your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-Charles Bukowski

I have been sitting for well over an hour now, contemplating this poem, again today.  In fact, I have been doing this day after day.  Taking in the simple, straightforward, pared sentences that Bukowski delivers like stiff drinks.  One after the other.  At first I dismiss his words as self-evident and folksy.  No kidding, Charles.  But as I sit with myself, sink deeper and grow silent, his words somehow turn sideways, unexpectedly open up something in the quiet space in me. They become a gateway to a cavernous part of the self, waiting to be explored.

your life is your life

Slowly, this simple phrasing of the self-evident truth, moves me past an endless feeling that often stalks me:  I am still anxiously in a preparation phase for my actual life; I have a lot to do yet to be prepared, piles upon piles of things still unsorted or undone – and I had better damn well get back to this endless undone-ness, and complete a good number of these things – so I will find peace at last.  It fuels a constant, ever-lurking feeling in the background of my life, of not having yet lived my actual life – when the irony is, this is far from the reality.

How often are we pulled out of the now, seduced by a kind of psychological ratcheting to what the mind thinks it needs to be doing about some endless and impossible task, one that is ultimately a defense, as well as an illusion?  So we come back to the beginning of the fundamental right to human existence, one that many of us have actually failed to grasp, regardless of how much we have accomplished, or achieved.  This simple message starts the poem:

your life is your life

My life is mine, alone.  For me to be living, as only I can. As an adult man, I must do the work that makes my life belong to no one else’s agenda.  It is to become my own, and it is happening right now.  Unfolding minute by minute.  And I can once more come back to that realization by “losing my mind, and coming to my senses” as Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, would say.  Drop the ego-driven thinking.  Come behind my eyes, listen with my ears.  Pay attention to my breathing, feel my body with my kinesthetic sensing.  By engaging my sensing organs, I engage with my life within me, and around me.

Then the first line of the poem finally reads differently to me, when I am not lulled into a dismissive attitude. ‘No shit’ becomes ‘Oh, shit!’   My life IS my life.  My life is MY life. Not just a cliché, nor a child-like ‘it’s mine’ declaration.  A renewed recognition of a vital awareness, sovereign and empowering, like a two-dimensional image coming alive through the added dimension of human awareness.  The quality of my life hinges on this simple, engaged awareness.  A privilege, a responsibility.  A possibility to be encountered, each day of life, anew.

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

Easier said than done.  We ongoingly feel assaulted and clubbed by life’s ordeals.  In adult living, it seems like the clubbing happens daily.  Defeated by something large and looming, by the many things beyond our ability to control.   Desired outcomes often do not take place.  Other people often don’t think and behave in ways we want.  We take failures, misunderstandings and disappointments personally.   It gets to us, weighs on us, and we want to quit.

be on the watch.

At first, I read this line as being on the lookout, a suspicious watching out for the bad guy. Watch out to keep bad things from happening. Be careful.  Be on guard.  Because that is how many of us are already set in our deeper interior approaches to living, regardless of how we present our personas to the world.   Many of us carry an underlying hostile projection onto life.  Think that it somehow really wants to do us in, is set against us.   It is a whole new perspective to realize watchfulness as a positive mindfulness practice.

Bukowski invites us to be awake, be aware, watch for opportunities.  An attentive eye, one that conveys a healthy, pro-active waiting, and a forward-looking stance.

there are ways out.

Again, a simple message, straightforward.  I interpret his expression ‘way out’ as ‘way through’.   Not an escape from life, but into it, traveling through it more skillfully, more gracefully.  But the way through is often not obvious, nor readily available, when we find ourselves in worthy challenges. The way through. A positive, affirmative thought for when we are in the midst of something we’d like to be out of – trapped, lost, distressed, confused – like the dark. This usually has something to do with our current mental state related our life as it is, when a circumstance or an outcome we didn’t ask for is upon us.

The same befuddled character struggle shows up: Not feeling good enough; feeling that something is wrong with me, fueling a familiar and chronic anxiety.  Or feeling a new loss, another betrayal.  Wishing we could be more or different from who we are, and not where.

This is the hero’s journey: going into the forest, then seeing no way through.  Somehow it seems that we are fated to the experience of losing our way, not knowing the way out.  These conditions hold the possibility of bringing forth the most unrealized potential in us.

there is a light somewhere.

Requires some faith from us, and another positive thought.  Making the effort to hold a positive frame of mind in trying or painful circumstances.  Believing in the existence of the light when we can’t see it.  Especially when we can’t see it.  Not giving in to a certain kind of darkness, the negation of ‘life as it is’.  Heading towards what we can’t see, but believing it must be there somewhere.

it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.

There often is not much light at first, especially when we’ve gone dark.  If we’ve gone dark for a while, we couldn’t bear much light, anyway.  But just a flicker of light is a significant thing, once we’ve been clubbed into dank submission by our wounds, by our disappointments, by our inability to accept life’s happenings as they occur.   Once the ordeal arrives, it is human nature for the self to have an attitude of negativity, of hostility, of resignation.  Being lost in the forest, not knowing the way, losing sight of what really matters.  Who doesn’t end up there on a semi-regular basis?

be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.

Back to work.  Back to making the effort to pay attention to what is happening beyond my own suffering and pre-occupation.  Being on the watch.  Being ready for the darkness to be disrupted, most likely by something unexpected.  The hard work of steady mindfulness in the face of challenge, riding it through until the shift come, the tide changes.

Then the line that opens up the whole poem:  The gods will offer you chances. This one takes a whole lot of ‘being on the watch’ to recognize.  We need to have the strength of heart to stay open to possibilities beyond our mind’s capacity to imagine.

What if we all are offered chances that take place within the limits of our fate?  What if there is a destiny for each of us, and the soul sees to it that we get our chances?

When we are used to making ourselves victims, or making ourselves small, or we are saying ‘no’ to life, these chances are beyond what our conscious minds can dare to fathom.  What if we get chances, small ones, sometimes every day, to step into our largeness?  What if we get chances, big ones, from time to time – when synchronicity takes over, and everything seems to line up for us on its own?   What if the practice of recognizing and responding to the small chances that fate or synchronicity bring about all the time, prepares us to say ‘yes’ to the bigger ones that come our way at just the right moment?

What if the gods are sending my way the next opportunity right now, embedded in the happenings of this particular day?  Then I had better be on the watch for it.

know them.

The Japanese word for crisis is interpreted as both danger and opportunity.  How do we know an opportunity when it presents itself to us?   Often, it reveals itself to us in the feel of threat, of a foreign and unfamiliar form, a sort of ‘not me’ or ‘not for me’ – where we initially have a reflexive turning away from the opportunity.  We at first sense it is too risky, pointless, unappealing or dumb.  Ego-systonic, in psychological jargon. It just doesn’t make sense to our familiar ways of thinking or being.

Yet this is often the first sign of an opportunity.  Our first internal response to it is “NO”, simply because it feels so foreign, so unexpected.   Then that is time to practice being on the watch.   Become curious the threat, wonder about why we resist it so much, what is exactly we are being stopped by on this unfamiliar path, the one we have not taken before.

take them.

Here is the heroic deed: taking the road not yet traveled.   Going where we have not gone before.   Saying yes to that, to which we have said no.  Changing.  But before we can act in new ways, we first have to think in new ways.  Changing our minds, taking a new perspective.   Saying ‘yes’ to what has been too frightening to move towards.   Facing the dragon, as Joseph Campbell would say.

I once had a teacher tell me that there would be times in my life when it would be more important to fail in a new way, than to succeed in the same old way.   That I would learn and gain more by screwing up in a new direction, by taking on a new learning curve, rather than over-relying on the mastery of something that had become too familiar to me, one that now kept me small.  He told me to start by failing in the right direction.

I would at least have better problems, ones that would be more likely to bring forth new potentialities in me.   To face my fear of failure, to look right into it, and wonder why it held such a curious spell over my venturing in new directions for so long.

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.

Here, I understand Bukowski to have meant death to be both literal (in the end) and metaphorical (along the way).  Death represents failures, endings, losses, missteps – everything that sets us up to grow, to mature, to become more complex, to develop a new and larger identity.  That is how we beat the death in the day-to-day-ness in our lives. Keep it from going stale, becoming stagnant.   To take what is no longer life giving, and let it go, let it die.  And trust that new life comes afterwards, as it does in every natural cycle of life.

and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

It is said that adversity does not define character, but instead reveals it.  We can learn to withstand the small ego deaths, tolerate the ones that tend to make us feel clubbed into dank submission.  Then finally we can become more resilient, more adaptable, more respond-able.   Not be defined by failures, defeats, losses, endings.  To look for the opportunity in the darkness, the lostness, the pain, and not just look to escape it.  We do this before the light has arrived.  Tolerating ambiguity, the ‘not-yet-ness’ of so many transition spaces in our lives.  Our life is our life.  Our inner life is ours alone.  How we navigate that dark terrain in the face of adversity contributes directly to what comes next.  To our ability to petition, look for, recognize and then open to the light, when it comes.

The image of the trapeze bar comes to me. For many of us, the greatest awakenings and deepest insights often emerge from these in-between spaces, the ones where we have managed to let go of the trapeze bar in mid-air, and have not yet been able to grasp the one arriving.  We have to stay aware, and be present to our lives as we tolerate the space between letting go and taking hold of what comes next.

your life is your life.
know it while you have it.

Yes, my inner life, and the ways that I express it in my external world, is mine alone.

A unique and perhaps peculiar embodiment of the zeal of eternity for incarnation in a particular set of space and time circumstances.  Each one of us, finding our own way, making our own meaning throughout our lives, alone and together, simultaneously.

Know it, while you have it. In my work, I have repeatedly been privileged to witness people who have taken the chances to live their lives true to themselves.  They come to know and accept their limits, and as well are willing to risk going beyond them.  These inspirational people have had an easier time accepting the limits of their life’s time, and therefore tend to die well.

We all know someone who has come to the end of their life filled with regret, knowing well after their time has passed that they missed their chances.  James Hollis writes “it is clear that those who fail to risk being who they are, who shun diving into the journey, are the most fear-ridden, regretful, and recriminating…This is a bad way to go.”   So take heed of this truth, wherever you are in the arc of your lifespan, and take the risk to know yourself, the real you, and not the one that others expect you to be.  This just may be the very thing that makes you become marvelous.

you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

We are each indeed marvelous acts of creation.  Some are splendid in their particular way of living in beauty.  There are others who display extraordinary compassion and courage.  Some of us are quirky in behaviors and distinctly unique in appearance; others are more reserved, and we must be patient in the revelation of their true colors.  And of course, there are those who are ornery or embittered, and they prove to be burdensome.  They are the ones who are slow to release their suffering, and soften into their true nature.

But all of us are unmistakably unique, with our particular mosaic of talents, gifts, flaws, potentialities, fates and circumstances.  Even if we work hard to shape ourselves to the cultural and familial expectations place upon us by the acceptable roles of consensus reality, the day comes when the gods give us chances – to step out from behind such roles and personas, and let the mystery of who we really are reveal itself.

I think in order to truly become a marvel of creation, we each must go through our inevitable trials and tribulations, and face the particular fates and ordeals we conjure.  We do this in order to define ourselves, and bring forth the golden potential within us.  I believe that this is how we become marvels, become heroes.  When we refuse the heroic passages we must take in order to individuate, grow or shine, we refuse the opportunity to become as vulnerable and as magnificent as we actually are, as marvelous human beings.  We don’t take up the chances that the gods give us, and have the adventure and brings forth our destiny, and become what gives the gods great delight.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

These days, I am embracing Bukowski’s poem. So I am on the watch.  Believing the gods are going to be giving me chances.  I want to know them, at least.  Whether or not I will take them, is yet to be seen…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now, just a few days after making the declaration above, I am away on a men’s retreat. We just completed a beautiful and sacred ceremony, opening us to the soul’s calling from within.  I get a clear inspiration to take advantage of opportunities that I was given a few months back.  I get the distinct sense that now is the time to act, as the window is about to close.   After I finish writing these words, I am writing to two individuals that I sense will be instrumental to furthering my destiny.  One I have known briefly, and one I haven’t met yet.  I want the gods to delight in me, through these risks of extending myself into new connections, worlds and teachings.

I also know that the gods will be giving you, who is reading this, yet another chance.  It very likely is coming your way now, very soon.  Be on the watch.  Know it, when you see it.  Take it, when you have it.  It will further your life.  You are marvelous.  You are the hero of your own life.

We all wait for the chance to delight in you.

- Michael Mervosh

There is a morning where presence
Comes over you, and you sing
Like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.

Your heart hears and, no longer frantic,
Begins to dance.  At that moment
Soul reaches total emptiness.

Your heart becomes Mary, miraculously pregnant,
And body, like a two-day old Jesus,
Says wisdom words.

Now the heart turns to light,
And the body picks up the tempo.

Where Shams Tabriz
walks, the footprints
Are musical notes, and holes
You fall through into space.
- Rumi

Whether we call them ‘holidays’ in their secular form – or ‘holy days’ through religious affiliation – sacred festival times have been embedded in cultures throughout the world, across the span of all civilized time.   Festive celebrations provide us with collective participation in that which is beneath the surface and beyond the reaches of day-to-day activity and functioning.  We make use of seasonal marker points to celebrate universal myths.  We engage in modern-day adaptations of ancient rituals to help keep our lives worthwhile, moving forward, and connected to a mystery and presence greater than ourselves.

The holy times of this particular season are meant to instill hope in the individual and tribal psyche.

Myths show us that what is deeply personal is also universal among human beings; which is why it is found in all cultures, across all times.  A vital mythology shows us a way of keeping life alive – a life that is unique, meaningful and deeply personal to the individual, through their lifetime.  At the same time, it provides the individual with opportunities for shared participation in a unifying, communal myth that speaks in some essential way to all human beings.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we stand at the turning point of the seasons.  We have just passed the solstice, the time when the “sun stands still”, and have entered our season of winter.  The term “winter” draws from the word ‘water’, indicative of the wet season – when cloudiness, rain and snow dominate nature’s landscape.  The element of water washes, clears the way.  It is a time to clear the way internally as well; making the heart-space ready, opened for what comes next.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The periodic changes in temperature and weather create our ‘seasons’ as a result of the earth’s axis being tilted by 23.45 degrees.  This universally accepted scientific fact was, of course, not a conceptual reality known by our ancestors.   The primacy and immediacy of their lived experience, vulnerable to every condition occurring in the wildness of the natural world, affected them profoundly.  Their primal experience of the approaching winter was very different from (and much more ominous than) our current cosmological post-modern perspective.

The winter season had to be an especially troubling time for all pre-historic peoples.  The slow descent of the sun’s passage across the sky, and the accompanying wet, dark and cold must have worn greatly upon their spirits, and challenged their will to live.  They must have worried that the light and warmth would not come again, and certainly worried if they would live to see it.

Prior to the advent of civilization 10,000 years ago, human beings are believed to have survived in small tribes, spending their entire lives in a relatively contained geographic space of 20 miles or less, their lives oriented around the search for food, water and shelter.   They had to learn ways to collect and store foodstuffs gathered over the more temperate seasons in order to survive the dark and cold time.  They lived off whatever they stored, and could only occasionally hunt (or be hunted by) animals not in hibernation, which were also trying to survive the winter.

So since the time before we developed civilized clusters of cultural and artistic life, before we learned agriculture and created homesteads, before we could even speak the first human language, we as a species have endured the darkness of winter, waited for the return of the light higher in the sky, the harbinger of the spring season ahead, which has yet to arrive.

Is it no wonder then, that our human psyches are wired for a need for hope, for a return of the light, in the midst of the wet, dark, cold, barren days of winter?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This essay is a winter’s holiday invitation to you: To live fully into the wholeness, the holy-ness experience of the season’s tidings.

We begin a festival preparation time by letting the dark time of winter come upon us, and be within us, incorporating it as part of our lived experience, especially so, at this time of the year.  Silence, stillness, emptiness, darkness – all necessary elements of the landscape for this cultural feast time.   T.S. Eliot says it best, in his second of four quartets in East Coker:

I said to my soul be still
And let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

Carving out the necessary time and space within us, and around us.  Clearing out.  Emptying out.  Addressing and removing perceived obstacles, stagnancies.  Discarding what is no longer useful.  Completing what has gone finished.  All necessary preparations for a way to be made, a place to be cleared for the new light, new hope, new life to come.   The new morning.

There is no better place than these days of winter, unfolding now, that we learn to say “yes” to the darkened times, to the emptiness within, to the space-making required.  The task is to be able to perceive the darkness, the ‘not-yet-known-ness’, as a womb-like and fertile space within us.  One in which the new light of awareness can enter, impregnate and intermingle with the dark in us, and be illumined and brought forth from within it.

As part of this season’s holiday preparations, I took up the project of clearing out my garage.  Sorting through things gone un-used, possessions that pile up with no immediate purpose, yet hard to discard.   Experiencing the stagnant feeling inside as I gaze upon a dusty collection of boxes in a buried corner.   I get help; we sort through items, together, from long ago.  I take leave of possessions.  I take hold of old memories.  I revisit the times in my late twenties, right before I got married.  Seeing pictures again of college classmates stirs old affections.   I Facebook them, and we reconnect, feel sentimental and appreciative of a past time, no longer relevant.  And I let go…. I clear more space, make room for a second car in the garage.  Simple things, but they seem to do more for me than just feel good about a practical task being completed.  I am making ready the way for what comes next…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After we clear the way, we must learn to properly receive the light that comes, take it into us, take it to heart.   Take it into the hollowed places within us that are dark with doubt and despair, or simply dark with the mystery of the unknown.  When the dark is joined by the emergence of light, a space is created where the polarities of life meet, and bring forth what is new.  What comes forth from this space is often previous unimagined, unconceived, and thus it can feel miraculous.  It becomes a source of true celebration.

So in this way, the dark as well as the light are incorporated into the wholeness of our being.  The light that emerges is especially beautiful and moving; because of its appearance within what has been dark, and also because of how it can go forth from the womb of darkness.

I think of the beauty of the votive lights in the dark chambers of church naves I visit from time to time.  I relish these enshrined spaces that reflect the infinity of darkness, as well as the inspiration of light.  It has been like that for me ever since I was a small child, and would visit these spaces with my parents and grandparents.  Captured by the interplay of light and dark, light shimmering through the red votive glass, carrying many prayers from the heart to an invisible presence, large and overshadowing me.

The votive candle is also a reflection for me of the divine feminine-receptive principle, the Goddess image, making beautiful light manifest in the dark spaciousness of universal presence.   It also prepares me for the festivity of the coming light.

It is from this image of the gothic cathedral shrine room, that I enter Rumi’s mystical poetry, and anticipate the return of the light.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Morning, from this perspective, is more that just the start of another day.  It is the gradual, inevitable return of the light from an extended time of darkness.  Seeing morning’s arrival metaphorically, we have the opportunity to awaken on a “good morning’ – to awaken to who we are in connection to some larger wholeness, aware of the presence to be felt in the immediacy of the moment, witnessing life pouring forth from a Divine Source.

There is a morning where presence
Comes over you, and you sing
Like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.

Rumi speaks of a moment where morning comes over us like a presence in such a way that it makes us want to sing.  This is especially so, once we’ve first been emptied.  Perhaps emptied of a sense of burden.  Emptied of false hopes, wishful thinking, and unrealizable fantasies.  It comes after we have learned to let go.  A morning of this kind doesn’t come because of our pleading for it, or our will to make it so.   A presence, a vitality comes over us, into us, moves through us of its own accord, and by doing so, we are moved.  Uplifted.

When something comes over us, we naturally desire to give expression to our movement.  (Holiday carols do this for some of us.)  When we sing songs, particularly songs known throughout our life’s time, they vibrate with meaning.  They vibrate through memories, as much as they do through the intonation of the vocal cords.  This body in song vibration can be as primal and as joyful as anything.  Like a rooster in its earth-colored shape, fully embodying the expression of sound waves through the muscles and flesh of our being, bringing forth what is alive in us.  Songs, mythic expressions of the zeal of eternity for manifestation in human form, do this so well.

Your heart hears and, no longer frantic,
Begins to dance.  At that moment
Soul reaches total emptiness.

Where there is song, there is also often dance.  When the light and sound vibrations are felt in the body, and reach the heart space, we join with what is larger than our individual selves.   When we surrender in the moment to movement, to the mystery of life unfolding, when we are in harmony with the rhythms of nature, of the universal pulse, we cease our frantic striving, set aside worries.  We join with the dance of life.

When we do this with others doing the same thing, we enter the spirit at the heart-center of the festival.  One aspect of feasting is the feeling of being emptied of all our usual worries and concerns.  Then the soul can become filled, and takes it place, one among many others, and feel at home and alive among their people.  Peace on earth.

Your heart becomes Mary, miraculously pregnant,
And body, like a two-day old Jesus,
Says wisdom words.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was the Christ, the presence capable of redeeming all that was dark, broken, or beyond love’s presence.  Her purpose was to bear the womb for the birth of radical love, embodied in human form.  She gave birth to a man-god, whose teachings and way of living created a revolution in consciousness, and seeded the history of Christian religion, which came later.   His presence on earth was a living representation of eternity’s love for humankind.  A God among woman and man.   The scriptures speak the myth of the Creator so loving the world, that It brought forth from eternity a human incarnation of Divine Love, so that we as a human species could best learn of it, participate in it, and bring it forth ourselves to those in need.

Light, the external representation of Divine Love, was to be bestowed upon us all, the worthy and the unworthy, the kind and the cruel, upon all aspects of humanity.  To live among us, and express itself among the imperfections of earthly life.  It came into a woman who said ‘Yes’ to a light beyond all human understanding, a woman whose desire it was to have her own soul, her own womb- magnify the Presence of Divine Love, so that it could incarnate and inhabit among us all.

Our hearts are to become like Mary’s womb, fertile and ready to receive the light.   Our bodies and spirits, to become refreshed and cleansed, made new from the Source of creation itself, like a two-day old child.  This is something worthy of a great feast.

Now the heart turns to light,
And the body picks up the tempo.

We prepare the way for the light.  We wait for the light.  We open to it.  Then, we join with it.

In the ancient traditions of the festival, people set aside for a number of days all   usual cares and concerns, in order to participate in direct relationship with the gods they worshipped, the mystery they could sense, and the awe and wonder they could experience.  They came into good relationship with that which created, inspired and loved them.

When we can identify with this reality, we are in the field of the gods, and the gods are indeed among us.  This awareness is what allows our own hearts to become light.

Where Shams Tabriz
walks, the footprints
Are musical notes, and holes
You fall through into space.

Shams was Rumi’s beloved teacher, who helped him with his own ego surrendering, and accompanied him in the sufferings of his own humanity.   At the time of Shams’ arrival in Persia, Rumi was a revered scholar and teacher, if not yet a renowned poet and mystic.  Shams’ teachings, and his own lived application of them, helped Rumi to pass through previous hidden thresholds into new landscapes of poetic artistry, ecstatic love and deep devotion to the Source of all that is.

Shams of Tabriz was a living embodiment of Divine Light that radiated to and for Rumi, in the way that Jesus was and is to all that followed Him.   When we can embrace and emulate the teachings and actions of those who embody and transmit Divine Love, we walk in their footprints, and from there find our own way into the deeply personal experience of rapture.   The holes we enter and fall through, when following the teachings of Divine Masters, are not simply static holes that swallow and bury us.  They become portholes, or portals, dark spaces and times that serve as profound thresholds through which the light can pass, and illuminate for us the message of hope, ever eternal, in the deepest recesses of the unknown.

One truth that I now claim as my own, as a result of what I have lived, learned and suffered through for many years, is this:  A transformation of consciousness occurs when we realize a return to the light with more consciousness than we had when we entered the last darkness.  We awaken, with the return of the light, with more of who we were before we entered the darkness.  Darkness, once again, is not something to only be feared and driven away, it can be something to be welcomed and incorporated as part of our being, as a womb, as a container for the light.

So this has become my annual holiday reflection during winter’s solstice; it is also my holy day Christ’s mass-tiding of consciousness:

Prepare for the Light; let the darkness come.  Make a place for the Light; let the darkness be. Clear the way for the Light; wrestle with whatever obstacle is made apparent.  Rest deeply in the darkness, wait in confident expectation for the Light.

In this way, our hearts become a birth-manger for the Divine.

At some point, the Light comes.  Open to the Light, when it comes.  Let it come over me, let it enter my dark being.  Recognize I am joining with the Light.

Finally, will I allow myself to say ‘I am One with the Light’?  In the midst of all darkness, no less.

What an enlightenment!

- Michael Mervosh

The Art of Self Reflection – Know the Deal Here: Impermanence

The Dakini Speaks

My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple–how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.

Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion is exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!
Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children any more.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

-Jennifer Welwood

There comes a time in our lives when we are confronted by life’s vicissitudes.  Everything turns away from where it once was.  What we gain, we lose.  What goes up, comes down.  What’s new grows old.  What is found becomes lost again. Disappointment, failure, injury, loss – all inevitable.  The longer we live, the more we come to realize the harsh reality.  It is the fallout of an incarnate existence. Somewhere along the way we forget, ignore or endlessly reject the deal.

There also comes a time, in an adult life, where we must realize our own childlike insistence that life as it is on earth should not be this way.  It should not be filled with difficulty, disease, and destructiveness.  I should not have to struggle.  Life should be better, easier and more enjoyable; more satisfying than it actually is.

It should serve me.

Perhaps one consequence of living in a Western culture is the breeding of a sense of entitlement.   A well-to-do, modernized world has given us access to an ever-growing plethora of technological advances, designed to bring more and more ease, efficiency and entertainment to our fingertips.  We are overloaded by informational minutiae, eroding any authentic connection to the broader and wilder aspects of the natural world.

And it seems that the more we fall prey to the entitlements and egocentricities of a privileged modern life, the more we also suffer from it.

As a result, we are vulnerable to becoming reduced to what George Bernard Shaw says is “a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making us happy”.

Jennifer Welwood’s poem provides an inspirational focus for this essay.  Her words come forth in the spirit and essence of the Dakini, the fierce and volatile feminine deity from Tibetan Buddhism.  She is a wrathful guardian, keeper of the great mysteries of the deeper self.  Welwood offers us a clear and penetrating piece of writing on a matter of great concern: impermanence.

At once both sobering and liberating, her way of unveiling illusion cuts through the self-deceptive and self-ingratiating tendencies of our ego-based, childish thinking.   In a simple and straightforward manner, she splashes cold water on our faces, puts reality right up in front of us, says ‘look closely, look right here’.    The first thing she asks us to look right into is the reality of loss.

My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple–how could we have missed it for so long?

Welwood begins with an imperative right from the start – grow up, and wake up.  Drop the sleepy, unconscious child consciousness demand that life take care of you.  This doesn’t work.   See the way the world actually is from adult eyes.  Acknowledge ‘chronos’ – the fact and consequences of the existence of time.  It may appear and feel harsh.  But this is just the way it is.  Stop taking it so personally!

Of course, we will lose everything.   I suppose we have missed this fact for so long  due to this child-like, ego based thinking that our minds do.   From the possessive perspective of child consciousness, losing what we seek to possess is devastating.   From a fearful and fragile ego-based mind, we learn to cling, to grasp; then we lament what eludes our grasping.

“Why do we have to suffer loss?  I hate to lose!  It hurts.” Yes, it does.   “But I don’t want to hurt.”  Really, no one does.  “But I don’t want to be the one who hurts; I don’t want to have to hurt.”   Right.   But sometimes, we have to.  It gives our lives a certain contrast.  Otherwise, our senses become dulled.   “I don’t care, I refuse to hurt.”   I understand.  And that refusal, unfortunately, is one of the privileges of being human.  We are free to deny what is inevitable – our fate, as well as our destiny.  Suffering is inevitable, it is said, but misery is optional.   And the big trouble, the ongoing and pervasive sense of misery in our lives, ultimately stems from this posture of refusal.

So back to the basic fact – everything that can be lost, will be lost.   Learning to say YES to that fact.   We suffer losses all the time.  Sometimes the losses will be big ones; we hope to be given them in doses we can accept.  We suffer little losses all the time, in ways that we may not even recognize as loss.  Unless we pay closer attention.

Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.

The other day, I find a gaping tear in the stitching in a favorite pair of dress pants – suddenly they are un-wearable.  Yesterday, as I crouched down to look underneath my sink – sudden awareness of ache in my knees.  The harsh fact of aging.  Then the less superficial ones come.

Last week, going through a desk drawer, I come across a buried photo of my daughter at age 5 – short blond hair, bangs and an innocent gaze toward the camera.  She is swallowed into a flowered sofa chair, clutching her beloved cat, Marshy.  The sofa chair, like her, is no longer in the house.  Nor is her pet for that matter, whose demise had come a half dozen years ago.  And the house in which the sofa chair sat – no longer our house.  Everyone, everything moving on.

Melancholy drips in with no advance notice.  The feeling of loss comes again with the subtle accumulation of losses  - especially so, with the ‘in-the-past-ness’ of my daughter’s early childhood times.   Maybe that is what makes the feeling of loss so difficult to bear – sometimes, you just can’t see it coming.  One minute you open a drawer looking for the postage stamps, you close it having found something else altogether.  In an instant, loss can appear right in front of you.  You wake up and notice.

Let’s grieve our losses fully.  An emotional task that the modern age works against.  This is very challenging thing to do in a busy life filled with distractions.  Grief needs time, space, and patience.  One has to be able to tolerate the strong sense of absence, in the midst of a presence going on as usual.  The sorrow brought on by feeling the loss of someone or something that matters needs to be felt in the body, and expressed by the heart.  It hurts.  The empty space created by our losses can be ominous and frightening.  This in turn may be used by our judgmental nature as an indictment, some sketchy kind of evidence of having failed at living.

But a healthy relationship to grief softens us.  Welwood’s Dakini tells that it ripens us, makes us more palatable as human beings.  We fear that we could drown, pulled under the waters of grief.  Others unable to enter the waters of grief- those who refuse to accept its inevitable arrival – become hardened, embittered by it.

Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion is exquisitely precise:

Impermanence – the evidence is everywhere.  How could any of us have missed it for long?  Here at autumn’s very end – dead leaves are littered across yards, the trees barren. The days grow darker.

There are other signs of it around the house:  That newspaper clipping on the refrigerator, already yellowing.  The downspout, discolored and peeling paint – when did that happen?  Then, noticing the cracks in the walkway pavement.

If you keep noticing, the stakes get higher.  The house next door, always exquisitely kept, now empty.  My neighbor now placed in the assisted care facility half a mile away.  Knee replacement for my mother; fluids building in my father’s once vital, now elderly lungs.    How does the wearing away of life not seem cruel?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I remember Sam Keen once saying that a man who cannot grieve becomes prone to violence.  Conversely, you can’t be soured and hardened in an angry posture if you have the capacity to spill hot tears from the core of your being.  We are laid open, vulnerable, made tender through allowing  ‘letting go’ to happen.  It is by the gradual arriving at the soft pain underneath it all, that we allow things to take a new turn.

I suppose this must be the exquisite nature of compassion.  If you ride the waters of grief through to sorrow’s very end (especially if you believe there will never be an end), at some point the light begins to peek through once again, like the sun does at the end of a thunderstorm.

Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!

The true ride through life, discerning what is real from what is unreal.  How to know the difference?   What we experience as real at one point in our lives seems unreal a little further down the ride.   When we suffer a loss and experience the absence of what once was, don’t we look back and ask ‘What was all that’?  Did that really happen?  Was it real?

What we know as real is what we experience to be meaningful, substantive and enduring for our internal world.   It is what remains on the inside, after the experience of ‘now’ the external world moves and turns, taking its place in the past.

Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children any more.

Making deals for a safe passage through this life.  Don’t we all have our own particular way of doing this?  Doing what we believe we can to insure ourselves against pain and loss.   We minimize risks by opening to them less – yet when we restrict our range of actions, and cordon off vital aspects of living – over-protecting and under-venturing – we create a closed loop that that breeds stagnancy, insulating us from life as well as loss.   This cost is high, but when we pay it little by little over time, we go to sleep, and hardly notice.

The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

What is the difference between a child’s and an adult’s mind?   When we are children, we need to be provided for.  We naturally look to life, to be served by life. When we are deprived of or denied this opportunity in our young life, we become stuck in this unconscious and unmet need as we move into adulthood.  Thus, we tend to continue with an increasingly unrealizable task – still looking for life to serve us.

Here is where we end up confused and hurt – we act like we don’t know the deal – because we have lost sight of it.  In adult life, our task is to serve life, not be served by it.  In fact, by being of service to life, bringing forth our talents, our vitality and our love, is how we are served in return.  The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm states that the giving of our lives, and from what is alive in us, is exquisite joy in itself.

When we give everything from this adult place in us, from what is most real and authentic, there is nothing to be lost.  We truly have nothing to lose.

When we are aligned with our true nature, our ‘wildness’ – we in fact do not need to rely on hope, for we are beyond the need for it.  Our willingness to dance with the vicarious rhythms of life, while in touch with our authentic inner life, is taking the true ride through life.  Riding life as it is, not as we wish for it to be.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As I was working on this essay, arriving in my inbox was the daily poem from The Poetry Chaikhana, a wonderful web resource created and provided by Ivan Granger.    Today’s offering was from Shodo Harada Roshi, a renowned Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher of traditional Rinzai practices.  I close this essay with his revered manner and loving-kindness method of teaching of  “knowing the deal here”.  Coming from an eastern culture, he speaks the same message, with a diametrically opposed style, that Welwood’s Dakini speaks.  He impeccably embodies and transmits the wild dance of no hope, in the most life-giving way.

In this passing moment karma ripens
and all things come to be.
I vow to choose what is:
If there is cost, I choose to pay.
If there is need, I choose to give.
If there is pain, I choose to feel.
If there is sorrow,
I choose to grieve.
When burning — I choose heat.
When calm — I choose peace.
When starving — I choose hunger.
When happy — I choose joy.
Whom I encounter, I choose to meet.
What I shoulder, I choose to bear.
When it is my death, I choose to die.
Where this takes me, I choose to go.
Being with what is — I respond to what is.

This life is as real as a dream;
the one who knows it can not be found;
and, truth is not a thing –
Therefore I vow 
to chooseTHIS dharma entrance gate!
May all Buddhas and Wise Ones
help me live this vow.

This takes me back to the very first line of Welwood’s poem.  My friends, let’s grow up.  Shodo Harada Roshi shows us what it takes to do just that.  By saying ‘yes’ to life, just like this.  One encounter, one mindful act at a time, as it arises.  The willingness to move beyond his own self concerns, time and again.  Right relationship to life.  How could we have missed it for so long?

I’ve been doing a good bit of traveling and writing as of late, often doing one as I am doing the other.   As I am composing the end of this essay, I am again seated (and have been, for quite some time) on an aircraft runway, hoping to be headed for home.  The pilot has just come onto the loudspeaker, announcing a “slight mechanical problem” with one of the indicator lights on the instrument panel.  We’ve taxied back to the gate, and now I sit – writing and waiting for the verdict.  I may be stranded overnight in Charlotte.

Time to practice Harada Roshi’s teaching.  I say ‘yes’ to this circumstance.  I suddenly recall an old axiom in the aviation field:  “It is better to be on the ground, hoping you could get in the air – than to be in the air, hoping you could get on the ground.”

For this evening, I’ll dance the dance of no hope.  Life as it is just got better.

- Michael Mervosh

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle
than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God.”

-       Matthew 19:24

In their book Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, Peter Senge and his fellow authors reference this scriptural passage, used as a modern parable for entering into sacred space. This biblical verse was taken from the literal facts of life in Jerusalem in the times of Christ.

Stories have been told as far back as the 15^th century about a gate used to enter into the walled city of ancient Jerusalem, after the main gate was closed for the day.  This gate was very narrow. Thus, a fully loaded camel had to have its baggage removed so it could pass through the gate and proceed to its desired destination.

From a mythological perspective, the “Eye of the Needle” serves as a ‘threshold crossing’, a gateway into enlightened space.   It requires those of us seeking entrance to the walled ‘treasure house of the soul’ to shed our ego baggage; being humble enough, and light enough – to pass through the gate, and towards a transcendent state of consciousness.

With certain types of mindfulness meditation, we practice the ‘letting go’ of ego grasping and striving.  We learn to pay attention to our breath – to the letting go that happens with each inhalation; again with each exhalation.  We practice being still, watching our thoughts chase themselves, one after another.  We allow these thoughts to run their course, to let them come and then go, like passing clouds. We can even reflect upon esoteric wonderings such as “who am I between two thoughts”?   Then, we let go of the question itself.

As we practice mindfulness in present moment experience – and without the ego willing a particular outcome into being so – we eventually come into the restful, restorative ground of ‘Presence’.   This way of ‘Presence’ can only be found by being aware of that which is happening right here, right now.  It has a distinct feeling of being both contained within and opened up by a sense of immediacy.  The simultaneously diametric qualities of solidity and spaciousness create a coherency that gives richness, substance and gravity to lived experience; it is what poets practice in order to master their craft.

It also carries the feeling of sacredness, of something that cannot be controlled by us. This, in turn, offers us with a sense of meaning, mystery and enchantment – of having entering into participation in something that includes, yet is much larger than the self.  As we experience our being-ness in the here and now, an ineffable state of awareness comes, where even words turn back.

We somehow pass through, without trying, into what the mystics call ‘eternity’, accompanied by a feeling being in awe, enraptured – being completely absorbed by the dynamic feel of ‘Presence’ – our own, and something larger, in the timelessness of the here and now.

In today’s modern life, Senge says it can feel easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for us to feel connected to what is most deeply meaningful, awe-inspiring, and enlivening.  The journey towards mystery and meaning is distinctly different from simple ego gratification or pleasure seeking.  This can be quickly pursued and achieved, and readily available for purchase in our culture – a hollow substitute for entering the rich inner chambers of the heart and soul.

In the Western world today, we have accumulated tremendous material wealth, and we learn to hold on closely to our money, our possessions, and our status in society.  We hold on to how others approve of us, recognize us, or even envy us.  We are taught to acquire things of this world, and in the acquisition, we create baggage for ourselves – by striving to keep up with the expectations and demands of others, in order to maintain their approval, recognition, acceptance.  Carrying the load of this ego baggage keeps us from passing through the eye of the needle.

What is clear to me is that in order to pass through any kind of threshold that takes us from an outer-focused, more ‘accumulative’ way of being, and into the inner, more expansive state of being, we must practice the following:

Slow Down.

Breathe Deeply.

Be Embodied.

Wait.

Until Awareness Comes.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Last week, I was practicing a collective type of ‘Presencing’ with our PsychoEnergetics Training group in Spain.  We began our 4^th year of working, being, and sharing life together, so we have built up over time a communal group energy. We sat together in mindful, meditative, agenda-less space.  Kept feeling into our bodies, quieting our minds. Waited, in the present moment, where ‘no particular thing’ happens (what our ordinary and panicky ego state would call ‘nothing happening!’).   The silence and immediacy of ‘being contained in open space’ can feel intolerable at first.  But ‘Presence’ only comes when we can be embodied and mindful, keeping our attention rooted in present moment experience, and then to stay with it.

Tolerating this staying with no thing in particular is what it takes to pass through the threshold crossing into Presence.  We go through the eye of the needle – and are always surprised by where we end up.  The Spanish poet Antonio Machado speaks to this process so clearly:

It seems that down there
In the depths
My boat has struck against a great thing…

Nothing happens…nothing.
Silence…Waves…nothing.

Or has everything happened,
And I am standing now
In the new life?

As our group sits in the active waiting, somehow a collective coherence – a wave – comes more strongly into being.  Then another.  More waiting…then yet another.  And then, I pass through the eye of the needle: remembering comes, washing over me in waves.  Distinct and clear childhood memories come.  Encounters with significant people; moments that mattered in my young adult life. Songs and poems come, too.  I could dive into any one of them, completely re-absorbed by them in the moment, or I can let these waves pass back out of my awareness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

From this place, Senge says we learn to see what is truly happening all around us, as we now are able to see from within the Source of all things.  We begin to witness what is emerging from the Source, as well.  We are of the sea and in the sea, floating on wave upon wave of awareness…

This flow of discovery inevitably uplifts the vessel of the one who is able to witness in this fashion, and it becomes strengthened when a collective body of people witness in this fashion together.  Those who can witness like this say that what happens cannot be understood with the rational mind, because something that appears impossible to the rational mind begins to take place – which is like the passing of a camel through the eye of a needle.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Back in our training group, I ride the wave of one particular remembering, fascinated yet again by the psyche’s spontaneous ability to bring forth and bring alive a clear memory from my youth.  I remember my love of bicycle riding.  As a 12 year old, I obtained a new bike with 26-inch wheels, gold, with a basket in front.  I felt a strong desire to make plans for long, adventuresome bike rides.  I mapped out a route to a county park about 10 miles away.   I was deeply disappointed by the realization that my friends did not have much interest in doing the trek, so I set it aside.

As a result, I would often go by myself for other extended rides, but I was reluctant to go too far from home by myself.  Then – one summer’s day, to my surprise, two of my friends decided that there was nothing better to do, and they thought we should take that ride to the county park!  I remember the ecstatic feeling of adventure, of going far into the world, places only accessible by car rides on infrequent occasions, ones that required adult supervision.

There we were, lunches packed, pedaling our way alongside automobile traffic, exerting tremendous effort up hills, dodging potholes and pedestrians.  Arriving at the park, we shared in the joy of being in it together.  We were somehow larger and freer now, proud of our accomplishment.  But what lingered for me, and what I was now re-membering into a deeper knowing, was the joy of being in something worthwhile together, and the sheer joy of that togetherness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Shifting my awareness back into the quiet stillness of the group’s meditative stillness, in my expanded state of awareness I felt like one of 40 boats silently bobbing on the sea.  I was in awe, in deep appreciation.  I felt the contentment and joy being spoken by others, coming from the simple act of sitting with one another, being together, of staying in the water.

It then struck me that we only tend to do this kind of sitting with another if one of us are ill, or in the hospital, or in need of some kind of intensive care.  We feel we have to earn this kind of presence through our goodness, or through our accomplishments.  But to have it, simply to have it – sheer wonder and joy!

It’s like a camel passing through the eye of a needle.

- Michael Mervosh

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
As if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see further into paintings,
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses as with birds,  I climb
Into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the sky
My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

- Rilke

I am presently teaching in our PsychoEnergetics Training Program along the Costa Brava in Spain.   Each day begins with an hour-long Yoga practice; afterwards, we break our fast.  Then we practice one hour of guided Mindfulness Meditation to further support embodied self-awareness.  Each week we focus our attention on a particular theme.  This past week, we aligned our bodies and minds with the fluid nature of our second chakra consciousness.  These practices tend to activate my dream life, and sure enough one night last week, I had a dream that involved a river passage.

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
As if the river shores were opening out…

As I awoke, I re-membered myself further in this dream.  As I did, I had vivid recall of prior real-life experiences involving this kind of threatening passage across water.  I was a young boy who was just beginning to venture into a larger world, entering the wildness of nature for the first time.

I attended my first summer camp around 7 or 8 years of age.  I joined a group of boys for a hike through the woods, heading out for our desired fishing destination – a nearby lake.  I was excited about being able to fish, and nervous about being with new people.  I was a young being in a big, strange, new wilderness setting.   At one point during our hike, we came upon a deep, flowing creek; a large tree had fallen across it long ago.  The creek appeared to be very deep, and I was told the water level was over my head.  The only way to reach the lake was to cross the creek by walking across the tree.

I was frozen by intense fear.  I could not swim, and I was too afraid and embarrassed to speak this to anyone.  My legs became rubbery; there was no way I could stand on the log.  Many of the other boys simply walked across the log.  But myself and another boy did not- we just could not do it.

There were no real camp counselors with us, just a few older boys, as it was an informal kind of camp run by my baseball coach.  One of them waited while I and the other boy slowly, and with great trepidation, inched across that downed log on our hands and knees.  I was as frightened as much by the amount of fear coursing through me as I was by the rushing water itself. Never once did I think to speak of it, nor do I remember anything being said to me.

I remember being completely shaken by this passage over the creek, and I was tremendously relieved to be on solid ground again, and headed for the lake.  But something had affected me, and stayed with me – something I would now name as a feeling of profound shame and inadequacy. But as a young child, I carried with me throughout that day (and future days) an encompassing feeling of being stained by something that would not wash off.

I could not enjoy much of the sunshine, the company of the other boys, nor the catch of many dough-fed bluegill fish that day.  I had the return back to fret about, and the knot in my stomach to contend with – which returns somewhat, even now, when I think of slowly crawling across the log one more time on way back to camp.

The next summer, I taught myself to swim in a nearby community swimming pool, inching myself into the deep waters, pushing off from the side and coming back, until I relaxed into the realization I was able to stay afloat in the deep.  I learned this without ever asking anyone for help.  It simply never occurred to me.

- – -

It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see further into paintings.

It was during my river passage into adolescence that I learned to communicate to my peers what was really happening inside.  My high school years were very liberating for me in that way.  And it was in my mid-to-late 20’s, as I began to grow along my career path, when I learned how to ask for real help.  I learned I could take my suffering, my fear, my distress to another – a professional, and someone who could make a difference – and they did.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps our deepest and most threatening river crossings require us to go from the solid ground of what we already know (or think we know!) to fluid waters that can take us (where we don’t want to go) into deeper, unforeseeable, uncontrollable realms of the psyche.  These waters can be dark and not easily navigated.  We fear drowning in feelings, moods, and dark thoughts.  Being in the spontaneous waters of self-revelation – revealing our emotional natures to ourselves and to others – is like swimming.  We enter the flow of emotion with all of ourselves, just like deep river waters.  Wholeheartedly.  Our kinesthetic sensing organ – our skin – comes alive with sensation, enveloped by fluid, ever-changing, flowing substance.  We become taken by it, we move with our whole self; we come to the surface again, we breathe.

We are buoyant- Very different from crawling across a log.

Returning to the vividness of the dream I had this past week: I inch myself out along the edge of a dam-like waterfall.  I am standing along its edge.  I am a man, and I do not have to crawl.  I am standing on solid rock under the water; I can stand on (and for) something now, despite the currents that push against me. I am still inching my way slowly, out towards the middle of the river.  This dream river is much bigger, deeper and wider than the small creek near the camp of my youth.

This river is fast and flowing, and it pushes insistently against my feet and calves as I slowly work my way out into the waters.  I want to get safely out towards the middle of it all.  I do not know yet the inner motives or desires that have me venturing out into the river.

Do I desire to leap or dive into the waters below me, and be taken by the river?  Do I want to cross the river entirely, pulled to the far shore, the new terrain? I realize that I am holding my breath, my heart pounds; I feel afraid.  For now, it is enough to breathe more deeply.   I am not ready to go any further.  I find myself on an unsteady foothold along the dam’s edge.  I am simply not yet ready to leap, nor go forward.

Then I begin to realize that I am practicing something crucially important – I wait.

I am doing now, what I could not do as a young boy.  I wait, with awareness.

Perhaps everything begins to happen anew when we find the ability to witness what is happening in the waiting.  I remain a bit unsteady, but I am also solidly planted, looking out upon the formidable flow of water.  Fluid nature.  Then the thought comes to me: What if I am that?

I feel closer to what language can’t reach.

I stay right where I am, for what feels like a very long time.  I stop pushing myself prematurely – to prove something, to get somewhere.  I am on solid smooth, uneven rock, with water flowing against and around me.  I am solid rock, and I am fluid, flowing clear water.  I feel deeply my own breath, body and beyond all that, where words can’t reach.

With my senses as with birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the sky

I wait until I am okay, right where I am – with who I am. I become more present to myself.  It is only then that I feel ready to move just a little further out into the river’s center.  I now feel my desire more clearly. I want to stand at the edge of the waterfall’s edge, and look out upon the flow of life, moving forward, and feel it.

I can finally feel my senses climbing, expanding: I am connected to the landscape, and to my own nature.  This river is fed by the rains that fall from the sky.  I am fed by the feeling of vitality that I feel at the waterfall’s edge.

As I remember this part of my dream, I suddenly recall this passage from a poem written for Mark Strand, by Dale Edmands:

If you stand here long enough,
stand here at the edge

where it flows past you
in a hurriedness of splash and roll,
of white foam over rock, of wave after wave,
you begin to understand that this is your life…

This is the flow of my own life, moving through me, to me, and from me.  Flowing forward, as much I can dare to feel and see.

Now I want to leap.  Leap into the flow of my life.

Today along the grey Spanish coastline, the winds are strong, and have whipped up enormous waves from the Mediterranean that heave and crash against the rocks.  I walk down to the edge near the rocks and feel the cool, refreshing, salt-air and mist against my face.  The crashing waves are very loud.

This powerful fluid nature is flowing right towards me.  This is a new relationship to water, to the flow of nature.

My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

I sink deeply into myself, and beyond myself, into the sea.  The feeling of mystery in my stomach, the smell of salt air enlivening my senses.  The deep parts of my life pour onward.

Somewhere, a boy begins to stand up on a log over a small creek.

I have come to the frightening conclusion
that I am the decisive element.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
I possess tremendous power to make life miserable
or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture
or an instrument of inspiration;
I can humiliate or humor,
hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides
whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated,
and a person is humanized or de-humanized.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat people as they’re called to be,
we help them become
what they are capable of becoming.

~ Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe was an 18th century German writer, botanist, lawyer, artist and theoretical physicist.  His studies of plant life were extended by Charles Darwin, among others.  He was a brilliant man whose holistic approach to scientific study was certainly ahead of his time.  He cultivated the capacity to see a living universe make itself manifest in the particular botanical species that he observed.  He articulated how the ‘whole made itself manifest in the particular parts’ he studied.  In the groundbreaking book Presence, Peter Senge et al speak of Goethe’s articulation that “every object well contemplated opens up a new organ within us”.  They state that in order for a science to enhance life, we (as the scientific observer) must become more alive ourselves.

The collective consciousness of today’s leading scientists and spiritual leaders are recognizing the same capacity for each one of us, in our concrete human forms.

The mission of our Hero’s Journey Foundation is devoted to this very concern.  To become the hero of one’s own life is no small task.  It requires us to relinquish our view of heroic endeavors to be only for those whom we hold to high achievements or ideals, and carry our projections as larger-than-life iconic figures.

Thus the choice today for a deeper reflection on Goethe’s “I Am the Decisive Element.”

Let’s enter this daunting invitation to be the shaper of one’s landscape…

I have come to the frightening conclusion
that I am the decisive element.

This one line alone is enough to base a life on.  It is quite the summoning to see one’s self as an active and involved participant in shaping the outcome of our daily encounters as they happen right in front of us.  This level of response – ability can be most unnerving to accept and actualize.  It is, in my mind, a heroic perspective for living.

Goethe goes on to expand upon this singularly transformative premise…

It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

I possess tremendous power to make life miserable
or joyous.

I can be a tool of torture
or an instrument of inspiration;
I can humiliate or humor,
hurt or heal.

In all situations, it is my response that decides
whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated,
and a person is humanized or de-humanized.

What a powerful challenge for my ordinary mind.  It is easy to imagine myself as too small or too inadequate to rise to this level of personal authority and responsiveness.  I like to think I am not significant enough to make a contribution to much of the world’s woes.  How do I dare enact this premise in daily life?  What examples can I draw from?

The only way I can do so is to bring it down to the level of do-able acts that can be taken up opportunistically, as a part of ordinary living.

I remember my family driving to Sunday morning Mass at the church to which we belonged.  I must have been eight or nine years old at the time.  One Sunday, my father surprised me by suddenly stopping the car alongside a well-dressed elderly woman, who was shuffling her feet along the uneven sidewalk.  He had realized she was also heading to Sunday Mass, and asked her if she would like a ride.

I was even more surprised that she said ‘yes’.  I remember how uneasy I felt – shy, awkward and self-conscious – as my father helped her into the back seat of our Rambler station wagon, crowding in next to me and my sisters.  I remained stiffened and uncomfortable by the presence of this elderly woman being so close to me, as she as made small talk with my parents.  Conversely, I also remember feeling uplifted and proud of my father’s actions.  I felt good about our family as a result of that encounter.   Even now, many decades later, something about this memory (and this capacity that my father still has) moves me.

As this recall comes into sharper remembrance, I wonder if I will have the courage to extend myself in this way to some “other” in my life.  Someone who is a stranger to me, or better yet, someone distinctly not like me.  Can I employ this kind of simple act that would stretch me beyond the security and comfort of my own ride through life?

Upon further reflection, I think about something from that memory that did not come forward in my recall before now.   The woman walking alone on the sidewalk said ‘yes’ to my father’s invitation.   Had she said ‘no’, my father’s action would have been a kind gesture, but most likely, not the touching memory it has become for me.  With her acceptance of the unexpected gesture, perhaps it was she who shaped my experience, even more so than my father.

By getting in a car with a family she did not know, this woman put herself forward and said yes to something she could not see coming just a moment previous to our car stopping beside her.  And though the boy in me was overcome by uneasiness and shy embarrassment, something on a soul level holds this memory for me as a teaching about dignity, human kindness, and the ability to let one’s capacity reach towards another’s need – and everyone involved, especially the silent young boy who was a witness, benefits.

By remembering this simple act of kindness long ago, he becomes today more of what he is capable of becoming.

If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat people as they’re called to be,
we help them become
what they are capable of becoming.

As I sit here with the feeling of being moved by a random act of kindness on the part of my father, it occurs to me that life has lived it arc across the span of forty years since that day.  It is now my father who is the one who slowly shuffles his feet as he walks, as he is far along into his own elderly years.

I feel moved to offer him the same kind of unexpected lift, except rather than it coming from a stranger, it could come from his eldest son.  The one who is learning that he is the decisive element, the one who possesses the power to make life miserable or joyous for another.  The one who can now humanize his father, and have compassion for his diminished physical capacities.

Perhaps I will tell him about my memory of his gesture of kindness on a summer’s Sunday morning’s ride to church.   Better yet, I think I will pull up next to his solitude one day soon, and take him for a ride.  My guess is that he will say ‘yes’ to the invitation.

-Michael Mervosh

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte

(The House of Belonging)

This essay is the follow up to my last writing, which drew from the first half of David Whyte’s poem What to Remember Upon Waking. For many of us, those first few moments of flickering awareness, coming forth from the depths of dream time’s rest, are the most vulnerable moments of our day.  We feel the remnants of feelings that visit our sleep, speak to our unfinished lives.  We may feel the weight of things gone undone, or things yet to be.  In our dream states, our deepest selves work with those matters that do not receive the necessary attention for resolution in the conscious light of day.

In my prior essay, I was drawn to David Whyte’s soul task of humanity:

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

Such an important part of a meaningful existence is learning to delve into the depths of our human heart, uncovering what feels most essential, bringing it forth to the surface of our lives, and making this energy visible to others.

Today we reflect upon the second half of David Whyte’s poem.   He confronts the final passage from Goethe’s poem ‘The Holy Longing’:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.

Here, Goethe informs us that in order to mature spiritually and grow developmentally, human beings must learn to allow our ego states to ‘die’ – or let go – so that our soul’s longings can speak to us in the opening that is created, once we do.  We must repetitiously practice these acts of courage, detaching from outcomes and willful intentions enough to let the serendipity of the universe come through, often surprising us by doing a better job of directing our lives than our small ego wishes could ever do.

Goethe goes further to say that until we learn this essential hero’s task, we cannot feel at home and at peace in an unfolding, dynamic, vital universe, one that has no need or desire to be controlled or shaped by our will.   When we over-attach to outcomes and insist on our way, we end up feeling disappointed, frustrated, and bitter.  Thus, we are only ‘troubled guests’ in a dark existence, just trying to get through this life, surviving our circumstances until it ends.

The second half of What to Remember Upon Waking begins with Whyte’s beckoning towards us, that we not succumb to this fate:

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

If I am not a troubled guest on this earth, and not an accidental happening doomed to fate – but instead, one who has been invited to incarnate from ‘another and greater night’ – the vast, unknowable Infinity we call “God” – how would I remember and uphold this essential truth as I wake to begin my day?

I believe we indeed have come from this other and greater womb of intangible mystery. And that we have been invited here for this incarnation on earth.  And apparently, we have accepted this invitation.

The other morning I awoke remembering various dream fragments.  Throughout my life, in my dreams, I often find myself in variations of school settings.  Last night was no different.  I was being asked to come into encounters with other people, having one-on-one meetings with different people (different aspects of myself).  I awakened briefly throughout the night, at the end of each encounter.

They all began with the same feeling: as if I was back in grade school being called into the head principal’s office. This did not happen to me very often in my youth, but when it did, it was never good news.  It involved being disciplined, lectured and punished for some breaking of the rules.   Each dream encounter began with feeling afraid, and having a palpitating heart.  I just could not imagine these meetings going well.

What unfolded in each encounter was seeing each person’s face up close to mine. While I could not recall the content of our conversations, the general feeling was apparent.  What I could not ignore, deny or fail to see was the humanity of the other, in the face of this other.  They were people.  They were real.  They mattered.  So did their perceptions, their feelings, and their experiences.  And so did mine.  My lived experience, different from yet connected to the other’s.  I felt myself becoming the same way in each encounter – more real, more relaxed, more enveloped.  More myself.   As we stayed in conversation, I would become aware of the presence of many others surrounding us.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,

I knew something was (is) opening in me.  I felt both raw and solid.  Being aware of the many other people nearby, I could also feel their humanity, and a sense of us all being connected and holding to the conversation, extracting life from it.  The end of each encounter left me feeling warm, completed, vulnerable, open –alive.  Spirit and matter coming together.

Reflecting further, it becomes apparent to me that the principal’s office is the space within of my own higher authority.  Where things can be real, true and lived.   No longer just a place where a punitive superego annihilates, and feeds on failures, faults or misperceptions.   It can be a place within me where various aspects of my selves can come together, explore contradictions, contend with different perspectives and motives, and be held by a growing sense of a larger witnessing, a wholeness within humanity strong enough to contain my experiences.

As I am willing to reconcile more aspects of my self to my wholeness, and gradually welcome home the ‘troubled guests’ of my psyche, perhaps I am coming together in new ways.  Growing my hero capacity to belong to my own life, and to the larger one around me.

I can sense that this coming together offers me a new challenge – to allow a coming forth from what has been hidden in my heart.  This impulse begins to feel more immediate, more urgent.  I can live with David Whyte’s next questions with more curiosity, wonder and vigor:

what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Perhaps this is what to begin remembering, upon awakening.   Re-membering, from a different place inside.  Asking the questions as a guiding light, not a willful forcing current.  I feel pulled forward by these questions, not needing an immediately narrowed answer.  What indeed waits in the seeds of my deep longings for love, for belonging, for taking my one true place in the world?

Today, I am practicing a visualization.  I am calling myself into the principal’s office of my highest and best self.  Arranging a meeting between my student-learner self and this other inner authority.  We sit together, and I feel a shared interest in what my future days could bring forth.

I have no need for a specific pathway, as I already hold a number of particular ways I am living a meaningful journey.  Or perhaps not yet ready for the next specific path to take.  More importantly, I can feel a sense of background joy in the fact that this meeting is taking place, and I feel ‘looked after’ – a tremendous feeling that uplifts me and generates an abiding gratitude.

It is enough that the meeting between selves is happening, positively and usefully, and I do not want it to end. I am learning to linger here.  In this meeting space, the earth is not dark for me.   I have a growing wisdom about a felt sense of ‘possibility’, one that is meaningful, better than forcing any premature outcome.  Solidness for me, in me.  This leads me naturally towards a state of wonder….

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?

In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?

Joseph Campbell says that if we follow our bliss, we put ourselves on a track, one that has been there all along, waiting for us, and doors open up to set us upon this track, doors that would open for no one else, and would not open before.  As I grow my capacity to hold open possibility in my mind’s eye, my own curiosity and wonder point me towards the track waiting for me.

This is the necessary attitude of the wanderer-traveler, the one who goes forth, open to what comes.  Eyes alert, but not fixed on finding one particular thing, or person.  This attitude pulls us towards the opportunities that we could not see before.

In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

With the embrace of the Wanderer archetype, the journeyer within us can become tolerant of the open and blank spaces in our hearts, in our minds, in our lives.  It is in these open spaces that spirit can enter, and surprise us with a moment of upliftment, if we can bear it.

We come into this life forgetting our place of origin.  We walk this earth dark and troubled until we awaken to our true nature, and to the source from which we awaken.

For today, may we all have the courage to let go of the plans that we have made – letting go of success, letting go of failure – in order to find that one life that is already there, waiting for us?

Something to remember upon awakening.

-Michael Mervosh

The Art of Self Reflection – What To Remember When Waking (Part One)

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

-        David Whyte

(The House of Belonging)

In the forward to Bill Plotkin’s seminal work Soulcraft, the eco-theologian and cosomologist Thomas Berry says that “the soul is fundamentally a biological concept, defined as the primary organizing, sustaining, and guiding principle of a living being”, and that “the universe and the human soul find their fulfillment in one another”.

He says that throughout all of time, “to know how to insert our human affairs into the larger functioning of the universe was the primary context of existence”, and that this is the thing that helps to make life livable.  Therefore, “when we lose our sense of soul, we have trivialized our existence”.   Meaning, vitality and a sense of connectedness shrivel without this primal context for living.

I propose that what we tend to know as ‘mythic’ – more true and real than facts – visits us in that very first instant upon awakening – whether that awakening is from our sleeping state, or other states of unconsciousness.

Much of the work we devote ourselves to in The Hero’s Journey Foundation has to do with the awakening of soul consciousness, that place at the center of our inner (and greater) being where we feel most truly ourselves.  We strive to create the necessary conditions for mystery, magnitude, and meaning to come alive, to create ‘primordial wombs’ from which soul encounters emerge and reveal themselves to us.  We search for pathways and thresholds within perceived obstacles and ordeals; entry through these hard-earned portals allow seekers to undertake adventuresome journeys towards those elusive and essential soul encounters that are lying in wait.

These days, we are working to support those of us seeking those very encounters within the context of today’s post-industrial world, which often appears stripped and void of nature, meaning, mystery or beauty.  Have you noticed that none of our technological advances, career accomplishments, or economic strivings seem to saved us from our own deep human anxieties, which also lie in wait to wrestle with us, on our way to or from sleeping.

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
to which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

David Whyte implies here that our daily journeys from the sleeping world to the waking world offer us mysterious glimpses into our psyche – and access to our soul.  Fleeting, intriguing, frightening, alluring, disturbing, inspiring – we nonetheless go back and forth to and from this larger, deeper, unknown space within – that from which all things begin and end – it is the one place we are sure to visit each day where soul is linked to a living, unfolding universe.

Since we cross this threshold daily (or nightly), we are given consistent opportunities to open to the vast and infinite energies of the invisible world – which closes the minute the ego awakes and becomes aware of itself, and incessantly begins making plans for the day.

It is important to make plans, and I don’t wish to belittle its functionality, or else nothing would get done in our lives.  The plans we make provide us with necessary structure along which energy and action can flow.  It is the riverbed that contains and carries the river, after all.  But this same function seems to be overdeveloped in the modern day ego, and I for one seem quite capable of extinguishing my capacity for joy, wonder, spirit and amazement as I carry out my day’s plans.

(Even as I write, I move back and forth between being completed immersed in the focused interest in composing this particular essay, and endlessly distracted.  One moment I feel the riveting magnitude of soul presence very near to me, the next moment I think about just about everything else, and fret about how I am going to get basic chores done as part of my day.  Agghh!)

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

This line breaks the compulsive spell, pulls my attention back to center, and causes me to pause for a while.  I can feel the resonance of how true these words are for me.  I feel how making my plans and lists can be defensive as well as functional.  How making another chore list first shrinks me, then pulls me away from going deeper into myself, stops me from becoming even more quiet and attentive.  (I just wrote a note to remind myself to drop the car off at the auto service shop tonight!)  My resistance is to giving over completely to that level of open space, and then waiting –  trusting that something more, something worthwhile wants to speak to or through me.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

What can I live wholehearted right now, right here in this moment? Back to basics -  my next breath.  A few more.  Sensing into my chest, my heart space.  My awareness of my body being a vessel.  Then my willingness to become one.

Now the image of being a hollow flute.  The phrase of a journey song comes next: “my heart, the altar”.  I sing this silently, repeatedly to myself.  Stay with it.  The whole song comes now.  Wholehearted-ness for that song.   Then for the particular men and women I have sung it with.   (Five minutes later, I feel more vital. ) How does this small, yet soulful happening emerge from the general sleepwalking I do in my ordinary moments?

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To be human is to become visible. This one line alone deserves time for the art of  self-reflection.   This sentence feels new, as if I have never heard it said before.  New awareness of “humanness requiring visibility”.

It is so easy for me to desire invisibility.  Such a reflexive, habitual inclination; ever since I was a young boy.  But perhaps not as natural to my nature as I tend to think.  Is my endless ‘making plans’ just another way to keep some deeper aspect of myself invisible to myself?  To stay invisible to others?

Each of carries our soul longing hidden in the recesses of our deepest heart’s desires.  We work with the metaphor of becoming miners, traveling down through small openings in the earth, to extract from the dark recesses the jewels that have been formed and shaped through forces of nature and time. If we are fortunate, we will realize these longings have the potential to be unearthed, to be expressed and actualized, so that they become gifts to others.

A lifelong and hidden gift I have silently carried and labored towards for many years, is the creation of particular alchemical spaces needed for soul encounters to take root within the hearts of those miners who are willing to endure the journey towards such spaces.   In order to be of service to this world, I see clearly that my own aliveness and my willingness to take action must increasingly become more and more visible.

As a demonstration of this, I have been consistently writing these essays, despite the strong impulse I feel to shy away from such endeavors.

So the heroic action here is to devote ourselves to the ongoing practice of bringing forth our hidden aliveness.  Sometimes, it will be requisite to do this in the presence of others, so that our aliveness can be useful to others.   Through this entrainment process, more and more people will bring forth their own aliveness, and make that  a gift to be paid forward, to those we will never see and never know.   For me, this awareness helps make life more livable.

To stay with this, I also must continue to recognize where, when and how I am still sleeping.  Or living out a deadness.  I need to keep re-membering to mine and extract this deadness from my life, to the best of my ability.   To journey again and again from ego to soul, from the known to the unknown.   And to remember what soul truly is.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

One of the more popular teachings of Christ came from his Sermon on the Mount, where he brought forth his Beatitudes.  Simply stated, yet profound, they are reflections on virtues which provide a path towards peace and happiness, as one ‘journeys towards knowing God’.  (Matthew 5: 3-12)

A Beatitude worth exploring further is “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”. Neil Douglas-Klotz has provided an interesting translation into English from the original Aramaic in which Christ spoke.   My basic re-interpretation of Douglas-Klotz’s translation is this:

“Blessed are those who have softened their bodies and minds enough to be grounded and open, receiving universal energy vibrations of the earth is their true or ‘natural’ inheritance.”

To remember the universal world, while I walk in this one.

Something to remember upon awakening.

- Michael Mervosh

It is time for all the heroes to go home

if they have any, time for all of us common ones

to locate ourselves by the real things

we live by…we ordinary beings can

cling to the earth and love

where we are, sturdy for common things.

William Stafford

So here I am: After all these years of ascribing to the paradigm of Joseph Campbell’s universal Hero’s Journey myth, I turn back one more to this one incontestable conclusion:  The world needs more ordinary heroes.

This I can say resolutely.  More to the point – we need everyday people to realize an extra-ordinary aim – to participate fully in this life we’ve been given – and to be actively building our capacity to respond authentically and usefully to the opportunities placed before us by circumstance, serendipity, misfortune.  And we need to learn to do so with as much willingness, gladness and grace as we can muster.

Heroes of today can no longer just be larger than life.  Heroes of today need to be willing to be more a part of life, instead of larger than it.  Ideals and idols have always been cast to inspire us; we aspire towards that which they symbolize, and we hold as valued.   A mindful awareness of an inspiring role model should not make us become smaller, or more passive, or in some way relieve us of our ability to respond to encounters  from our deeper capacities.  We must take up the adage that ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’.

So, let’s continue to re-define heroism in and for our current times.  Instead of wishing for larger roles to play, or positions of power to obtain, we must simply become more willing to become captivated by something other (and larger) than our own self concerns – and take heartfelt action from that place.

An even greater challenge for some of us may be letting go of the ideal of being a hero to another – being admired, regarded, looked up to – for deeds well done. Learning to be the hero of our own life, facing the necessary and inevitable challenges and setbacks we face on a daily basis with a renewed conviction or resilience – now that, to me, is heroic enough.  This is how we grow stronger. And daily life will provide the fodder for this strengthening.

For instance, I am writing this essay from on-board a flight I am taking.  Perhaps a trivial fact, except that so far today, the flight began very early this morning, and was diverted from our connecting hub (due to unexpected fog upon arrival) to another airport, where we sat on the tarmac – in a line of planes that then needed refueling.  Which was delayed, delayed further, and then joined in a long line with other diverted flights, waiting on the runway.  Arrived back at the hub, five hours later, with many other delayed passengers, more long lines – this after having my original flight last night cancelled, just before boarding it, due to mechanical problems.  Which is what had me on the early flight this morning to begin with.

So frustration had a justifiable free pass with me for a while today.  Yet the moment of ordinary heroism came while sitting on the tarmac, waiting for a refueling truck. Staying with my ability to allow the authenticity of my frustration, long enough to find a way – any way – beyond it.

That moment came when the plane’s crew opened the door to let in some sunlight and fresh air.  They became human to me then, more than just airline employees.  I became engaged in conversations with them, which surprised me.  (I usually like to stay quiet and keep to myself when I travel.)  We shared a momentary but unmistakably communal feeling; a common-ness came – like when automobile passengers gather on the side of the road during a massive traffic jam.  The sense of frustrated helplessness somehow turns into accepting one’s powerlessness. We let go. Surrender happens.

The flight attendant makes more coffee.  I stick my head out the plane’s door.  A strong, cool breeze blows in. The pilot comes out of the cockpit to make small talk about our situation.  The ground crew rolls up a stairway, comes on board, and makes wisecracks with the flight crew.  No one to blame for what is.   No one to spare me my circumstances.  Nowhere to go but here. No hero to save the day, just me. Perspective finally comes in through the shared space – the simple realness of ordinary beings, made sturdy for common things.

Hours later, still no arrival at my final destination.  Just the writing of this, and   perspective, born of surrender.  The pilot comes through the intercom, apologies for the inconveniences, indicates we are finally nearing our airport.   I have arrived somewhere else in the mean time.

Acceptance.  A sense of connectedness to life in the midst of its inevitable vicissitudes and daily hassles.   One more dragon slain in me, through another day’s unanticipated happenings.  Alive enough to live into the rest of my day.

Not larger than life – but larger, for the moment, than my self-concern.

All the larger than life heroes can go home now, if they have any.

- Michael Mervosh

inexplicable – unable to be explained or accounted for: for some inexplicable reason her mind had completely changed.

For this essay on the Art of Self Reflection, I return once again to the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke’s masterful way with words, showing us in his inimitable way how to navigate the intangible realms of human existence. What does it mean to fear the inexplicable?

Rilke has a particular way of bringing forth essential truths that lie dormant, somewhere below the surface of our awareness. He contends that this most human of fears – the fear of what the ego and mind cannot essentially grasp – is something that dearly compromises the quality of life within a human being, as well as the depths of relationship that could exist between human beings.

Fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens.

It is human nature to move back and forth between protecting ourselves from the world, and venturing forth into the world. We both yearn for and dread the exploration of what we do not know or understand – that which is within us, or out there in the world. Being in a self protective mode, we seek to preserve what is. We keep to what we know – about ourselves, about others, about life in general. In contrast, being in a venturing mode, we seek out new experiences, follow our curiosity, change the status quo, create new possibilities. As human beings, we move back and forth across this continuum, endlessly weaving a together a fabric of preserved and newly lived experiences, as we move throughout the span of our lifetime.

Rilke is saying to us that when we remain caught in the deep fear of what cannot be grasped, explained or known in advance of our exploration (or even cannot be known at all), we gradually become skewed towards preservation tactics in order to feel secure in our lives. He is telling us that this strong pull towards self-preservation gradually and inevitably impoverishes the souls of human beings, and constricts the range of possibilities for human interactions with one another.

Being overly focused on self-preservation, we kill off curiosity, openness, and ultimately, the eros of living. Life is more stable this way, but nothing of surprise, wonder or spontaneity can happen. Life force energies that allow us to be moved, or to be creative, are no longer able to enter us, and take us. Neither can it flow out from the core of our being. Our moods gradually level and flatten. Our thinking becomes fixed; we begin to think we already know ourselves, and our loved ones (as if there were nothing new or more to know). Particularly as we age, we play it safer, tending to lean more towards the ‘explicable’, which is how we become fallow. Nothing much happens.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

It is inevitable that becoming overly self-preserving and cautious slowly brings us towards inertia, leaving us seemingly unable to renew ourselves within the confines of our daily lives – or to move out of the boundaries of daily routines at all. Perhaps the biggest indictment of our adult inertia is boredom.

Outside of pure ignorance, is it not true that human nature feels most vulnerable at the beginning point of any worthwhile or unestablished path? I suppose this is why it can be said that ‘ignorance is bliss’. If we don’t know what we are getting ourselves into, we don’t know enough to be hesitant, thwarted or frightened by what is ‘unforeseeable’. For it is the unforeseen that threatens our sense of safety, security, comfort, certitude. Thus we become anxious, increasingly threatened by what appears unpredictable to us – what life on its own terms brings to us on a daily basis. We also become threatened by what we could bring to life, as we live it out each day.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.

One of the basic tenets of our modern-day Hero Work is to ‘expect nothing, and be ready for anything’. This is one of the primary tasks of an adult who wishes to grow beyond their current capacities. Learning to say ‘yes’ to life, again and again. To develop ourselves, we must begin to take up this inclusive approach to the world’s vicissitudes – and this is no easy task. But Rilke’s premise implies that the reward of taking up such challenges to the ego is a more vital life. As we relate to life on life’s terms, we come alive. We become capable of bringing forth new resources, new life force energy, from within ourselves – because we are more “response-able”, and therefore less reactive and protective. In doing so, we have more to give to life, and become less inclined to simply take from it.

For if we think of this individual existence often as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

Again, Rilke speaks of how much our egos tend to carve out a small space in life, make it our own, and get overly attached to it. Much of our potentiality goes uncultivated and unrealized when we do this. We become ego-constricted and territorial about our possessions and our potentials. We hold onto them, rather than make good use of them; this keeps us small.

Rilke also gives us a useful metaphor here of the psyche. These corners of our rooms, these strips of floors; they eventually imprison us due to the hold we have on them. These well-worn places in our psyches become limiting and fixed, as we ward off what is in the next room, yet alone the basement.

(I am reminded of the many nights I’ve spent at our Journey Intensive site in the West Virginia mountains. It is a natural inclination to want to use a flashlight at night, so we can see better what is right in front of us. At the same time, it makes the darkness surrounding what we illuminate darker than it actually is, something to be kept at bay. When we practice walking in the darkness, we learn to go more slowly, and see what makes more time to be able to perceive. But it also incorporates the darkness into our experience more intimately, and allows it to be something we also fear less.)

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

Here, Rilke makes the bold declaration of moving beyond fear, and beyond an imprisoned consciousness. We are elemental life force energy, bodies that vibrate with energy, creatures of and from this earth. Human beings are in this way elemental, as we have evolved from the earth’s very elements, over hundreds of thousands of years, adapting and bringing forth new and emergent capacities as creative adaptations to our circumstances. We have become so like the life that exists here on the earth.

But our psyches have also evolved and adapted. We have many more rooms and floors to our psychic homes, compared to our ancestors of long ago. And so we create for ourselves new troubles as well. Rilke tells us that we need not mistrust this world, for life itself is not against us. Perhaps it is more true that it is the other way around. That our own scared and hostile minds turn against life as it is, with all its vicissitudes, disappointments and tragedies. Perhaps this is what locks us into the corners of our minds, so that we see ourselves as prisoners.

Rilke goes on – yes, there is terror in and of this world. We also project it from our minds. Yes, there are abysses in this life – and we belong to them, and so must explore them – in the same way we belong to and aim for the mountaintops. Yes, life is dangerous. And safety may be the final danger, precisely because it isn’t recognized as such, so subtle and gradual is its ensnarement. What does it mean to love the dangers at hand? Perhaps we can learn how to stand in presence of danger long enough to extract something meaningful emerging us. Vital life force energy is to be gained from the opportunity a dangerous moment, well faced, can give to us.

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses…

This is one of my favorite passages from Rilke’s great body of work. To hold to what is difficult does not necessarily glorify suffering. It doesn’t mean that pain itself is good for you; it doesn’t mean that life has to be harder than it actually is. But when we dismiss the first noble truth of Buddhist teachings – that life is difficult – and then attempt to subvert or avoid this reality, we tend to create even more severe difficulties in the process.

It is actually quite a tribute to personal development, to pursue the paths most alien to us, as our most unrealized potential lies along that path. This is the hero’s journey, as (s)he would purposely choose the path that has not already been made. If there is already a path, Joseph Campbell would say, it was made by someone else, and so it is meant for somebody else. We must find that path that only we can take, and follow it, in order to find our bliss.

Then Rilke mines the mythic tales, ones where dragons return into their original, true natures – princesses! But we don’t know that in advance; we can’t. It only comes as we face our dragons, practicing loving compassion, in order to enter the realm of the inexplicable. This realm is found in all the great myths.

…perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

This final passage in particular is the one that slays the dragon in me – the dragons are my own fears, of course. This slaying moves me, beyond words. Perhaps everything terrible – in me, in you – is truly in its deepest being, simply a place in us that has known profound helplessness – and is now coming forth, at last, to be helped.

We all must learn to do what it takes to hold on to this deep and compassionate awareness about threatening people, thoughts, or circumstances. Perhaps they show themselves in their dragon forms to us as (primarily unconscious) cries for help. Perhaps these aspects of our own dragons come forth in the same way, secretly hoping that others might finally withstand us and love us – and know these dragons are not our true nature. All tall order, no doubt – that a compassion just might reach towards the worst in us, if we could only recognize it as such.

What threatens us most in our daily reality right now? What is familiar about the way we react emotionally to the perceived threat? How have we endlessly justified that posture? How do we get beyond the familiarity of that defense? So we can now cross a threshold into a new experience or outcome?

What would it require of us – to enter a new path, and go somewhere we have not gone before, beyond the protective constriction of this threatened corner of our room?

When we finally pass through this threshold of fear – we open. And in opening, we can touch love once more, and be made new. In opening to what has been alien and unexplored, we become, inexplicably, beautiful and brave.

-Michael Mervosh