“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same”, sings Gerald Manley Hopkins, that wonderful bard who observed his world so loving-wisely. You can read the poem I’m reflecting on here at this site, which includes a bite-sized biography, along with short, helpful observations.
“One thing and the same”, Hopkins says, sounding confident, like he really knows.
What? you ask. The thing we all are, a self that “[d]eals out that being indoors each one dwells”: the “indoors” we each inhabit, the self we look out from onto everything around us. Deal it out, pay it out like divination, rope or money or time.
Hopkins gets it. He goes on: “Selves – goes itself, myself it speaks and spells”. Each self does this, it goes as itself, it “selves”, as if we are all verbs now, and everything we do speaks us and conjures us both out of and into the cosmos. To live at all is a magical act, “to be alive twice” as another poet calls it. From time to time we hear the echo of both lives, the two halves of us we can’t ignore, that kindle in us a human restlessness we can never extinguish. It’s also what we are, what we do as selves.
I’m born and I come upon myself, I gradually become self-aware, the self simply a larger and more engaging preoccupation among all the other things I do. Each of us sits in a self like we sit on benches. The bench of the self weathers in place, this place, the world of heights and depths, times and places.
And what is the “speech” and “spell” it utters? Bard-like, Hopkins says it like he hears it: all these selves “Crying What I do is me: for that I came“.
I’m doing it right now, and it also will take me my entire life to do it completely. When my heart stops and my last breath goes out, I’ll have finished this particular doing, one turn on the spiral, whether I become the lichen near the bench or the shadow of tree-trunks or a tree or a human again, or something else “different”, says Whitman in another poem, bard singing to bard and to all of us, “different from what any one supposed, and luckier”.
Have you felt it, luck in the sunlight, possibility on your skin? There’s Druid-luck just in living, which I can know if I heed the reminders, or ignore them and suffer. Either way, it hurts, says therapist Rollo May. I’ll suffer anyway. OK, on to do something through and around and even, if I have to, with my suffering. What I do is me: for that I came.
“Don’t you know yet?” scolds Rilke. (Damn these bards! The conversation hasn’t stopped since awen first stirred in us. One thing and the same. We recognize it in others, in the voice of the Bards, because we’re doing it too.
What? I ask again. Rilke answers, part of the Song singing all of us here, the voice at the center of things that makes music out of us all, the voice we hear in dreams and silence and sound, laughter and tears and the spaces inside us.
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
…..
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
to leave even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Retrieval. Of course we fear death, if we’ve done it so many times before. A healthy fear of death, something I know, rather than terror of what I don’t know. I’ve done this death thing countless times already. What’s one more?
Well, a great deal. How many years to retrieve this time around, to begin to recall things I’ve never forgotten, maybe, but misplaced, thrown out, ripped up and shredded even, for decades, centuries. A self that emerges out of nothing, returns to it, and also manages a retrieval, with the help of crazy bards and singers on the edges, reminding us. Pointing us back to song that’s still singing us, notes on the wind.
What I do is me: for that I came.
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Since my wife and I are too cheap to spend money on cable, we get most of our programming through the internet. Vermont sometimes gets tagged in people’s minds as one of the hinterlands of the U.S., though in fact it’s scheduled to have ultra high-speed internet by 2013, billed as “fastest in the nation,” and VTel (Vermont Telephone) installers are actually ahead of schedule in some areas.
One result of our cable-free existence and frequent obliviousness to whatever is “trending now” is that we often discover programs toward the end of their initial run, or well after they’ve already gone to syndication or archive status. Hulu is one of our friends, so if you’ve already watched the Canadian series “Being Erica” and you’ve moved on to newer fare, this post may not be for you. It may be a case of BTDT (been there, done that). So my electronic alter ego here with his Druidry and opinions and evident desire to pry where it’s sometimes uncomfortable (but interesting!) to pry isn’t offended if you log off and go do your laundry, or at least surf onward toward something more engaging.
==PILOT EPISODE SPOILER ALERT==
If you’re still here, the show’s pilot episode does a good job of making the series premise clear. 32-year old Erica feels she’s over-educated (a Master’s degree) and under-fulfilled (single, and with a low-level telemarketing job). The pilot brings her to a low point — she wakes up in a hospital bed after an allergic reaction, and receives a brief visit from a Dr. Tom, who leaves her with a business card that reads “the only therapy you’ll ever need.” As Erica and the audience simultaneously discover, he’s able to send his patients back through time to deal with events in their pasts that they regret. Not to “fix” them in some facile way, but to learn more fully what they have yet to teach.
Vancouver Actor Erin Karpluk, who plays Erica, reveals a wonderful vulnerability and resilience, and she develops a daughter-father chemistry with Dr. Tom, played by veteran Michael Riley. There’s also a “Canadian” flavor to the series, by which I mean something mostly vaguely felt, but nevertheless detectable at certain moments: many episodes are less politically correct, more real, better scripted and more risk-taking than the typical formulaic and “safer” equivalent might end up being in the States. There’s been abortive planning to make both U.K. and U.S. versions.
So you know I just have to make a connection about now. Ah, and here it is, right on schedule. In my experience, the past is not some fixed thing, written into concrete forever, like one false step into a bog that draws you down and suffocates you. Instead, it depends for its whole existence on you, in your present, here and now, in these circumstances and with this awareness, to understand and explore it. Change your understanding of the past, and your past itself can change in almost any sense you care to claim. Not what the “facts” are, which is almost always the least important thing*, after all (peace to all those police procedural shows and their fans!), but how they matter and still shape you today. Just as history gets revised through time, as we gain new understandings and perspectives, so too do our own experiences, choices and destinies appear new or different to us as we change. That bully in grade school turns out to have helped us develop a thicker skin, or empathy — or an unacknowledged contempt for “trailer trash,” or a keen taste for revenge that dogs our heels to this day. Pick your blessing or poison.
The future is what is fixed, the track we’re still following, and reconfirming right now with our current habits, choices and focus — fixed, and set in stone — until we “change” our pasts by knowing and owning them more fully. Seen from this perspective, “fate” is undigested, rejected past that’s come back to haunt you. Healing comes not from literally changing “what happened” — possible only through repression or selective recall — but from squeezing out of each experience every last drop of wisdom and growth we can get from it. Yes: easier said than done. Much easier, often.
But if we find our pasts too painful to deal with, we’ll not only carry them around with us anyway, regardless, but miss out on their lessons as well. As therapist Rollo May said, “Either way, it hurts.” The point is not avoidance of pain, but growth. My past comes at me whispering (or shouting, depending), “Do something with your pain, Dude.” Revisiting and re-imaging the past may sound all New-Agey and Hallmarky, but if it’s one way among many to heal, why mock it or discount it, unless you love your pain more than anything else you have? “Yes, it may be pain, but it’s mine, my darling, my precious. Go dredge your own.” Gollum much?!
This present moment is the pivot, the hinge, the point of transformation, if I’m ever going to act on those New Year’s resolutions that now seem so distant. How many of them have I achieved? (In a December post, I confess to not making any, at least not big ones, partly for this reason.) Baby steps. What’s the smallest change I can make? That’s often the best starting point, because unlike the large resolution, I really can do the small stuff, and stick with it. And then build on it. Treat it all as experiment. Document it — write it down. (Oscar Wilde says one should keep a journal so that one always has something sensational to read.) My life as lab for change. Talk about a show.
Part of the appeal of “Erica,” of course, is watching somebody else go through this. Yet this isn’t merely a voyeuristic thrill so much as it is a provocation to reflect. A significant part of the interest of the series for me is that even Erica’s therapist Dr. Tom, while often truly guru-wise with her issues, isn’t God, or some perfected being. (We often really can see and understand others’ problems more clearly than our own. The challenge is not to abuse this insight, but make the most of it in the best way for our own specific circumstances.) He still has his struggles too — deep ones, as we come to discover, ones that come play a role in Erica’s therapy, to the dismay and growth of both of them.
And my response was “How right!” A perfect being would be a bit of a pain, and might have forgotten (or never known) what it’s like, this human gig. Jesus is never more useful and accessible than when he suffers humanly: when his friend Lazarus dies and he weeps, when he gets angry and physical at the money-changers for profaning the Temple, when the fig tree has no fruit because it’s not the season, and Jesus curses it anyway, when his friends ditch him to save themselves. This human thing, he gets it.
Incidentally, I’ve never understood the Christian obsession with sin. We’re all guilty and imperfect. Check. We’ve messed up. Check. But the point is that our pasts are our teachers. They help us grow. Our “sin” is what tempers and forges and perfects us in the end. Yes, it’s a long end. We’re all slow learners, those “special ed” kids, every one of us. A sequence of lives to learn and experience and grow and love in makes sense for this reason alone. For God or any Cosmic Cop to damn us to hell for “sin” cuts off the whole reason we’re here, from this perspective. It’s like flunking everyone out of first grade because we haven’t mastered algebra yet. We’re not ready. Give us time. Life’s tough enough to break every heart, several times if necessary — and to remake it bigger. OK, here endeth the lesson.
==Final Season Spoiler Alert==
Except not quite. The fourth and final season — Hulu doesn’t carry it — of “Being Erica” comes out this month on DVD, and Amazon.ca just sent email confirmation that it’s shipped. My wife and I are looking forward to watching Erica become a therapist: “Dr. Erica” in her own right. Isn’t that part of our journey, too? Out of our experience we grow, and then we can help others along the way, specifically because of who we are, and what we’ve learned. Our imperfection and individuality are our great gifts, which we grow into ever more fully. That’s an eternity to look for, if you’re in the market for one.
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*Even facts prove slippery, as any attorney, judge and gathering of eyewitnesses knows. But sometimes it’s precisely a fact that makes all the difference. Then it’s usually a fact that confirms or disproves a perspective, and so it throws us back to the centrality of perspectives and understandings once again.
Image: Being Erica.
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A Druid Way 