Loose Change, Too

How to engage our lives is the question. 07/12/09

2009-07-12T13:09:00.002-04:00

The church is the great destroyer of lives, the subversive supplanter of civilizations. Or would be, if it believed it’s own message, which is “Wake up! Live the life that is yours to live!” If everyone lived his or her own life it would transform the world. If any of us did it, it would shake the foundations. That’s the revolution, living your own life, the life that is yours to live—which is not to be confused with the life you want to live, would like to live, wish you could live. What the world most needs is for you to live the life with your name on it. The church as it ought to be would be enabling us to do that.

How to engage our lives is the question. How to live the life that is ours to live. There are many distractions to take our minds off the business of sitting down, shutting up, being quiet, looking and listening, watching and waiting.

We wait for the path to appear before us, for the white rabbit to grace us with a glimpse, even as we work to pay the bills and mow the lawn. We do the things that need to be done while we wait to see what NEEDS to be done. Waiting is a test of our faith, courage and resolve. We have to believe in something. I recommend the path and the white rabbit. We wait for the path to open, for the white rabbit to appear.

We look and listen our way to where we need to be. We don’t think our way there. We listen for what’s next. We look for what needs to be done. We don’t think up these things. We spend our time waiting to see, to hear, and then acting upon the obvious. Of course! Why didn’t I see this, hear this, before?

We have to live out of our feel for what needs to be done even if it makes no sense and seems to be a waste of time. Everything hangs on our doing what needs to be done—on what we say needs to be done—whether it matters to anyone else, or makes any discernible difference in the way the world works, or not. Our task is to do what is meaningful to us. It doesn’t have to mean anything to anyone else.

Gandhi said something along the lines of “Of course your contribution will be insignificant, but it is essential that you make it. No one can do it for you, and if you don’t do it, it won’t be done. Nothing is more important than that we do what is ours to do.” I couldn’t have said it better.

But we cannot look for recognition and results, outcomes and payoffs, to provide us with the necessary motivation for doing what is ours to do. The motivation is entirely internal. We do what we do because we need to do it—because it needs us to do it! The external recognition, acknowledgment, appreciation, etc. is quite beside the point and can distract us from the essential focus which is doing what needs to be done—what we need to do—no matter what. Our response to the lack of external reinforcement is “Oh well,” and a return to the matter of attending the internal directive. The absence of external reinforcement can be seen as a test of our resolve to align ourselves with the inner directive no matter what.

The problem is that the life that is our life to live—the work that is our work to do—isn’t what we think it should be. The life we get is not the life we have in mind. We are always called beyond ourselves. It is never our idea for ourselves, for our lives, we are asked to serve. We are here for more than our own life, our own pleasure and happiness. We have to trust ourselves to the life that is ours to live even when it seems like it is all for nothing. Joseph Campbell says, “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off.” Being on the beam becomes tedious and boring and it looks like nothing is happening and we are going nowhere fast and we long for excitement, and adventure so, off the beam we go.

We are always looking for the exit. It doesn’t take long for us to be done with this life and be ready for something else. We look for things to help us escape our life. We hate our life. We want out of our life. We want some other, better, finer, easier life instead. Happiness is always another life. But not the life with our name on it. We aren’t about to go to Nineveh. We have to be really desperate to go there!

We look for things to take our mind off the life we are living. Romance. Wealth. Prosperity. Winning the lottery, you know. Dreams of how it will be when we have it made. We need to look for things to engage us with our life. For things to deepen, expand, enlarge our lives. For things that will enable us to live our lives. But, that’s the last thing we want to do.

We’re playing a game called “We’re not playing a game!” The game we are not playing is designed to keep our mind off the life we are not living, the life that is our life to live. The problem is how to get us together with the life that has our name on it, that is our life to live. We want the excitement and the glory of Gay Paree. We want to enjoy our lives. We wouldn’t mind living the life with our name on it if could also be the life we have in mind, the life we wish we could live.

Sad to say, the adventure we get is never the adventure we have in mind. The beam we get is never the beam we want. We have to trust ourselves to the beam, and do the work that is ours to do, and let that be that. But wait. We don’t know what the work is that is ours to do, right? We would do it if we knew what it was, but we don’t know, so we can’t do it, right?

I don’t buy it. We know what we have to do (or are afraid we might know), and what we have no business doing. Boarding the boat, Jonah knows Nineveh has his name written all over it. All this talk about not knowing what to do with our lives is just an excuse to keep us from doing what we don’t want to do. When it comes to not living the life that is our life to live, any excuse will do. It’s another way of boarding the boat, or another way of missing the boat, same thing.

Our only hope is to go on doing it our way. Boarding the boat, or missing it. Sailing away from Nineveh as fast as the wind will blow. Our salvation is the great spiritual truth that no matter how far we go, or how long we’re gone, we’re just walking around the block. This is another way of saying, “Nothing is wasted.” Everything works together to wake us up. If we can wake up, we will wake up.

The process requires us to help one another see the way we see. I'm here to help you see the way you see. You're here to help me see the way I see. From seeing the way we see comes all things. When we finally see our way of seeing for what it is, we start listening and looking, asking, seeking and knocking, watching and waiting. And, at that point things change.

Things change when we begin listening within for the voice that knows what it is talking about. This is what being still and quiet and attentive does for us, it opens us to the truth of our lives, of the life that is ours to live. What carries the force? The ephemeral weight of necessity? That is so negligible that we can dismiss it, discount it, overlook it, ignore it, not know it when we hear it yet is so powerful that it runs the universe by its authority and holds the world in its hands? That is the voice that knows what it is talking about. And it is our place, our responsibility to hear it and align ourselves with it. Everything depends on it. Everything is on the line. Everything rides on our knowing “the time of our visitation” and doing right by the moment at hand in a “Thy will not mine be done” kind of way.

The spiritual practice of listening deeply connects us with our spirit which knows more than we do about who we are and what we are about and the life that is life. But when the path opens and the white rabbit appears, we have to follow. We can't be saying, "That wasn't what I had in mind!"

“(We) can do all things through (that which strengthens us),” is the old scriptural formula for living out of the power within us. It is not a power for our good, but for the good of the whole. The boon is not for us but for the world. If we can come to terms with that, we have it made.
The talk of prosperity and abundance feeds the cultural/capitalist bias toward what’s in it for me. The subversive counter to that orientation is the idea that we have what we need to do what needs to be done, which has nothing to do with having what we want. What we want has no necessary connection with the life that is ours to live. “You have your life as a prize of war” (Jer. 45:5). Our booty is our life, is the experience of being alive, is the knowledge that we did what was ours to do. In a “Well done, good and faithful servant” kind of way.

We are free to choose the life that has chosen us! 07/05/09

2009-07-05T13:40:00.003-04:00

We think freedom means doing whatever we want, whatever we choose, whatever we please. But we are not free to choose what we want, to choose our choices, to choose what pleases us. How free is that? We cannot be told what we cannot hear. We are imprisoned behind bars we cannot see.

Each of finds our own path to freedom. It begins with our waking up to how un-free we are. The more conscious we are of our bondage, the more we can exercise what freedom of choice we do have in the service of the life that is ours to live. We cannot choose any life. But we can choose to align ourselves with our life, the life with our name on it, for better and worse, in sickness and in health, from this day forward for as long as we shall live. This is our freedom, to choose the life that is ours to live, to submit to, to serve, a will beyond our will.

We get a sense of this “will beyond our will” in encounters with the numinous and through our experience with resonation. We do not make up what resonates with us. We do not decide what catches our eye. Our freedom consists of whether we will respond, to what extent we follow.
Our freedom consists of the latitude to determine to whom, or to what, we will give ourselves—to decide in light of what we shall live. Our freedom is to choose our own direction, to chart our own course, to find our own path, to decide for ourselves who will direct our steps, who will be our guide—in a “Thy will, not mine be done,” kind of way. Our freedom is the freedom of self-determination. And we make a mockery of it by handing ourselves over to the culture, to the norms and codes and structures governing how things ought to be, by working to live as life is “supposed to be” lived and going where they tell us to.

If we are just like those around us, how free is that? How free are we to voice an opinion that is not the opinion of those we run with? How free are we to see things differently from the way they are seen by those in our “in crowd”? How free are we to think, feel, or believe something that is not supposed to be thought, felt or believed? How free are we to speak with our own voice, to sing our own song, to live out of the foundation of our own authority—apart from any script, any set of established norms, any influence from the guiding voices of Those Who Know Best? Whose opinion matters most? Whose opinion do you live to trash? These are the people who are running your life. How are they doing? Our lives are empty because we've been digging dry wells where someone else told us there was water.

What is meaningful is rarely easy. Here’s the catch, what’s easy is rarely easy. We think we are saving ourselves time and trouble when we opt for easy over meaningful. We think if it’s easy, it will be meaningful enough. We sell out for easy. That’s the story of our lives, of the life of the species. We think easy is easy, but easy is hard. This is the thing we will not learn. Easy is hard. Short is long. Fast is slow. We don’t get it. We think we can have what we want: easy and meaningful. Sorry to be the one to tell you: Only in our dreams.

We stand between meaningful and easy and sacrifice meaningful for the sake of easy every time. And whine because life is empty. No kidding. Our only hope for a meaningful life is to live the life that is our life to live. We find our way to the life that is meaningful by asking, seeking and knocking. By searching, inquiring, experimenting, challenging. By doubting, questioning, exploring. By listening, and looking, and waiting attentively, expectantly, patiently. By being awake, aware, alive. By waking up, being conscious, in a community of the right kind of people.

The right kind of community, is a “we” composed of “I’s” who are being true to themselves in respectful acknowledgement of the “otherness of the other I’s” who are being true to themselves. A “we” is not a merger, or a blend, of “I’s,” but an association of “I’s” who use the “otherness of the other I’s” to bring forth what is also true and, in so doing, expand, enlarge and deepen each other. A “we” is formed around “I’s” who are becoming larger, more complex, more complete, more whole, more integrated thanks to the other “I’s” whose perspective is necessary for the development of the individual “I’s” and of the “we.”

The right kind of community is not “one big happy family,” where everyone silences her or his own voice for the sake of the harmony of the whole, but is, rather, a cacophony of voices learning to integrate themselves into a symphonic arrangement of individuals participating in the wonder of the whole that is produced by the “otherness” of each other. We bring out the best in each other by being true to ourselves, singing our own song, speaking our own voice, honoring our own perspective without striving for dominance or control. We are not here to quell, or crush, convert or quieten the other, but to listen to the other and to be transformed (deepened, expanded, enlarged) by the experience of “the otherness of the other” (James Hollis), by our “disinterested” (in the sense of our striving to force our way on the other, to have the other recognize how brilliant, wonderful, and right we are) interchange with the other, with all the others.

The right kind of community enhances the “self-ness,” the “otherness,” of each member of the community. If anyone feels diminished or dismissed or discounted or silenced or ignored, the community suffers. If anyone gives up self to belong to the community, the community ceases to exist. The health of the community is a reflection of the health—emotional/spiritual—of the individuals comprising the community. Our emotional/spiritual health is an indicator of our degree of alignment with the truth of our own soul, of our living (and speaking and being) in sync with our heart’s true desire. If we forsake that for the sake of the peace of the community, we die and the community dies, though the façade might live on for years or generations. Keeping up appearances is what we do best. But the right kind of community catches us in the act of “being nice,” calls our hand, and insists that we speak truthfully, reminding us that means hearing what is also true. The dialectic is not between what is true and what is not true but between what is true and what is also true!

Without this kind of compensating and confirming community of Others, the way we see things becomes the way things are. We slip easily over the edge and become lost in our own constructs, increasingly out of touch and disconnected. The right kind of solitude is possible only in the right kind of community. It takes both to produce the right kind of awareness, the kind that perceives what is true and what is also true, and lives in the tension, on the boundary, between yin and yang.

We have to listen to ourselves, but we cannot listen only to ourselves. The right kind of community of Others challenges us, confronts us, opposes us and provides the counterbalance to our subjectively biased view of the way things are. It takes an Other to introduce us to what is also true.

Listening to an opposite point of view doesn’t negate or cancel out our own. Oppositional is not adversarial but expansive. It asks us to take into account the “other side,” that which is also true. Every perspective is true as far as it goes, as far as it can see, up to a point, and needs to be enlarged by other perspectives which see more than any one person can see alone. All of us together can see more, can see better, than any of us alone can see. But hearing other points of view is not easy.

We are always changed against our will. We resist it all the way. We are the young child snatched from Mother’s arms and thrown screaming into the rite of initiation from which we emerge transformed. Spiritual growth is not for those who do not have what it takes to die. Again and again. Spiritual growth is for those who have run out of other options. We need the contrary voices to deepen us, enlarge us, expand us, wake us up, grow us up, round us out, and develop within us the capacity for true human-being-hood. On our own, we are narrow, shallow, blank-eyed (or wild-eyed) and empty.

Every church needs to have the capacity to define, to re-imagine itself, to be redesigned anew from the start all over again at any point in its life. Of course, there is no starting over in life, but, on the other hand, we are always starting over, beginning again. “O God of second chances and new beginnings, here I am again,” goes the old prayer. As it is with us, so it is with the church. And we need the capacity to redesign ourselves from the ground up, to re-think what it means to be the church in each generation. We have to have the freedom to bring to life now what needs to be brought to live now. To think what needs to be thought now. To believe in what needs to be believed in now. We cannot take what was meaningful to our ancestors and give it to their descendants. Nobody can hand us meaning. We have to create what is meaningful for ourselves in the moment of our living. And the church needs to provide the atmosphere in which this work to find what is meaningful is encouraged and sustained. May it be certainly so!

No one has the last word! 06/28/09 b

2009-06-28T16:16:00.003-04:00

Truth

Truth does not come wrapped in bright paper and tied with a bow, between two covers, nicely worded in sequential fashion like some wonderful Final Theory, which isn’t theoretical at all, but fully factual all the way so that that’s that, and there is no question about it. Truth isn’t like that.

Truth is all squirmy and slippery, and contradictory, and inconsistent, and paradoxical, and conundrumatic. So that the truer it is the less sense it makes, and you have to carry it around with you for days cogitating on it, poking it, and prodding it and turning it over in your mind, and the more you think about it, the more you see that its opposite is also true, and that doesn’t negate it, or cancel it out, but deepens it and expands it and enlarges it, and you find yourself saying, “Of course!” and laughing at the wonder of it all—which includes wondering why people take truth so seriously that they excommunicate one another and go to war when they should be laughing together and singing Pub songs.

+++

Woody and I tripped up to Roan Mountain State Park to take in the Rhododendrons and Flame Azaleas on Roan Mountain, and I asked for directions to Carver’s Gap from an 80-something year old on the path from the cabin to the car. “Honey,” she said, “you’ll have to ask somebody else. I’ve been coming here all my life, but I only go where they tell me to.”

We don’t want to know any more than we need to. Carver’s Gap is somewhere. We know that much, but if someone else will do the driving, why bother with the details? Just get in the car and enjoy the ride!

It would be a different world if people were living their own lives. Most of what passes for life is a substitute for life, a surrogate for life, a replacement for life, a facsimile of life that depletes us and leaves us exhausted and empty. But, if we stay busy enough and tell ourselves to just do what we are told enough, we may not notice the emptiness and be “just fine” all our lives long.

The clouds kept the camera in the bag during the early part of the day, so I drove into the village of Roan Mountain, Tennessee and had breakfast at Bob’s Dairyland, and sat waiting on my eggs and toast among the locals who were already enjoying theirs. As I took in the crowd, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have a chance with them. Better to keep my ideas to myself, discretion being the better part of valor, and all.

I walk among, live among people who cannot begin to understand what I’m saying. “Why don’t you talk to us about things we can understand?” means “Why don’t you tell us what we expect to hear?”, or, “Why don’t you tell us what we have always heard?”

For people to understand what I’m saying, they would have to reformulate their world view. They would have to un-think everything they think, and ask questions they cannot begin to ask. The gap is too great. It’s FM talking to AM. So, I don’t push the matter. Those who hear me hear me, and those who don’t hear me, don’t hear me. Those who are with us are with us, and those who are against us are against us. We have to do what is ours to do and let that be that.

“Some girls don’t like boys like me, ah but, some girls do!” The Sawyer Brown song wraps it up. Some people can’t hear what I have to say, ah but, some people can. So I say what I have to say and those who can hear it, hear it. But they don’t stop with having heard it, as though I’ve said all they need to hear. They use it as a spring-board into what else they need to hear. We all continue to listen for what else we need to hear.

Life consists of listening for what we need to hear, looking for what we need to see. When we hear it, see it, we know it. It resonates with us, and we have no question about that being what we need to hear, to see. We incor-porate that into our lives, make the shift necessary to accommodate what we have heard and seen, experience the transformation, and look and listen for the next thing we need to see and hear. There is always a next thing.

There is no final word, no Final Theory. We never arrive. We just stop too soon, are satisfied with too little. We go where they tell us to go, think what they tell us to think, believe what they tell us to believe, and are happy with that. But, we cannot quit. The path does not end. There is no settling down with this point of view, or that one, this belief system, or that one, this way of structuring reality, or that one. Here, in the world of how it really is, everything is off the table and up in the air!

No one has the corner on truth. Truth cannot be cornered. Captured. Incarcerated. Truth cannot be dissected. Examined. Exposed. Explained. Truth is not content, but process. It is not a noun, but a verb. We cannot talk about truth any more than we can talk about God. Or, when we talk about truth and God, we can only use words like “mystery,” and “numinous,” and “contradiction,” and say of both truth and God, “There is that which is true and that which is also true.”

But, not everyone can hear that. There are those who ask you what truth is and then answer, before you can, “The Word is truth!” And, that’s that. They say it because they have been told it, and believe it, because they have also been told that to fail to believe it is to go straight to hell and stay there through all eternity. Going where we are told to go doesn’t get us anywhere.

If we are going to get to the Land of Promise, we have to find our own path. We have to look in order to see. And it takes seeing to spur the looking in order to see. Something winks at us, nods to us, flashes across our field of vision, waves to us on the periphery, and is gone. From there begins the search. We don’t get to the Promised Land, we don’t find the Holy Grail, in chronological order, first this, then that, if-then-therefore. This is not a logical, rational, intellectual exercise. This is intuitive, instinctive, insightful, discerning all the way. We struggle to see and then, like that, grasp the truth of what we have always known without knowing that we knew, or are stunned by a reality beyond our grasping, and cannot help laughing, or crying.

When people speak from the heart—as opposed to reading from the script—about what they see and think, about what they have experienced and gleaned from their experience, about their lives, we all benefit. I am drawn to the places where the truth shines through.

This is the kind of talk that saves the world, honest talk, straight from the heart about what we have experienced and gleaned from our experience, and what has helped us most with our lives. We cannot get by on the strength of someone else’s experience, but their frank discussion of life’s impact can help us find our own way.

There is no formula. There are no directions to give. No explanations to make. There are no maps to the Promised Land. No one else’s path to follow. No nostrums, remedies, fixes, or cures. There is only life and living it. What helps? What works? A lot of people are hawking a lot of things, but there is no removing from us the burden of life and living it. What have we found to be helpful? What have we found to work? What enables, allows, assists us in living the life that is ours to live? In doing the work that is ours to do? What do we need to live the life that is ours to live, to do the work that is ours to do?

We crave certitude, certainty, explanation, structure, and we are called to step into the unknown, “To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” What’s it going to be? We have to move past what we want into what we also want. We have to know what we also want. We have to open to that part of ourselves that wants more than we want. We cannot just go where they tell us to go. We have a voice—we have to listen to it!

My trick is to connect you with you and get out of the way. You might say that my place with you is to bore you so much with me that you turn to yourself to find what you need. I have to refuse to give you what you want. I cannot become who you need me to be. Only you can become that. I cannot, must not, usurp your power to provide yourself with what you need. That is your responsibility, and you cannot grow without bearing the burden, the cross, that is yours to bear, namely YOU. You are charged with the care and tending of YOU. We find our way in the company of those who are finding their way, but it isn’t the same way. We may drink the same water, but we dig our own wells. We all may wind up in the Land of Promise, but we find our own path.

Being Soft

2009-06-21T14:18:00.002-04:00

We don’t have enough soft places in our lives. Those of you who were on hand Wednesday night know that I uncovered my need to soften up in an encounter with a photo of a tree at Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Soft is where it all begins. Soft is the essential step, the crucial place to be.

Becoming soft means trusting, relaxing, letting be, laughing, enjoying, easing up. But, it’s hard to be soft. It’s hard to be easy. So, we have to be easy on it not being easy. Be soft with it being hard, and let things be as they are for as long as it takes for them to be different. We all will make it as well as we can for as long as we can. What more could be asked of us? What more can be asked of the tree at Rocky Knob? We have to celebrate that tree, and honor it for what it is. The same thing applies to each of us.

The path begins beneath our feet. We start where we are. We don’t have to be somewhere else. We begin by being soft with ourselves. Accepting ourselves as we are. Letting ourselves be. “Easy does it,” is an AA slogan for staying on the beam and in sync with our true best interests, intentions and desires without trying to make anything happen. Of course, we would be better off sober than drunk, but we can-not will sobriety any more than we can will ourselves to fall asleep. But, we can arrange to fall asleep, just as we can arrange to be sober.

There is a Zen technique for dealing with our propensity for internal chatter, or “monkey mind,” during meditation. “Let it come, let it go,” or “This too, this too,” simply acknowledges the noisy thoughts without engaging them. We just observe them and allow them to pass on. This is quite different from “fighting for peace,” or “willing ourselves to be calm and serene.” We arrange to be quiet without forcing ourselves to quieten down.

The same approach applies to spiritual development. We cannot force spirituality. We can be spiri-tual, but not by not trying to be spiritual. “Do or do not,” says Yoda, “there is no try.” This is the Taoist doctrine (And they say they don’t have doctrines!) of wu-wei, or doing by not doing (It’s how water wears away stone and finds its way to the sea, how dandelions grow through asphalt, how we go to sleep and wake up—we do it but we don’t consciously, willfully, DO it). It is a matter of aligning ourselves with what needs to happen (so that it becomes what we want to happen) and getting out of the way.

Getting out of the way is the trick. We have to accommodate ourselves to the possibilities. This is where “easy does it” comes in. We don’t get out of the way by willing it. There is no forcing. “There is no try.” That’s the trick. How do we learn it? Spiritual practice, practice, practice. And the practice is becom-ing soft. Softening up. Getting out of the way.

It’s hard to be soft. And so, we practice. Being soft. Softness. Softness has to do with resiliency. With acceptance. With accommodation and acquiescence. And with persistence. Courage and resolve, kid. Courage and resolve. Soft is steady, constant, unrelenting, yet undemanding and non-intrusive. Soft is receptive, willing, waiting, anticipating. Soft is putting everything on the table, and seeing what comes forth, seeing what shows itself to be important, perhaps to our surprise and consternation.

In talking about his understanding of God, Carl Jung said, “(God) is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or worse.” How different is this view of God from the popular offering of institutional religion, where God is the benevolent doofus, the kindly Sancho Panza, helping us along our way, serving our ends, seeing to it that we prosper and are happy, and rewarding us with paradise when we die.

The soft understanding of God allows God to shake up our lives and allows our lives to be what they need to be in order to wake us up and change our intended course “for better or worse”—for better AND worse!—in order to become what they must be. If we are going to adopt the soft image, and allow the tree at Rocky Knob to be what it is, and allow ourselves to be who we are, we must also allow God to be who God is and allow our lives to be what they need to be. If we are going to be soft, we are going to allow things to unfold according to their nature, to become what they are, to “do” us, to “live” us, rather than us “doing” and “living” them!

The work of being soft is to sync-up with our lives, with the lives that are our lives to live, the Authentic Me, so to speak. We are all more or less authentic, there is something genuinely us tucked away into each one of us. The idea is to live so as to be more of who we are and less of who we are not—to live with our eyes on the lives that are ours to live. Ah, but. We have eyes for other things! And so, we must get out of the way!

How do we get in the way? What do we do to escape the lives that are waiting to live us, that are our lives to live? To numb ourselves out so that we don’t feel the uncertainty, anguish, and anxiety that comes our way? To avoid the fear of being abandoned or overwhelmed? To avoid the agony of not being able to live the kind of life we wish were ours (which consists of, don’t say it doesn’t, more in the way of avoidance and less in the way of responsibility)? In what ways are our lives spent running from life? Complying and denying? Where are we being asked to grow up, to do for ourselves what we wish someone else would do for us? Where are we not facing what needs to be faced and not doing what needs to be done? Where are we asserting or failing to assert the power of our own personal authority over our lives?

What do we do to keep from being still and quiet? How quiet can we be for how long? What meets us in the silence? How do we meet it back? Then what happens? The only thing silence is good for is listening. When we listen in the silence, what do we hear? What are the voices? Whose voices are they? What are they saying? Are they chastising us? Condemning us? Berating us? Where did we first hear them? Where in our lives, in our lived experience, did they originate? What person in our experience do we most easily associate with the voices? How old were we when the voices made their lasting impression?

We are no longer that old. We have to stop acting as though we are. Step into the silence in behalf of the person you were when the voices made their lasting impression. Stop agreeing with the voices. Whose side are you on? Become an advocate for yourself. Ask the voices what they want. When they tell you they just want you to become somebody, to make something of yourself, tell them they are taking a dumb route to that end. Ask them when has telling someone she is fat made her thin, or when has telling someone he is lazy, stupid, slow and worthless made him the opposite of those things? Point out to the voices that for all the years of their constantly haunting and hounding you, you are still the poop pile you always have been and their strategy of yelling at you hasn’t gotten them anywhere, and that is indisputable evidence that they are as great a failure as they accuse you of being. And then tell them to step aside because there are other voices you must attend.

The other voices have been waiting for you to be quiet long enough to hear what they have to say. These are the voices who know what you need, who know who you also are, who are with you to help you find and explore the path that is yours to walk, the life that is yours to live. Ask them what they have to say, and begin the dialogue that will sustain and guide you through the rest of your life.

There are a number of ways of developing your ability to engage the nurturing voices in this kind of sustaining, guiding dialogue with ourselves. The Clearness Committee exists to help us hear our-selves—our deeper selves—speaking to us. Parker Palmer’s “Circle of Trust,” which Carol Steger and Julie Strope are going to initiate here in the near future is another approach. Keeping a journal is another. Working with your dreams and paying attention to your projections are others. Learning to participate in active imagination is another. The list is long of ways to listen to ourselves and talk to ourselves and deepen, expand, enlarge ourselves thereby. It is a spiritual practice that never ends, and one that cannot begin too soon.

06/14/09, Negotiating the relationship between inner and outer

2009-06-14T14:09:00.003-04:00

We all have sold ourselves short and sold ourselves out for something. Maybe it was for money, or Mother, or Father, or Husband or Wife, or the Children. Maybe it was for status, social acceptance, recognition, adoration. Maybe it was for the title The Most Responsible Living Person, or The Greatest Living American. Maybe it was for our idea of Who We Ought To Be. Maybe it was for security, stability, certainty, comfort, peace, happiness. The list is long. Adam and Eve sold themselves out. We all sell ourselves short, sell ourselves out. The theological term for our inescapable propensity to sell ourselves out is “Original Sin.”

Our sin is our failure to be who we are, who we are built to be, who we have within us to become. It is to settle for less than we can be. Our life’s work is now to redeem our failure to take up our life’s work by becoming who we are. But the way back to Eden, to our true home, to the locus of our natural self, is blocked by the angel of death with a flaming sword, which means that in order to live we have to die. Or, as Jesus put it, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives (in the service of life—he said, “for my sake and the gospel’s”) will find them.” There you are. The good news is that it is no more difficult now than it was then. The bad news is that it is no easier! We are always at the point of giving self up for what seems better, easier, than self. It is always hard to be who we are. The delight of the forbidden fruit is always there to distract us and to save us from the work of being who we are.

The journey is to recover what was abandoned. We have to go back and redeem what we left behind, what we rejected of ourselves. We have to live what we can of the life that is our life to live. If gestures and fragments are as close as we can come to the life that was to be ours, then gestures and fragments it will have to be.

Carl Jung said something on the order of, “We always are who we have always been, and we always are who we will become.” There is always something of us as we were meant to be apparent in who we have become. We never completely sever ourselves from the gift, the genus, and are never far away from who we are called to be. We are always a mere perspective shift away from the truth of our own souls. The tragedy is that we can be that close and not know “the time of our visitation,” and not recognize the one who is with us always, and not hear the one who is calling our name.

There is always that within us which believes in us. Which seeks after us. Which calls us to wake up and be who we are. But we think we missed our chance back there in Eden, back when we “coulda had class,” when we “coulda been a contender,” when we “coulda been somebody, instead of a bum which is what (we are).” And we think if we can’t be now what we “coulda” been then, why try? What’s the use, or the point? So we turn our backs on ourselves again, and perpetuate the sin of Eden, and do not allow ourselves to become who we are, who we have within us to be, because we can’t do it “right,” the way we wish we had done it back then, when we had the chance and didn’t know what we had.

We still don’t know what we have, and again walk away from the chance to do what we can with what we have to work with. Our sin is a failure of vision and nerve. It is a failure to be ourselves, a failure to believe in our-selves, a failure to do what is ours to do, to the extent that it can be done within the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.

We are always limited, always restricted by, bound to, the time and place of our living. There is always something that isn’t quite right, something to have to work through, around, something to overcome. We failed to be who we are back then with good reason. There were obligations, you know, duties. There was no money for med school or law school. We were in love. That list is also long. There is always a reason to not be who we are. Always something we have to confront, stand up to. There is always a dragon blocking the path, a Cyclops in our way. And, there is always that within us which believes in us, and calls us to believe in ourselves, and hopes eternally that we will have what it takes to do what needs to be done and become who we are in the time left for living.

Will we believe in that which believes in us is the question. Will WE believe in ourselves is the question. The hardest thing is to believe in ourselves, in our gift, our genius, over time, over the course of our lives. Will we trust ourselves to the gift, to the genius, to the Self we are capable of being—within the terms and conditions, con-text and circumstances of life, within what remains of the time left for living? We give up too easily, quit too soon. The Self/Soul is eternal and timeless. The time is always NOW for Self/Soul. It is never past, over, too late. Self/Soul does not understand the concept “too late.” Self/Soul is always calling us to be who we are NOW! “Dance however you can!” Self/Soul exclaims. “If you can only blink your eyes or wiggle one toe, blink or wiggle in rhythm to the music, and if you can’t hear the music, imagine it!”

Self/Soul doesn’t cut us any slack, doesn’t grant us any excuse. Self/Soul is a “harsh taskmaster,” demanding always demanding that we be as much of who we are as the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives will allow NOW—and demanding always demanding that we push against the limits in order to see what we can get by with, and not give up too easily or too soon in the service of the life that is our life to live.

We begin the work of recovery, of redemption, with the question, “What does our soul want?” Clues exist in the places we are most alive, and in the places we are most dead. In the experiences that are most meaningful and in the experiences that are least meaningful. In the things that catch our eye, that nod to us, wink at us, speak to us. In our dreams and dreads. In the things we feel drawn to (not like alcohol or gambling or strip clubs and other forms of addiction and distraction, but like music or books or tools or conversation and other forms of engagement and enlargement). We have to do the work of participating in an inner dialogue with soul, with that which is deepest, best and truest about us, and find ways of expressing the inner truth of being (who we are) in our outer lives (who we also are). The sum of the spiritual journey is here, in negotiating the relationship between inner and outer.

This is not something we can read in a book (“Five Weeks to Holistic Living,” for example). This is the work we engage in over the course of our lives, merging inner with outer, becoming who we are in the time and place of our living. It requires us to learn the language of soul and participate in regular conversations with the mystery of being. In this work, we are all you have. You are all we have. We remind each other of the strength we have within.

In this work, everything is on the table, or off the table. Either way, it’s the same thing. Nothing can come between us and our life’s purpose, our soul’s intention, the life that is ours to live, “God’s will” for us and our life. Complete integrity of being, oneness with purpose and life, expressing, bringing forth, what is ours to express, bring forth, is IT. Is LIFE. Anything less than that is some stage of death, of dying. How alive are we willing to be is always the question. “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

Easy to say, hard to do. The truth is that no matter how much we wish we were engaged in our own spiritual development, we are always looking for something to save us from that work. Escape and entertainment fuel our lives. We are always running away from something. Hiding from something. Hoping that something will leave us alone. Where do we ever square up to it, stick it out, stare it down? Where do we ever face what must be faced out of the resources and resolve we find within? We are always looking to be saved, to be rescued, trying always to reach the land flowing with milk and honey. Where do we ever stop running and make a stand?
What are we looking for that we don’t have? What is the source of dissatisfaction, disenchantment, dismay, conflict? What is it going to take for us to, here it comes, get ready, be happy?

What it takes is the right combination of outer and inner. Outer is what it takes to meet the physical requirements for life—food, clothing, shelter, tools. Tools are important because that is what it takes to bring forth the inner. Inner is what it takes to meet the spiritual requirements for life, to bring forth, incarnate, express the mystery of being, of who we are, within the visible world. We live to make the invisible visible.

Our work is making our peace with the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of our lives. Our work is to bring forth what is within no matter what. Life gets to do anything to us, no holds barred, anything goes, and we get to bring forth what is within and honor one another, and live with grace and compassion for it all. That’s the deal. If we want something else, we are standing in the wrong line.

Carl Jung says, “All our troubles flow from being separated from our instincts.” But, if we lived only on the basis of instinct, we would be in trouble as well. Jung goes on to say, “Too much of the animal distorts the civilized person, and too much of civilization makes sick animals.” We live to find the right mix between our instincts and our duties, obligations, and responsibilities—between the requirements of life on the spiritual level and the requirements of life on the physical level. Too much of one and not enough of the other and we are in trouble.

We are here to serve the genius, the gift, the vision that is our vision, the life that is our life to live—regardless of how well that is received and valued. We must receive it. We must value it. We must believe in it, align ourselves with it. Our faith you might say, isn't so much in the God "out there" as in the gift of God "in here." The challenge is to serve that gift and let the outcome be the outcome. May we all have what it takes to do that and go on doing that day in and day out, "for better or worse, in sickness and in health," for the rest of our lives!

06/07/09, What does being happy have to do with it?

2009-06-07T14:39:00.002-04:00

The normal distribution curve would suggest that the majority of people who gather in a church on Sunday morning fit the following profile: They don’t want to grow up. They don’t want to be responsible for their own life. They don’t want to have to go to any trouble, be inconvenienced in any way, or do anything they don’t feel like doing. They want to be pleasantly taken care of, entertained with a lifetime of diversions and distractions, and live happily ever after. And they would want me to tell them how to arrange for that to happen.

Since you are already outside the normal distribution curve by being here on Sunday morning, I can reveal to you the actual truth and you will not cringe, blanch, or run and hide: Here it is, spoken by Shelton Kopp over 30 years ago: “We have to solve our own problems every day for the rest of our lives.” Here’s more of it, spoken by Carl Jung over 60 years ago: “None of the real problems have solutions. We don’t solve them. We outlive them.”

There are no fixes, remedies, potions, cures, nostrums, recipes, answers… There is only living in the mess and waiting out the problems. We outlive what we cannot solve. I know that isn’t inspirational. We don’t want to hear it any more than the people do in the church of our experience. We have our stake in the status quo just as they do. We long to be comfortable in our little world, just as they do, just as anyone would. And we don’t want to do anything to disrupt what peace and certainty we have managed to attain. Our lives are in enough upheaval without our adding to it.

We want me to go away with my take on reality. Leave us alone. We want stability. Safety. Refuge. Rest. And, here is the interesting part, we want to take up the spiritual journey and grow spiritually and live deep, ex-pansive lives. Yet, we don’t want to go anywhere or to do anything new. We don’t what to change. We want to grow without changing. We want things to be better without things being different. We want opposite things at the same time.

Always the tension, the contradiction, the dynamic! “Without contraries is no progression” (William Blake). We cannot take anything at face value. What is true is counterbalanced by what is also true, and we live between opposites, on the boundary between yin and yang, for better and worse, all our lives long.

We want to be reassured that the life we have chosen for ourselves can work with just a bit of spiritual tweaking, with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo, meditation, maybe, or a crystal medallion. A personal mantra—that would do it. But don’t ask us to change. We have worked hard enough to be where we are, and we are not about to give up any of it for the sake of spiritual growth and life lived on terms other than our own.

But, we also know there is no place of safety for those who are alive. There is no immunity, no protection. We know we have to get used to it. Only the plastic people feel no pain. Life is painful, work, trouble. If we are going to be alive, we are going to do the work of accommodation, adjustment, acceptance, acquiescence, adaptation… We move over and make room for life, or we wrap ourselves in a bubble of denial and pretence—pretending we are not pretending and not knowing the first thing about being alive.

The church as it ought to be is only good for those who are into life, living, being alive. It exists as a way-station of encouragement when life rises up to slap us around. “Get up and get back into it” is the message of the church as it ought to be. Not, “Come here and you will be safe and happy until the kingdom comes.”

Being safe and happy have absolutely nothing to do with being alive. Happiness is a cultural substitute for life. People make themselves happy to compensate for being mostly dead. People who are alive don’t worry about happiness. They are too busy living, invested in the experience of being alive. The pursuit of happiness is a dead-end path and the antithesis of the spiritual journey. Happy growth and development is the oxy-est of oxymoron’s.

Being alive is about working the program. Working the program means waking up to how it is with us right now. What is true and what is also true? Where are we most alive? What is trying to come to life in us? Where are we dead? Stuck? Blocked? Refusing to live? What fears drive us? Limit us? Keep us from being alive? What are our dreams saying to us? Our symptoms? What keeps flirting with us as an interest, an urge, an inclination, an attrac-tion? What do we keep putting off? What are we doing to keep from doing what we know needs to be done? The practice is being aware of the life we are living and how it needs to be lived instead, and taking up the work of mov-ing from where we are to where we are asked to be.

We don’t want to work the program. We don’t want to be silent and reflective. We don’t want to dialogue with our dreams and symptoms. We don’t want to explore our stuck places, examine our repetitive, recurring, reactions and encounters, look at our patterns, make inquiries about origins and messages from the gods. We want our lives to unfold according to our ideas for their unfolding. We want the life of our dreams delivered to our door. We want to know how to get what we want. We want to live happily, conveniently, ever after. It is not to be.

I know as much about God as anyone on the planet. So do you. The idea that there are authorities on God—theologians—God scientists tucked away in the high hallways of academia, or the lecture halls of institutional religion, who know what we should believe and not believe is a trick played on us by us. We want somebody to know more than we do. We don’t want to be left on our own, alone with God. Yet, that is exactly the path each of us must tread to the land of promise. We drink the same water, but we dig our own well. Each of us must find our own way to God, simply by waking up to the God who is calling our name. Ah, but. That God asks hard things of us. That God doesn’t love us the way we want to be loved. Therein lies the problem. So, we call on the theologians to tell us what to do to get God to love us the way we want to be loved. And God recedes farther into the background of our lives.

Always the opposition, the contraries, the limitations, the restrictions, the boundaries, the barriers, the terms and conditions! Life is lived in contention with that which does not support life. The universe doesn’t care about us. Doesn’t even know our name. Is not here to serve us and dote on us and make sure we have what we want, or need. We have to work in the service of life. Life is lived pushing against the limits that make life difficult, if not impossible. We are the dandelion buried beneath the asphalt. What are we going to do about that?

We cannot put living off. If we are going to be alive, we have to begin in this moment right now by opening ourselves to the moment, receiving the moment well, seeing what the moment has to offer and what the moment needs, and offering to the moment what we have to give out of that which is deepest, best and truest about us. What are the possibilities for life right here, right now? Who would we have to disappoint in order to take advantage of the possibilities? How would we have to do it, and not do it, in order to be alive right here, right now? What existing structures would we have to ignore? What new ones would we have to honor? How differently would we have to live? What is keeping us in place, locked into the same old, same old, waiting to be rescued, delivered, in-vited to be alive?

None of us is aware of everything. The more aware we are of one thing, the less aware we are of other things. Diffuse awareness dilutes particular awareness, particular awareness inhibits diffuse awareness. We are always missing something. Always unconscious of that of which we are unconscious. Always being challenged to see more than we see, to hear more than we hear, to understand more than we understand. We never graduate from the school of awareness. Don’t even get to the second grade.

But. We’ll figure it out. We will figure it out if we are nurtured and cared for (Mothered) in the right kind of way. All we need is time and the supportive presence of the right kind of community. We need to be upheld, sus-tained, encouraged while we figure it out. If we are Mothered in the wrong kind of way, it’s all over. We don’t have a chance with the wrong kind of Mother. Everything hangs on the kind of Mother we have and are.

We cannot hope to be an “I” except as a part of a nurturing “we.” “We” bring “you” into being. Not by telling you what you need to hear, but by listening to what you have to say. We hear you into the realization of yourself, into the you-ness of you. We ask you the healing questions. We explore with you the lair of dragons. We call you to work the program even as we work it ourselves. We share the path with you and laugh with you along the way.

The training for becoming a nurturing “we” is the work of being a listening “I.” It is the work of seeing, and hearing and understanding. The work of developing eyes that see, ears that hear, and a heart that understands. There is no way to do that. There is only doing it. It is the way to Carnage Hall: “Practice, practice, practice,” until we can work the program in our sleep and follow our dreams to the land of promise.

09/24/09, Loose Change

2009-06-01T11:11:00.001-04:00

Everything exists in the service of losing our way or finding it. Which is to say that we are never more than a slight perspective shift away from being lost, or found. Everything that happens to us seals us in or opens us up, depending entirely upon what we think about it, look at it, and do with it. Delta Dawn’s betrayal and abandonment could lead to her death, or to her life. Nothing has to be what it is. The future exists as 10,000 possibilities in every moment. Life is always out ahead of us, calling to us, urging us on. We are the ones holding back, complaining, “Oh, it’s too hard! It’s too much trouble! It’s too painful! Just leave us alone! Let us die!”

We don’t know enough to know when to quit, fold up, hand it over, shut down. We think we are tired, we think we’ve had enough, we think it’s too hard, with too little payoff and not enough fun, we think we will get off the bull and sit in the shade, but, so far as we know, this is our one shot at life, and we have no idea of what might happen if we actually lived the life that is ours to live in the time left for living, and there is only one way to find out, and why die not knowing?
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We are certain that the agony and anguish of life cannot compare with the bliss of oblivion and seek the bliss to escape the agony. Just give us the mountain retreat, the cave, the cushion! Spare us the pain of income tax returns and cleaning the gutter and deciding what to do with Mama in her dementia and decrepitude! Keep us from the misery of not having our way! We forsake it all for nothing, thinking nothing is better than the dreads of life

Look. If we are going to give up our way for some stupid mountain side, and leave everything to meditate our way into oneness with the Divine (which is, you’ll have to admit, zeroing ourselves out in order to merge with the Universe), why don’t we just zero ourselves out and take care of Mama without the agony and anguish of having her in our way? We are giving up our way for the Guru. Why not give up our way for Mama?

It’s our way that is in the way. The agony and anguish of life is the agony and anguish of not having our way. It isn’t life that is the problem but what we want life to be. Shift the wanting and disappear the problem. No anguish, no agony. Just doing what needs to be done. Even in the monasteries they have to do what needs to be done. I wouldn’t lie to you about that. And someone has to take care of the Guru in his dementia and decrepitude.
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Everything is equidistant from perfect union with the Divine, bliss, oneness, transcendence, absorption in the Absolute—what’s important, or whatever it is that we think we are after. If you leave here and go there, or there, or there, you are no closer to “it” (however you think of it). “It” is right here. Right now. Seeing it or not seeing it has nothing to do with its proximity or its availability to be seen.
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It helps to sit with something for a while before trying to change it, disappear it, X-it out of your life. Of course, that doesn’t apply to hot horseshoes straight from the coals, yellow jackets, or bad coffee. There are some places you just have to get yourself walked out of fast. You have to decide for yourself, when to sit, and when to leave. It is enough to know that knee-jerk is not the only reaction, and as a life-style it is largely lacking.
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There is nothing here for you. We don’t have anything to give you that you don’t already have. We can only give you you. You come in here with you and you leave with you. What happens in between in you. You happen. You becoming you is what your life is all about. We are here to help you become you. You are here to help us become us. I don’t have anything to give you but you. You don’t have anything to give me but me. How do I give you you? By receiving you well. How do you give me me? By receiving me well. We receive each other well, and allow each other to be who we are and who we also are, and it is beautiful. We are beautiful in each others’ eyes.

We are all mirrors and sounding boards for each other, showing each other who we are, and who we also are. Once we know who we are and who we also are, there is only the matter of bringing that to life in our lives. But that is really one thing, the knowing and the bringing to life, not two things. We don’t know and then bring to life. We know as we bring to life. We live as we live. We are alive as we come to life in the lives we are living, by seeing, hearing, and understanding who we are and who we also are, what we are doing and what needs to be done.
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There are recipes everywhere for doing what we want to do, but how do we align our wants with what truly needs to happen? This is the search for the Holy Grail. Can we serve the Grail, is the question. Can we get out of the way and allow the magic to happen? Can we trust the magic? Can we take our place and not be jousting for what we want our place to be? “What is MY place?” Can we ask the question and receive the answer?

“Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Can we live with that if we are Saul? Can we realize that Saul has his place and David has his? Can we focus on making our place a really good place to be, and leave the other places to those who occupy them? Can we not have to be the shining star? Can we not have to have fortune and glory? Can we reconcile ourselves to our lot, and be content with what is ours to have, and be, and do?

“But, what is OURS?” How do we know our place when we see it? Don’t worry about it. Just do your part and let the outcome be the outcome. “But what is OUR part?” Seeing, hearing, understanding—and doing what needs to be done, what we are capable of doing, out of the gifts and talents and skills and aptitudes and abilities and interests that we have.

Our life calls itself forth. Children who like to draw, draw. Children who like to dance, dance. Children who like to build things, build things. What do you like to do, for no reason beyond liking to do it? What do you do just because you enjoy doing it? Do more of that thing. Not for fame and wealth, but because you enjoy doing it. Not to be seen and acclaimed, but because you enjoy doing it. Do that. See what unfolds around that.

And don’t be in a hurry. Your life unfurls itself over time. One thing leads to another. There is no plan, no timetable. There is only living as only you, as only we, can live. So, “get busy living.” And don’t worry about knowing anything or if you are doing it right or doing the right thing. Just do what you like, what is “most you,” and see what that becomes over time.

And, be sensitive to your urges and inclinations and budding interests. Be alert to the white rabbit when it flashes across your field of vision, or appears momentarily on the edge of your peripheral vision. Don’t pass up opportunities to adventure, but don’t push yourself into adventures that don’t have your name on them. The white rabbit will come back around. If you aren’t sure, wait, watch. Use waiting for the white rabbit as prep time for being ready when it comes again.
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We have to trust ourselves. That is the primary act of faith. Trusting our own voice, our own sense of direction. And, we have to trust ourselves when trusting ourselves doesn’t work out like we thought it would. When we make wrong turns and end up in bad places. We have to trust ourselves to get out of there. We have to trust our mistakes to just be mistakes, and steps on the way to getting it right. We have to keep trusting ourselves. Eventually, we will become trustworthy. At least, that’s the theory.
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Nothing has to be the way it is, and nothing is wasted. The fact that nothing is wasted doesn’t mean that everything is necessary. Things don’t have to be the way they are. The fact that nothing is wasted doesn’t mean that things are good as they are. They could be better in 10,000 ways. The fact that nothing is wasted means that everything is a part of our experience and has its place in the production of us. We incorporate all of it into who we become through the process of living our lives. This is the way it is. What are we going to do about it, with it? How are we going to deal with it, use it, change it, improve it, integrate it in the work of our own becoming?

05/31/09, Everybody believes in something.

2009-05-31T19:14:00.002-04:00

Everybody believes in something, being happy, keeping up appearances, rocking the boat, or not rocking the boat, staying away from edges, jumping off edges… The list is long. How does what you believe help you live your life is the question. How does it help you be who you are—how does it help you be fully, wholly, wondrously alive in the time and place of your living—within the terms and conditions of your life is the question. At least, I believe these are the questions, which underscores my belief in being who we are and being alive in the time of our living.

Ephraim and Minerva (“Nervy”) Bales believed in plenty of things: having children, for instance. They raised nine of them in a two-room log house, one of which was a kitchen, in the Roaring Fork area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee from 1890 to 1930. They farmed, if you could call it that, on about 30 acres of poor topsoil four inches away from granite rocks and boulders. They had pigs and chickens and a cow or two, and raised enough corn to feed themselves and their livestock most years.

I walk, occasionally, through their house and over their land, wondering about their lives and what kept them in place there. What made that a good-enough existence for them? Why did they think that was the best they could do?

Two things come to mind: fear and shame. I imagine that they were afraid and ashamed. Ashamed of their ignorance. Ashamed of not knowing how to move smoothly through the larger social and cultural world beyond their two rooms and thirty acres in an isolated corner of an isolated region in the south. They were ashamed of their lack of social skill and of themselves, and afraid of being shamed in a world where they didn’t belong or fit in. They believed in their inability to live in a world beyond the world with which they were familiar and in which they were safe and comfortable, if you could call it that.

Of course, all of this conjecture is entirely projection on my part. I’m giving Ephraim and Nervy the roles of Will and Nan Hamilton, my maternal grandparents in Itta Bena, Mississippi. I expect that there is a high probability that I am right in making that connection and the judgment that goes with, but I’m still imagining the Bales as an extension of me and my impression of my experience, transferring where I have been to where they were. I could be wrong about it all, but I cannot get out of the impressions I’ve formed in order to form different impressions. If you think that’s easy, give it a turn around the block. Think of some of the ways your life has impressed you and cook up a different impression. Once the impression has taken hold of us it’s hard to shake. The way we see things, you see, becomes, in short order, the way things are.

Our impressions are among the most invisible, we could say “unconscious” things about us to us. We can see them best when we react emotionally, either positively or negatively, to someone else. Our reactions to others disclose who we are. This is the nature of a projection. We project our unconscious impressions onto someone else and see in them what we cannot see in ourselves. I see fear and shame in Ephraim and Nervy Bales because I would stay on those thirty acres for thirty years out of my own fear and shame.

Compassion, as you know, is a way of identifying with another’s feelings. It is feeling with another, bearing the burden, you might say, of the other’s experience along with the other. With projection, we give another our feelings, our reactions, our impressions, our needs and see him or her as though he or she is who we are. When we fall in love, we see the other as having the qualities that are missing from and needed in our own lives. We fall in love with what we feel like we are deficient in, and try to find in another what is so absent in ourselves. So a question we might ask ourselves when we fall in love is what we might be asking our new true love to do for us that we need to do for ourselves.

On the negative side, we despise or pity in others what we cannot admit or face in ourselves. I am not proud to say that I would be afraid to leave a hardscrabble life in Tennessee because I would be afraid of my ignorance and lack of social skills and my insecurity would keep me stuck. But where do you think stuckness comes from? Fear, insecurity, anxiety. We stay in a hole in Tennessee because we are afraid that something worse might happen to us if we leave. Is there anything sadder in the entire history of sad things than to be stuck with something that is killing us because we are afraid that something worse might kill us more dreadfully?

We are stuck wherever we are stuck because we do not have what it takes to step voluntarily into an unknown world and learn different skills and different ways of living. It has to be forced on us. We have to be thrown out of one world before we can step into another one.

Maybe it was that way with Ephraim and Nervy Bales, and maybe not, but my bet is that more misery can be laid at the feet of a failure of nerve than any other cause. We are a fearful lot. How else can you explain the proliferation of bad religion over thousands of years of hard evidence denying the assertions of bad religion? Bad religion doesn’t have to say anything that is true in our personal experience because we want so badly for it to be true we explain away the fact that it isn’t. We are that afraid, and insecure, and anxious. We are afraid to call the gods out. We are afraid to say there is nothing to them. We are afraid to step unprotected into the rawness of life.

Here’s the truth for you: Everything is always on the line. Everything rides on the choices we make. Playing it safe is just another way of betting the ranch on red and giving the wheel a spin.

We yearn for reassurance and affirming guarantees that our lives will be what we want them to be: safe, reliable, comfortable, certain, secure. IF we do our part, obey the rules, stay carefully within the prescribed limits, and step in the black footprints all the way to the grave.

Life laughs at our timid ways, and comes at us with fearsome ruthlessness no matter how we try to ward off its intrusions with our charms and nostrums. Life smashes through our defenses, demanding relentlessly, “Stand up and show me what you’re made of!” And we cower, and whine, and plead incessantly for the protection of the gods. Surely, there is a god somewhere who will give us what we want if we believe the right beliefs and offer the proper propitiation! And bad religion prospers with its empty promises and sham directions to the land of milk and honey.

We have to get over it. Grow up. Stop looking to be rescued, delivered, taken by the hand and led to the lemonade springs and the popcorn trees on Big Rock Candy Mountain. What we do with our lives cannot be governed by our desire for safety, security and a trouble-free existence, or determined by what we fear. We have to listen to the deeper voices, leadings, urges, intuitions and inclinations and override the tendency to inertia and sameness and death.

Being alive is an ordeal, a test of the spirit and will. The question is always will we go to the trouble? Will we have what it takes? Being alive asks us to follow our soul’s lead, but we hold back wanting it all spelled out in advance. How do we know? After all, we can justify anything, talk ourselves into anything. Fooling ourselves is what we do best. No, telling ourselves what we want to hear is what we do best. No, shooting ourselves in the foot is what we do best. How is soul to break through? How are we to know when it does? Is it a white rabbit, or a red herring, or a wild goose? We only know after the fact. Wisdom is known by her children, sometimes by her great grandchildren. We make our best guess and take our chances.

There is no such thing as happy growth and development. We suffer our way to wisdom. The spiritual journey is a painful path. Sorry to be the one to tell you. We buy into the spiritual quest thinking it is the way to get our lives lined up with all that is right and good, which, of course, will qualify us for abundance and prosperity and easy living and happiness ever after. The truth is there is nothing in it for us. Being spiritual is just being alive in the moment of our living for the simple sake of being alive in the moment of our living. Don’t take my word for it. Ask any of the spiritual giants what they get out of it—Sister Teresa. Ask Sister Teresa what she got out of it. Thich Nhat Hanh. The Dali Lama. The Buddha. The Christ.

All they get out of it is being alive in the moment of their living, in this moment right now just as it is. How much of the moment are we aware of? How much of the moment is going unnoticed? We can gauge how alive we are by noting how present we are in the moments of our living, how open we are to what is present with us. Be it fear and anxiety, shame and insecurity, or love, joy and happiness. Welcome it all, and be open to what is being asked of us, make your best guess, take a chance. May as well, since you’ll be taking a chance no matter what you do.

05/17/09, A Poetry Reading

2009-05-17T07:21:00.002-04:00

Perfection
The only two perfect people in the history of the world are Ken and Barbie. To be perfect, you have to be plastic. No life. No personality. No choices. No choosing. Always doing what somebody else wants you to do, living the life someone else has in mind for you, perfect according to someone else's idea of perfection. Perfectly pleasing to those who know best. Perfectly dead and dying. If you want to live, you have to put perfection aside and live a gloriously imperfect—perfectly imperfect, you might say—life, laughing at the idea of life lived any other way.

Getting It Right
Getting it right means being graced by rightness. We cannot arrange rightness. We can’t plan for it. Foresee it. Predict it. Make it happen. We fall into it. Splash around in it, glorying in the wonder of having done something right for a change, looking forward to the next time it comes upon us out of nowhere for no reason when we aren’t expecting it and have no hope of it and get it right again, anyway, magically, mysteriously, wondrously. And stand there dripping wet with rightness, amazed, again, that we of all people can do something right.

A Good Start
We come self-confident and glowing out of the womb. What happens then tells all.

Here’s the Truth for You
Okay, here’s the truth for you. Not one of us thinks we deserve to die. Not one of us thinks any of the rest of us deserve to die. Some of “them” might deserve to die, but not “us.” And some of “us” think that not even any of “them” deserve to die. Not any of “them.” Not even those of “them” criminal courts would sentence to death, have sentenced to death. Yet, we are told to believe Jesus saves us from the death we deserve to die by dying in our place. Wait a minute. We don’t think we deserve to die. Somebody help me here. Anybody.

All We Need
All that we need to find what we need lies latent within, waiting for the environment required to bring it forth. All we need to find what we need is the proper environment to awaken us to the gifts that come built-in. What more can we ask than for an environment which enables us to see ourselves? What is more nourishing, nurturing, than relationships which lovingly accept us while helping us to see and be who we are, and also are? No excuses and no exclusion, no denial and no dismissal. Squaring us up with ourselves without abandoning us to ourselves. Growing us up in healthy, healing ways.

Encouragement
We can’t get too much encouragement. Incentive certainly doesn’t come from the results of our ef-forts. Where do we find what it takes to get up and go at it again, if not from the company we keep? If we aren’t finding it there, we better find some different company.

Our Lives Are Too Small
Carl Jung talks about the importance of “living mythically,” and says we “walk in shoes that are too small.” Our lives are too small. Too shallow. Because we are afraid to venture forth beyond the world of concrete and steel and take on the dragons that guard the treasure, that hoard life in their possession, and require us to stare down our fear if we would claim our fair portion. But the “also truth” is that the world of concrete and steel will let us down. The life it offers is a mirage that moves away as we draw close. Its promises are boxes of smoke wrapped in bright ribbons and bright paper. We live safe and empty lives, afraid of the dragons that have made off with LIFE. Jung says, “Only boldness can deliver us from fear,” but we deny our fear even as we hide from it in the game of profits and losses or the other games of pleasure and progress. Life has no stake in any of our games, and waits in the lair of dragons to be claimed and lived.

The Dragons Are Laughing
To “live mythically,” we have to have a sense of what is being asked of us by our lives. What are the intentions of soul we must protect and serve? What are the fears that hold our life captive? The things we cannot allow ourselves to do because “there be dragons” that must be faced? Is Responsibility a dragon we dare not slay? Or Duty? Or Obligation? Or Desire? Or Expectation? Or Mother? If we do not slay Mother, Mother will slay us. But, to slay Mother, we have to become our own Mother, and who is up to that task, immersed as we are in the fantasy of a trouble-free existence? Life is not trouble-free. The dragons are laughing.

Vulnerable and Alive
Always the decision about what to do, about what is being asked of us, about what is truly needed, about what must be done, with no rules to rely on, no black foot prints to go by, making up in the moment of our living how the moment is to be lived, taking another chance, hoping for the best, being vulnerable and alive in the time left for living.

No Assurances
There is no knowing what to do. No Assurances. No protection. No safety. Somebody is going to not like what we do, how we do it. Those Who Know Best will frown. Those Who Must Be Pleased will express their displeasure. And, we may be wrong. But, whose life is it? And, whose side are we on?

What Is the Nature of Our Fear?
What is the nature of our fear? Of what are we afraid? What are we afraid will happen? What keeps us from breaking free of the restrictions we place on ourselves and taking a chance on life? What is it we won’t look at? Refuse to think about, consider? What keeps us locked into the life we have always lived, safe from the intrusion of other possibilities?

We Owe It To Ourselves
We cannot allow our fear to keep us from living. We owe it to ourselves to go into our fear and see if there is anything there to be afraid of. Everything is fearsome at a distance. “There be dragons,” you know, “over there. Don’t go there!” The edge of the world is always just out of sight. "Don’t go looking or you’ll fall off!" Go look. Find the edge of the world. Jump off.

The Higher Calling
We admire those who don’t let life get them down, and wish we could become more like them, distancing ourselves, stoically or philosophically, from the events and circumstances of our lives, living with balance and sanity, wisdom and grace, compassion and humor, living out of who we are and not out of what happens to us or what we are afraid might happen, or what we want to happen. If only we could shift the focus so that we are no longer resisting or compelling or forcing or fighting or fearing the world, but are birthing ourselves, bringing ourselves to life no matter what the world does, no matter what is happening around us. If only we could remember that we have a higher calling, a larger mission than to make a nice little nest for ourselves, have our way, and be comfortable and happy during our lifetime. If we have had an easy, trouble-free existence, but never lived, what good is that?

The Welcome Mat
Recognition, realization, recollection, these are the things that grow us up, that wake us up, that reconnect us with ourselves, that restore us to the “dynamic core of our being,” that heal us and make us whole. What of us can we see in the things around us, in our lives, in our reactions and responses to the things in our lives? What of us can we see in our dreams and symptoms, our projections and phobias, our desires and disinclinations? What of us can we see, and seeing, accept, and accepting, love, and loving, heal and welcome home? We are the home we seek. We need to put out the welcome mat, and invite us in.

Integrity
It isn’t about getting anything, or having anything, or making use of something, or benefiting from something. It is about living with integrity of being (of being at one with ourselves) to the point of self-sacrifice. We give it all up in being who we are for the sake of being who we are without anything in it for us, without getting anything out of it, without having anything to show for it. There is no boon in the sense of realized good fortune. The boon, the blessing, is the realization of integrity, the fullness of life, even though it leads to death. All roads do, you know. So, what do we gain by not dying? We are going to die anyway. We may as well die in the service of integrity and life, and trust the boon to be a blessing in the lives of others. Besides, we get to say we followed the white rabbit and rode the bull. That's cool.

05/10/09, Working the Program

2009-05-10T15:00:00.002-04:00

We have to work the program. The program consists of listening, looking, watching, waiting, trusting, trying, asking, seeking, knocking—of learning the language of soul, being conscious, of waking up, of taking ourselves under our own wing and growing ourselves up over the course of our lives. We work each day to be more aware and alive than we were the previous day. To see what needs to be done and do it. To notice what winks at us and know the difference between an invitation and a test. Working the program will ask hard things of us and make us true human beings—and, of course, you know what that will do for us. Nothing. And everything. But no one can sell us on the idea. We have to decide for ourselves how important being alive is and if we are going to do what it takes to bring ourselves forth into the world. It’s our call all the way.

It is not easy. There is nothing I can tell you to make it easy. There is nothing I can say to make you want to do it. We are not here to make it easy for you. We are here to make it possible for you. We begin by telling you it isn’t easy, but it can be done.

Life is not easy. There is nothing easy about it. Dying is easy. Living is hard. If you want to be alive, you’ll have to pay the price, which is not doing or having what you want! The price is doing what has to be done, never mind what you want to do. The price is dealing with how things are, never mind how you wish they were. Doing what you want means not doing what you want!

If you want to be alive, you have to do the work. The work is done on two levels. We work to bring two worlds together. You have to learn to think of yourself as having a dual citizenship in two different worlds. One world is the physical world of outer, tangible, concrete reality. The other world is the spiritual world of inner, abstract, metaphorical, intuitive, instinctive, numinous reality. The inner world is the world of heart and soul. The outer world is the world of the body and the physical universe. We live in both worlds and our work is merging the two, bringing the spiritual into the physical, so that the two become, in us and through us, one.

We do this work by becoming conscious of our place in both worlds and working things out between worlds. What does the inner world require? What does the outer world permit? The work is negotiating the ways between the worlds. The work is being awake and aware. The work is seeing, hearing and understanding. Making connections. Bringing heart and soul to life through the body in the physical world. The work is constant, continual, eternal and unending. You never graduate or retire. You don’t get a plaque to hang on a wall declaring that you are awake. If you think you are, you aren’t. If you think you aren’t, you’re right.

We cannot take up the spiritual journey without deepening our relationship with the inner world. We have to learn the language of soul and intuit the leanings of soul, the intentions of soul, and serve them in the outer world. We also have to understand how our desire for safety and security and comfort creates barriers between ourselves and soul, and inhibits our bringing forth what soul intends.

We carry with us a collection of impressions, and memories, and assumptions, and ideas about our experience with life. We see the outer world through the filters of these memories. We interpret and react to the outer world based on the impact of our experience that is stored away within. We have to become conscious of how our memories restrict our living, our bringing to life the intentions of soul in our lives.

The more unconscious we are, the more difficulty we have separating what is happening to us from what has happened to us. We lose the line between inner and outer, and live here and now as though it were then and there. As we wake up, we wake up to our origins, to our history, to what happened to us and how we responded to it, and how that has impacted, determined, the way we live our lives. We wake up to the inner source of our being the way we are in the outer world.

Seeing things changes things. We don’t have to react to present experience as though we are eight years old, or twelve, or fifteen. We can become increasingly able to recognize what is needed and respond to it out of what we have to offer without being compelled to react out of the impact of past experience and its influence upon us. We can work to bring soul to life in our lives without having to always please, or refuse to please, our father, or our mother, or whomever it is that we think must be, or not be, pleased.

Knowing what we have to offer is a function of deepening our relationship with the inner world. Our life in the outer world is where we incarnate, bring forth, birth, the deep gifts of self that are latent and waiting in the inner world. Our mission, our calling, is to read, serve, and express the creative intention of our soul by bringing forth the beauty and truth of our nature, our “dynamic core of being,” and exhibiting it in the world of external reality.

We stand between the outer world and our soul. We decide what is called for in the world of external real-ity and what is being asked for by our soul, and choose what to do. We have to protect our soul from the outer world and we have to express, incarnate, reveal, exhibit our soul in the outer world. How well we do that determines how well we live, how alive we are in the time and place of our living.

Our ability to live well between the worlds hinges on our skill in making choices. We learn to make choices by choosing and being conscious of the outcomes of our choice. We teach ourselves all we need to know. At least, that’s the idea. We don’t have to do it that way. We can wall ourselves in, seal ourselves up, entomb ourselves until we die. We can avoid life, or we can live. Our choice.

How would you do it? How would you live your life, if it were your life to live? It is your life to live, you know. Who knows better than you what you have to offer and how you might make that available to your life? No one can tell you how to do it. You decide for yourself. What are you going to do? Whatever is pleasing. Who knows what that is better than you?

Ah, but, here’s where it gets tricky. We have to do what is pleasing, but we cannot live any way we please! There is only doing what is ours to do the way we would do it, but we can’t do anything we want. We do not do what is needed only if, and on the condition that, it provides us with what we want. We do what is needed and let the outcome be the outcome. And there, in the outcome, we do what is needed again. See? Get it? What does wanting have to do with it?

We are both guardians and servants of soul. We keep soul safe and live soul out in the world. That is our work. Soul is dependent upon us for its protection and expression. We are dependent upon soul for consolation and direction, and the wherewithal to do what is ours to do. It is a perfectly functioning system as long as we don’t wreck it by imposing our ideas about how things ought to be on it and wander stupefied and agog among the lights and action of Gay Paree.

It is all practice. We are practicing being who we are at the level of soul, bringing ourselves forth into the world. We are aren’t here to get anything, have anything. We are here to be who we are and bring ourselves forth into the world. To live the way we would live. To do it the way we would do it. To keep faith with ourselves. And to enjoy everything about the experience. Everything. And to want, when it is over, to do it all again.

We have to find what works for us, what assists us in doing the work that is ours to do, in doing what is asked of us, what needs to be done, what needs us to do it. We have to find what enables us to do that, what helps us engage our lives. This is where this gathering comes into the picture.
This gathering is here to equip us to be who we are, to be ourselves, to be who we are doing what is ours to do, to bring us forth, to birth us, individually, personally, to introduce us to ourselves, and invite us to come alive, not by stepping in the black footprints, but by intuiting the next step and the time to take it all the way to the Land of Promise.

We have everything we need, but we have to access it. We have to be open to it. When life calls for it, we have to be able to stand aside and bring it forth. We have to trust it and allow it to show us who we are, what we are capable of. In order to do that, we have to work the program, engage in the practice. We can’t play shortstop without having played shortstop. If you know what I mean.

What is helpful? What is useful? What do those questions mean in a world where nothing is wasted, where every experience has the capacity to open us to the truth, to connect us to ends worthy of us, to wake us up and re-store us to ourselves? Hitler and Gandhi were both agents of revelation, realization, enlightenment, so in that sense both were equally helpful, useful. One was the servant of suffering and death, the other the servant of grace and peace. What is truly helpful and useful wakes us up graciously, kindly with compassion and peace, smiles and says, “It’s about time you were waking up.”

05/03/09, Living Organtically

2009-05-03T14:19:00.002-04:00

Our lives have an organic or an artificial base. We bring forth what is within, or we impose restrictions and align ourselves with what is without. Organically, we are seen as having everything we need, and are encouraged to incarnate what is within and find ways of exhibiting ourselves appropriately in the world. Artificially, we are seen as blank slates to be written upon, lumps of clay to be molded into who we ought to be according to some external conception of the Ideal Self. We meet encouragement and suggestions or commandments, restrictions and regulations. We become our natural selves or we become somebody else’s image of who we ought to be. Our inner peace and development depend on the luck of the draw, on the environment that receives us when we emerge from the womb, and on the environments we live in throughout the life that follows. We live in search of an environment that is conducive to life. Or capitulate to death and live out our days with hollow eyes and an aborted soul.

The outer world has to be conducive to the birth of the inner world. We need a world that is receptive to our coming forth. Vulnerable souls need a welcoming environment. Or, a protective presence that can deal with any environment. Enter Ego! An Ego that lives in right relationship with Psyche/Soul is exactly what we need to bring ourselves forth into the world. We might think of Ego as The Guardian. A Guardian whose task is to Protect and Serve the Soul, but a Guardian that can be seduced, corrupted, by the lights and action of Gay Paree (or by the fruit of a forbidden tree). A Guardian that is aligned with the world’s idea of what it means to live successfully is death to the soul. You see where this places us. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on?

Whose side ARE we on? How come we keep complicating things for ourselves and getting in our own way? Why are we always shooting ourselves in the foot? Refusing to cooperate with the deeper leadings of Soul? We’re burning daylight here. We have a life tied up at the hitching post while we peruse the sights and sounds of Gay Paree, or whatever passes for Gay Paree. We distract ourselves with Wonderful Nothings, console ourselves with comforting choruses of “Poor, poor pitiful me,” and wait longingly for deliverance while our lives stomp and snort impatiently, and the day drags on.

Oh, but it’s too late now, isn’t it? If we were going to live, we should have started in our twenties. No one can live with their best days behind them. Everyone knows that. After a certain point, it’s all over and you just have to hang it up and tie another one on. That’s what they make beer for. The white rabbits are dancing on the table and we are drinking to missed opportunities and lost dreams. There is a country song in here somewhere.

Figuring out what Soul is asking of us when we have an interest in doing something else is as diffi-cult as anything in the Book of Difficult Things. We are in our own way, and have to constantly decide whether to make way or give way. It is easy enough for us to read our dreams as indicating our opposition, even refusal, to engage in the work of soul, but to see where our cooperation is needed in our daily life—to understand where we are actually being obstinate and obdurate—is beyond the scope of ordinary awareness. And so, the need for developing our sensitivity to, our discernment of, the movement and whispers of Soul. But, why would we?

We don’t want to go where Soul needs to be. Soul seems to be a master of taking things in stride, of biding its time, of waiting things out, of keeping the pressure on, but it also seems to thrive on encouragement and the least amount will do. But without some indication of our willingness to recognize and express the leanings of our Soul, Soul breaks out of its bondage with explosions of Shadow-truth, and we are left with messes beyond imagining to clean up, if we can. If we don’t chase the white rabbit, she will come driving six white horses to run us down, and that will not be pretty.

But becoming who we are, in light of who we also are, is no picnic. This is no walk in the park. It is not for sissies. This is the Search for the Holy Grail, the task of life, the great adventure we all crave as children and shrink from as adults. The monsters, they be real. Who wouldn’t seek the safety of the womb, of Mother’s lap, of the same old same old, of fundamentalist religion, of the black footprints laid out before us to the grave?

No one would volunteer for this work. Or, volunteering, no one would stick it out. It has to be forced on us. We have to be conscripted. Dragged out of our beds at night and thrown into an initiation ritual against our will. This was the place of those primal rites of passage, to force growing up upon us, because not one of us would have what it takes to do it on our own. Yet, we have developed a culture in which we have to do it on our own. No one kidnaps is in the dark and thrusts maturity upon us. This is the task to which all are called but few are chosen. James Hollis says, “Childhood dependency must be relinquished for adult self-possession and creativity. The longing for a trouble-free existence must be put aside in favor of the mature meeting of responsibility. Such changes constitute not only the quickening of consciousness but a form of election. All are summoned to grow up, not all are up to the task.” And why would they be? What do “adult self-possession and creativity” have to offer against “the longing for a trouble-free existence”? Surely, you see the problem!

What exactly do we get out of growing up? What’s in it for us? Why not remain infantile forever? We are leaving Mama’s arms for what? What is better than Mama? Who thought this up? Besides, what’s a soul good for in this world? What’s a soul going to do for us? Get in our way! That’s what. Keep us far from that happy shore, storm-tossed, at the endless mercy of the wine-dark and trackless sea!

All we want is “that happy shore,” and it’s blissful promise of a trouble-free life. In other words, Mama. But the truth is: “We are born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.” That was Job’s take on things (5:7) 2,500 years ago, give or take. He couldn’t find any buyers then, or now. We don’t want to hear it. We want to hear, “Come to Mama, baby. I’ll take care of you.”

See how many surrogate Mamas you can identify roaming through the culture, promising freedom from worry, fear, and trouble. All we’ve ever wanted is freedom from worry, fear and trouble, and we’ve created a culture to provide it for us. Of course, there is one small catch. We have to believe The Lie: “I’m your Mama.” And, we have to hand over our lives. That happy shore is the land of the Sirens--another name for Mama. The terrible thing about Mama is that we can’t be safe in Mama’s arms and be alive. Mama kills the babies. Mama is a Death Eater in disguise, devouring the souls of those she shields from the worries, fears, and troubles of life, rendering us safe, soulless and as empty as gourds on dry ground.

We save our lives by realizing that we have what it takes apart from Mama. We don’t need a trouble-free existence. We have what it takes. If you are going to believe anything, believe that you have what it takes. Believe that you have what you need. Believe that you can stand naked and defenseless before IT, before the way things actually are, and be okay, and be just fine. Don’t hide behind your made up shields, clutching your contract with life, saying, “Look here, look here. It says right here if I do this and this and this, that will happen!” Life will laugh and say “That has no validity—it’s only a joke you’re playing on yourself! You don’t get what you deserve in this league. You get what you get. Now stand up and let’s see what you are made of.” So, stand up, and look Life in its ugly red eye, and smile. You have what it takes. All it takes is trusting that you have what it takes. And, you will never know what you have if you don’t live as though you have it.

How to enlarge ourselves and be true to ourselves is the trick. Enlarging ourselves pulls us beyond ourselves. Being true to ourselves chains us to our idea of ourselves that we have become accustomed to over time—an idea that has to be shattered again and again as we show ourselves who we also are by dealing with situations we have never encountered. We cannot restrict our idea of ourselves to who we have been, to who we have shown ourselves to be through the process of living our lives up to this point. We have to expand our idea of who we are and be true to more than we can imagine we are capable of. We surprise ourselves. We don’t know who all we are. We are here to find out, but it is not easy.

We need the help of Soul. “Look,” we say something on the order of, “Look, you have to speak up if you expect to get my attention. You have to make plain what you want. You can’t be coy and subtle and expect me to get it. I need your help here. What do you want? Signs and signals are crucial. Signs and signals. It’s the least you can do.” Of course, the least we can do is read the signs, and follow their lead!

04/26/09, We find the way by getting out of the way.

2009-04-26T18:27:00.002-04:00

We have to do the work of becoming conscious of, making our peace with, reconciling ourselves with, squaring up with, becoming comfortable with where we have been and what has happened to us and how we have responded and how that has impacted our life, for better or worse. The work is to make our peace with the life that is ours to live. It’s called growing up. It’s also called the spiritual journey. It is a continuing process of coming to terms with our lives that covers the entire span of our lives.

This process of growing up, of the spiritual journey, of coming to terms with our lives, involves us in living out our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about. We have to keep faith with ourselves by living in ways that are commensurate with our idea of ourselves, of who we are and what we are about—even as we do the work of aligning our idea of who we are and what we are about with who we actually are and what we actually are about.

We aren’t free to just make something up here. We have to be true to ourselves. There is an essential reality, a specific, individual identity that we have to take into account and accommodate ourselves to. We have ourselves to consider. We have to be who we truly are in the world, and live so as to express the proclivities and inclinations, aptitudes and abilities, the calling and gifts that are ours to express. We have to do the work that is ours to do. We have an appointment with our life. No matter where we have come from, we still must live our life. Part of that work is continuing to deepen and expand, to clarify and express who we are, so that our idea of who we are increasingly coincides with who we actually are, and we live with integrity and are at-one with ourselves in the world. This is growing up, the spiritual journey.

At every point along the way, we have to be confident in our own ability to know what is right for us in any situation, to know what the next step is here and now. And, we have to be patient with the process of clarification, of knowing what we know at that point, with the information available to us. We can only act on the basis of what we know at the time. As we gain experience and our perspective expands, deepens, enlarges, we may well change our minds about what is right for us, about what needs to be done. We may misstep all along the way. But we remain confident in our ability to make the corrections necessary to get back on track and in the center of life as we need to live it, one step at a time. “We know when we are on the beam and when we are off it” (Joseph Campbell).

When something “rings true,” when something resonates with us, we know it. That is foundational, essential, knowing. That is the knowing that guides us through our lives. Yes/No is the fundamental choice. “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituency?” Soul wonders. Whose side are we on? When we stand apart from ourselves, from our agendas and aspirations for our lives—when we get out of our own way—we know what is right for us. That’s the knowing we need to know.

This knowing suggests that there is an unchanging essence about us all, an unshakable foundation of goodness and life, which can be counted on as a reference point through deep nights on churning seas. The truth abides: we have what we need and will not be left bereft, abandoned and alone. There is “a very present help in time of trouble” that we can trust to see us through dark times and difficult places. In seeking the stability we yearn for in the external world, we are like a woman holding her car keys looking for her car keys.

That being said, there is something attractive about lives with a comfortable, and comforting, sameness about them. Marriages that remain vibrant through the years, houses with flowerbeds that have been tended over time, places we return to for their continuing ability to nourish, nurture and sustain. We need actual, tangible, physical reminders of that which is stable, reliable, durable and dependable within. “As above, so below.” “As out there, so in here.” We have what we need, but that doesn’t mean that our lives will be smooth and easy with nothing but “ups, and ups, and ups” (Lucy in the comic strip Peanuts). Soul doesn’t care about smooth and easy.

What does Soul want? Not very much, it seems. We have our, Ego has its, eye on the displays of success, achievement and arrival, on wealth, prosperity and having it made. Soul is happy with the aroma of fresh bread and digging in the dirt of spring. Soul wants the simple experience of being alive and the straightforward expression of its interests and gifts in the world. Neighborliness. Conviviality. Grace. Compassion, Hospitality. You know the list: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Gentleness, Generosity… Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Living in the service of life. Bringing life to life in the time left for living. Walking the straight and narrow.

Oops. Now I’ve done it. Walking the straight and narrow. We’ve always understood this as the way of moral rectitude. Being a straight arrow. But the straight and narrow is exactly the way of compromise between Ego and Soul/Self/Psyche. It is the fine line between the interests of both sides of ourselves. It is the Third Way between submission and defiance. It is the way of working it out. Of deciding together with ourselves what is being asked of us and how we will respond, of knowing what is needed and what must be done. We do not know this beforehand, intellectually, rationally, apart from the anguish and agony of the struggle with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Sometimes we only know it well after the fact, and have to repent, turn around, redeeming what can be redeemed, and bearing the pain of the burden of what cannot be redeemed. Not being sure about what needs to be done or what to do about it is the cross of life, borne by all who would be alive.

Oh, but, we want more than being alive. We want to be rewarded. We want to be recognized. We want accolades and commendations and prosperity. We want the effort to be who we are to be worth our while. We want to get something out of it beyond being ourselves, alive and open to the wonder and glory of life. We want something to show for it. We can’t settle for being awake, aware, and alive. We want to be rich and famous. Celebrity status. We can’t just be who we are. We want to be Somebody. You see the problem.

What does wanting know? We can want what we have no business having. We are in the mess we are in because of wanting. Wanting, and doing what we wanted, got us here, now. And doing what we want will lead us on. What are we going to do? What we don’t want? That puts us in the position of wanting what we don’t want. We are still doing what we want, even when we do what we don’t want. Even when we do what someone else wants. We have to do what we want whether we want to or not.

Wise wanting is wanting that remembers, imagines, anticipates, intuits. Growing up means honing our wanting, discerning what to want and what not to want, getting better at wanting the right things. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. What are the wrong things? There you are: The task of life, discovering what is worth our time. The surest way to find out what the wrong things are is to invest ourselves in them. We figure out how to live by plunging into our lives and experiencing our experience. But, we prefer lectures and books on experience. We want to do it right. We want to avoid investing ourselves in the wrong things. We can imagine our way around some things, but some things we have to live with for a while in order to avoid them in the future.

Wisdom is known by her children, and what is right becomes apparent over time. In the moment, however, there is only feeling, sensing, intuiting, hunching, guessing. We can be wrong, and often are wrong, and we cannot let that keep us from guessing again, from going again with what feels right, even though it may be wrong. The hope is that we will guess our way to becoming better guessers.

Being wrong can lead to the deepening and expanding of our perception of truth and self as surely as being right can restrict and limit our perception of truth and self. We can be wrong in the right way and right in the wrong way. Impact and outcome have to be assessed over time. Sometimes, wisdom is known by her grandchildren. Sometimes by her great grandchildren. The jury, as they say, is out.

What works is the question. What does it mean for something to work? Works in light of what? Does it increase the level of grace, mercy, and/or peace in the world? Does it lighten loads, enhance joy, produce gladness? Does it bring life forth? Does it work to make the world a better place to be? Does it make you a good place for others to be? Is anyone blessed by it? Does it serve a good that is greater than your own good? Do the things that infuse you with life, bring you to life, enable you to be alive. Live so as to be alive in the time left for living. Evaluate the life-potential of your choices, and go with life wherever it takes you.

04/19/09, Life is the origin of all that is.

2009-04-19T18:14:00.002-04:00

You Are Your Only Problem

You are there to catch yourself when you fall. You have to believe it to know that it is so. When you are on the edge of the abyss, hanging onto the cliff side with bleeding fingertips, dangling at the end of your rope, despairing, having lost all hope and at the point of the end of it all, it is only your idea of how things ought to be that is slipping away. You are only being asked to change your mind about what is important. And, who is asking you to do that? YOU are! When you have run out of options, then you have to trust yourself to yourself. To The One Who Knows. You are never alone. You always have exactly what you need at every point in your life. You just don’t have what you wish you had. Things just aren’t what you want them to be. That’s your only problem. Make your peace with that and let your Self lead you along the way, and you’ll have it made.

The inner world is more important than the outer world. The only value of the outer world is its place of expression for the inner world. The inner world is to be incarnated, birthed, made visible, tangible, actual and real in the outer world. If we aren’t doing that, we are dead, or dying and soon to be dead. Of course, we aren’t doing that because we are distracted by the lights of Gay Paree, and think the outer world is the living end.

We think the Outer world is where life is to be found—in the lights and action of Gay Paree—and neglect the Inner world, which connects us with life, and is life, and live draped with beautiful rags, wearing glass beads, admiring ourselves in our silver mirrors, oblivious to the death that would point us to the path of life if we could only wake up and know how dead we are. Death is the path to life to those who realize they are dead. And, it is only death to those who think they are alive.

Life is conditional upon the inner work that is necessary to connect us to life, bring us to life and enable us to be alive in the outer world of normal, apparent, reality. Outer calls forth inner which blesses outer, and all things are complete, and one. But, in order for that to be the case, we have to do our inner work.

We have to reestablish our connection with the inner world by learning the language of soul—image, metaphor, dream, symbol, symptom—and bringing soul to life in our lives, living to incarnate soul, to give it concrete, tangible existence. Soul work is the work we do to bring soul to life in our lives.

Carl Jung says we have to find the image tucked away in our experiences. What has become of the dragons and monsters, the demons and ogres? The path? The journey? The magic? We don’t live magical lives, lives that are attuned to the inner world because we think it’s all about concrete and steel, and what you see is what you get. We have forgotten that there is more to life than meets the eye. In order to recover the sense of “more than eyes can see,” we have to rekindle our imagination and curiosity, and see the outer world with the “inner eye.” We have to live with a foot in each world and know which world is home.

We also have to connect our experience of the spontaneous images that arise in our minds with our experience of the concrete world of tangible reality—making the experience of the mental images concrete and tangible in the outer world of daily experience. What does it mean that I dream of snakes? How does the image of the snake connect with my lived experience? How do I translate the image of the snake into the tangible world of concrete and steel? Where are, who are, the snakes (dragons) in my daily life? It is the work of consciousness to make the connections, to find the meaning, and live with a foot in both worlds.

As it turns out, I hate snakes. Whenever I encounter a snake in a dream, I, the dreaming dreamer, say in the dream to whomever is in charge of production, “You know I hate snake! I’m going to always hate snakes, and you keep throwing snakes at me!” I hear the producer laughing. The dream is indicative of my waking world in which I encounter an endless stream of things I hate: trips to the dentist, to the auto repair shop, income tax preparation, balancing the check book… You have your list, you know what I’m talking about. The snakes at night are the hated list by day. The dream producer seems to be saying, “Get used to it. Get over it. Take doing what you hate in stride. Life is full of stuff like that.” Image becomes reality. Another snake dream underscores the truth of the way it is, invites me to accept it, live around it, and get on with my life, with doing the things that bring me to life, the things that I am here to do, in and around the snakes, the things that must also be done.

Inner prepares us for Outer, for life in the world of normal, apparent reality, offering images which reflect and shape experience, enabling us to live in the external world as those on a mission from the internal world. The mission is to bring forth who we are in spite of the context and circumstances of our lives. The mission is to be alive in a world that is not always conducive to life. Life is an inner reality to be brought forth in the world of physical experience.

Two things here. One is that the physical experience of life is not the only experience of life. Life is experienced on more than the physical level. Life is expressed physically, in the world of outer reality, but it does not EXIST physically! Physical existence is not the only form of existence! The inner world connects us with another world—who knows how many worlds there are—and life is the source of all worlds. This is a switch from the normal way of perceiving reality, which scratches its head and ponders the origin of life, as though life is produced by the physical universe. Reverse that train of thought. The physical universe is produced by life as a means of expression of life, of experiencing life. It is one of the ways life exists.

From the standpoint of this view, an end of life, of LIFE, is out of the question. Life is the foundational reality, the absolute, the given. If you are going to believe in anything believe in life beyond life, on-going, unending, eternal, beautifully, wonderfully, mysteriously, real. Life is not bound to the physical expression/experience of life. When physical existence ends, life continues. It only takes being a little bit alive to know this is so, and we are here to be alive in the time of our living. Being alive is exactly the work of soul, the work of bringing ourselves forth in the world of normal, apparent reality.

The second thing is that this past week I made my annual spring pilgrimage to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For three days, I walked among the flowers and alongside the streams with camera in hand honoring the rebirth of the world. This year, my wanderings took me to the Ephraim and Minerva “Nervy” Bales place in the Roaring Fork region of the Smokies. Ephraim and Nervy raised 9 children in a two room log house, and one of the rooms was a kitchen. They farmed about 30 acres of four inches of low grade topsoil covering granite rocks and boulders from 1890 to 1930. Think about bringing soul forth under those conditions. Think about bringing soul—yourself—to life there, then. Well, we’ve had it worse for thousands of years, and a large portion of the world’s population has it worse today.

In spite of that, life finds a way. We can count on life. And, we can join life in the work of finding a way by getting out of the way, by standing aside, by not interfering with life by imposing our judgment, evaluation, commentary—by keeping our terms and conditions and expectations from adding to life’s burden. We are here to assist life, to help bring life to life, not to impose more restrictions and limits. Even hope gets in the way when we misunderstand hope and think it is “for” something, or “that” something will happen or not happen. “I hope the Cubs will win the World Series,” is not hope. Hope is what water has when it finds its way to the sea no matter what obstacles it encounters along its path. Hope is the hard-headed, resolute, determination to find a way, when there appears to be no way, when there IS no way. Hope is life at its best, which we trivialize by hoping it doesn’t rain on our day off.

The challenge is the same in every time and place: Honor the inner world and be alive in the time and place of our living. Bring soul forth. Do what is ours to do, what we came to do, what we are here for. And that is not to achieve some great work in the world of outer reality, but to unfold what is within, to bring forth the inner into the outer, to express what is ours to express, to exhibit what is ours to exhibit, to make known what is ours to make known, namely who we are, who we are capable of being. “What I do is me,” says Gerard Manly Hopkins, “for that I came.” In order to know what that is, we have to attend the inner world, learn its language, and assist the unfolding of what is within.

To attend the Inner World, we have to feel the feelings stored there, and honor their place in our lives as we find ways to express them appropriately and consciously. Inner work is not intellectual. It is experiential. It can be wrenching. Like dying. The dead have to die if they are to come to life and be alive. It is easier to remain dead. And so, we have to do what is hard and bring soul forth in the time and place of our living, assisting Inner in the work of transforming Outer, and saving the world.

04/12/09, How Many Easters in Your Life?

2009-04-12T19:08:00.002-04:00

Stream Theory
I operate out of the stream theory of life: Sometimes we flow fast and sometimes we flow slowly, sometimes we have to find our way around barriers and obstacles, sometimes we are sluggish, sometimes we are stagnant, waiting. But the path takes us to the sea. We follow the path in different ways at different times, but always the path. Different streams have different paths, but always the sea. It's good when we flow close enough together to call out encouragement from time to time, and share the joys and sorrows of the journey.
How Many Easters?
How many times have you died and been resurrected? How many personal deaths and resurrections have you experienced? How often have you been reborn? The Easter story is about you, don’t you see? “As above, so below.” As with Jesus, so with you. “(We) once were lost, but now we’re found, were blind, but now (we) see.” How many times has that happened to you? How many Easter mornings have you risen from the dead?

Ah, but. To get to those Easters, our Easters, we have to get beyond That Easter, and understand Easter is every time we wake up and come alive in our lives. We get there by understanding that the idea of “the Christ” is more important than the person of Jesus. We confuse the Christ with Jesus and close ourselves off from the ongoing experience and expression of the Christ in our lives and in the world. The Greek word, “Christ” and the Hebrew word “Messiah,” mean the same thing: “ the anointed,” or, “the anointed one.” The terms reflect the Jewish idea that God would send “the anointed one” after the manner of King David, to right wrongs and restore Israel to her place of leadership among the nations, in ordinary, historical time.

Clearly, this did not happen with Jesus, and the New Testament writers, with Paul leading the way, had to rethink Messiahship, Christhood, and come up with a new spin on an old concept, which they did with the idea of the resurrection and return. Jesus is coming back, they said, to fulfill the role of the anointed one and establish his kingdom of peace and prosperity upon the earth, in ordinary, historical time, for those who believe and are faithful. They further declared that their spin was the only authoritative and acceptable spin (because they knew Jesus personally and who was better positioned to say what he was about) and if anyone else tried to spin the idea of the Christ, the Messiah, they were to be treated as anathema and shunned, or worse. The question for us, of course, is do we buy their spin? If we don’t, is there a spin we can buy?

Here’s mine: The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, is anyone, everyone, who lives so as to bring forth God into the world. Ah, but, then we have to talk about God. God is the source of sense of the rightness of things, the right order of things, the meant-to-be-ness of things. God is the mystery at the heart of life.

God is the mysterious, numinous, source of the awareness of the rightness of things when they are how they truly ought to be, when we are how and who we truly ought to be, when our life is how and what it ought to be. Our place is to align ourselves with the rightness, the ought-to-be-ness of things—as Jesus did—in a “Thy will not mine be done” kind of way. When we do that, we live as those whose food “is to do the will of the One who sent us and to accomplish his work.” As we do this, we are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, living to bring forth what truly ought to be in our lives and the world. As we live to be who Jesus was in this way, we are Christians, or “Little Christ’s.”

Our lives are our practice. We practice bringing forth what ought to be. We practice being The Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, who brings forth what is truly right and needs to happen. As we bring forth that which is deepest, best, and truest about us, as we live aligned with the ought-to-be-ness of things, we grace the world with caring presence and dance with our lives.
Understanding the Christ in this way turns New Testament theology on its ear, of course, but it is quite compatible with Jesus’ treatment of the kingdom of God as metaphor, not political fact.

Jesus’ statement, “My kingdom is not of this world,” establishes the fundamental rift between him and the Jewish notion of the Promised Land and the messianic return of King David. The Messiah the Jews were looking for would establish a Kingdom with geographical and political boundaries, latitude and longitude, and all the spoils that go to the victors. But Jesus understands the kingdom in a spiritual, not political, way. The kingdom that is “not of this world,” is the one envisioned by the prophet Jeremiah: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more (Jeremiah 31:33-34). A kingdom in which all are the Christ.

Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom as being “not of this world” stands in opposition to the Jewish understanding of the Messiah and in opposition to the Apostles’ view that Jesus would return and establish his kingdom within the historical world of space and time. Jesus is the denunciation of those expectations. The Christ who Jesus is is not the Christ anyone expected or desired.

And our practice is to bring that Christ forth into the world. We begin with our lives because our lives reflect our alignment, or lack of alignment, with the source of the rightness of things. We are at odds with ourselves, remember? There is no better definition of sin. To overcome our at-odds-ness and live in synch with who we are is the practice that brings the Christ forth into the world.

The question is how well does our life exhibit who we ought to be, disclose “the face that was ours before we were born”? To what extent are we living our life, the life that is ours to live, the life that brings us forth into the world? Where are we not keeping faith with our life? What are we going to do about it? Our work is to know and do what is ours to do, to live the life that is our life to live. We have the rest of our lives to learn how to live the lives that are ours to live. Our work is to be reconnected with ourselves and our lives. To be restored to our life. To be resurrected from the dead. To wake up and live.

There is no instant recipe for waking up. See what you are seeing. Hear what you are hearing. Feel what you are feeling. Know what you are knowing. Think what you are thinking. Taste what you are tasting. Love what you are loving… Experience what you are experiencing in every moment for the rest of your life, including how what you have experienced impacts what you are experiencing, and you will be more awake at the end than you are now. But, you’ll never be all the way awake. Waking up is a process, not an achievement. Here are some steps in that process:

(1) Strong feelings are indicators of stirrings of soul. Something is stirring up something. Check it out. Sit with the feeling and interview it: “What is this touching in me?” “What does this remind me of?” “When did I first feel this?” “Where does this come from in my history?” “What is being remembered that my present situation is triggering that arouses this feeling?” “What is behind the feeling?” “What is beneath the surface of this feeling?” “What are the ideas around the experiences that give rise to this feeling?” “What wound is being exposed here?” “What do I need to make conscious in order to begin healing the wound?” “What am I being asked to remember that I would like to forget?” “What does this feeling have to say to me? What do I have to say to this feeling?”

(2) When you find yourself resisting something, dig in at the point of resistance. This doesn’t mean become more resistant. It doesn’t mean “stick to your guns,” “stand fast,” “hold your ground.” It means examine your resistance, explore your resistance. It means find your fear. What is the threat? Where in your experience have you felt that threat, have you been threatened in this way? What does this threat remind you of? What is being asked of you that you don’t want to do? That you don’t what to surrender? What is at stake for you personally at the point of your resistance? What do you stand to lose?

(3) Reflective conversation is the highest value. Conversation that doesn’t encourage reflection doesn’t engage the soul, and cannot bring us to life. Conversation that is restorative wakes us up and connects us with our-selves and our lives. This kind of conversation is the dialectic. The primal soup. The birth place of the clash of contraries. The seat of consciousness. The origin of life. The pathway to soul.

(4) The ultimate conversation is with our soul. To speak with soul, we have to learn the language of soul: metaphor, image, story, dream, symbol, symptom, intuitive sense, persistent drift toward or attraction to, disinclination or resistance… Soul comes at us in different ways with the same message until we wake up and get it and live aligned with soul’s idea of how life is to be lived. Generally, we can only do that when our idea of how life is to be lived has lived itself out, and we have nothing much left to loose. But soul keeps talking, on the chance that we are ready to hear what it has to say.

Soul is a white rabbit appearing momentarily in our peripheral vision and disappearing down holes and around corners while we try to decide if we saw anything and what to do about it. And soul will be “driving six white horses when she comes,” and it will be impossible to miss her. She will run us down, run us over, and demand that we get on board or else. That’s the way it is with soul. If we don’t give chase, we will be chased. Better the rabbit than the horses. Take my word for it. You do not want to find out the hard way.

04/04/09, Dance with what scares you

2009-04-05T14:06:00.002-04:00

We stand between different perspectives, different points of view, different ways of seeing, different interpretations, different theories, different hypothesizes, different spins, different theologies and philosophies and decide which one to embrace, agree with, espouse, profess. We decide which one is right for us. How do we know? However we do it, decide, know, how do we know that’s the right way to do it? This gets us to the heart of the prob-lem of knowing what to believe, of deciding how we are going to see something, anything. Golf, bread pudding, Jesus. By what authority do we say “this” or “that”? What moves us to one position or another? How do we know?

Most of the time we don’t think about it. We just buy what someone else, someone we admire and trust, is selling, or has bought. We think, “If it’s good enough for Mama, it’s good enough for me,” and let it go at that. We are influenced by the example of someone we trust to do our thinking for us. Saves us the trouble. We have enough to worry about. It is our life, of course, but we don’t mind if someone else lives it for us. We just fall in line, do as we are told, follow the black footprints to the grave. What’s the difference? What do we care?

We have one life to live and we opt out of it. We live a nice, well-rounded, cookie cutter life, that is some-body else’s idea of how life ought to be, that looks remarkably like everyone else’s life on the block. We tell ourselves to just tell them what they want to hear and show them what they want to see, because what difference does it make anyhow and it’s so much easier that way. We ignore whoever it is that’s screaming inside, locked away in a back room, away from the light and what passes for life, wishing it would leave us alone, and in time it does. And we are left with a life that everyone is happy with and is a complete waste of our time.

When we die and go to heaven, we will meet our lives there, and have to explain to them why we didn’t live them. And that will be hell. So, we need to take a Quality of Life Assessment on a regular basis. How alive are we? How interested, and interesting, are we? How invested are we in our lives? Do we have dreams for our lives that weren’t realized, that aren’t being realized? Are we living in the service of our dreams? If not, what keeps us from living in the service of our dreams? Are we living the life we wish we could live? If not, what keeps us from living the life we wish we could live? Have we put our dreams away, shutting them up in a back room perhaps? Are we living in the service of our fears? What fears keep us from living? What stands between us and being alive?

Here’s a bumper sticker for you: Walk confidently in the direction of your fear. Here’s another: Run to embrace your fear. Here’s another: Step into what makes you most afraid. Marsha Truman Cooper has a poem about this very thing:

Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”

Two of the things we fear most, that would surely be locked away in Paris, are our own thoughts and our own feelings. We will think anything to keep from thinking what we think. We will do anything to keep from feeling what we feel. We embrace bad religion to save us from ourselves, but it is the connection with ourselves and the life that is our life to live that is at the heart of good religion. You see the problem. We cannot get to good religion without going through the heart of Paris.

We need to think our own thoughts, and feel our own feelings, and live our own lives. In order to live our own lives, we have to be able to make a case for the life we are living. We have to think it out, think it through, think. But how do we know that what we think is what to think? We don’t. We can’t. We can only think what we think, and think it out, and think it through, and be able to articulate our understanding of God and life and what it means to be alive and what we are here for and how we are working to incarnate, express, bring forth, all of that into the life we are living. It will be good practice for when we stand before our lives in heaven.

Another of the things we fear is being wrong, being exposed for being wrong, being shown to be wrong, we have to be right. Okay. Here’s the question. Is it worse to be wrong or to be right? And, here is the catch, we have to risk being wrong in order to be right. When Jesus quotes the proverb, “Wisdom is known by her children,” he’s saying “time will tell.” He’s saying we can’t know beforehand how right we are. He’s saying “Truth will out. Truth will shine through. Truth will show itself to be what it is.” In time, but maybe not in our lifetime. We cannot live knowing we are right about the life we are living. We have to take a chance. We have to risk everything with our lives on the line. The idea gives us the willies.

Our panic fails to take into account the truth that we have what we need. We are afraid of being overwhelmed, undone, exposed, obliterated. We are afraid of the complete dissolution of soul. We are afraid of nothingness, and have nothing to worry about. All it takes is imagination, curiosity, and courage. Those things come packed into each of us at birth. We only have to sit loose in the saddle and enjoy the ride. We are only along for the ride. But we cannot ride casually, unthinking, unfeeling.

The catch is that something can feel right and not be right, so the constant need for examination and exploration, observation and inquiry. What are the contraries at work in our lives? How do we reconcile ourselves to them? How do we square ourselves up to the contradictions in our lives? Where are we not keeping faith with our-selves? How do our lives need to change to be better aligned with who we are? How are we blocking the way of soul, the expression of Self, in our lives? In what ways, and from what, are we hiding? What does what we are thinking about keep us from thinking? What does what we are doing keep us from doing? What are we avoiding? Where in our lives is the deep water calling our name?

The problem, of course, is that we can justify anything. Which makes it impossible to know if what we are doing is right or a spin job. And leaves us quite up in the air about everything. Maybe we are doing what needs to be done, and maybe we are fooling ourselves. Is it clarity, or is it self-deception? How can we be sure? We make our choices and live our lives, and that’s that. Time may tell if we were right, but after enough time it won’t much matter. But, we could be a little less smug and certain about our way being the way. That would help.

We can justify anything. When we wake up, we wake up to our ability to justify anything. The only differ-ence between being awake and being asleep is that awake we question our justifications and wonder if we are telling ourselves what we want to hear or actually making the choices that need to be made. Are we kidding ourselves or living soulfully? How do we get to the bottom of that one? Isn’t this great? I wouldn’t be anywhere but here for anything. I mean anything. This is so it. So perfectly, wonderfully, crazily it. We’ll never think our way out of it. If you can’t love this, you can’t love anything, because everything is going to test your ability to love it over time. And, if you can’t live with ambivalence, and ambiguity, and anxiety, and anguish, and angst, and agony, you better not come out of the womb. That’s just the A’s.

03/29/09, We live between what is right for us and what we want.

2009-03-29T14:27:00.002-04:00

The Dream

“Have you cut the tip of your finger?” she asked. “What?” I replied. “What’s that got to do with it? How many fingers do I have to cut?” She paused, thinking. “At least four,” she said, somewhat hesitantly, as though there could be more. “Four!” I said. “Why four?” I ask all the right questions. I should get credit for that. But, it seems that she thinks I’m putting off the inevitable, that I should just cut four fingertips and get it over with. Easy enough for her, seeing, as she does, from her point of view. Take a peek from mine, I say. If I’m going to cut four of MY fingertips, I want to know the ins and outs. I want to know why and how that’s going to help and what’s the point. Surely, by now, she has to understand what she’s up against in me, and would gently explain how it is. Seems to me, I hold the trump cards. All of them. I don’t want to swim in icy water anyway. Why cut four fingertips to do it? What does one thing possibly have to do with the other? All I can imagine is that the pain of the finger slicing would take my mind off the pain of the cold water. Which is completely stupid, and much less wisdom than I would expect from the Wisdom of the Ages. I think she is making fun of me, laughing. I’m shrinking back from the cold water, and she is making fun of me, laughing. I HATE cold water. And she knows it. And she’s laughing.

We have to go where we don’t want to be and do what we don’t want to do. If we can make our peace with that, we have it made. Which is to say that what we want has nothing to do with it. What needs to be done is the question. Where do we need to be is the other question. Forget wanting. Wanting got us in the mess we’re in. We see what wanting will do for us. We create a good many of our problems by choosing to have what we want at the expense of what is right for us.

What is right for us has nothing to do with what we want for us. If you are ever going to hear me, hear me here. Learning to listen within in order to know what we know, in order to know what is right for us, past all want-ing it to be otherwise, and to have what it takes to do it, to live in the service of what is right for us, no matter what, day in and day out for the rest of our lives, ah, there be the nature and scope of the spiritual journey.

The way to wholeness, to integrity of being, is awareness, paying attention, waking up. It’s the way of knowing how things are and how things also are (which includes the truth of how we feel about how things are, and also are—the truth of how we wish things were). It is the way of putting truth on the table, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, the truth in all its conflicting, mutually exclusive, cacophonic glory. And letting truth trans-form truth, and wake us up, so that we live in light of all the truth that is true. That is the way of integration. It is not exactly what you would call pain-free. But it is exactly what you would call life lived to the core.

One of the truths that goes on the table is fundamental, foundational: We are at odds with ourselves. We relax (ignore) the tension within ourselves at high cost to ourselves. We have to live consciously within the tension of the opposites within, and choose what we will do each time a choice is to be made. No dismissing. No discounting. No denying. No Ignoring. No running, hiding, escaping, pretending. We bear the pain of our own contrariness as we carry out the business of life on the boundary between Yin and Yang.

Of course it is hard. We’re here to ride the bull. If it were easy they would call it riding the hen. We are here to do what is hard: Face ourselves and our lives and bring to life in ourselves and our lives that which is deepest, best, and truest about us—that which is truly right for us and the time and place of our living.

There are no black foot prints on the spiritual path. We find our way alone, but in the company of those who are finding their way, alone. There is no substitute for personal experience, yet, experience has to be experienced, and it cannot be experienced without being expressed. We have to talk about our experience with those who can receive well what we have to say. In so doing, we see better what is to be seen, become increasingly awake, and find our own way, the way that is truly our way, the way with our name on it. We could not find the way that is our way apart from those who listen to us, enabling realization, discovery, understanding, enlightenment—enabling us to know the truth of who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also it with us). But, once we find the way that is our way, we discover that it has a cross attached.

The cross was the price Jesus paid for living the life he lived. We all pay a price for living the life we live. The trick is to realize that, and bear consciously the cross and the responsibility for living the life that called it forth—and to know that if we choose to live differently we will bear the cross of living differently. We can’t get away from the crosses with our name on them. The best we can do is bear them consciously, responsibly, smiling along the way, because we get to live the life we are living for the one low price of cross bearing. Of course, that means we better feel right about the life we are living, else the cross will be a bear to bear.

Bearing the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, means paying the price of living the way we live or changing the way we live, but then we have to pay the price of that choice. We have to take what comes from doing what we do the way we do it. If we run up a bill, we pay the tab. But we only pay our tab. We refuse to bear the pain of other people’s choices, the weight of other people’s lives. It’s the Robert Frost line about “good fences making good neighbors.” We have to know where we stop and other people start. We take care of our business and they take care of theirs. And, when we help one another, we help one another help themselves. When we help one another, we help one another bear the pain of their own choices, the weight of their own lives. If we won’t bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives, we can’t be helped, we can only be carried, mothered, babied, and live as a burden upon others all our lives long.

We have to bear the pain of our own choices, the weight of our own lives. When we do not, we neglect our duty to the tribe and pass on to others the responsibility of carrying us along. Then, we become an excessive bur-den on the social structure and undermine the good of the whole. Compare this to our calling to live as a boon to the world, a blessing unto all who come our way, and you quickly see the scope of the damage we bring to life by refusing to bear the pain that is ours to bear. Not only are we not a source of good in the lives of others, but we also deplete what little good there is by requiring them to do what is ours to do in taking care of us. When we grow up and shoulder our own cross, bear the weight of our own life, everyone is relieved and released to live the lives that are theirs to live, and joy comes to life in the world.

We have to do our part. And, we have to prop one another up. No one does it alone, yet we all have to help the others help us. This is called community building. We encourage one another in the tasks of life. We are a compassionate, abiding, presence. Urging each other along. Cheering each other on. Just being with someone who has the right spirit about her, about him, makes all the difference. Joseph Campbell says, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” Our individual task is to cultivate the right spirit within, to be vital, alive, and to live as a compassionate presence in the lives of others.

To be connected at the level of truth is the essential connection. To see truth truthfully together is to create a “weness” that forms a lasting bond between us, among us. This is the basis of the community we seek, and must have, to make it. It is not enough to say the truth, to say what is true, we also have to be heard, we have to say the truth to those who can hear us with understanding, who can stand with us as witnesses of the truth we know to be true because we experienced it. The truth must be told, but not only told. It must be told until it is heard, until it is received with understanding, until it is recognized as the truth that it is, by someone, anyone.

The most abusing thing about child abuse is not the abuse itself but the silence that surrounds it. The secrecy. The "explanations." The dismissals. The denials. "Oh, you know your Daddy, Uncle, Brother really loves you, really wouldn't do anything to hurt you," etc. The displacements. "It's your fault." The most abusing thing about child abuse is the refusal to hear the truth of the child, the refusal to stand with the child, and bear the truth with the child, knowing what the child knows, knowing that the child knows we know, refusing to look away, but bear-ing the truth with the child, bearing the child’s truth, the truth of the child, the child, all the way to the heart of truth, and saying, “Yes. That’s the truth. That’s how it is. And it is very wrong for that to have happened, for that to be the way it is. And I am very sorry, and I am with you to bear witness to the truth, and to help you bear the pain of the truth, because two sets of shoulders are much better than one.”

To bear the truth alone, when the world is saying, "That isn't true. That couldn't be true. You know it isn't true," is to risk losing our bearings, to split off from that part of us that knows, and to deny ourselves what we know to be true as a way of surviving in a world that does not believe us. To hold on to the truth and to know what we know and to know that we know what we know in the face of the constant refusal to hear/believe/know is the hardest thing. We need help bearing the truth of our lives. We need those who can witness the truth of our lives with us, to corroborate the truth, affirm it, and thus ground us in the reality of that which cannot be real but is, and provide us with a reference point for navigating through the madness of the world, reminding us that the world is mad, but we are not.

The more truthful we are, the crazier we sound in a world that is not geared to the expression of truth. And so, the need to create communities of truthfulness where we can say who we are (and also are) and how it is with us (and how it also is), to those who can hear us and serve as reference points for the long journey home.

03/22/09, We have to soothe ourselves somehow.

2009-03-22T13:24:00.003-04:00

On the One Hand

We seek justification, redemption, affirmation, validation, because we think there isn’t much to us. We are afraid we don’t count, that we don’t add up to anything, and have no real business being here. We think we are just taking up space, breathing someone else’s air. We live frantic to convince ourselves that our lives are worth the effort.

And on the Other

Who has it down? Who is doing it right? The Dali Lama? I hear he wants to retire. He’s had enough of being the Dali Lama. Wants to tag out. Stop doing it. Quit. Quit being the Dali Lama. Walk away from the job. Since when did it become a job? Let a seven year old kid take his place. So he can just hang out for a while before he dies. How’s that for being grown up? Nobody has it down! Nobody is doing it right! Yet, we are all over our backs for not having it down, for not doing it right. Give me the name of someone who does! No! Wait! Give me the name of the person who thought this up. We need to talk.

We want to be justified and we want to quit. And, the longer we are at it, the more we want to quit. We all know about wanting to quit, wanting to hang out, free of responsibility, and obligation, and duty—to live freely, joyfully, at peace with ourselves and our lives without life getting in the way. Life is hard. We hate it. Want to check out. Quit. But quitting has its hard side. Everything does. Hard is how it is.

Of course, we have this happy fantasy of being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, for as long as we want, with no repercussions or side effects, and everyone loving us always and forever. It’s called having Mother take care of us. We run up the tab, Mother pays the bill—not our biological mother, who was never the mother we needed her to be, but the Idealized Mother of Fantasy Land who will take care of us the way we want to be taken care of forever and ever, Amen! When it gets hard, we long for Mother.

Life without Mother is the hardest thing. The hardest thing is growing up, bearing the truth of life, making our peace with how things are (and also are), being our own mother, being responsible for doing what is to be done, every day for the rest of our lives, and doing it with gentleness, kindness, compassion and grace. Who do you know who lives like that? See? I told you it was the hardest thing. But we don’t cut ourselves slack or treat our-selves gently for wanting to quit, for wanting to avoid life without Mother.

We were raised on John Wayne and James Bond. They had no weaknesses and did everything single-handedly. Yet, John Wayne smoked himself to death, and James Bond has no friends. Even the actors who play James Bond can stand him only so long. He hates himself. And has to run, or drive, or fly, or swim from one action packed moment to the next. Make him sit still for an hour. Give him our life for a week. He couldn't handle it. His life is one big collection of distractions. But we think he is the master of all things. We think we should be John Wayne and James Bond. We were raised to believe we should stand there and take it. No one can stand there and take it, not even John Wayne or James Bond, but we can’t allow ourselves to get out of the way. We can’t take it and we can’t take not taking it. Who thought this up?

Col. Nathan P. Jessup (the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men) put us all in our place with his "You can't handle the truth" declaration. No one can. Not all the time. We have to put some distance between ourselves and the truth to have a chance. But then, and this is the part I really don't like, what we do for distance becomes part of the truth we're trying to get away from, and we have to get away from it. Distraction becomes addiction. And we have to distract ourselves from our distraction. We have to deny our denial. Escape our escape. Reality keeps shifting on us, becoming something else, tracking us down, breaking in. Who thought this up?
Ignorance is bliss. Denial is ignorance. We will do anything to feel better about our lives. Or to feel nothing. Consciousness is pain. To know is to suffer the fear and anguish brought on by the pain of existence. How much can you see before covering your eyes, looking away? How conscious can you be before you run to Mama? Uncon-sciousness has its place, else it wouldn’t be so popular.

We can only handle so much truth. So much mindfulness. At some point we have to give ourselves over to mindlessness and watch a football game, or play with the puppy, or swing a grandchild, or have some ice cream. We have to set life aside and live from time to time. Really. I’m serious here. We have to get out of our heads and into our lives. If your thinking disconnects you from living, keeps you from living, stop thinking. If you can’t think and enjoy pizza and a beer, stop thinking. Better to be mindlessly alive than mindfully dead. A lot better.

The religions of the east boast of their consciousness quotient, but how alive are they is the question? What is their life quotient? They dismiss the truth they cannot bear to acknowledge as illusion. Dismissal is another form of denial. They live in the midst of horrendous suffering and see it only as Maya brought on by desire, without see-ing their desire to ignore suffering and their responsibility for relieving it. Nobody can be conscious without a break, but to be unconscious of our unconsciousness is bad religion.

Bad religion exists to enable us to feel better about our lives. Good religion exists to enable us to see, hear and understand—to know how things are and how things also are—to feel what must be felt, and do what must be done, and to call time out and step away when that must be done. The pain of the truth of life will be borne, experienced, expressed, either consciously or unconsciously, either by ourselves or by our spouse, or our children, or society, or the world. The pain of the truth of life will be suffered by someone. What we do not bear consciously ourselves will be borne by others, perhaps over long generations. Pain that is not felt, experienced, and appropriately expressed, will be passed along, and the world will suffer from our refusal to suffer our portion of what must be suffered. We always increase the corporate pain level in the lives of those around us when we refuse to bear our personal pain consciously.

But, we cannot bear it all the time, and we cannot bear it alone. We have to have relief at regular intervals. No one can stare down reality. We step in and step out to restore our souls and have what it takes to step back in and do what must be done. Stepping out is one of the things that must be done, but there is a fundamental difference between stepping away from reality to nourish, nurture, and restore our souls, and running to the safety of Mama’s lap.

There is more to us than we can imagine. We are always giving up on ourselves. We don’t know who we are or what we are capable of, but we think there is nothing to us. We think, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that, or that, or that. I couldn’t possibly survive on those terms, under those conditions. I must have my bon-bons and my telly.” The Hero, the Heroine, within doesn’t get a chance to show us what we are made of because we are always collapsing in the dust, writhing, whining, moaning, calling for Mother, saying, “Help me! Save me! Won’t somebody help me! Mama! I want my Mama!”

We all have a resilient core that is more than capable of making its way in any world. Look at where we have been—both individually and as a species. Look at what we have dealt with. Hairy Mastodons. Genghis Kahn. Life cannot give us anything that is worse than the things life has already given us. We have what it takes. It only takes trusting that we do. We are the only thing we cannot handle, and stand blocking our way by not having what it takes to trust that we have what it takes, crying for Mama.

What is the pain, the fear, the anxiety? Abandonment? Overwhelm-ment? Isolation? Exclusion? Aloneness? What is it that we think we cannot bear? Too-much-ness? Is the all-ness of life, the truth of life, too much for us? What exactly do we think growing up entails? Growing up means looking our life in the eye and saying, “Show me what you got.” Until we can do that, we are children seeking Mother’s lap. And, the hope is that we will find those who can accept us, lovingly, as we are, even as they repeat the saving mantra, “I’m not your Mother!” and exhibit its truth in their way with us over time, while we grow up and become who we are capable of being.
We cannot bear the weight of our lives without a corroborating witness, or witnesses, standing with us, knowing what we know. We cannot know what we know alone. We have to share the burden of the knowledge of the weight of our lives. Souls sustain souls. That is the work of community. It is the work of sustaining one another in the knowledge of who we are (and also are) and how things are (and also are).

It takes two or more standing together to know what we know. We cannot bear the weight of consciousness alone. We cannot see (or hear, or understand) by ourselves. And, we cannot allow one another to run, hide, deny, pretend, excuse, justify, soften, or otherwise ease the atrocity of truth. The truth goes on the table. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we live in light of the truth of the table. As we live, we uncover more of the truth, and put that also on the table. We are constantly adding to the truth of the table, and our lives change as truth transforms truth, and perspective shifts, and understanding deepens, and worlds expand.

The ideal community is one in which we draw one another out. Bring one another forth. Birth each other. Enlarge each other, deepen each other, expand each other’s perspective, extend each other’s conscious awareness, wake each other up, enable each other’s coming to be in the world, and help each other bear the pain of the truth of life and become increasingly whole and alive. The work of consciousness is communal to the core.

03/15/09, A Poetry Reading

2009-03-15T13:38:00.002-04:00

Introduction
I had a poetry phase once, in which I wrote poems every day for a year. And then I quit because it seemed to me that I was a poem, and that everything I said or did was poetry, and I could no longer tell where the poem ended and I began. The more I listened to me, the more I found myself saying, “You’re talking poetically again! Cut it out!” But, I could only shrug and say back, “You cut it out—if you can!” Over time we gave into it and allowed ourselves to splash around uncensored in poetic shallows, occasionally getting in over our heads, sometimes swimming in the waves, or floating with the current, laughing.

Mama
She wouldn’t actually have to be Mama. Mama wasn’t Mama. Not the Mama I have in mind. Not the Mama who would take care of me the way I want to be taken care of. So, any reasonable facsimile would do. She could wear a wig, a badly fitting wig, and heavy make up, and have on a red dress cut down to here, and combat boots. Combat boots would be good. You wouldn’t want a Mama who wouldn’t go to war for you. And bangle bracelets, and a turquoise broach. And, she could lie. Who cares. “I’m your Mama.” I’d buy it. For a while. I get desperate sometimes. Don’t you?

Explanation
Lemme ’splane this to you. We are fragmented, splintered, disjointed and ache to be whole, centered, stabilized, safe and secure. We seek a grounding connection with the core of being. Something to help us make sense of things and find the way forward through all that is in our way. The deck appears, more often than not, to be stacked against us. Or, if you would prefer a different metaphor, the deck is always pitching and rolling. No one can stand upright, and we’re always in danger of being lost at sea. There are times when it is difficult to imagine that anything, or anyone (including ourselves), is on our side, has our best interest at heart, and stands ready to help us toward that which is good. During these times, we have to be glad it isn’t worse yet, and do what is ours to do amid circumstances that come and go according to forces that don’t even know our name.

On Our Own
We are on our own in this place, and make it as well as we do on the strength of our associations and friendships and the luck of the draw. Genghis Kahn, or the US Cavalry, is always just over the hill, and Hitler is waiting in the wings, and we deal with them like we deal with the rest of it, by getting out of the way and making the best of it to the extent that we are able. We think we have a leg up until the phone rings with the lab report, then the structure that held our world together collapses and we are left with making the best of it, to the extent that we are able.

Lab Report
We are never more than one lab report away from the complete loss of life as we have known it, the demolition of our world and all it’s shiny structures. Then what? The task is always the same: Do the best we can with what we have to work with, and do it with as much grace and compassion and good humor as we can muster. We do that by what we tell ourselves, by what we say, about the present experience of our lives. The task is always the same: we are to interpret experience in ways that do not deny experience but, at the same time, enable life. If we get that down, we have it made, as much as we can have it made. That’s as grounded as it gets.

Grounded
The bad news about being grounded is that the core itself is not grounded! The core is a heaving swirl of possibility, a rolling boil of potential. No wonder the deck is pitching and rolling! We are riding breaking waves of chaos, looking for solid ground! This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of a mad, mad world. It means we have the responsibility of providing the stability and structure we seek for our lives. We are the organizing principle of existence. We shape our lives according to our reading of what needs to happen and what can happen within the context and circumstances of our living. We work out the details. We make the compromises. We produce the foundation, create the form, provide the meaning we long to have. We make life livable via the perspective we adopt riding the waves churned up by the vital, dynamic core of being.

Hermeneutics
We cannot look for steady—we provide steady! We are the source of steady! We are the basis of the constancy, the consistency we seek! We bring sanity to life in the world. We are the stabilizing influences in our lives. If we internalize the outer pandemonium, we become the bull—the wave—we are riding and go over into madness, disintegrating beyond reconstitution. The work of integration is the work of interpretation, translation—the work of hermeneutics (Hermes was the messenger of the gods. His work is our work. We bring the messages “of the gods,” of our life experience, to ourselves in a way that makes sense of the experience and enables life in the face of it. We interpret, translate, experience so as to make life possible in the midst of experience. The trick is to do that truthfully).

The Power of Meaning
We have the power of meaning, the power of making meaning, the power of perception, the power of looking meaningfully at our lives, the power of ascribing meaning to our lives, the power of finding meaning in our lives. We have to learn how to use our power to see, and hear, and understand in meaningful ways, in ways that enable us to live well in the time left for living.

The Power of Interpretation
Who says what the dream means? We do. Get it? Therein lies everything. We say what our experience of the dream means. We say what our experience of our life means. We say what life means. We hold the power of interpretation, of translation. We make sense of it all. And we know when we are right, and when we are wrong, when we are on the beam and when we are off.

Trusting the Internal Guide
What is this “beam-knowing”? This sense of rightness? What do we know and how do we know it? Enter the mystery. We are guided by our sense of the rightness of our movement, of our resonating with the direction we are taking, but where that comes from, we do not know. Trust it. Unknowing. That’s the task. And, if it leads you to a dead end, or into the abyss, trust it to lead you out of the abyss, beyond the dead end.

Spin Doctors
Our work is the work of finding meaning in experience, of making experience meaningful by way of interpretation. We spin experience to produce the steadiness we seek. We are the source of stability, the stabilizing influence, bringing life to life in our lives. And, of course, we can tell ourselves what we want to hear. Which is to avoid the work of interpretation and settle for denial and pretense. We have to interpret experience, not deny experience. That’s the challenge of integration, of integrating experience truthfully into our lives.

We Are What We Seek
We take this and make that. We are Alchemists, making gold out of lead, transforming common experience into the elixir of life. We are what we seek. We are the Philosopher’s Stone, the Universal Solvent, producing the aqua vitae, the water of life, from ordinary, hum-drum, events and from the crushing, devastating disruptions of life as we know it. We do that through the magic of interpretation and resonating with the rightness of the spin we give to experience.

The Rule of Life
The rule of life is follow the resonance. Go with what resonates with you. With what moves you. Follow the movement. Go with the flow. Not with the flow of life around you, but with the internal flow making contact with something, someone, in your environment. With the flow of energy connecting you with some aspect of the external world of normal, apparent, reality. And be open to the possibilities, aware of the choices that are yours to make.

Questions Worth Our While
We are after a sense of rightness about our lives. What has to be changed for us to feel right about the way we are living, about what we are thinking, feeling, believing, doing, wanting, having, being… ? Where is the incongruity most pronounced? Where do we feel most inauthentic, disingenuous? Where are we ignoring the voice of opposition within—the voice of what is opposed to our living the way we are living, to doing what we are doing, to the way we are being in the world? What price are we paying to deny how it is with us, to pretend that things are “just fine” with us, to embrace the false sense of rightness that characterizes our lives? Faking some things keeps us from making anything of ourselves, of our lives, of our one shot at being alive. What are we not seeing, not noticing, in order to feel good about our lives? What are we not willing to give up in order to feel right about our lives?

To Know Is to Be Afraid
People who wonder what they are to do with their lives know. We all know, on some level, and are afraid. We are afraid of what it might mean to us to know what we know, and we cannot conceive of paying the price of living the way we would have to live to feel right about our lives. So, we don’t let ourselves know what we know, and wail loudly saying, “Oh, if I only knew what to do with my life!”

Courage
It isn’t knowledge that we lack. It is courage. We lack the courage to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. We all know how we should be living, what we should be doing with our lives. We just can’t imagine doing that and paying the bills—the bills we want to pay—the bills for the things we don’t need to live the life we should be living, but want, and think we need. We try to hang onto the life we want to live, and that’s the problem. We would have to pay different bills to live the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives, and that’s the problem.

The Table.
Facing the problem is the first step toward living the way we have to live in order to feel right about our lives. The journey consists of putting truth on the table. We have to put the truth on the table. All the truth. The truth in all of its contradictory, mutually exclusive, convoluted, contrary, discrepant, discordant, dissonant, cacophonic, glory. Including, be sure you don’t forget this part, the truth of ourselves. The truth of who we are, and also are.

True Human-Being-Hood
When we get it all on the table—every last bit of it—we have to step back from the table, walk around it, observe it, nod, and say, “Yes. That is so. And that is also so. And that is so as well. All of it is so. That, too. That, too.” And, let it be because it is. And, then we have to decide what we are going to do—what’s next, what’s the next step to take—based on our knowledge of the truth on the table. If you can do that, you have what it takes to be a True Human Being, but you won’t take much pleasure in that achievement, because you know the price of True Human Being-hood.

Living in Light of Truth
The work of the rest of our lives is learning to put the truth of ourselves, the truth of our lives, the truth of life, on the table and live in light of it. This is how it is. What are we going to do with it, about it? How shall we live in the knowledge of the truth that is on the table? To what extent are the lives we are living designed to help us avoid/deny the truth of our lives? To what extent are they designed to acknowledge and serve that truth? The challenge is to wake up and to bear the burden of being awake. To see and not look away. To breathe, knowing the truth. And to live (knowing the truth) in ways that bring life to life there, amid the truth of life as it is.

03/08/09, Optimizing Our Lives

2009-03-08T16:10:00.003-04:00

We are here to optimize our lives. Primarily, this means learning to trust ourselves, our own sense of what is right and what needs to be. It also means learning to nourish our souls and express the truth of our deeper Self (that which is deepest, truest, and best about us). It means learning to see, and hear, and understand—to know what is truly important and do it.

There are two tables. On one table we are asked to put our ideas about the way things are, the way we think things are. On the other table, we are asked to put the way things are. Then, we are asked to live in light of the truth of both tables. That is all there is to it.

Our perception of truth keeps us from perceiving the truth. We come into the room (any room, every room) with ideas about how things are, about the structure of reality, about what is in control of our lives and how we can manipulate the controlling forces by giving them what they want. If we figure out the hoops to jump through in the proper sequence in the right frame of mind (we have to be true believers, you know), then the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe, will smile upon us and life will be, finally, grand.

We think it’s all about our arranging grand lives. Life is pretty stinky. And, if it is not stinky yet for us, it is stinky for a lot of people and we want to guard against the stink settling in on us. We want to avoid the bad and amass the good, and so the search for the right hoops to jump through, and the right steps to take in the right se-quence, and the right recipe to follow to the life of our dreams, and if not quite our dreams, at least close enough.

So, we come into this room, into every room, with ideas. Motives. Agendas. Interests. We come into the room with something in mind. You know what you want to hear. You know what I’m supposed to say. And that limits what can go on here. There should be a sign for us to check our baggage at the door. Wouldn’t that be nice? Com-ing in here with no baggage. Completely open. Free to ask any question. Free to examine all of our ideas, motives, agendas, and interests. Free to put everything we think about reality on the table, and take everything off the table, and bring back to the table only those things that are truly helpful in growing up, waking up, seeing, hearing, and understanding, as those who are increasingly awake, aware, and alive. Wouldn’t that be something?

Where do we get the idea that our personal comfort is the idea, or that we know what to want? What is there really beyond living knowingly with compassion? Beyond doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? Beyond bearing the cross of realization, awareness? Beyond living in the searing tension between how things are and how things ought to be and working endlessly there to make things more like they ought to be than they are for all people, for everyone, even the least of our brothers and sisters around the world? And, what do we need for that work beyond clarity and courage? Yet, we look for what? Not for clarity and courage, but for assistance from the gods, or God, or the stars, or the Universe in avoiding the bad and amassing the good for ourselves and those we love alone, and if there is any extra good left over that we don’t need, perhaps it will trickle down to the poor masses who have failed to please the powers. We have a long way to go. And it begins with putting what we think about how things are on the table.

We have to step back from our seeing in order to see. But, isn’t that the trick, though? Seeing how we see things is the first thing to see. When we see, we see that the way we see things is just the way we see things, and it has no necessary connection with the way things are. What are the statements we call truth? The things we believe to be valid? We have to put them on the table, and step back from the table, and consider the table and the things on the table. And the things on the other table.

We have to square ourselves with who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us. What are all the things that are true about us and our lives? These are the facts of life. Put them on the other table. The work of wholeness is the work of recognizing the truth of who we are and who we also are, and how it is with us (the truth of all the things that are true about us), and living in the light of that truth as we make our choices in the time left for living.

It is difficult to face the truth of ourselves and it is difficult to bring forth the truth of ourselves within the truth of our lives. It doesn’t get easy. If you are looking for easy, don’t wake up! Dying is easy. Living is hard. The disparity, discrepancy, between how things are and how things ought to be will take your breath away, and not give it back. We cannot breathe knowing the truth. The first task is breathing, knowing the truth.

What nurtures, nourishes our soul? Expresses, exhibits our Self? We have to do more of those things. We have to live to nourish our soul and express our Self. And the two are likely to be one. We have to be true to our-selves within the context and circumstances, terms and conditions, of our lives. That’s where we run into trouble. We have competing, contradictory, mutually exclusive truths at work here. We are torn within with conflicting mo-tives and agendas, and we are faced with the impossibility of living in the world, on the world’s terms, in light of the best we find within.

We also have to bear the contradiction between what we experience as true and what we have been told is true. We have to bear the weight of our experience without the comforting buffer of what we have been told is true. Reality is a hard pill to swallow. The Way is about consciously bearing the tension between who we are, and who we also are, and what is required by, and allowed in, the context and circumstances of our lives. We have to walk slowly along that way, knowingly, with compassion, every step along the way. It is amazing how difficult this is. Dying is easy. Living is hard.

There is a price to be paid for waking up. It’s the price of a new pair of shoes. Jim Hollis is always quoting Carl Jung’s statement, “We walk in shoes that are too small.” By that he means that we live lives that are too small. He means that as people we are too small. We are small people who need to become large. Who need to grow up. We grow up by waking up. We wake up by seeing, hearing, and understanding how things are with us. We wake up by living consciously, by being conscious, being aware, of the life we are living, and of the lives we are not living. We wake up by being attentive to, paying attention to, and aligning ourselves with what Jim Hollis calls “the soul’s summons.” But to live like this is the most subversive life imaginable. This is a problem.

The problem is that the life our soul would have us live is not the life the culture, and our parents, and our peers, and anyone who matters in our life, including us, would have us live. From the beginning it has been this way. In the old story about the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ignored the life their soul had in mind in favor of that which “was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise (but not really)” (Gen. 3:6). And, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus exemplifies the struggle of those who follow their soul’s leanings when he prays, “Not my will, but thine, be done!” (Mark 14:36).

This is the price we pay in waking up, in living between the life soul would have us live and the life we wish we could live—the life the culture wishes for us to live—and choosing to go with soul more often than not. Our task is to nourish soul, to express the Self’s true desires, within the terms and conditions of our lives.

Waking up means waking up to the need to be responsible for our own lives. It means being uncomfortable, and disturbed, and squaring up to the way things are (and the way things also are), and finding our way, over, un-der, around and through the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our living to the deep truth of our-selves, in order to relish and express the wonder of who we are, and be alive in the time left for living.

“The facts” resist us, oppose us, enlarge us, deepen us, expand us, and grow us up as they challenge us to be who we are within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” We are bigger, better, people for having lived our lives with an eye on “the facts” and an eye out for our own hearts (which is one of the facts) serving the interests of our souls (still more facts) within the limitations and restrictions of space and time.

We have to adjust ourselves to the realities of our lives. That’s the work of maturity, of consciousness, and grace. The world is not how we would have it. Life is not lived on our terms. We have to square ourselves with “the facts,” all of them, internal and external, and live in and around them, finding ways to express the contrary truths of our core values within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” To be awake and alive we have to consciously bear the pain of living, and live as fully as we are able within “the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives.” That’s all there is to it. No diversion, no distraction, no denial. Life in the raw. Life on life’s terms. Without capitulation or surrender. We live with the facts of life in ways that are true to our own hearts, souls, selves. And our lives are works of art.

The work that is art is squaring ourselves with the facts governing our lives and living to bring the good to life, anyway, nevertheless, even so. It is to blow on the coals of love, joy, peace, etc. and ignite a roaring blaze of ex-ceptional worth and unaccountable value in the time left for living. Our task is to know exactly what the deal is and live as though we don’t know, or knowing, don’t care. Our task is to be an enigma, to not make sense, to be an anomaly, to stand as a stark contradiction to all that we cannot deny. To explode in a mighty burst of goodness, and generosity, and mercy, and grace. To let no opportunity to express compassion and exhibit kindness pass unseen or unseized. To live as life should be lived. Without worrying about the outcome, or thinking things are invalid if they don’t last. Fireworks don’t last. No one ever boos and hisses at fireworks. Live like fireworks. Make them oou and ahh at your passing. And, don’t forget to wink on your way out, as though you know something.

03/01/09, Process, not Programs!

2009-03-01T13:43:00.003-05:00

I’m here to change the way you think (and you, of course, are here to change the way I think). Now you were all happy when I was talking about being here to change the way the church of our experience thinks. Change the way they think, sure, let’s do it. We can all clamor aboard that wagon. But, I’ve “quit preaching and gone to meddling” when I talk about changing the way you think. But, that’s the deal. You don’t think right. I have to change it.

Here’s what I mean. Even though you’ve had it with the church of our experience, that’s the only model of church you can envision. You don’t even want to use the word church when you think about what we are doing here. Never mind that the word church, ecclesia, simply means gathering (or “gathering of those summoned”). Like a gathering of sojourners. There is nothing churchy about the word church except by way of what goes on in your heads. I have to change what goes on in there. I have to change your thinking.

I have to change your thinking about what we are doing here. You have the old model of church in your heads, and you think what we do here has to be based on that. Particularly, you’re thinking of programming, and programs, and what we do to perpetuate ourselves and our thinking through the long generations of those that will follow us. We have to know what we stand for, you know. And be able to teach it to others. And design programs, curriculum and study guides, in order to convey what we want them to know and how we want them to think. I have to change your thinking about that. We want them to think what they think. I want you to think what you think. And, I have to change your thinking about what you think to get you to think what you think.

That’s beautiful, isn’t it. Contradiction. Paradox. These are the things life is made of. Learn to love them. Embrace them. Relish them. Delight in them. I have to change what you think about your thinking in order to get you to think what you think. Where are you going to go to beat that?

There is no program to tell you how to think. The only thing to tell you is think what you think consciously, with awareness. You think about your thinking when you say what you are thinking in the company of those who receive what you have to say without debate or argument (which only solidifies us in our thinking by forcing us to defend, excuse, justify and explain what we think) but with acceptance that seeks clarification, deepening, by pushing you to think about your thinking and asks you questions (like a good clearness committee) to get you going. There is no program. There is only intently interested, and hence interesting, conversation. There is no program, there are only people listening carefully to one another. And bringing to light the contradictions, the paradoxes, in what they hear us saying.

Process Not Programs. Could be a bumper sticker. We are engaged in creating a process, an atmosphere, an environment in which and through which we might grow up. No kidding. That’s all there is. Growing up. Becoming mature. Waking up. Being aware. Being conscious.

Karen Najarian is a breast cancer survivor who has a solid grip on the kind of attitude we are developing here. She says, “Get a pick and a shovel (and maybe a camera) and dig deeper into your life. THAT's real medicine. John Muir said it best: ‘Between every two pine trees lies a door to a new life.’” You can’t be clearer about what we are about than that. Digging deeper into your life. How deep can you go? We’ll never get to the bottom of it. There is enough life there for each of us to keep us busy for the rest of it, even if we work hard at digging deeper every day. We are here to help each other dig deeper into our lives.

We all drink the same water, but we dig our own wells. You can think of life as the water we drink, or God, or The Mystery… It can be all of these things, and other things, all things. But we can’t drink someone else’s water. We have to dig our own wells. Thelma Foster says, “Each generation has to come to its own understanding of God.” And K Misenheimer says, “God doesn’t have any grandchildren.” They are both saying that we have to dig our own wells, by digging deeper into our own lives.

There is no program to tell us about God, or life, or The Mystery. No shortcuts. No doctrine. No list of things to believe. No creed or catechism to memorize. No sacred book to study forever. “Get a pick and a shovel (and maybe a camera) and dig deeper into your life.”

Where do we start digging? Anywhere, really. One good place is by looking in a mirror. We can’t wake up without facing ourselves. When we wake up, we wake up to ourselves, to who we are and how it is with us. To who we also are and how it also is with us. Where’re you going to start? How about with your feelings, your moods, your reactions to the events and circumstances of your life?

In the presence of any strong feeling, emotional response/reaction, to our environment, we have to ask, af-ter James Hollis, “Where have I been here before in my life?” “This reminds me of what?” “This triggers what in me?” “What experiences does this stir in me?” “What am I defending myself against here?” Everything wakes us up to something else. The web of connections is vast within. Our responses to the events and circumstances of our lives are memories stirring. Our reactions are wounds that still need healing. Remembering is healing. Knowing is healing. Consciousness is Gilead’s balm for the soul. But our fear is great before the door closed to pain.

When you are stunned by life into not being able to breathe, see if I have this right. Life just planted a big juicy wet one smack on your kisser. Is that it? And winked? And told you there was more where that came from? When you can't breathe, it's life on your chest, laughing. It's great, isn't it? Where would you go to beat it? Who coulda thought this up?

There is nothing like a healthy dose of reality to wake us up. Disturbance clarifies. It’s the only thing that does. Discomfort is the prelude to, and the price of, growth. Think the seed is happy to become a plant? It’s death. Death to the seed is life to the plant. And, look what happens to the caterpillar. Who is in charge here? Who’s idea is this, anyway? Of course, we are the ones who oppose us. We oppose ourselves. As Walt Kelly observed, “We have met the enemy and it is us!”
We cannot run from our fear, from our anxiety, and wake up. We have to wrestle with the angel of death if we hope to be alive. The blessing is life, you know. If we are going to dig deeper into our lives, we are going to have to face the thing, the things, of which we are most afraid. Walk right up to it and plant a big juicy wet one on its kisser and wink. And say, “There’s more where that came from, Sweetie.”

What I’m saying here is that the conscious recognition of feelings—emotional responses to the experience of life—and the concomitant reflection, exploration, acceptance, experience and appropriate expression of them is the path to True Human Being-hood. It’s called bearing the full impact of life in the world. We can’t do it alone. We have to share the load, grieve, cry, laugh and rejoice together. Human Being-hood is a participation sport. We cannot be True Human Beings by ourselves.

This is where the church as the right kind of community comes in. A gathering of those summoned by the task of life. A gathering of sojourners. A gathering of those who have taken up the work of soul, the work of digging deeper into our own lives, the work of becoming awake, aware, and alive, the work of growing up, waking up, being conscious, and present for the good of one another in the moment of our living. We help one another wake up, grow up, see, hear, and understand.

Look at everything in your experience as a Rube Goldberg device that your soul has put together to wake you up. Everything that has happened, and is happening, and will happen is as it is to wake you up. To shake you awake. To stir you to life. So that you might be consciously alive in the time left for living. It’s all about you. Your life is the Truman Show, and the real point is Truman leaving the show, leaving his life, and stepping courageously into his life. You are Truman. So am I. Here’s to us.

We cannot live without trusting ourselves to ourselves, to our lives, to one another. Yet, all is not worthy of our trust. Part of the task of life is learning who is trustworthy and who is not. And, the learning is not intellectual, logical, rational. The learning is spiritual, of the soul. We learn to wake up, to be aware, to be conscious, and to lis-ten to what resonates with us and to trust ourselves to that knowing. And even when it proves to be not trustwor-thy, we don’t see that as evidence of the untrustworthiness of the way of resonation, but trust it to get us out of the situation it got us into. We trust ourselves to the way of resonation, to the way of awareness, to the way of consciousness, all the way to the finish line.

And, we have to come to terms with the facts that limit our lives. Life will not be like we want it to be. Certainly not for long. What are we going to do about that? Dance with it! Do what we can with it! Wake up to it! Square up to it! Live with it! Live in and around it! That’s part of the work of being alive.

Our lives may never be what we wish they were. If we can come to terms with that, make our peace with that, we have it made. To the extent that we can have it made. We cannot do much about the things that matter, but we must do what we can. We must do what can be done. We must live in the service of the best we can imagine within the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of our lives. We cannot acquiesce to death before we die. Everything depends upon our being alive in the service of the best we can imagine in the time left for living.

The point is to be as awake as we can be. The point isn’t to build pyramids or change the world. The point is to be as awake as we can be. That’ll change the world.

Prayers of Confession, Guilt without Shame

2009-02-28T11:12:00.001-05:00

James Hollis has written (In Swamplands of the Soul, New Life in Dismal Places), “To say that I have erred, that I am guilty of bad choices and their hurtful consequences, is not only the beginning of wisdom, but the only path that can ultimately lead to release.” Toward that end, I offer these prayers of confession, as a way of helping make conscious what is true with us all.

01. We try figure it out, make sense of it, comprehend it, and know what’s going on. The way we see it, once we understand how things work, we can work them to our advantage. That’s how it is with everything else in our lives. The Government makes regulations to restrict our behavior and we figure ways to comply with the regulations without changing our behavior. It’s called “beating the system,” and it’s what we do best. But Life is a tough system to beat because nothing works the same way twice. Once we think we “get it,” and devise a system to work the system to our advantage, something comes along to upset our neat formula and remind us that we can’t beat “the house.” In trying to beat the house, we show that we do not understand that we are here to serve and not be served, to give and not receive, to take up our cross and follow the one who is Christ by responding to what is needed in the moment with what we have to offer to the moment. And so, we pray that we might be conscious of what has need of us, and how we might best live in serving a good that is more than our good. Amen! May it be so!

02. We want to grow spiritually, develop our capacity for compassion and grace, deepen our awareness of what needs to be done and do it, without giving up anything on the rest of our schedule. We want to become whole without surrendering our interests or involvements in any of the areas that are important to us. We want to be wise without changing the way we live. We want the comforting, stabilizing, reality of an abiding relationship with Holy Presence, without taking up the task of relationship, doing the work of relationship, making the effort relationship requires—in every moment for the rest of our lives. We seek guidance, but don’t want to do anything differently or be inconvenienced in any way. And we pray for the wherewithal to step beyond the childish orientation of our youth, that we might give way, stand aside, relinquish our agenda, our terms, our ideas of how our lives ought to be, and understand what it means to say, “Not my will, but thine, be done”!

03. We live to have things our way—to the exclusion of every other way. Compromise and concession are terms we avoid at all costs. Getting what we want is the whole point of our lives. It is fine for others to have their needs met, just not at the expense of our own. Sacrificing our goals, aims, purposes, interests and desires for the sake of someone else’s is an idea whose time has not yet come. We have a personal investment in Our Way, and we cannot imagine why we should hand over our hopes and dreams in deference to other hopes and dreams. Yet, in refusing to submit to that which has need of us, we serve values which declare the good of the part over the good of the whole, and fail to recognize a good greater than our good. And so, we pray for vision, wisdom, and compassion required to set self aside in the service of that which truly ought to be, that everyone might be blessed by our presence and the boon might belong to all.

04. We follow the rules to keep from taking chances. We do what we are supposed to do to evade the risk of personal responsibility. We believe what we are told to believe want to be told what we should believe and how we should think to avoid the embarrassment of being wrong about what to think and believe. We have to save face even if it means losing ourselves! We have to look like everyone else even if it means ignoring the rhythms of our own heart and discounting the voice of our own soul. We cannot trust the authority of our own sense of direction, of our own sense of right and wrong, of our own sense of what fits, and what belongs, and what is good, and true, and beautiful. We have to look to see how we must look, and wait to be told what to do. And, in this, we have failed to be true to the truth within, and have not been courageous in the service of creativity and intuition. And so, we pray for vision, wisdom, and compassion required to set self aside in the service of that which truly ought to be, that everyone might be blessed by our presence and the boon might belong to all.

02/22/09, Whose Life Is It?

2009-02-22T16:55:00.001-05:00

“What do you have to look forward to without marriage in your future?” I asked a would-be bride in a dream who had just cancelled her wedding. I didn’t hear her answer. The dream shifted. The bride went off to change clothes. An old man mouthed something to me but the background noise of people leaving the hotel (now that there was not going to be a wedding) drowned him out. And I’m left with the idea that the question is more important than the answer.

We find our own answers. What do we have to look forward to without marriage in our future? For “mar-riage” we have to substitute “what we have been working for, living for, intending with our lives up to this point.” What is a future without that in it? We are brides who have cancelled the wedding when we turn away from the life of our dreams waiting on us at the altar and we step into our own lives, the lives that have their fingers crossed, hoping that we won’t marry and settle for an existence of routine conventionality that is death dressed up in life-like costumes. We have life to look forward to. And, who knows what form, what shape, it will take? Bring it on! Hallelujah! Amen!

That’s the message of the dream. The task is to incorporate it into our lives. To live the dream that is actu-ally a dream, and not our dream for our lives. Always the choice is between the life that is ours to live and the life we want to live, between what is being asked of us and what we want to be given, between the ends we are called to serve and the goals we aspire to achieve. The problem is that we are at odds with our soul about how our life is to be lived. Whose life is it? Who is in charge here? We waste a lot of time understanding and coming to terms with who is in charge. In all of this, the soul’s strategy for waking us up is simple: “Okay. Do it your way.”

In doing it our way, we keep trying to arrange life as we want it to be, while the life that is waiting to be lived waits for us to wake up to the emptiness of all our wanting and get with the business of being alive in the time left for living. The clock’s ticking and we’re burning daylight building sheds to store our stuff.

We keep ourselves from being who we are with our ideas about who we want to be. We have to develop our awareness to the point of consciously standing between who we are and who we also are and choosing who we are going to be, here, now, in this moment of our living. And, do it again in the next moment, and all the other mo-ments. There is no quick fix for the division within. Taking the next step consciously will eventually lead us to the finish line, if we live long enough.

Consciousness is the fastest horse to the finish line. The finish line is freedom, maturity, grace, beauty, truth, peace, compassion, Buddha-hood, Christ-hood, Self-hood, True Human Being-Hood, You. The finish line is you coming home to you, to “the face that was yours before you were born.” We come alive by being awake and aware. Conscious. Consciousness is the final solution.

Consciousness is our only tool in the work of the reclamation of our lives. Everything speaks to those with ears to hear. The path is always opening before those with eyes to see. This is not difficult. It is only a matter of knowing what we know, and knowing what is to be known. Wake up! That’s all there is to it. It’s all right there, be-fore us, jumping up and down, waving it’s little hands, whistling, cart wheeling, waiting to be seen. We only have to look to see that it is so. Does the fish know how to swim? There you are. What are you worried about?

The good news is that we cannot give ourselves—or be given—anything that we cannot use in the reclama-tion of ourselves. Every experience goes into the production of us, into the process of bringing our soul to life in the world. It’s all a part of the path. We don’t have to be right. We learn as much from our failures as from our suc-cesses. What is better—to gain or to lose? Nothing is wasted in the work of aligning ourselves with the soul’s idea of the life we are here to live. Of course, if we refuse to wake up and get to work, the whole thing is wasted, but, even then, our example isn’t wasted on those who live to not be like us. Without us, where would they be? So, even in wasting our lives, we aren’t wasted. I don’t think a day goes by when I fail to remember my grandfather, drinking himself to death, hating everybody. Thanks, Grandpa. I’m not like you again today. May it always be so!

When we are genuinely, authentically, being who we are, that’s enough. The world will be blessed. The boon belongs to all, and the boon blesses all when the treasure is content to be the treasure without aspiring to more than being the treasure. What treasure wanted something for being the treasure? When we find the pearl of great price, we sell everything in order to possess it, but what does the pearl get out of the deal? WE are the pearl, don’t you see? There is nothing more for us to want, or desire, or strive for, or have. We are stupid pearls who don’t understand our own value, and keep wishing for something valuable to transform our lives and make all things good. We are the transformation we seek. We make all things good. Just by being truly who we are. Just by being true to who we are. All a pearl has to be is a pearl.

We only have to do what is ours to do until we die. If we don’t do what is ours to do because we are afraid we might die if we do, we just die sooner by not doing what is ours to do. If we aren’t going to do what is ours to do, we may as well be dead. Being dead to what is ours to do is being deader than dead. And that death is worse by far than dying in the service of what is ours to do. So what if we live to be 150 years old and never do what is ours to do? All we can hope for is doing what is ours to do until we die. It doesn’t matter how long we live. It matters how well we do what is ours to do.

“Nobody gets in to see the Wizard! Not Nobody! Not Nohow!” We read the phrase and think that the Wiz-ard has sealed himself, has sealed herself, off from the masses, safe from the world on the other side of the curtain. But the statement raises the question, “Who has locked the Wizard away?” Is the Wizard in self-imposed exile, or is something else going on? The story of the Wizard of Oz isn’t about the Wizard of Oz, but the Wizard of All. Dorothy, and the Lion, the Tin Man and the Straw Man, all discovered their own personal Wizard Within along the Yellow Brick Road. They woke up, as from a dream, to find themselves, and began to trust their own innate ability to dis-cern the right path and choose it, and find their way home—home being not where they came from, but where they were going.

Conundrums and contradictions are everywhere. On the one hand, We think life consists of enjoyable pass times. Passing the time in comfortable surroundings, in delightful ways. Golf and cocktail parties. Concerts and art galleries. A six-pack and a football game. We think life is about walking around looking at life—going to movies, watching someone else live, watching actors act the part of someone else living.

And, on the other hand, we want to relieve ourselves of the anxiety and discomfort of not knowing what to do by doing something, anything, now. Any action, in our view, is better than no action at all. We do not wait. We do not watch. We do not reflect. We do not listen. We act. All the heroes are Action Heroes. Not one of them ever sits in a rocking chair drinking a cup of coffee looking out the window. Action is a way of distracting ourselves from the deeper task of waiting to see what needs to be done, what needs us to do it.

The work is always watching and waiting. We wait for an opening. We cannot hurry growth, or see beyond the current limits of our seeing, or understand more than we are capable of comprehending. We always think we are more ready than we are for the next thing. The next thing comes in its own time, in its own way. Our place is to wait and watch, and follow the white rabbit when it appears. The trouble with this plan is no one knows where we are going, not even the white rabbit! You can’t beat this for a ride! We make it up as we go! Are you coming or not?

We make it up as we go because there are NO BLACK FOOTPRINTS! That’s the rule for life, living, being alive. There is no plan, no map, no doctrine, no dogma, no recipe, no agenda, no profile, no prototype, no model, no replication, no way to do it. And yet, it is done, everywhere, all the time, by everybody who listens and hears, looks and sees, and brings forth who she, who he, is within the terms and conditions, context and circumstances of her, of his, life.

And we find the way together. But not too much together. This is the tricky part. We are on our own and we can’t do it alone. God can’t do it alone! Should be a bumper sticker. Nobody can do it alone. We all need one another to encourage, sustain, resource our lives, to help us make it through the night. And the day following. And the next night… God needs us, we need God, or the gods, however you imagine divinity, the Mystery, That Which Knows, the Dynamic Core/Center of Life and Being... Ah, and what is it to be done? Life! Life is to be done. Within the terms and conditions, context and circumstances, of this world of physical, concrete, normal, apparent, reality. And we, like God, are on our own in the doing of life, and we can’t do Life alone. No one can. Another beautiful little conundrum, don’t you think? Here comes another one.

What is the good we call good? The trouble with the good, of course, is that it is also bad. There is a down-side to the upside. Which can fool us. The good is tricky that way. We have to be onto it, and do it, for better and for worse. We could also not worry about it, and do the bad, which is also good, on some level, and force good to come out of hiding by slinging bad around. But, that’s too easy, and no fun. How many bad guys enjoy themselves? They are always on the run, hiding, denying, pretending. No bad guy was ever alive. You could look it up. To be alive, you have to pay the price of waking up and doing good, even if it is also bad. You have to trust me in this.

02/15/09, The Price of Being Alive

2009-02-15T16:53:00.002-05:00

If we aren’t depressed, we either are not paying attention or, we are in denial. We have to be depressed to have a chance. Insomniantic (I made that word up) depression is caused by our inability to remain asleep in our lives, which is different from biological depression and situational depression brought on by loss and life events. If we are suffering from insomniantic depression, we are either not quite awake but know, on some level, that we need to be, or we are waking up and don’t want to. We have to face our depression and let it be, because it is. We can’t talk ourselves out of being depressed. We can only wake up and bear the pain. That’s the price of being alive. And, that’s depressing.

One way of squaring up to the depression that comes with waking up, is to tell ourselves, “Of course, you don’t want to wake up. Why would you? Who would? It’s so much more blissful and serene to be there, safely secure in Mother’s arms (Not our biological mother, who never was the mother we wanted her to be, but the Ideal Mother of the world of happy fantasy, who takes care of us the way we want to be taken care of, or would, if we could only find her), dreaming of roses, rainbows and white picket fences. Who would leave Mother’s lap to grow up and make her, make his, own way in the world? Hush, little baby, go back to sleep. If you can.”

Another way—and my personal favorite—of dealing with the depression that comes with waking up is by bellowing loudly from time to time (a crowded elevator is a great place), “Mamma! I want my Mamma!” (Not our biological mother, who never was the mother we wanted her to be, but the Ideal Mother of the world of happy fan-tasy, who takes care of us the way we want to be taken care of, or would if we could only find her). I don’t hate anything quite like I hate the idea of having to take care of myself, and deal with my own problems, and do what needs to be done in every moment of every day for the rest of my life. “Mamma! I want my Mamma!”

There are no new problems and no new solutions. All the problems and solutions are forever old. We don’t have enough of the right kind of help, and something is always preventing us from having our way. In a perfect world, everyone would mother me. Of course, you see the problem. All of my potential mothers want to be mothered themselves. And, this is not a new problem. Old as the ages. The solutions are, too: We can have a tantrum and hope to be mothered the way we want to be mothered, or we can sulk and pout the world into mothering us properly, or we can cry and wail until the right mother comes along, or we can sink into motherless depression in pro-test and rebellion and hope that our suffering will be duly noted and tended to. The final solution, of course, is that we can grow up, but who in his or her “right mind” would opt for that one? That’s the one we put off until we have no choice.

All of our real problems are completely irrational and absolutely real. Hopelessness, despair, anguish, depression—anyone can give us perfectly valid reasons not to be any of these things. “You don’t have it nearly as bad as some people. Stop complaining until you are as bad off as they are!” We can agree with the logic and admit that we wouldn’t trade with them, but our problem with life doesn’t disappear just because it’s been invalidated. “Reason can’t uproot what reason didn’t plant,” goes the old saying. We cannot think our way out of the deep ruts and the dark woods. The quickest exit is to bellow loudly: “Mamma! I want my Mamma!” (Not our biological mother, who never was the mother we wanted her to be, but the Ideal Mother of the world of happy fantasy, who takes care of us the way we want to be taken care of, or would if we could only find her). And keep it up until she comes along, or we decide to do our own mothering.

We want what we want so much that we believe we can have it. We tell ourselves, “If you wish for it, it will come” (The Law of Attraction, you know). We believe in Mother. Not our biological mother, who never was the mother we wanted her to be, but the Ideal Mother of the world of happy fantasy, who takes care of us the way we want to be taken care of, or would if we could only find her. We go to our graves, in one form or another, believing in, and waiting on, and looking for, Mother. All we ever wanted was to be mothered the way we wanted to be mothered. The spiritual journey consists of finding our way through this world without the Mother we wish we had. How’s that for the worst news in the world?

There is nothing like knowing we will not be mothered the way we want to be mothered to wake us up to the truth of how it is with us. No one is going to mother us the way we want to be mothered. No one CAN mother us the way we want to be mothered. Every real would-be mother falls far short of our imagined ideal, who reads our mind and brings us coffee the way we like our coffee, no, orange juice, no, oatmeal, no, a red Ferrari with a black Lab in the passenger seat, no, a Golden Retriever, no, a Honey or a Hunk… Ain’t no Mom like the Dear Old Magical Mom we wish we had. But, we resist the intrusion of that truth into our lives, and wait for Mom to come. Mom isn’t coming. The work of growing up is ours to do on our own.

Our only tool in that work is consciousness, making conscious that which is unconscious, knowing the truth about us and the world in which we live, and the worlds beyond the world in which we live. Awareness, awareness, awareness. Eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand. Seeing into the heart of things and knowing how things are, and how things also are, and what needs to be done about it, and what can be done about it, and what is ours to do, and doing it. This is the path of spiritual development, whose other name is, you guessed it, Growing Up.

All the talk about growth, spiritual growth, personal growth, psychological growth, is just about growing up. There is no growth apart from growing up. We need to grow up. Tie our own shoes. Solve our own problems. Make our own choices. Find our own path. Live our own lives. And stop looking for people to take care of us. And stop living as though someone is in charge of us, overseeing us, approving or disapproving everything we do.

Consciousness recognizes the tension of opposing positions, points of view, places itself squarely within the dialectic and chooses what to do knowing the contrary impact that its choice has. Things are not good OR bad, better OR worse. They are good AND bad, better AND worse. We make our choices and live with our outcomes. For better AND worse. Which makes it very difficult to know what to do.

It is no light thing to take up the work of soul, of listening to soul, of aligning ourselves with soul. This is no lark. It is no Sunday morning exercise in which we get our inspiration for the week, so that we might feel good about the lives we are living, the goals we are serving, and step into them and do what we must to make them work like we want them to. Soul doesn’t care about what we care about. That’s the first hurdle we have to climb—the first shock to the system.

All this time we thought soul was on our side, our spiritual Mother, ready to help us be happy if we just thought the right things about God and led a moral life. The soul doesn’t care about our happiness. The soul cares about our aligning our lives with its interests and living to incarnate its values/intentions in the world, and do what it wants done. WE are the soul’s Mother!!! How’s that for the really worst news in the world? We mother ourselves, all right, but not in the way we want to be mothered—in the way our soul wants to be mothered!

We cannot draw up a profile for a soulful life. There are no black foot prints to follow. No rules to memo-rize. We live it in the moment of our living, always alert to what needs to happen now (asking soul, “What can we do for you now, honey?”), and not knowing what the next step with be or where it will take us. We hate the insecurity of not knowing what is going to happen, of not having a map, of not knowing where we are going. We like to be comfortable with predictability, and certainty, and stability—and soul is like the wind that blows where it will.

The future unfurls one step, one choice, at a time. And, if we go to sleep, and allow the last step to deter-mine the next step, and fall into a pattern, a routine, of always doing what is expected of us (or what is not expected of us), or what best serves the goals we set when we were in college, or, were set for us by our parents, or the culture, before we were born, we lock the future into some presumptive vision produced in some forgotten past to avoid the agony of deciding what to do now and smooth our path to the grave, and that path is itself a grave, which we walk with lifeless eyes, until someone mercifully buries us, and we can continue to rest in peace forever.

It’s hard enough for me to decipher the next step, to pick it out from among all the possible steps that I might take next. I may be right or wrong, it doesn’t matter, because then the task becomes that of deciding what the next step is, which, itself, may be right or wrong, and calls forth the situation of deciding what the next step is then. Intent on the situation “as it arises,” and what is being called forth there, what is needed there, and taking the next step in the unfolding of what is important and what must be done to serve it, I lose complete sight of the compilation of the steps, where they are leading, what their purpose might be. I don’t know. I don’t have time to bother with it. I have to decide what step to take here, now.

The saving grace is we don’t have to be right. We only have to let being wrong wake us up. That’s beautiful. To say we are wrong when we are wrong is as right as we need to be. Our lives will correct us all the way to the heart of truth—if we can be corrected. We don’t have to figure it out. All we have to do is listen. And take the next step. That’s the plan for the rest of our lives. Don’t have to know what you are doing. Listen and take the next step. Trust the core and take the next step. Nothing to it. And, everything rides on it. The only reason we don’t do it is that we are afraid. Who are we going to trust? Ourselves? Trusting ourselves is what got us to this point in our lives. If we continue to trust ourselves, we can only expect more of the same. But, ultimately we have no choice. We only have to wait until it is bad enough in order to have what it takes, which is nothing to lose, to trust ourselves to listen to that which is asking us to die to all that we thought was good in order to embrace the good and live.

The Frog King, or What's Wrong With Us All

2009-02-11T07:24:00.002-05:00

It happened quite by accident deep in the night when the moon was dark and dense clouds covered the sky, and no one could see anything if they were awake that late, and looking, which the Wicked Witch Peggy of the Dismal Forest was. Of course, you couldn’t actually say she was “looking” for anything. But, she was searching with rapt concentration. The Wicked Witch Peggy was trying to find tender sprouts of Night Creeper Vine, which grows only during the darkest night of the last week of spring, and are highly desirable for a number of witchy brews and spells. Since the slightest bit of light is enough to spoil the Night Creeper Vine sprouts, you can’t look for them with lanterns or even candles—you have to sniff them out.

So, The Wicked Witch Peggy was on her hands and knees, sniffing along the floor of the forest, searching diligently for the object of her desires, when several things happened at once. She nosed into a puff ball and inhaled a solid quart of puff power; she opened her mouth to gasp and wheeze; and a frog named Gibley Dade, frantically trying to hop away from all the commotion, landed squarely in The Wicked Witch Peggy’s mouth.

The Wicked Witch Peggy gagged, and sputtered, spewed, and coughed. “BLEAATCH!!” she bellowed, sending Gibley Dade flying into the darkness. She wiped her mouth, trying to remove the thought of a frog on her tongue from her memory. It didn’t work.

She whimpered and shivered and gagged at the very idea, and ignited a small shrub with the snap of her fingers. In the light of the burning bush, she saw Gibley Dade trying to rub the feel of witch’s tongue from his memory.

“Ha!” said The Wicked Witch Peggy. “There you are! I’ll curse you forever for this, you filthy frog! May your fondest dream come true!”

Having his fondest dream come true didn’t sound like much of a curse to Gibley Dade, particularly when it was such a wonderful one. The only dream Gibley ever had was of becoming a king. He’d heard all the fairy tales, and knew it was common practice for kings and frogs to change places, and he had always thought how grand it would be for it to happen to him.

And now it had! Instantly, Gibley Dade was transformed into the handsomest king on record, any record, before or since. And Peggy disappeared with a snap and a pop and a slight wisp of smoke. Gibley was alone with himself and the glowing embers of the bush. He admired what he could about his new appearance. “This isn’t bad,” he thought.

Suddenly, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men arrived with torches, and lanterns, and bark-ing dogs. “Here he is!” they shouted. “Hooray! We’ve found King Gibley! Where have you been, Your Highness? We’ve been searching all over!”

Gibley could only shrug as they hoisted him onto his white charger and carried him away to his kingdom. They arrived at the palace to the cheers of women and the cartwheels of small children, and Gibley was ushered straight away into the banquet hall, which was overflowing with all the delicacies of the realm. “You must be famished, Your Majesty,” said Gibley’s servants, “Sit and eat!”

Gibley was a bit hungry, but the platters of meat and vegetables, the baskets of fruit and the plates of dessert didn’t interest him at all. For some reason, his eyes stayed on a fly that flew about the table.

In the days and weeks that followed, Gibley grew increasingly depressed. The demands of kinghood were more than he could bear. There were always decisions to make, and public appearances to tolerate, and people seeking audiences and favors.

The only relief he found was in the time he spent swimming in the lily pond on his country estate. He didn’t know why he preferred that to the indoor pool at the palace, but he felt more at peace with himself there, at home somehow.

But it wasn’t enough. Gibley spent his days in sorrow and despair because kingship wasn’t really what he wanted. He didn’t know what he wanted, but the kingly life wasn’t it. He pined for what he didn’t have. The sadness showed in his eyes.

Gibley’s subjects tried everything they could think of to cheer him up. They held grand parties and circuses and ice capades. They sent him to the great resorts. He went skiing, and scuba diving, and mountain climbing. He rode horses, and went fishing, and watched television. But none of it helped. Gibley didn’t feel any better.

Nothing he did eased the notion that things were not as they should be. Nothing he bought filled the hollowness within. Nothing he could think of doing, or having, or seeing, or hearing eased the emptiness in his soul, or diminished the ache for Something More that he carried with him every day.

“What do you want, Your Highness?” asked his loyal court. “Just tell us, and we will gladly bring it.”

“I don’t know what I want,” said Gibley. “I don’t know what to want. I just know this isn’t it.”

The people looked at one another with perplexed concern, and brought him everything they had. They brought him bicycles and dinner jackets; baseballs and sports cars; hula hoops and elaborate stereo systems. They worked late in their factories, hard on their technology, around the clock in their research labs. Every invention, creation and project was hailed as the salvation of the king.

But nothing worked. No matter what they gave the king, his countenance did not lift, his spirits only lowered. Then, one day there came a light knock on the palace door. The guard admitted a little girl who said, “My name is Mary Nuel, and I want to see the king.”

“I’m sorry, child,” said the guard, “but the king cannot be bothered.”

“But it’s rather important,” said the little girl. “I want to help the king.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” replied the guard. “The entire kingdom has been trying to help the king, to no avail. What makes you so bold as to think that you can succeed where so many others have failed?”

“What do you have to lose?” the girl asked.

“Good point,” said the guard, and he showed her to the throne room of the king.

The little girl walked up to the king’s throne. His eyes were closed, his brow was wrinkled, and his body was slumped in defeat. Gibley had tried with all his might to reason his way out of his difficulty, and now he was lost.

“Excuse me, Sir,” said the little girl, tugging on his sleeve. “I want to give you something that I think will help.”

“Nothing will help,” sighed the king. “I know. I’ve tried it all. Several times.”

“This is different,” said the little girl. “It always helps me when I feel bad. I think it’s just what you need.”

“What is it, then?” asked Gibley.

“Here,” she said, holding out her hand. “It’s my pet frog, Emma. My mamma says she is like one of the family. So I call her Emma Nuel.”

The king looked at the frog, and something stirred within. He felt the realness of times long forgotten. His eyes lit up. A smile came to his face. He didn’t know what it was, or how to begin putting it into words, but, as strange as it seems, he felt a connection with the frog—it was as though he could see himself in the frog. And he knew if he was going to be the kind of king the people deserved he had to become the frog that he was.

So, the king spent the rest of his life pondering the essence of frogness, and he worked diligently to become less kingly and more froggy.

“Frogs live close to the land,” he decided, so he moved out of the palace and into the woods. He tilled the land himself and taught the people the value of hard work, and led them to respect their relation-ship with the natural world.

“Frogs have no pretensions,” he realized. So, he gave up his royal robes and set aside his many titles. He stopped acting as though being king made him better than anyone else and lived to identify himself with his subjects and listen carefully to their concerns.

“Frogs don’t try to get ahead,” he reflected. So, he let go of his desire to solve all imaginable problems in order to relax in the pleasing splendor of the Ultimate Answer. He simply dealt with each difficulty in the moment that it arose, and let tomorrow’s problems be tomorrow’s problems.

In this way, Gibley Dade lived out his life, reflecting upon and expressing the best of his inner frogness through all of his dealings with the people of the realm. The kingdom prospered under his rule; the people grew strong during his reign; and the swamps resounded with the proud croaking of all the frogs.

02/08/09, We cannot be whole without facing ourselves.

2009-02-08T15:35:00.002-05:00

What’s the point? Why are we here? What are we trying to do, to get? What’s it going to do for us when we do it, have it? Good questions, don’t you think? It would help if we knew the answers. Here’s mine. Wholeness. Wholeness is the whole point. By wholeness I mean alignment of being, integrity of being, oneness of being. I mean knowing who is running the show and assisting the operation. Knowing who is in charge here and placing ourselves in that service. I mean understanding what is at stake in Jesus’ prayer, “Not my will, but thine, be done,” and intending that with our complete being. That kind of wholeness of being is the point. What’s it going to do for us when we have it? Life. It’s going to do life for us. It’s going to bring us alive in a way that glass beads and silver mirrors—or the current cultural equivalent—cannot touch. But, you are going to have to believe it to see it, to know what I’m talking about. And, you are going to have to be willing to pay the price.

The price, of course, is the surrender of your idea of how your life is to be lived. We have to leave the safety of our comfortable way with life, our structures and routines—home, if you will—and find the way in the wilderness where there are no maps and nothing is as we expect it will be. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Call it the first irony. Leaving home doesn’t necessarily mean going anywhere.

Lao Tzu says, “The master travels all day without leaving home.” And, “Even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it.” Jesus says, “There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions.” Leaving doesn’t mean going away so much as it means seeing differently, living differently. With the same burdens we had before the shift happened. That’s the bad news about the good news. It isn’t the only bad news.

The really bad news is that we have to face ourselves—we have to see ourselves—and decide what we are going to do with ourselves, about ourselves, every day for the rest of our lives. We have to know how it is with us. It’s like this: We have to have a home in order to be able to leave home. Home is where we are given life—nurtured, nestled, brought to life. Home grounds us, centers us, focuses us, names us with an identity that serves us well and enables us to step forth with all that we need to find our way in the world—to find the way that is truly our own, and not just a worn path with the black foot-prints laid out through the long years of the far distant future. Ah, but, how many of us start out with a home like that?

But, a home like that is necessary for us to grow up around a protected core, a strong sense of who we are. We must protect the core. The core is the Soul, the Self—the inner dynamic center around which we constellate. It is the foundation upon which we build our life. The core is that which is deepest, best and truest about us. Our central identity. The essence of us. We grow out of a protected core (And home is really the self we have to leave in order to, finally, find).

If we do not have a home that supports life and protects the core, then our primary search is for a home, a place, a community, that will help us develop spiritually/psychologically to the point of being able to leave home. The problem is that without a protected core, we enter the search for the right kind of home wounded and in need of such healing that our energy is devoted to, drained by, restoring the core, and the work of aligning ourselves with the core and redeeming the world is indefinitely delayed.

To take up that work, we have to learn to heal and protect the core. We do that by consciously processing the harmful experiences. We say what happened, what its impact was, and how wrong it was, how wronged we were by it. We witness the wrong and name it specifically and clearly. We do not deny it, or gloss over it, or say anything other than the truth about it. And, we look for corroborating witnesses, those who can hear us and understand. We have to know we are not alone and we have to know the wrong that was committed against us, and we have to know it was wrong, and grant it no excuse, no defense.

We heal and protect the core by consciously bearing the pain of harmful life experiences—by saying what happened and how wrong it was that it happened, and how no one should have to deal with what we are having to deal with, and bringing the knowledge of that experience and its impact into our life, and letting ourselves not get over it and act as though nothing happened, but walk with a limp, because we have received a blow. The core cannot stand unprotected against the meanness of life. It needs us to defend its interests and take up its cause. This is the Hero’s Task, bearing consciously the blows of life, and it is one that we need a community to help us undertake. It is not ours to do alone.

Once the core is vital and dynamic, the fun begins. James Hollis says all the soul wants is an interesting life. We think the soul wants a straight arrow kind of life, a straight-laced and narrow kind of life. Our idea of the right life for the soul, and the soul’s idea of the right life for itself, are two different ideas. We think right is about moral rectitude, or peace and justice and fair play all around, equal pay, equal rights, hunky-dorey, everybody’s happy now, let’s just be nice and the world will be a better place. Boring.

The soul hates boring. The soul loves interesting. The soul loves not knowing what is going to happen next. The soul thinks the Right Life is one where we: Upset the apple carts, rock all the boats, yank the rug out from under everything, stomp the egg shells, don’t do anything the same way twice, create chaos wherever we go, create something anyway, make a mess, relish messes, love the mess, get our hands dirty, don’t know what we are doing or where we are going, live without a map, or a plan, or a schedule, live for the situations in which the rules do not apply… That’s the kind of life our soul has in mind for us. And you thought the soul was on your side. Anybody that thinks that doesn’t know the first thing about soul.

We want stability, security, predictability, sameness, constancy, certainty, dependability, death disguised as life. The soul wants life in the raw. No disguises. No costumes. No pretense. The soul wants to be alive. You see the disconnect, I’m sure. Whose side are we on is the question. To what extent are we living to be comfortable? Seeking to be comfortable? Surrounding ourselves with that which makes us comfortable? We cannot be alive and comfortable. What’s it going to be?

We cannot be alive and comfortable because life is inconvenient and inconsiderate and insistent and incessant and unrelenting. We just want to settle down and be happy. Life is goading us and urging us on. We just want to “get there.” Life won’t let us stop. We never get done living—we never get living done. We look for a groove. Life gives us upheaval. We look for smooth sailing and easy street. Life gives us chaos and says, “Here. See what you can do with this.” It’s a conflict of interests all the way. Who is in charge here? Who is running the show? We can force a life on Soul that Soul doesn’t want, and Soul picks out a nice wall to slam us into. Those who know, know who’s in charge. Those who don’t know are learning.

Soul isn’t here to serve us, we are here to serve soul. “Not my will, but thine, be done!” Until we understand the right order of things and put ourselves in the service of soul, there is hell to pay. Of course, there is hell to pay if we serve soul, so either way, there is hell to pay, but serving soul is a different kind of hell, it’s the kind where we can grin and laugh while we are going through it, or after we go through it. The path to heaven winds through the right choice of hell. The wrong choice of hell just winds around in hell. Choose the right kind of death and you come alive. Choose the wrong kind of death and you’re just dead.

It comes down to a question of faith. Who are you going to trust? Put your trust in the core, in soul, and step into your life. Every day. That’s all there is to it. We have to know, remember, be conscious, aware, that our primary work is bringing forth soul, living aligned with the core, manifesting the core—that the call is for wholeness, integrity, authenticity, genuineness, and truth—that we are called to live lives that are integrated, that are integral, with what is deepest, best, and truest about us, with the soul, the core. That is our work, knowing the core, living from the core. Living the life the core would have us live, the life that translates, incarnates, embodies, exhibits, makes concrete the core within the context and circumstances of our lives, the time and place of our living.

But this gets tricky. Because we decide what the core would have us do. Surely, even if your name isn’t Shirley, you see the problem. How do we know that what is important to us is important to soul? We pay attention, and practice, practice, practice. The first place we listen is to our bodies. Psyche is Somatic. Soul is physical—is expressed, known, felt physically. So, we talk about “gut feelings,” and taking a “gut check.” The thing we have in common with our soul is our body. Soul communes with us through our physical sensations, our feelings/senses, our emotions, our reactions to our life experience, our dreams, our slips of the tongue, our unconscious drifts toward music (humming a tune) and memories and preoccupations, our symptoms, our fears... We tune into ourselves and find Soul talking to us, calling to us, trying to get our attention.

And, we can’t worry about being wrong. It all becomes clear over time for those who keep looking for clarity. We have to live toward the best we can imagine at all times and let the outcomes guide our future direction. Therein lies wholeness and life.