Some two years ago I commented: “… a devotional practice undertaken with love over time generates a momentum no finite thing can contain”. More than ever I’ve found that’s true, in ways easy and hard.
a play of shadow and light
But what if you’re not devotionally minded? What does that even mean, anyway? Beyond humans and pets, who is there to be devoted to? (Some politicians and holy folks keep shedding our trust like snakes wriggling out of old dead skin.) Or if not an incarnate being, how can you be devoted to something (or someone) invisible? Gods may just not do it for you. And as for “momentum”: momentum toward what? I hear you, questioner. I hear you.
“You keep using these words,” goes the oft-quoted meme from The Princess Bride, “but I do not think they mean what you think they mean”. So do they mean anything?
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This morning my wife and I received word that a beloved friend just passed away yesterday in his wife’s arms. He was in his mid-60s, and his death wasn’t from the virus. So “plugged in” he was, to the cosmos, to the pulse-beat of things, to the endless possibilities of his life as a lacrosse coach, high school teacher, father, husband, and spiritual mentor to many, that it’s impossible to feel sad for him. But we sure feel sad for us, for his wife and son and many friends, for the prospect of no longer being able to hug him, talk with him, listen to his stories and his corny humor, his remarkable spiritual journeys and example, and the impact of his deep humility and love on everyone he met. He remarked in passing some months ago that he knew where he was going in “the next step along the journey”, and I’m convinced he did, that his words applied to his passing as much as to anything else. More to the point, we can know, too, if it’s something we want and need and choose to know. Where am I going, after all? Where are we all? No reason to make an idol out of him, something he would have detested. Every reason to make the most of the inspiration he provided.
As Ursula LeGuin writes in A Wizard of Earthsea, “Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it”.
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Grief is an energy flow, like so much else. So is love. Of course that’s not all they are, but I’ve found it’s often helpful to understand them in that way, to see how I can begin to provide a clear channel for their flow, rather than block or wallow or some other reaction. As with grief and love, provide a channel for inspiration, too. Learn how not to fear them, hoard or repulse them, how to see them as part of life, how each of us handles them somewhat differently, how to honor and respect them. Pit or portal? says a Native American elder. What will we make of such experiences? Part of their power is that in the end no one can rush them. They take their own time.
the first of three loads for next winter
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“When I am among the trees”, writes Mary Oliver in a poem by that title,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often …
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So I walk, and bow as I go.
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I’m still learning courage, just as we all are. Tests along the way, but no endpoint, no “I’m as brave now as I can be.” Courage is a practice. And I’ve learned that I miss opportunities for bravery where I need to, and can, practice it daily — in the face of my lazinesses and indulgences. These opportunities don’t look particularly heroic or brave, but that’s because I’m still learning what courage is. Too often I think it’s something somebody else has, or needs to have. Or I bewail its lack in others to whom I give power over my life, giving away the courage I already have. I slip into fear, and then into denial as soon as someone points it out, makes me aware, that I’m acting out of fear.
These are not words of self-blame. They’re words of clearing away, of washing the dishes, polishing the silver, emptying the ash from the woodstove. They are words of working the soil, turning the compost, preparing the growing space for the season to come. Actions that make room for courage to happen. As I prepare for health reasons to leave this teaching career of almost two decades at a private boarding high school, I look for new work. Some of it, some of what I know I need to do, doesn’t offer a paycheck. Some asks me for payment instead, and of a different kind.
Sometimes courage is just inconvenient. I’ll do it, whatever has to be done. If I’m the penguin next off the ice floe, I know that water’s cold. I’m not looking forward to it, but I know it’s necessary. I bring the best heart to it I can, if not for my own sake at this moment, then for others, as I move forward. Plunge. Afterward, I discover — maybe — that was courage. At the time I thought it was “just living my life.” “Guess what,” my life says back at me. “No difference.”
In the end, curiosity is stronger than fear. If I can imagine something different, I’m halfway there. Just catch a hint of it, a flavor, a whisper of something new yet also oddly familiar. There it is again …
Teacher, counselor and author Stephen Jenkinson has become a voice I listen to (“Yes, I hear voices”), to see what I can learn from him. He speaks, among many other things, about our need for elders — for people who have done the work and learned and earned wisdom. He talks about cultural death and the need for witness:
There is a lot of work to be done now, right now, in our time. Some of it is ecological, some political and economic, but all of it is cultural. Work I think is best understood as ‘the thing you’re least inclined to do’, and so we have our work cut out for us. The dominant culture, as near as I can tell, is in the beginnings of a terminal swoon. I don’t think it can be avoided. It’s end can only be prolonged or prompted, veiled or midwifed; those are our choices. The dominant culture was not built as if the last five hundred years on these shores had happened; it was built in spite of those years. It was built with a shrug to the past, and with the view that the past is gone. That is the principal reason for its ending. A culture unwilling to know its ragged, arbitrary origins is fated to a kind of perpetual, uninitiated adolescence, and it is by this adolescent spirit of privilege and entitlement and dangerous amnesia that our culture is known in the world.
We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize. That learning and remembering costs people dearly. The work of building culture is learning and remembering how things have come to be as they are, without recourse to premature, temporary fixes, or to depression and despair. The way things are now, despair is a laziness no one can afford.*
That’s useful: knowing what I can afford. Fear leaves, despair leaves, when I know I can’t afford them any longer. Not a matter of will, or often even of anything other than a realization one day. A judgment, wisdom coming at last. Something taking its place — the place of fear — but also something taking its own place, its rightful position all along. Something bigger, more important. Fear turns out to be just a temporary place-holder, a filler, padding, a zero that ultimately let me count how many spaces have room for something more, native from the beginning. Return.
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*From “There’s grief in coming home“.
Thanks to Philip Carr-Gomm for sending me a link to Griefwalker, a moving and provocative video about some of Stephen’s work. You can watch a trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xLQWM2j3AVg
You can watch the whole film, approximately 70 minutes long, here:
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/7728/GRIEFWALKER–
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A Druid Way 