book list: in the absence of the ordinary
Title: In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty
Author: Francis Weller
Summary: In the Absence of the Ordinary frames our current era as a rough initiation--an upending experience of profound trauma and transformation that demands we reorient our ways of thinking, being, and relating....Weller guides us in naming our collective traumas and peeling back the false armor of modernity. Here, we're called to the depths--to understand the power of descent, cultivate the necessary skills of initiations, and distinguish between the self and the soul. This book invites us back into collective alignment with the wider world of belonging. It gives shape to the emptiness we carry, teaches us to welcome our experiences with reverence, and calls upon us to face the myriad ways that modern life severs us from our inherent interdependence with the living earth. In each essay, Weller fortifies us to become immense--to meet these unpredictable times with presence and faith, to restore our soul's place in the soul of the world, and to hold steady, amid and for it all.
Memorable Quotes:
We have entered a prolonged season of descent that has taken us down into a different geography. In the imagery of myth and fairy tales, we have left the ordinary world and have entered the underworld, a sightless terrain that is shadowy and strange.
In this shadowed terrain, we encounter a landscape familiar to soul--loss, grief, death, uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear. We have--in the old language of alchemy--crossed into the nigredo, the blackening. The alchemists described this time as a season of decay, of shedding and endings, of falling apart and undoing.
From the perspective of the soul, down is holy ground.
Soul draws us downward, into the geography of vulnerability, tenderness, loss, intimacy, and death. It keeps us close to longing, beauty, ritual, outrage, and the forest of imagination.
Soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy. To know soul is to feel our wild entanglement with all things, revealing our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi, the soul of the world.
Restraint offers a breath, a pause, a moment of reflection, which allows things to be revealed. Restraint enables something to ripen before we move into action.
We become susceptible to mystery, to revelation. We do not know what is going to happen, and this truth keeps us humble, vulnerable and open to possibilities.
Not knowing situates us at the edge of discovery, especially when we are in the uncharted waters of the underworld.
...recognizing and valuing the necessary work that takes place in the dark.
It is the realm of the soul--of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally.
Fear and anxiety readily appear in times like these when the ground of the ordinary is unsettled. Our work is to turn towards these jittery guests and make a place at the table to offer tea and soup, a warm place to rest.
Our times remind us of something inevitable but strangely denied: we are vulnerable, interdependent animals, clinging delicately to our little thread of life.
We do not know what will happen today or tomorrow, and this brings us to the intimate truth of our mutual tender existence.
We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes. It is simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another.
Can we coax a few words of praise from our lips? Perhaps recite a poem to the birds, plant seeds, call a friend, pray, read the great myths that tell us, again and again, how we might find out way through the impossible. This is a season of remembering the ancient rhythms of soul. It is a time to become immense.
To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world--a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty.
To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being--weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear--everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.
We become immense, not in some grandiose, "I've got this" kind of way, but in a way where we become flexible like a willow, taking it all into our open arms and offering shelter to all that is frightened and vulnerable.
The vitality of the animate, sensuous world and our encounter with the sacred depend on our souls being fully alive! A soul that is awake is entangled with the living world--its beauty, allure, and wonder, its sorrow, rips, and tears.
Soul responds to crisis by awakening to a deeper sense of purpose, leaning into how it can contribute to the repair and renewal of the world.
The soul recognizes the markers of descent--darkness, sorrow, anxiety--as requiring radical change. The conditions of trouble and uncertainty activate some profound movement toward alterations in the psychic landscape. These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs. We are in such a threshold time.
One of the essential movements that made us human was our ability to hold one another in times of grief and trauma. This skill has, for the most part, been lost under the extreme weight of individualism and privatization. This has had a profound impact on how we process and metabolize our personal encounters with loss and intense emotional experiences. Without the familiar and reliable container of community and family, these times can penetrate our psychic lives in a shattering way, leaving us shaken, frightened, and unsure of our next footstep.
Pain itself is not pathological. The pathology emerges from the isolation that all too often surrounds our experience. A holding environment is a form of ritual ground, within which we can pour our grief, fear, and pain and trust that it will be held.
It is as if we intuitively know that someone should have responded to our distress, and when they did not show up, the thought fell on us like ash that it must be because of our unworthiness.
Ritual initiation radically reshapes our sense of self. It is meant to break us open to the widest possible experience in identity.
In an ideal situation, identity slowly emerges from the rich loom of inner and outer threads, woven together to craft something unique and beautiful. Until the age of initiation, the coalescing self is meant to be sheltered, protected, and allowed to burrow deep into the womb of family and village. This identity, however, is not large enough to contain the wild edge of the soul's calling or the demands of the daimon. When the safety of the familiar confronts the yearning of the soul, it is time for initiation. It is a time of disruption and eruption as the demands of the soul make themselves known. It is at this point that the elders recognized the need to end the life of the youth, as they knew it, and ritually escort them across the threshold into a new sense of self. Trauma enacts the same shifts in identity, often without the guidance, witnessing and containment of the village.
Traditional initiation is what I call a contained encounter with death.
These ordeals dislodge the current sense of self and radically reshape it through encounters with vastly larger energies.
Traditional initiation breaks us into a wider and more inclusive experience of self. We become part canyon, part meadowlark, part cloud bank, part village. We are made porous through these profoundly deranging experiences, broken open to allow ourselves to be penetrated by the holiness that pervades all things. Through this communion, we feel our kinship with the singing, breathing world/cosmos. We become immense and connected to the whole. We fall in love with the world and learn to protect what we love.
Trauma is the uncontained encounter with death.
The soul finds cracks in the foundation and brings to the surface what we attempted to bury, in hopes of completing the initiation that remained latent in the trauma.
The German word for trauma is seelenershuetterung, which means "soul-shaking." We are shaken in times of trauma, disoriented, and bewildered. Trauma enters our beings at profoundly deep levels, not unlike the conditions of initiation.
Whereas initiation breaks us open to the widest possible aperture of inclusion in connection to the breathing cosmos, trauma isolates us and fragments us into the smallest imaginable hub of existence.
What reconstitutes the psyche after trauma, in addition to understanding what happened, is reestablishing our place within the wider cosmological context.
These conditions are what help us restore the psyche after trauma: 1) it requires a context: community....2) It requires a certain energetic: ritual...3) It requires a certain vibration: the Sacred...4) it requires a certain spaciousness: Time...5) It requires a certain terrain: Place.
We need to slip into soul time, "geologic time." This expanded sense of time allowed the timeless to break through, offering glimpses of the eternal that rooted the new life of the initiate in something vast.
When these five elements are woven together, the container is fortified, and we are able to cross the threshold and enter into our own adult lives with the capacity of honoring life and feeding the soul of the world.
This is the process of homecoming. When we are able to return to the original ground of our belonging, we come home and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
The immediate need of our time is for ripened and seasoned adult human beings to take their place in our communities; individuals who carry a deep and abiding fidelity to the living body of this benevolent earth, to beauty, and to their own souls.
Through the long labors of multiple initiations, individuals were gradually crafted into persons of substance and gravity.
We are meant to cross many thresholds in our lifetime, each a further embodiment of the soul's innate character.
Our souls must be shaped by a process of intense ritual encounter, communal reflection, and immersion in the natural and supernatural worlds. In other words, to become an adult, certain gateways needed to be crossed for that territory to be fully embedded within the person.
As we mature, we are asked to come into a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. We are called to develop the manners that help sustain the body of this exquisite world. Values such as respect, restraint, mutuality, reciprocity, gratitude, and courage help to fortify our ability to stand and protect what we love. We are here to participate in the ongoing creation, to offer our imagination, affection, and devotion to the sustaining of the world.
We are living in a collective field of sorrows that will take a long, long time to metabolize.
In some northern European cultures, the season of grieving the loss of someone close was known as a period of living in the ashes. This extended time was an era of descent, a movement into the underworld where the bitter tincture of grief was meant to be churned and metabolized into medicine for the community. It was a sacred time, a time out of time, in which the primary work was digesting sorrow.
Times of great uncertainty call for a level of generosity to ourselves that helps to offset the effects of trauma that can often envelop our emotional bodies. This must be our first and primary intention: to hold all that we are experiencing with compassion; to offer a safe place for our fears and grief to land.
It is the great work of the heart to behold our life as eminently worthy of compassion and love. We will not figure our way through this maze of grief and suffering. We must, instead, learn to turn toward our sorrows with kindness, tenderness, and affection.
Nothing ever heals in an atmosphere of judgment or criticism. We contract and get small under such conditions. We open and soften only when the space around us invites revelation and connection.
A working definition of self-compassion is that it is the internalized village.
There is a premise in the alchemical tradition that says we must keep the materials warm for them to ripen in the vessel. If we do not, our sorrows and fears will harden and congeal, making movement impossible. When we hold these challenging emotions with affection, concern, compassion, and interest, they stay flexible and fluid, capable of change. We keep them warm by holding a steady vigil with these difficult guests and not turning away and neglecting what these pieces of our soul life need from us.
Be mindful of how much conditioning we have received that tells us to go it alone; to not need anyone or bother anyone else with our struggles. Challenge those thoughts. "This is," as one of my teachers said, "the solitary journey we cannot do alone." Coming into the company of others, human and more-than-human, reassures us and adds to the internal feeling of safety.
Patience creates a state of spaciousness where the deeper rhythms of the soul can reemerge. Patience also invites a creative emptiness where the unimagined can arise. We are not the authors of our healing. Our task is to generate a space of receptivity to dreams, images, insights, intuitions, and inspirations, all through the hospitality of patience.
It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss that, when left untouched, block our access to the vitality of the soul. To be able to freely move in and out of the soul's inner chambers, we must first clear the way. This requires finding meaningful ways to speak of sorrow. It requires that we take up an apprenticeship with sorrow. Learning to welcome, hold, and metabolize sorrow is the work of a lifetime.
It takes tremendous psychic strength to engage the wild images, searing emotions, chaotic dreams, grief-stained memories, and visceral sensations that arise in times of deep grief. We must build soul muscle to meet these times with anything resembling affection. The apprenticeship is long.
[Grief] is a skill that must be developed, or we will find ourselves migrating to the margins of our lives in hopes of avoiding the inevitable entanglements of loss.
The skill of grieving well enables us to become current--to live in the present moment and be available to the electricity of life. We gradually turn our attention to what is here, now, and pay less attention to our need to repair history.
Coming to know sorrow as a companion helps to ease our fear and offers us the opportunity to come into a more ongoing and abiding connection with this inevitable presence in our lives.
The third layer to our apprenticeship concerns our ability to stay present in the adult when working with the movements of sorrow in our world. Only the adult can work with grief. Only the adult has the spaciousness and skill to hold and engage sorrow's tangled edges. Learning how to migrate this into the adult's hands is central to our apprenticeship.
Silence is a form of hospitality to what is most tender in us. It offers a courtesy of attention and witnessing that is often lacking in our cultural attitudes of getting beyond our grief as soon as possible. Solitude is a deep bow to the soul's need for time alone in which to bring a patient affection for these raw and vulnerable emotions.
There is no healing path that does not course through the territory of self-compassion.
Our final element is remembering our wild entanglement with all our relations. We cannot face the sorrows of the world or our own personal encounters with loss in isolation. We need to feed a robust companionship with the wider world, with the cosmos itself. Our apprenticeship is rooted in this extended sense of kinship with the surrounding watersheds, the microbes and root structures, the clouds and star clusters.
What slowly emerges from this long apprenticeship, this vigil with sorrow, is a spaciousness capable of holding it all--the beauty and the loss, the despair and the yearning, the fear and the love. We become immense: the apprenticeship is patiently crafting an elder.
After years of holding steady with sorrow, a distillation of wisdom occurs. We develop a capacity to see in the darkness and find there, in the depths of it all, something holy, something eternal. We touch the indwelling sacredness of the life we inhabit, digesting bitterness and returning with a determination to feed the community. We become a hive of imagination, dispensing what we have gathered over this extended education of the heart.
Elders are a composite of contradictions: fierce and forgiving, joyful and melancholy, intense and spacious, solitary and communal. They have been seasoned by a long fidelity to love and loss. We become elders by accepting life on life's terms, gradually relinquishing the fight to have it fit our expectations. An elder has no quarrel with the ways of the world. Initiated through many years of loss, they have come to know that life is hard, riddled with failures, betrayals, and deaths. They have made peace with the imperfections that are inherent in life. The wounds and losses they encounter become the material with which to shape a life of meaning, humor, joy, depth, and beauty. They do not push away suffering, nor wish to be exempt from the inevitable losses that come. They know the futility of such a wish. This acceptance, in turn, frees them to radically receive the stunning elegance of the world.
An elder is a storehouse of living memory, a carrier of wisdom. Elders are the voice that rises on behalf of the commons, at times fiery, at times beseeching. They live simultaneously outside culture and as its greatest protectors, becoming wily dispensers of love and blessings.
It is ordinary to know loss and sorrow, to be taken below the surface of life and be reshaped by the currents of grief. It is ordinary to be deepened by the draw of sorrow and its intense washing, clearing away old debris and outdated strategies. It is ordinary to feel the aperture of the heart open because of our intimacy with grief. No longer compelled by the allure of being special, we are free to take our place in the world, casting blessings by the simple offer of our presence, seasoned by sorrow.
We are all preparing for our own disappearance, our one last breath. It is difficult to pick up this thread and hold it in our hands.
How do we say goodbye? How do we acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in our lives--those we love, those who touched our lives with kindness, those whose shelter allowed us to extend ourselves into the world? How do we let go of sunsets and making love, pomegranates, and walks on the bluff? And yet, we must. We must release the entire fantastic world with one last breath. We will all fall into the Mystery. We are most alive at the threshold of loss and revelation.
We are required to periodically surrender and meander in the vast uncharted terrain of the underworld. These are times initiated by soul.
It is helpful to see this as an inevitable and necessary time, a time of shedding and letting go, of sitting close to the furnace of death as it cooks away all that is spent and no longer serving life. our time in the nigredo is a period of dissolution. Old patterns and perceptions, old, outworn identities begin to dissolve as we are unmade. Things fall apart. There is an unraveling, an emptying of hope, and an undermining of our great heroic enterprise to be in control and rise above our suffering.
Coming to understand that much happens outside of our consciou interventions is freeing and adds to our faith in the capacities of soul to take us where we need to go in these unexpected times of descent.
The process of change is not one of addition and growth but one of letting go, decay, subtraction, and death, what the alchemists called putrefactio. It is a via negativa, a road of negation. Like nature, it has a returning rhythm of slow movements or stillness, repetitive thoughts and feelings, and memories that arise repeatedly. We come to see that this season is necessary for any spring to unfold.
Our time in the underworld brings us close to sorrow. Our grief carries love in it; love darkened by the loss of friends, homes, marshes, marriages, children, animals, and dreams. It is this mode of love that leads us toward the black tones of duende, a fierce love--musty, gritty, and suffused with powdered glass. We weep tears of darkness, gripped by what is calling us close to the earth. Duende is a wild, vital energy, and when it touches us, as it often does when sorrow's fingers caress the soul, we feel strangely unsettled, as though something in our underground world has been violently shaken. We feel a strange mixture of immobility weighed down by the sediments of grief--and activation in the deep cavern of soul when duende moves us. Duende asks for movement, for some form of expression that honors the depth of feeling that is present. It rises through the soles of our feet, carrying the black earth into our bodies aching for full voice.
This is our true inheritance: the wild, undulating majesty of the soul.
Soul as root, as well as heartbeat, the perennial ground that binds the human and the more-than-human worlds together.
We have forgotten the grandeur of the soul, our innate inheritance, and have been reduced to trying to keep ourselves afloat in the boat of self.
Soul offers continual intimations of belonging. And isn't that what we need in these times--a sense of belonging that is entangled with melting glaciers, cedar waxwings, the cries of families separated at borders and whispers shared deep in the night between lovers? To step into the domain of soul is to enter a rich and vibrant terrain punctuated with images and eruptions of affection.
Whereas the self refers definitions and structure, soul is too rambunctious to be contained in one simple story, particularly our biographical narrative. That is, in part, why there are so many variations of fairy tales and myths. Soul requires a multitude of ways to express its full nature.
The ground of our being is wide and deep. We are part wind, part track of moonlight on water, part dreaming coyote, part slumbering bear. To attend to these wider strands of soul life binds us with the dreaming Earth, the soul of the world.
When we turn our attention to the inner world, we frequently do so with an eye toward evaluation and critique. We look for flaws and defects, casting about for evidence of failure. This gaze is harsh and causes the soul to retreat. I have never seen anything open or change in an atmosphere of judgment. An approach of reverence, on the other hand, is foundational to a life imbued with soul. From this way of seeing, we recognize that everything possesses a measure of the sacred, including our sorrows and pain. How we approach our inner life profoundly affects what comes to us in return.
All true intimacy requires an approach of reverence, deep regard, and an unknowing of who or what we are meeting. It is our bow honoring the exchange.
We are designed for encounter; our senses are rivers of connection in a continuous exchange with the world around us. How deeply we experience this encounter, what we come to recognize and discover, is a question of presence, of reverence.
The idea of the vessel is one freqeuntly referenced in spiritual traditions and in the work of therapy. The idea suggests that deep psychic work requires a holding space, a secure container, within which the work of change can take place. When grief arises, in any one of its many shapes, it asks to be held by us, carried close to the heart, and nourished by our affection. We are asked to slowly build a vessel spacious enough to contain all the wild movements of a soul in grief.
The vessel is created by work that takes place both within and without. It is shaped by how we hold what is present in our lives and it is enriched by how we are held by the surrounding field of friendships and the world.
We are asked to bring our warmth to the material and slowly allow it to cook. This is the work of alchemy.
It takes strength to engage the energies emergeing from the psyche. It takes a strong vessel to engage the wild images, surges of grief and remorse, the difficult memories that return, the agitations and depressions, desires, and longings. The vessel, strengthened by our attention and devotion, becomes capable, over time, of containing it all.
It is not about resolving our issues or repairing the past but becoming more spacious and capable of holding all that psyche and life bring to us.
Discipline is the effort and muscle of vesseling, without which the vessel breaks. We all want to invoke the wild, passionate, creative energies in our lives, but without discipline, without containment, we will burn out.
In a very real way, we cannot cultivate a psychological or soulful life without containment.
When we practice the arts of vessling, we extend an intimacy to what is moving in the soul. This happens through the slow, continuous building of the vessel. Think of therapy, for example, and the ongoing repetition, hour by hour, turning over the materials of psyche--images, dreams, moods, memories, fantasies, confusions, complexes, relationships--all requiring a space to be witnessed and deepened, allowing the masa confusa to slowly yield some new precious drop of insight.
Restraint invites a pause, a breath, a moment of reflection. How rarely we do this--pause, breathe, reflect. It is a core practice in the art of ripening. We must grant time and space for things to ripen and mature. Insights, intuitions, encounters, and dreams, all require time to incubate and consolidate into something substantial. We continually reveal and share things too soon, rarely allowing a new revelation time to mature and become part of our psychic ground.
Our constant management and manipulation of all things psychic reveal a lack of faith in the movements of soul. It is essential to practice noninterference, letting the deep work of soul go on without our interventions.
Restraint is a form of trust in the deep workings of soul.
Grasping to satisfy every hunger leaves no room for the generosity of the world to find us. Restraint is a form of faithfulness: faith that we will be cared for; that we will be offered kindness and care from others when our hearts and souls are troubled.
Restraint is a form of discipline. It offers a holding space, a vessel, in the old alchemical language, for cooking the raw material, the prima materia, into a new shape.
Restraint moves contrary to the goals of acquisition and accumulation. It is, rather, a value that serves the commons, arising as it does from our long story of mutual survival.
The action/nonaction of restraint suggests that there is a value in holding back and limiting the movements we are wanting to make. Restraint recognizes the dangers of continuous growth, addition and consumption. It leans into the wisdom of moderation.
In an age of "you can have it all," there is an implicit entitlement to consume, extract and possess. What drives this rapacious appetite is an interior sense of emptiness and lack.
Soul...values repetition. Repetition is a form of sustained attention, returning us repeatedly to a place, a person, or a practice, which engenders depth and familiarity. It is in the very essence of repetition that we come to know something more intimately, whether a partner, a friend, or our own interior worlds.
Soul engages repetition in many ways. Consider how often we are brought back to the cave of our wounds. We are taken to these places, often unwillingly, as a way of remaining close by, not straying too far from something essential in the making of soul.
The ritual of life is reduced to the routine of existence. That is repetition without soul. That is the drone of addiction. That is repetition that deadens. Soulful repetition offers a way to foster the art of remembering.
Repetition is a gesture of affection, of fidelity. We return again and again to tend what it is we love and, by doing so, we keep it alive and vital.
What does our heart require in order to feel alive and connected to the wider expanse of swifts and swallowtails, lichen, and Mozart? One essential thing we need is time. We need to slow down and come into the spaciousness of not doing.
I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm because this is how the soul moves.
Geologic speed--the rhythm of eons, of millenia--is etched deep in our bones. When we grant ourselves the time and pace of stone, we come into a deep memory of who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
Geologic speed weaves through our minds, bodies, and souls, shaping our instincts, dreams and longings. In our modern frenzied culture, however, with its twin obsessions of progress and speed, we rarely address this intrinsic mode of being. We are more familiar with the din of the machine, and the hum of the computer, but rarely the songs of the soul. What matters most to our soul is found in places of slowness, the terrain of geologic speed. For the sake of our souls and the soul of the world, slow down and come into the rich loam of the waiting world.
So often, our efforts at change in our lives mask subtle and not-so-subtle acts of self-hatred. We attack portions of our life with a vengeance, fully believing that our weakness or inadequacy, our neediness, or our failures are the reasons for our suffering and if only we could be free of them, then we would enter into a state of perfection; all would be well. Our obsession with perfection is itself a strategy that we cling to, to overcome our feelings of being outside the wall of welcome.
Giving up our muscular agendas of self-improvement is an act of kindness. It says that by befriending our life, we deepen our capacity to welcome what is, what comes, and whoever arrives at the interior door of our soul's house. We do not often get to decide who or what shows up in the "guest house," as Rumi says, but we can cultivate an atmosphere of curiosity and receptivity. Self compassion gradually becomes one of the basic elements of maturation. We slowly relinquish the harsh program of ridding ourselves of our outcast brothers and sisters for the sake of fitting in; we simply set another place at the table.
Progress is one of our culture's most cherished fictions, but it can do great harm when applied to the life of the soul. As soon as we are not moving forward or progressing, we feel something is wrong and that we are failing, so we redouble our efforts. What self-compassion offers us is the space and breath to listen and take notice of how our soul is moving at this moment; what it is asking us to pay attention to at this time.
One of the deepest sources of depression for the soul is a diminished range of participation in our life. To be fully alive: that would be the goal.
Every day we are asked to sit with pieces of our interior world that lie outside of what we find acceptable and welcome. We must explore our learned responses to our places of suffering and actively engage these pieces of soul life. We have often treated these parts of ourselves with indifference, if not outright contempt.
Our ability to receive love is proportional to our capacity to welcome all of who we are.
We were meant to have a lifelong engagement with a beautiful and strange otherness. It was meant to be an ongoing presence, not an exception or something we capture on our cameras while on vacation in Yellowstone or by watching it on the Nature channel.
Nearly every day in my practice, I hear someone talk about feeling empty...what if what we are experiencing is a deep silence, a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red-tailed hawk, or the melancholy call of the loon? What if this emptiness is the great echo in our soul of what it is we expected and did not receive?
This rip in the fabric of our belonging is what Glendinning calls our "original trauma." This trauma carries with it all the recognizable symptoms associated with this psychic injury: chronic anxiety, dissociation, distrust, hypervigilance, disconnection, as well as many others.
Our soul life diminishes, flickers dimly, and rather than feeling a kinship with the entire breathing world, we inhabit and defend a small shell of a world, occupying our daily life with what linguist David Hinton calls the "restless industry of shelf."
We too are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play, and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation.
When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the haert, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and, in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, iridescent body of the planet.
The first move we can make to help restore our connection with the beautiful and strange otherness is to recall the soul's primal rehythm. This rhythm was established over hundreds of thousands of years when we walked the earth. Our senses and minds were synchronized to streams and night skies, to times around the fire, to the long, patient wait of the hunter, and to listening to stories told by elders. We moved slowly and drank in the entire spectrum of life through our bodies. We need to take up an apprenticeship with slowness and remember this ancient mode of being.
We are permeable, exchanging the vibrancy of wind, pollen, color, and fragrance. Life moves into us and through us like a breeze, affecting us and shaping us into a part of the terrain. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us. To mend the attachment disorder, we simply have to step out of our isolated room of self and into the wider embrace that awaits each of us.
Our entire biological structure is designed for engagement with the world.
Gratitude is a spiritual responsibility . A grateful heart acknowledges and participates in the ongoing exchange with life.
We can feel either grateful or alienated but never at the same time. Gratefulness softens our sense of alienation. Our belonging is celebrated in thanksgiving, in full appreciation that we are both giver and receivers in the exchange of blessings.
The constancy of the sun, moon, and stars, the generosity of the rains, rivers, the earth, the abundant richness of birdsong, the fragrance of roses, wet streets after a downpour, the delectable sweetness of blackberries warm with the heat of the day, the luscious colors of fall, all are offered to us freely. When we listen and take in the astonishingly sensuous earth, we come awake to the thunderous beauty that surrounds us. We are inundated with the world pouring through every opening, and in this awareness, we recognize a fundamental truth: we are of the earth. In fact, as cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests, humans were put on earth to gawk. That is our cosmological destiny! To be astonished, amazed, and delighted in the intricate weavings of the cosmos is to listen fully, and to send out our sigh of appreciation is what is asked in return.
Every meal we eat is a cosmological event.
Gratitude is the other hand of grief. It is the mature person who welcomes both. To deny either reality is to slip into chronic depression or to live in a superficial reality. Together they form a prayer that makes tangible the exquistite richness of life in this moment. Life is hard and filled with suffering. Life is also a most precious gift, a reason for continual celebration and appreciation.
Within this sacred cavern of night a sacred gestation is taking place.
What do we need to stay present and engaged and to keep our love moving into a world of radical uncertainty and change? The world aches for our love, our affection, and our devotion. Our hearts need to be supported to keep the aperture of love open and flowing outward. We need robust medicine for the Long Dark.
Friendship is meant to be reciprocal, a mutual exhange of care, warmth and attention. This truth tells us that any relationship of substance requires effort and nourishment. Friendship is always mutual. It is not something we simply receive; it is something we exchange.
Friendship and community are protective. When we live within the folds of friendship, we can sense that whatever befalls us, we will be sheltered under the covering of community. We will not be left to fend for ourselves.
Imagination is rarely understood as central to our psychological lives. For the most part, imagination is seen as either wishful thinking or a waste of life. Soul revels in the undulations of the imaginal: the sensuous, spiraling, gyrating movements of images arising from the unseen world. Carl Jung said that the psyche's primary activity is image-making.
Imagination invites us to loosen our fixed sense of identity and allow a more porous experience to arise. In other words, our rigid definition of who we are begins to soften in the realm of the imaginal, when the separation between self and world is relaxed.
We must listen and feel the dreaming Earth to keep our world green and vital.
The wound brings us closer to the ground of soul. When we free ourselves from the esxcessive commentaries about our wounds being evidence of our unworthiness, we begin to see how the wound has acted as a catalyst, drawing us into the eros of darkness. Here we encounter vulnerability, sorrow, heartache, longing, affection, tenderness, surrender, nightmares, grace, intimacy, touch, and listening.
Our wounds keep us circling soul, around the depths of our 'seecret inside flesh.' This gravitational pull draws us into a persistent relationship with our weakness and vulnerability, and wih what is most intimate about our interior lives.
We find soul at the margins.
The slow digestion of our wounds, the gradual enclosure of our suffering within the container of compassion, yields the medicine the village needs. Vesseling the wound! The slow titration of trauma/wounds into blessings.
In the Long Dark, we find a different way of knowing, one rooted in soul. If we remember the injuction to appraoch with reverence, we might sense the holiness that dwells in the darkness.
The medicine of entanglement, the web of relationship that gathers everything together: hillsides, cloud banks, forests. We found our shared roots that connect us with the anima mundi, and by extension, the heart of the matter--the sensual, erotic field of aliveness.
The deeper we go down into psyche, our sense of individual uniqueness retreats farther and farther into darkness. We become increasingly part of the collective.
In the soul medicine of the Long Dark, we find not only permission to rest and slow down but also encouragement. It's in the place of rest that dreaming can occur. It's also where we begin to feel the intimate movements of soul. Soul is subtle so we need to move at a rhythm slow enough to become attune to her emerging mystery.
We are not without medicine. We have what we need to navigate the long season ahead. We have the resources. We have access to our gifts. We have friendship and community to lean into when need be. We are all carriers of medicine and there are many other forms of medicine available. Beauty, laughter, awe, nature, creativity, play, and many otehrs are all vital forms of support to help us walk steadily through the Long Dark.
We will still know joy, passion, delight, and wonder in the Long Dark. The decades ahead will not be a steady pall of gray and shadow. The world will need our affection and warmth, our outrage and kindness. Let us become capable of generating a living culture once again. Let us dream of a wild earth, teeming with life and richness. We are not bereft. We are not alone. We are part of this dreaming Earth. There are many forms of sweet soul medicine.
By saying it all turns on affection, I am saying that affection, love, a tender and fierce intimacy with the living world and our own mysterious depths are the most essential elements for us to cultivate in these tenuous times. In the absence of the ordinary, we thankfully have our own hearts to return to again and again. And here, in the secret nest of the heart, we can nourish a robust love for this world.
Affection is not passive or necessarily gentle. It also carries a ferocity that enables us to stand up and protest, to advocate on behalf of what has been marginalized.
Loving anyone or anything is a fierce and demanding practice.
Everything exists entangled with everything else.
