I haven’t been with you for six months. I feel guilty about this, but I also think that as this is a blog or project about process, about how one comes to find a way to hold the ground for oneself as one’s world is coming apart, my inability to put something here is another sign of how the process works. It isn’t linear, as they say. It’s dreamlike. The rest of my life is smeared all over it. So I apologize, but I’m also offering the comfort that however we try, we all still do whatever we do. We can only do what is important to us in our own ways, often at a lumbering or frenetic but undirected pace, often distracted, often just discouraged. Self improvement is a myth if you don’t include the self as it is. But then, at times it isn’t quite right to talk to others about what is ill formed or a bit embarrassing or unclear to oneself. That would be like asking people to read multiple rough drafts; best to burden people with only one if they have been kind enough to show up to read it.
I have indeed been writing, and I had various pieces I thought to load. But then somehow it seemed that they weren’t right, or true, or they suggested I knew what I was talking about when I didn’t. Even the questions were coming out sounding like I knew what I was talking about. They sounded like directions that I myself hadn’t and couldn’t have followed, or discoveries that were perhaps beautifully written but actually lies. I need to learn to write not didactically but more heartfully, which according to autocorrect isn’t a word, surprisingly.
But what’s point in being angry with something that must follow the same rhythms of the universe as everything else? I doubt a flower feels guilty because the absence of something is slowing its growth. Something was missing, though I couldn’t name it.
I think our minds—my mind—work through material cognitively—sorting, organizing, forming conclusions, but then they go underground and begin to work elsewhere, where the synapses and connections are made at a level that penetrates behavior and thought but without one noticing. During those times, what one writes is never quite right, and there are days of simply not going back to something the next day because when one does, it sounds stupid or overblown or didactic. Wrong.
So I lined pieces up and then just couldn’t put them on, even though my little beaver self wanted to. My mind by that point was also elsewhere, underground, and so on the surface uncooperative. I stopped doing the little routine I had developed: serious meditation everyday before sunup, a schedule of reading, writing, and walking, etc. Work in the morning and late afternoon. I actually had more time to do all I had said I wanted to do, and yet found myself absorbed by the news and detective novels and writing pieces I didn’t like, and in the interstices feeling guilty. Still that driven sense; like a two year old who wants to do something but can’t figure out what and so just screams. I couldn’t budge. You might call this writer’s block, but I was writing fiendishly, and every piece felt like it was the cat’s meow until I read it.
But what if what I had been doing to become a bit to be more brave, more aware—more able to see the larger picture so I wouldn’t be so angry or terrified at the small one—was working? Maybe I had done enough on the surface that deep down it was happening, just not in a way I could see or feel. The writing was rehashing and re-labeling what I’d already figured out. It wasn’t wrong so much as boring. Meanwhile my mind was hammering and banging things together in a deep construction site. Maybe my time was well spent with the detective novels.
We’re taught to keep going, to stick to a plan, to follow things through. This is all good if you are just skimming from one thing to another, doing what needs to be done in space and time. But sometimes, my spiritual guides (they will be coming up soon), or my insight or whatever you want to call it, say that in fact you do change and grow, and you enter different stages, and the materials and practices you were comfortable with before become a little wide of the mark. They feel less complete, like a tight pair of shoes. It’s fine. Time will tell. Let it be. All of those comforting cliches are there for a reason. As the Beatles sang: “There will be an answer, let it be-eeeeh….”
I think when we are in the sorts of changing and disastrous times we are in now and will be for a while, it’s critical to carefully and with attention let matters move as they will in oneself. If there are times of changing horses, perhaps the old one is indeed worn out. I think it’s even possible in an age of the globalization and some hybridization of faiths to find that other traditions and their practices or perspectives come to seem relevant. It’s good just to be mindful of what falls into one’s lap. Even detective stories hold wisdom.
This is particularly true when we are considering what should work in the world and what isn’t, and why. To me, I'm seeing ever more clearly that what is missing in our deliberations about climate change, global warming, violence, and strong man rule is the spiritual dimensions of life that we jettisoned with the coming of materialism. Not that this is my logical conclusion of matters carefully assessed. It’s a discovery. In my time of frustration, the spiritual emerged while I was wondering what I was doing and in my not-doing. Like Magellan running into the Pacific, which turned out to be huge.
But what we are offered in the realm of spirituality can feel anachronistic, confining, unbelievable, unkind, or unrealistic. I think this is because in a time when we need to grasp the underpinnings of faith and not their dogma, we remember the latter, usually from our childhood. We need to grow up, to look for other ways of grasping what is beyond us because this is a different, multi-vocal, multicultural time of multiple agonies and failures across a whole planet. Those ways are there, but we may need a period of the hybridization of faiths to find what will work for us now as a hybrid global culture.
So it began to occur to me that what we need now the ability to be spiritually agile. Maybe I need to see where the truth of different faiths lies for me. I grew up an ecumenical Christian, have long been an Episcopalian and a Buddhist at the same time. I’ve practiced shamanism for forty years. None of these has been studied or practiced lightly. Now I attend a Quaker meeting, which seems to put many of these together in a broad-minded faith that mainly requires me to be kind and aware. I attend a meeting of Methodists, Presbyterians, non-believers, and Quakers studying Buddhism. But I don’t dip. I embrace these. I don’t move. I collect.
Each of these offers an experience of another part of the elephant. Where these trip over themselves, where they reflect the other times and cultures of their practice, maybe I can let those go. After all, all faiths are human and historical creations, and we are all different and we are all wrong at least some of the time, and also right.
The logical possibility of faiths being narrowed to one band of the whole and sometimes just wrong helps me to relax into a wider perspective, a chance to say that there is no sin or error in looking into other faiths. It’s like knowing a ‘bird” is called that in English, but in Spanish is an “ave” and in French “l’oiseau.” Even more importantly, it’s important to know that a bird probably doesn’t care what you call it; that’s your problem. Somehow, faiths seem to tend toward exclusivity. As a former Christian, I am still afraid that God may punish me for straying from the fold like a lost sheep. My adopted Buddhism doesn’t demand that I be exclusive exactly, but it requires great study and time commitment. If I stray from the path, it may be said that I’m just not willing to follow the demands of a guru or a lama, suffer from ego blindness, or am not willing to surrender to the strictures of the faith.
Yet this is a time when surrender is exactly what we mustn’t do. We must remain true to ourselves and to a pragmatic decency and faith. So I go with what other spiritual teachers say, which is that each of us is different—our experience, our genetic makeup, our cultural location, our parents, our karma of lifetimes—are all different. How could we expect to have the same configuration of awareness of what lies beyond ourselves, or even to grasp that there is such a thing, when not one of us is the same? Cultures in contact invariably share genes as well as practices and often enfold other beliefs, even unconsciously.
Anthropologist Michael Harner, one of the first re-introducers of traditional shamanic practices to the West, put it in a way I could understand, though it seemed a bit twisted a first. He said, the universe is all the same. But we are all different, so it has to appear to all of us differently so we can see the same thing.
So now, after six months, it’s become clear, as if bubbling up from below as something I always knew: the focus for me now has to be on becoming clear about how the spiritual can become pragmatic for me. Every day I have a choice between anger, which will destroy me and make me physically vulnerable to other angry people, or I can look to how the world actually works and try to keep working with it, even to the point of stopping now and then to let the muddy water settle. Stay with the principles and rules by which the world works, and not with what we are doing, which is far from that. This is an old idea. But gates into the spiritual world must be found again, and new ones made, now, again. Much of what we need has almost been lost. As the sankofa bird of the Akan people of Ghana says, “go back and get it!”
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