sing. We can’t stand in two worlds. Either we’re on the path, our path, or we’re walking the path of someone else’s choosing. If we don’t stand tall where we choose to stand, it won’t reveal to us who we really are and to what our wholeness calls us.

What do we tell our youth, then, of their starter dreams? Just that – they are starter dreams. We now have starter marriages, starter homes, so why not starter dreams? Do whatever you undertake like it’s all the passion you need. Join your energy to whatever pleasures you, whatever energizes you, and that energy will spill over into your present venture. Connect with your present venture with the same passion and energy you would a sexual partner.

Represent yourself and what you really have to offer the world, because, if you’re unsure, you won’t offer yourself in your full richness. Be flexible, don’t get stuck in one choice, one venture, but be willing to go with the flow of change. If you’re doing what you do best, someone will notice. Be open to new opportunities to express what is in you, even when it doesn’t seem likely this is how you would choose it on your own.

Some doors may be closed to you. Go through the door that is open and make it possible to express your gift there. Make it work for you until something does work for you. Do whatever you do in your way, so you can come to your fullness, wherever your path leads. Don’t be too hooked on one dream. The dream changes as opportunity knocks.

Hardship is out there. What you do with it is important. Let your song be, “I’m gonna find a way to be!” Remember, the Grail journey is a search that never gets there. It’s not finding the Grail but how you experience your life along the way that is the real goal, the real prize. To feel and to fully experience is the Grail, not anything you can put in your hand.

And when “tragedy” comes, as Whitehead says it must? Don’t run from it, as instinct will suggest. Don’t lose that energy you’ve shepherded so well. If your relationship or your career crumbles before your eyes, shift the dream, shift the energy, if all else fails. Get that passion back into your life and look for the next right step.

There’s an old Krishna story about a demon chasing Krishna, with Krishna racing to escape. It isn’t until Krishna looks back to see if he can discover anything interesting in the demon, find any passion in the chase, that new energy emerges. Krishna discovers the imagination to teach the demon how to dance with him. And then they dance, until the demon becomes a Beautiful One.

Deeper “tragedy” — losses that break the heart — demand more archetypal energy. It’s life itself that wants to dance with us, and the ticket to dance defies our understanding. Then, Dear Youth, step back into all those life-death-life stories you carry in your soul and sit until the tearing clears. Fall into the unconscious and wait for energy to stir your passion once again.

From ancient times, we’ve known that sacrifice is bedrock to the human experience. The underworld is the breaking of the bread of us, so that new energy can emerge from the broken pieces. Unbroken bread is unconsecrated bread. To be consecrated – to be blessed by life – the bread must be broken. It is in the breaking that we are transformed into something other, something sacred – transcendent in fact – a eucharist to be shared in every human story.

The underworld, the ordeal, is the threshing floor of this harvesting of youth. The “harvest of tragedy,” for Whitehead, is that all this suffering brings Youth to what he could not otherwise attain, “the Harmony of Harmonies.” It is only in the sacrifice that the fullness is realized. It is only in the loss of youthful dreams that the real dream awakes the dreamer and offers life.

Grow Down, Not Up

Knowing what direction to go in makes all the difference. Perhaps it becomes clearer with the wandering, but I wish I had known when I started out. I tried so hard to grow up when, all along, I should have been growing down. I wish I had known to tell my children that.

As a child, I looked to the adults around me to get an idea of what it meant to be grown-up. Now that I am an adult myself, I smile to think the models of maturity I chose to emulate didn’t know then any more than I know now. We inherit a tribal image of what it looks like to be “mature” — to be settled successfully in a career, to be responsible choice-makers and committed partners, to have the wisdom to know what our spouse and children need and the grace to give it to them.

We take on this image as we would a borrowed garment, from the outside in: We marry and assume we’ll know how to make it work, we have children and assume we’ll know how to be loving and effective parents. We try to grow up — take on roles expected of us — rather than allow ourselves to naturally, authentically grow down into the duties and circumstances our particular life presents us, on our individual timetable.

The notion of growing down into our life is a gift to me from James Hillman, a Jungian analyst, author of The Soul’s Code. We receive a particular body, family tree and life circumstance that tie us to the earth and create a container in which we experience living. The trick is to move ever more deeply into our own unique mix until we discover who we are, what we want. It’s not about copying society’s standards or comparing success. It’s not about making our family proud. It’s about discovering our own unique calling and meaning.

The problems I see with the notion of growing up:  If I don’t live up to others’ expectations, I feel guilty, inadequate, when it may be that I’m just not emotionally ready to take on something. I’m  where I am, where I need to be and can only be on my journey. If I’m heckled about the need to grow up, I feel judged, criticized for who I am, compared to others who may be in different circumstances, need to be on a different journey, to learn different things than I do.

If I’m encouraged to grow down, I feel supported in my effort to become who I am, more able to affirm myself and my personal pace, not caught in comparing myself to others. I’m not stifled by the fear of disappointing anyone. There’s no end to it as there is in “He’s all grown up.” I get the message, “Easy does it,” and “Go at your own speed” rather than “Measure up!” and “Stand up like a man!”

When young people don’t think they’re “making it” in their own or in others’ eyes — according to traditional mores of growing up — they often fall into “faking it.” They lose their grounding, their footing on the earth, as they opt for ways to escape the shame of not measuring up, not meeting some external standard out there for which they were probably not emotionally equipped.

They become so focused on looking successful, adequate, grown-up, they lose touch with being who they are. They’re robbed of learning the lessons they need to learn. They become disconnected from soul, disoriented, unable to develop the gifts and talents they were intended to contribute to the world – all out of love and loyalty to their family tribe.

As the shame or the escapism takes over, they isolate, aren’t comfortable being around anyone who might know the failure and confusion they feel. The garment/image of what maturity “should” look like, placed on them by the tribe, doesn’t fit, so they experiment with other things, like drugs or self-destructive living. They “act out” rather than pull in and take stock of what’s happening to them. They move further out, on the edges, where no one can touch them.

Life has a way of being there for our lost children even when we cannot. Some calamity will arise, a legal tangle perhaps, some random event that uncovers the truth of their running. Everything falls apart. Sitting with the broken pieces of their life, they are forced down into the circumstance they were trying to avoid. Life offers them, and us, another chance, another look.

We all stand, together, where they are, not where we thought they were, needed them to be, but where they are. Down, into the pit with them, into the mess we created together. That’s where their spiritual journey begins. That’s where their soul emerges like a phantom from the depths and screams in pain, “I’m starving. Pay attention to me.”

What rises from of the ashes, what works its way up from the black muck of crisis is something real and human, something we can all get our arms around. It sometimes takes a fall to see better where we stand on the ground. Our child gets to know themself better and we begin to really see them as separate individuals.

What would I tell my children if I had it to do again? Find something you love about yourself, find something you’re passionate about doing, love what you have to offer the world. Stand in your own place. Take your time. Don’t compare; it robs important energy.What would I tell myself? Throw away narrow expectations and family “shoulds”,  delight in your child’s fantasies and dreams, encourage your child’s uniqueness, don’t compare, and listen, listen, listen. 

Maybe it’s all semantics, just words, to squabble over “growing up” or “growing down.” But words carry energy and direction and meaning. And words are all we have to tell our children we love them just where they are on the journey right now, that there is always time, and that we will always be in their corner, cheering them on.

A Look At Life From Both Sides

“My neighbors tell me I waste time by pulling weeds in my yard when a chemical weed killer can do it with one stroke. I like sitting in the grass, listening to nature, pulling weeds one at a time!”

My friend’s remark reflects how many perceive the impractical nature of soulmaking. Persons who are into doing find it difficult to understand those who are more into being. Doing is goal oriented, task oriented, action driven. Being happens beneath the level of the skin, is more subtle, less measured.

Drinking in nature’s performance as it moves across the day, sensing a shift in our partner’s emotional presence, experiencing a sunset in the pores of our skin — this is about being. It’s a quality, a receptivity, an intuitive awareness, an inner going-on that is invisible to others. It serves no purpose but to enhance meaning. It has no tangible result but an enlarged soul.

A person into being honors their activities, not by trying to complete them, but by trying to be present to them, by remembering them while they are doing them. A person into doing enjoys their activities, but most of the enjoyment comes with the feeling of accomplishment, with delighting in the outcome.

It’s a difference of focus: one focuses on the process or experience of something, the other, on the end result. I often find that someone into doing finds it more difficult to be, whereas someone into being can certainly do, but needs time for being in order to be more active. It’s more difficult for a doer to understand or appreiciate a person more into being, whereas both preferences are necessary for a balanced life or a satisfying relationship.

It’s the imbalance or neglect of either that brings an individual or a couple scrambling into my office. It may surface as loneliness or as dissatisfaction or as a conflict in priorities. Dialogue has to happen, whether it’s between the two sides of an individual’s personality or between two individuals in a relationship.

Within the personality, the dialogue is between the complementary aspects of our doing and our being energies: our capacity to focus and activate our dreams and plans, but, also, to enjoy the experience we have just activated. It’s the play between knowledge and wisdom, between our focused and our softer energies, between causing things to happen and experiencing them happen, while they are happening. When the personality is tilted or lopsided in favor of one over the other, an individual is not in touch with his or her full capacity for wholeness and creativity.

Within a relationship between two persons, the dialogue is between the needs, expectations and preferences of each. The partner who favors the being energy may frame it as a loneliness felt when the other remains solely in the doing mode. They long for the doer to slow down, to appreciate the reflective moments of life, to spend emotional time together, to be still together.

The partner who is more into doing energy may express anger with the be-er for not taking more initiative with daily chores, for not taking charge of planning activities or setting common goals. They often feel unappreciated for all the doing, responsible things they contribute to the relationship, thinking the partner who functions more out of a being mode to be less committed.

Both partners, both energies need to be reframed positively as serving to nudge each other toward wholeness. Both energies are vital, one aspect of the whole journey, seen from different vantage points. Learning to appreciate and deal with the differences, experiencing life from the other’s perspective, joining forces rather than judging and discounting one another — these efforts strengthen relationships, not threaten them.

As soul is the pull between spirit and matter, soul pulls between doing and being. The divine longing, the discontent at our core, rouses us into doing, then reflects and relaxes in our being side. Soul wants to experience both the being and the doing, to be caught up in the action and the reflection, to experience every feeling, then sit back and delight in the accomplishment of it.

Our doing keeps us grounded in matter, in the physical world; our being keeps us in touch with the invisible world of wholeness. Both release light in the other. Toiling in the invisible world and in the visible world come together in more insight in what it means to be a human person. Doing and being are starting points from differernt perspectives. One journey, different energies.

Most of the people close to me that have always been into doing seem to come around in later life to appreciate and enjoy the being side of themsevles. It’s part of their spiritual evolvement. Those who have preferred being all along seem to exhibit, in later years, a desire to develop skills they never attempted in their youth. Perhaps this is the pull of soul, the push toward wholeness and completeness.

The sacred is roused in us, reaches out for us; we reach back. That is the doing. The finding, the moment of intimacy is the being. Soul delights in both.

Wholeness: Unordered Order

We had a rainstorm last night. A good rainstorm is just what I need to remind me that life is not supposed to be perfect. Life is whole.

I have a dry creek bed in my back yard, to hold and channel the runoff when it rains hard. It begins on a hill and slopes down into my yard. Otherwise, the runoff from the street, as I am in the lowest plain, carries everything into my backyard and makes a mess.

Every now and then, a heavy rainstorm shows me who’s the boss. I woke up this morning to see my small river rocks, or pebbles, spread throughout my yard as if it was a rock painting in the grass. I could never create such a lovely design as nature had so easily. It was wondrous, if it wasn’t that I knew I had to go out there and spend the day restoring order.

We try so hard to keep life neat and ordered, with everything interlocking in symmetrical and sequential patterns. Our day should follow our plan, just the way we write it in our day-timer. Our relationships should be as easy as the self-help experts say they can. Our professional life should unfold like those of all our friends who seem to have their act together. 

But, life is whole, not ordered, and, certainly, never neat. Wholeness contains all possibilities, all opposites, all options within the circle of itself. Days run smoothly then blow themselves out into chaotic free-for-alls. Relationships look neat and tidy to the neighbors; they never are. And, our professional life? What sacrifice was made if they assemble like directions in a cookbook?

I walked the neighborhood this morning. There’s a tree across the street around the corner. The local electric company was out with chain saws and workers on lifts, replacing downed wires and restoring power. I passed the duck pond and stopped to watch the ducks. Three baby ducks were playing in the puddles – one more reminder of nature’s cycles and what wholeness brings. Life is always ready to come back ‘round again and offer what wasn’t, just moments before.

Joseph Campbell came to believe that the soul of life is not about meaning, but about aliveness. We participate in life’s aliveness. That’s why we’re here on earth, to participate in the wonder of it — the ups and the downs, the beginnings and the endings that never really end, the cycles that bring drought and then rain storms and baby ducks. The more alive we are, the more open we are to what wholeness and the life-death-life cycle of which we are a part offer us in terms of humanness, the more meaning we create from that aliveness. The gift is that we just are.

I love those small river rocks that form my dry creek bed. They force me to pick them up and play with them after virulent rainstorms and place them back in ordered patterns, different somehow than how they were just days before. I don’t know what order, or what place in line they liked the best. I can only put them back as the moment predicts, as instinct dictates and imagination leads me. I know they’ll only rearrange themselves and spread out across my lawn once more.

Is this not the way of life? Don’t I daily pick up the pieces of my life that have been scattered across my field of becoming? Don’t I lead with my imagination and my soul to place them exactly where I think they need to rest? And doesn’t life, one more time, scatter my plans and safety and should-be preferences into some other lovely design I would never orchestrate myself? What else is left but to say, “Yes, yes, once again, yes.” I want the aliveness. I’ll have to accept the chaos.

Wholeness is everywhere, offering every opportunity for us to see beyond the momentary setback or confusion to the work of sacred energy active in our life. The circle cycles back around to embrace our surprise that life is always larger than we can contemplate, that what happens before us is participating in something larger than we can even dream of. That frightful rainstorms and baby ducks and even death are in the service of our becoming our freest selves.

The day wasn’t wasted. I’ve played in my back yard under nature’s canopy and participated in the aliveness I want so dearly to embrace in me. And, even with the hours I’ve spent creating order in my yard where once again I know chaos will break loose, I love the wisdom of it. It’s only when I delude myself into thinking I’ve created an order that will last that I leave myself open to being reminded in even more devastating ways.

Wholeness has an order all its own. I’d better learn to love it and laugh with it and participate in it as it fashions even me into what it dreams I can be.

Life Opens Wide As We Open To It

Sometimes we have to let go of the life we think we have in order to embrace the life really offered us. It’s like diving for shells on the ocean floor and then realizing that rocking in the warmth of the ocean itself is the real prize.

Loss, change, happenstance – these wash away those things we first thought our living on the earth to be and carry us kicking into the full flow of whatever our life really has to teach.

For my part, divorce brought with it the challenge of discovering my real gifts and direction. A grown daughter and grandchildren moving away brought time and reason to find within myself another focus. A grown son close-by brings opportunity for a mother and son’s adult encounter. Each of these carve space in me, making room for life’s sweet teaching to hold all things loosely.

For another, it may be the loss of a dream. A middle-aged woman grieves for the child she will never bear, never hold, never name. She surrenders to the gift in her of mothering in other, more universal ways. A man grieves for the success or a specific goal he will never achieve. He opens himself to relational possibilities that career demands could never offer. This, too, is learning not to cling to maps and messages not meant for one’s particular path.

It’s as if some master craftsman has all along been stripping away layers of pre-conditioned notions of what life is until we can bask in the naked truth that life just is. Life is not for storing up in barns, Jesus said, or for overdosing on endless desires, Buddha taught. Life is now and precious and full of tangled treasures.

The only constant in life for me has been nature herself, God’s hand brushing across the horizon in strokes of color that sprinkle sunrise and sunset across my day. My pre-dawn walk, the evening quiet with its cycles of moonlight, the play of animals – these ground me. People move in and out of my life. Years whittle away what expectations I may have harbored in younger days.

Rather than less, I am filled with more: inner peace, tranquility of soul, the realization and clarity of what really matters in my life. Whatever the day offers is prize enough. When something doesn’t happen as I might expect, I look to see what the universe has planned for me that day. It points me in directions I may not have looked for the gold I find there.

As I allow the rhythms of nature to pulse my being, I find it easier to allow others to be on their path without my need to control the outcome. If others do not behave or respond in ways I think best or healthy, I know there is a teacher wiser than I to guide them in the journey seeking them.

This leaves me available to focus on my own soul adventure. The sound of the bird’s song becomes more sweet, music, more pure, touch, more precious. In the words of Pat and Tom Malone, “I am more able to live as myself in my world as it is, to live in my relationships with other people as they are, to live where I am, with whom I am, doing what we are doing together, while we are doing it.”

Life opens wide and lays before me a banquet I did not know was mine while I was so focused on what I thought my life was supposed to be about. Perhaps that’s what loss and change and happenstance bring – the opportunity to claim what was truly authentic about ourselves before we took on the roles and tasks that captured our energy.

I didn’t know in my twenties who I would be in my fifties. I thought I would marry, have children, and that would be my life.

Life is long, and lovely, and as wide as the sky.

Thinking Can Terrorize Us Or Set Us Free

When I was a child, I had a baby doll. I could change the expression on her face from a smile to a frown by turning the knob on the top of her head. Turn the knob and my doll was smiling. Turn the knob and my doll was frowning. I always knew the smile and the frown were but a turn away.

Life experiences shift and change just as quickly. Like the colors of a kaleidoscope, the elements of change are always present, ready with the slightest shift to create a new experience. Rather than be intimidated by or fearful of this unpredictable, impermanent aspect of life, we can learn to anticipate and befriend it. Psychology calls this “holding the tension of the opposites.”

As we move from Center into everyday life, we move into the field of time, the field of duality or opposites – night and day, right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark. It is the field of change, the field of suffering, the field of our human endeavor. Our perspective of this field of time and how this impacts our life determines the freedom and comfort we experience as we live out our life.

If I believe the universe will provide what I need in order to become whole, I can trust that what ever happens to me is in the service of my wholeness. I can call the light of consciousness into whatever darkness I find myself and hold the tension until the dark is transformed into its opposite – until it releases the light present in it. Rather than view a downturn, the opposite of the safety I experience now, as negative, I would see it as part of my evolution toward wholeness. 

If I believe man is “fallen,” estranged from nature and transcendence, pitted against an impersonal universe, I would not trust my natural self to know what is best for me. I would not trust that what happens to me – a shift into an opposite energy — is what is supposed to happen, part of the evolution of my wholeness. My goal would be to outsmart the fates and gain the upper hand. Any downturn of circumstance would be seen as a misfortune to avoid at all cost.

Were I to rename the faces on my baby doll in light of these two perspectives, I would rename them fear and joy. Fear and joy are like two aspects, or opposites, that shift and play with one another, always present when the other is present, even when hidden from our awareness.

If I believe the universe will provide what I need in order to become whole, I will address any fear I experience with the assurance I am in the hands of a wisdom greater than my own. I will view my anxiety as an indicator of my aliveness. If I believe that man is “fallen,” that life is unsafe, I will view my fear as a way for me to hold my edge as I compete with others to try to gain control of whatever happens. I would act out of negative energy instead of positive energy.

The face of fear on my baby doll, then, congers up two different experiences depending on my perspective of the universe. “There’s nothing I can do to stop the unexpected” leaves me on guard, trying to outsmart the inevitable. “There’s something I need to learn from what is happening right now, some new energy trying to be released in me” does not entirely alleviate the fear but couples the fear with the joy that I am moving towards some shade of wholeness.

If we have been lulled into believing — by the American Dream, by our religious ethic — things should always be good, that, if we do the right thing, we are safe from harm, we are devastated and disoriented when bad things happen. We take it personally, like we have been singularly picked out for this momentary derailment, by God or by some downturn of fate.

In reality, it’s the natural law of things. As the stock market goes up, it is already correcting itself and making its way back down. As we make special effort to live a healthy life, we are, at that same moment, in the process of dying. As we try to get everything in our life under our control, something will happen in the family or in our finances to throw us into chaos. Everything contains its opposite. It is the natural course of things, not an unexpected catastrophe.

Holding the tension of the opposites means that we become more comfortable with transitory moments, with the in-between states of knowing, with the turnaround that is occurring at this very instant. It is befriending fear and joy as two blurred feelings within the same experience: I fear losing the magic that cannot be sustained while delighting in the joy that the magic brings.

Our thinking can terrorize us or set us free. “This isn’t supposed to happen to me because I follow the rules” sets me up for terror. I see any downturn as personal, catastrophic, a threat to my core safety rather than a natural movement. Seeing sudden shifts as natural allows me to more easily ride the waves. If my intention is pure, if I have done my best to do what I see as the right thing, I can trust that life, the universe, the transcendent that informs me at my personal center, is somehow near, coaxing me towards my ultimate wholeness.

I am more able to sit with the fear until I can dance with it, dialogue with it, learn from it, and eventually, transform it into something that offers grace. Rather than fear the unexpected, the downturn, I recognize it, as it is happening in my life, as an old friend coming back around to greet me. I am able to hold the two experiences as part of the whole movement called change. This allows me to surrender myself to a deeper act of living in the world.

As a child, I was in charge of turning the knob on my baby doll’s head to change the frown into a smile. As an adult, I am in charge of changing the thinking that goes on in my head, to change the fear, or frown, into a joyful celebration of life as it presents itself to me on a daily basis.

The Other Side Of Retirement

“I always rolled sevens,” Steve smiled with shy humility. “I was always lucky where I landed, no matter the turn of the wheel.” Steve, now 62, was a corporate executive and very successful in his career. He retired two years ago and suddenly finds himself disoriented, confused. “I can’t tell if my life is what it should be, or even if I’m happy,” he complains. “There’s no measure or feedback in retirement.” Part of him enjoys the time to be. Part of him doesn’t.

“It was always ‘Do and then you’ll know yourself’,” he said. “Accomplish something first, my father always told me, and that will be your identity, how others will know you; how you will know you. I feel lost now, about who I am. There’s no business card to hand someone. I don’t have an identity.”

Steve’s plight isn’t unique in the corporate world. The outer journey of accomplishing, producing, providing, supersedes the inner journey of self-reflection, value clarification, spiritual awareness. The inner journey has to wait until there’s time, until goals are accomplished, until financial responsibilities are met. By then, it takes more than time on one’s hands to know how to step on the path of self-awareness and inner growth. There’s no executive plan.

“I always told those who worked for me, ‘Don’t confuse your job with your life’, and now I think I did just that. I know it sounds strange,” Steve confessed, “but I’ve had a hard time, with retirement, not being important to anyone.” Without a recognized position or role with which to project himself, Steve doesn’t know why others should care about him, what he wants from his relationships, how he wants to fill his open schedule, whether or not he likes his wife.

After convincing Steve he is right where he needs to be – dealing with his present moment – we began the slow excavation of his person. Steve has to build an inner man from the inside out, to create a person out of the fragments he does know about Steve-the-human-being. What is Steve passionate about? Does he have any hobbies? Is he a man who allows others close to him or does he maintain emotional distance? 

Plato was right – Know yourself (first). Be. Then you’ll know what you want to do. Your doing will flow out of your being, your passion. If you’re used to having to make only the big decisions – which stock to buy, what company to sell – start paying attention to the small ones – Do I want pizza or hamburger tonight? Do I want to take a walk with my spouse after dinner or read a book? How do I want to spend time with my grown children? It’s about becoming conscious.

It’s the outer and then, if the inclination is there, the inner journey for most corporate workers in our culture; a move “from success to substance,” from doing what you must do, to doing what you were really born to do – become a fully developed human being.   

The trick is learning how to do this before retirement, creating the kind of passion for life and interests while you are in the full bloom of energy, to have a life to enjoy and to which to redirect your focus. It’s keeping one eye on the invisible world while you’re fully invested in the visible world. So the invisible world of soul and aliveness trying to connect up in you won’t be such a dilemma when retirement offers the time to enjoy this part of the personality.

Steve’s emotional well-being, his self-esteem, was tainted at an early age by his father’s insistence he wouldn’t feel good about himself until he successfully accomplished something – the “accomplish something first and that will be your identity” thing. If Steve felt cherished and enough just as he was, as a child, he could have chosen a life work, a career, out of his giftedness and not out of a sense of obligation, or survival, or the need to prove his worthiness.

The opportunity to develop our unique gifts and interests has be to recognized as important in our childhood in order for us to keep this vital connection with ourselves alive and well throughout our business career. Then, retirement will be welcomed as a natural blessing after a long and fulfilling adventure of self-discovery and self-expression, a time to enjoy all the things we love about ourselves but never had the time to fully set free.