Here are some of my recent essays to nourish the wild soul.
The Values of Soul: #2 Repetition ©Francis Weller

Our exploration of soul values began with the often-neglected practice of restraint. We now venture into another underappreciated quality of soul, and that is repetition. Like restraint, repetition is not glamorous or sexy. It is ordinary and ebbs and flows through our daily lives in both conscious and unconscious ways.
We struggle with the idea of repetition, anything that seems too familiar in this culture. We want things to be novel, new and improved, the latest. There’s nothing wrong with this. It does, however, tinge the old and traditional with a feeling of being antiquated and outdated. (It’s interesting to note that to many traditional people, anything new was approached with an attitude of suspicion. Where did this come from? Will it serve the people? How will it affect the land?)
We live in a society that prizes constant innovation and novelty. The singular focus on growth and development has provided us with many new devices and technologies, and granted us a degree of ease seldom known by our ancestors. It also casts a long and weighty shadow. Embedded in this ideology is an obsession with progress.
Progress is holy scripture in this culture. It is the one-directional arrow of time and productivity that surrounds us and informs us daily. We feel it in the constant pressure to have more, be more, achieve more. There is something inherent in the concept of progress, however, that leaves a residue of discontent in its wake. The better life is always just beyond the horizon, awaiting the arrival of the latest product, accomplishment or discovery. We are taught to crave what’s next, the up and coming. The old and familiar are considered outworn and outdated. We are quick to discard anything considered old—including people—leaving us skimming the surface carried along on the swift moving current of progress.
This pressure is felt in our psychological lives as well. There is an ongoing focus on improving and being better. How we are is rarely good enough. We must constantly strive to grow. Growth and progress are the two primary imperatives within psychology. Consequently, discontent is built into the way we approach our psychological lives. The focus settles on what we don’t have, what we haven’t achieved, the progress we haven’t made.
Soul, on the other hand, values repetition. Repetition is a form of sustained attention, returning us repeatedly to a place, a person, or a practice, that 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. Any movement toward depth requires repeated contact. Gary Snyder, Zen poet and nature philosopher, wrote that “Getting intimate with nature and our own wild natures is a matter of going face to face many times.” There is no depth without excavating and digging into the marrow of what matters to soul and culture. Repetition is a form of courtship.
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. It is through the ongoing entanglement with our suffering, that flavor and shape are delivered into our lives. James Hillman says our wounds and traumas are “salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live.”
Our sense of discontent, in part, arises out of neglecting the core practices that were repeated unbroken for hundreds of generations. Now, under the fevered pitch of individualism and the heroic ego, the original practices that wove the individual and the community together, have been largely forgotten. Consequently, the ritual of life is reduced into 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. We live in a culture that encourages amnesia and anesthesia; we forget, and we go numb. In our obsession with progress, the roots of memory have deteriorated and faded. “Repetition,” says anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, “is a form of permanence.” This was vital for our survival. The dances, rituals, songs and stories, the intricate knowledge of plants and animals, how to shape adult human beings, all combined to form a means of maintaining the trail through the world. The continuity of wisdom passed on generation to generation was crucial to our ongoing survival. When we forget the old ways of our ancestors, we lose contact with the roots of wisdom.
We live in an ongoing tension between forgetting and remembering. Nearly all enduring cultures developed practices designed to help us remember three central things: who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred. Prayer, meditation, and ritual, are, at root, designed to help us stay awake. These practices serve to sustain the ground of remembrance, which is, in turn, a form of permanence.
Soul exerts its gravitational pull repeatedly in our lifetime, calling us into the rich loam of image, emotion, memory, dream and longing. Living cultures exert a similar compelling quality, drawing the community together through the repetitive gestures of ritual, initiatory cycles, pilgrimages to sacred places and the ongoing rounds of tending the village. Oral traditions are rooted in the rhythms of repetition. The great stories were told over and over again. It was in the retelling that the multiple layers hidden in the tale were slowly revealed. Our earliest shared acts were designed to weave and knit the community together, and then by extension, into the surrounding field of nature and cosmos. Repetition serves to continuously renew and reaffirm the entangled nature of our beings.
Soulful repetition is not boring or bland. It is musical, rhythmic, and enduring. We require touchstones of return to stay connected to what matters to soul and culture. Ultimately, repetition is a gesture of affection, of fidelity. We return again and again to tend what it is we love and by so doing, we keep it alive and vital.
Practice/Reflection: In what ways do you nourish the ritual of everyday life? What core practices help sustain your intimacy with soul? In what ways do you engage in repetition without soul?
We struggle with the idea of repetition, anything that seems too familiar in this culture. We want things to be novel, new and improved, the latest. There’s nothing wrong with this. It does, however, tinge the old and traditional with a feeling of being antiquated and outdated. (It’s interesting to note that to many traditional people, anything new was approached with an attitude of suspicion. Where did this come from? Will it serve the people? How will it affect the land?)
We live in a society that prizes constant innovation and novelty. The singular focus on growth and development has provided us with many new devices and technologies, and granted us a degree of ease seldom known by our ancestors. It also casts a long and weighty shadow. Embedded in this ideology is an obsession with progress.
Progress is holy scripture in this culture. It is the one-directional arrow of time and productivity that surrounds us and informs us daily. We feel it in the constant pressure to have more, be more, achieve more. There is something inherent in the concept of progress, however, that leaves a residue of discontent in its wake. The better life is always just beyond the horizon, awaiting the arrival of the latest product, accomplishment or discovery. We are taught to crave what’s next, the up and coming. The old and familiar are considered outworn and outdated. We are quick to discard anything considered old—including people—leaving us skimming the surface carried along on the swift moving current of progress.
This pressure is felt in our psychological lives as well. There is an ongoing focus on improving and being better. How we are is rarely good enough. We must constantly strive to grow. Growth and progress are the two primary imperatives within psychology. Consequently, discontent is built into the way we approach our psychological lives. The focus settles on what we don’t have, what we haven’t achieved, the progress we haven’t made.
Soul, on the other hand, values repetition. Repetition is a form of sustained attention, returning us repeatedly to a place, a person, or a practice, that 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. Any movement toward depth requires repeated contact. Gary Snyder, Zen poet and nature philosopher, wrote that “Getting intimate with nature and our own wild natures is a matter of going face to face many times.” There is no depth without excavating and digging into the marrow of what matters to soul and culture. Repetition is a form of courtship.
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. It is through the ongoing entanglement with our suffering, that flavor and shape are delivered into our lives. James Hillman says our wounds and traumas are “salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live.”
Our sense of discontent, in part, arises out of neglecting the core practices that were repeated unbroken for hundreds of generations. Now, under the fevered pitch of individualism and the heroic ego, the original practices that wove the individual and the community together, have been largely forgotten. Consequently, the ritual of life is reduced into 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. We live in a culture that encourages amnesia and anesthesia; we forget, and we go numb. In our obsession with progress, the roots of memory have deteriorated and faded. “Repetition,” says anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, “is a form of permanence.” This was vital for our survival. The dances, rituals, songs and stories, the intricate knowledge of plants and animals, how to shape adult human beings, all combined to form a means of maintaining the trail through the world. The continuity of wisdom passed on generation to generation was crucial to our ongoing survival. When we forget the old ways of our ancestors, we lose contact with the roots of wisdom.
We live in an ongoing tension between forgetting and remembering. Nearly all enduring cultures developed practices designed to help us remember three central things: who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred. Prayer, meditation, and ritual, are, at root, designed to help us stay awake. These practices serve to sustain the ground of remembrance, which is, in turn, a form of permanence.
Soul exerts its gravitational pull repeatedly in our lifetime, calling us into the rich loam of image, emotion, memory, dream and longing. Living cultures exert a similar compelling quality, drawing the community together through the repetitive gestures of ritual, initiatory cycles, pilgrimages to sacred places and the ongoing rounds of tending the village. Oral traditions are rooted in the rhythms of repetition. The great stories were told over and over again. It was in the retelling that the multiple layers hidden in the tale were slowly revealed. Our earliest shared acts were designed to weave and knit the community together, and then by extension, into the surrounding field of nature and cosmos. Repetition serves to continuously renew and reaffirm the entangled nature of our beings.
Soulful repetition is not boring or bland. It is musical, rhythmic, and enduring. We require touchstones of return to stay connected to what matters to soul and culture. Ultimately, repetition is a gesture of affection, of fidelity. We return again and again to tend what it is we love and by so doing, we keep it alive and vital.
Practice/Reflection: In what ways do you nourish the ritual of everyday life? What core practices help sustain your intimacy with soul? In what ways do you engage in repetition without soul?
Gratitude For All That Is ©Francis Weller

There is a tradition among the native people of the Iroquois nation that goes back over a thousand years. It is known as the Thanksgiving Address. In the language of their people it is called, "Oh'nton Karihwat'hkwen," which translates, "Words Before All Else." The tradition involves the invocation of creation in a manner that extends thankfulness to all living things for their gifts to us. In this way, the people are brought into alignment with Nature. This eloquent ritual practice places gratitude as the beginning point for any further matters. Words Before All Else. What if our daily practice was to include this deep-seated reverence for creation and to acknowledge the never-ending flow of blessings that come our way? I remember Brother David Steindl-Rast saying, "It is not happiness that makes gratefulness, but gratefulness that makes happiness."
Gratitude is a central value to the indigenous soul. It forms the very heart of a life rooted in the awareness and recognition that we truly live in a gifting cosmos. Our deep time ancestors, and those remaining indigenous cultures still living in the old ways, know that everything we need has been given to us. In the ecology of the sacred our responsibility is to receive these blessings with gratitude. After all, what is the proper response to a gift if not gratitude? This understanding formed the basic attitude of traditional people and it is also readily recognized when we too, turn our attention to this fundamental truth.
Gratitude furthers the soul, calls it forth into the world in an act of intimacy. The simple gesture of receptivity paired with the expression of thankfulness completes the arc that binds the soul and world together in communion. Doing so confirms our relatedness with the cosmos and it is relationship that we are so in need of today. Our isolation and loneliness are in great part the consequence of forgetting to say thank you. This may sound simplistic, but the opposite is true. We live in a completely interdependent world and gratitude is the acknowledgement of this fundamental reality.
There is an old thought that says the strength of a community is reflected in the presence of generosity. In other words, the richness of the village is made visible by the expression of appreciation, recognition and thankfulness for the ways the people support one another and the way the world holds the people together. It seems that we are bereft of such a unifying ingredient at this time. Rather than acknowledging the multiple layers of gifting that are offered to us, we focus more on lack, on what is missing. This isn't some cynical move but rather a consequence of conditioning that continually references us back to what it is we don't have. Modernity keeps us hungry for more by turning our gaze towards absence. Psychology colludes in this as well by focusing primarily on what's wrong, what we didn't get in childhood, and so on. This chronic feeling of not enough makes it difficult to register blessings and to feel gratitude. It is our task to stay aware of what is being gifted here and now and to register the primary satisfactions that enrich our soul life, our emotional and bodily life. These are what make the moment thick with meaning and contentment: we have enough.
Gratitude is a spiritual responsibility. A grateful heart acknowledges and participates in the ongoing exchange with life. Gratitude is an act of faith, of trust in the ways of life. It is a confirmation that we are inextricably bound to each other thing in the cosmos. In this sense it is a reflection of belonging. Another thought of Br. David's was that we can feel either grateful or alienated, but never both 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 receiver in the exchange of blessings.
How do we develop gratitude? Perhaps the most fundamental practice is listening. This attentive move slows us down to the speed of life where we are more resonant with the movements of the world. By listening we can register in our bodies just how fluid this flow of blessing is in our lives. Think about that. 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 literally 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, 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.
A second means by which we develop gratitude is through ritual. Ritual is the pitch through which our personal and collective voices are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond the point of our minds and into the realms of nature and spirit. There are many opportunities for daily rituals that can drop us into a felt connection with life. Every meal we eat is a cosmological event. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that through the practice of mindfulness we become aware of the deep story within every meal. We are wedded to the cycles of sunshine and rain, the movements of microbes and root systems, the farmer and butcher, the animals and plants, the grocery store clerk. The entire cycle that brings the morsel to our mouths is what we are ingesting and to behold that movement with gratitude is to sacralize the moment.
Our annual Gratitude For All That Is ritual is a beautiful gesture to the visible and invisible worlds. To communally send our prayers of thanksgiving into the world is a rich and verdant act. Our ritual is eloquent and simple. After building a gratitude shrine, we make our prayers and offer small gifts to the other world of tobacco, corn meal, agates, or whatever has been brought. These offerings are made in a small crawl-in grotto made of fir boughs and ferns where they are left over night. In the morning, some children are asked to gather the offerings together and we then make our way singing across the grounds into the woods where a small opening is waiting to receive the gifts. At that time, the children that are there come forward and place handfuls of the offerings into the Mother's body and for that moment we are aligned with the rightness of our lives and the community. We have placed something back into her body in an act of recognition that everything we have, comes from her. It is sweet medicine.
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 exquisite 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. To everything, as the old prophet said, there is a season. This is the time of Thanksgiving.
Gratitude is a central value to the indigenous soul. It forms the very heart of a life rooted in the awareness and recognition that we truly live in a gifting cosmos. Our deep time ancestors, and those remaining indigenous cultures still living in the old ways, know that everything we need has been given to us. In the ecology of the sacred our responsibility is to receive these blessings with gratitude. After all, what is the proper response to a gift if not gratitude? This understanding formed the basic attitude of traditional people and it is also readily recognized when we too, turn our attention to this fundamental truth.
Gratitude furthers the soul, calls it forth into the world in an act of intimacy. The simple gesture of receptivity paired with the expression of thankfulness completes the arc that binds the soul and world together in communion. Doing so confirms our relatedness with the cosmos and it is relationship that we are so in need of today. Our isolation and loneliness are in great part the consequence of forgetting to say thank you. This may sound simplistic, but the opposite is true. We live in a completely interdependent world and gratitude is the acknowledgement of this fundamental reality.
There is an old thought that says the strength of a community is reflected in the presence of generosity. In other words, the richness of the village is made visible by the expression of appreciation, recognition and thankfulness for the ways the people support one another and the way the world holds the people together. It seems that we are bereft of such a unifying ingredient at this time. Rather than acknowledging the multiple layers of gifting that are offered to us, we focus more on lack, on what is missing. This isn't some cynical move but rather a consequence of conditioning that continually references us back to what it is we don't have. Modernity keeps us hungry for more by turning our gaze towards absence. Psychology colludes in this as well by focusing primarily on what's wrong, what we didn't get in childhood, and so on. This chronic feeling of not enough makes it difficult to register blessings and to feel gratitude. It is our task to stay aware of what is being gifted here and now and to register the primary satisfactions that enrich our soul life, our emotional and bodily life. These are what make the moment thick with meaning and contentment: we have enough.
Gratitude is a spiritual responsibility. A grateful heart acknowledges and participates in the ongoing exchange with life. Gratitude is an act of faith, of trust in the ways of life. It is a confirmation that we are inextricably bound to each other thing in the cosmos. In this sense it is a reflection of belonging. Another thought of Br. David's was that we can feel either grateful or alienated, but never both 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 receiver in the exchange of blessings.
How do we develop gratitude? Perhaps the most fundamental practice is listening. This attentive move slows us down to the speed of life where we are more resonant with the movements of the world. By listening we can register in our bodies just how fluid this flow of blessing is in our lives. Think about that. 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 literally 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, 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.
A second means by which we develop gratitude is through ritual. Ritual is the pitch through which our personal and collective voices are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond the point of our minds and into the realms of nature and spirit. There are many opportunities for daily rituals that can drop us into a felt connection with life. Every meal we eat is a cosmological event. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that through the practice of mindfulness we become aware of the deep story within every meal. We are wedded to the cycles of sunshine and rain, the movements of microbes and root systems, the farmer and butcher, the animals and plants, the grocery store clerk. The entire cycle that brings the morsel to our mouths is what we are ingesting and to behold that movement with gratitude is to sacralize the moment.
Our annual Gratitude For All That Is ritual is a beautiful gesture to the visible and invisible worlds. To communally send our prayers of thanksgiving into the world is a rich and verdant act. Our ritual is eloquent and simple. After building a gratitude shrine, we make our prayers and offer small gifts to the other world of tobacco, corn meal, agates, or whatever has been brought. These offerings are made in a small crawl-in grotto made of fir boughs and ferns where they are left over night. In the morning, some children are asked to gather the offerings together and we then make our way singing across the grounds into the woods where a small opening is waiting to receive the gifts. At that time, the children that are there come forward and place handfuls of the offerings into the Mother's body and for that moment we are aligned with the rightness of our lives and the community. We have placed something back into her body in an act of recognition that everything we have, comes from her. It is sweet medicine.
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 exquisite 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. To everything, as the old prophet said, there is a season. This is the time of Thanksgiving.
An Apprenticeship with Sorrow ©Francis Weller

“This night will pass, then we have work to do.”
- Rumi
Grief and loss touch us all, arriving at our door in many ways. They come swirling on the winds of divorce, tucked into the news of the death of someone dear, as an illness that alters the course of a life. For many of us, grief is tied intimately to the ravages we witness daily to watersheds and forests, the extinction of species, the collapse of democracy and the fading of civilization. Left unattended, these sorrows darken our days. It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss that, when left untouched, block our access to the vitality of the soul. 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. This requires an apprenticeship with sorrow. Learning to welcome, hold and metabolize sorrow is the work of a lifetime.
Our apprenticeship begins as we come to understand that grief is ever-present in our lives. This is a difficult realization, but one that carries the opportunity of opening our heart to a deeper love for our singular life and for the wind-swept world of which we are a part. We begin by simply picking up the shards of grief that lie littered on the floor of our house. Nothing special. Nothing heroic. Not unlike young novices entering an apprenticeship with the master teacher, we begin humbly—sweeping the shavings, mixing the pigments, cleaning the brushes, tending the fires. We begin the process by building our capacity to hold sorrow in the womb of the heart. Through this practice, we become able to welcome the pervasive and encompassing presence of grief.
-
Grief works us in profound ways, reshaping us moment by moment in the heat of loss.
We are also asked to work grief and to take up our apprenticeship with fidelity and love.
-
Tremendous psychic strength is required 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 more than an emotion; it is also a faculty of being human. Grieving is a skill that must be developed or we will find ourselves migrating to the margins of our lives in hope of avoiding the inevitable entanglements with loss. It is through the rites of grieving that we are ripened as human beings. Grief invites gravity and depth into our world. We possess the profound capacity to metabolize sorrow into something medicinal for our soul and the soul of the community. The skill of grieving well enables us to become current—to live in the present moment and feel the electricity of life. We gradually turn our attention to what is here, now, and less to our need to repair history. We remember we are more verb than noun, more a jumpy rhythm, a wild song, a fluid leap than a fixed thing in space. As Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma said, “I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”
-
This apprenticeship is, at heart, about the shaping of elders, the ones capable of meeting
the pain and suffering of the world with a dignified and robust bearing.
-
After years of walking alongside grief, working with its difficult cargo, we gradually come to see how we have been reshaped by this companionship. We see how we have cultivated a greater interior space to hold more of what life brings to us. 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 patiently crafts 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. What was learned was not meant for us alone, but was meant to be tossed like seed into a fertile mind, a waiting community, a hungry culture.
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. Elders have 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 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 frees them to radically receive the stunning elegance of the world.
Ultimately, each elder is a storehouse of living memory, a carrier of wisdom. Theirs are the voices that rise on behalf of the commons, at times fiery, at times beseeching. They live outside culture yet are its greatest protectors, becoming wily dispensers of love and blessings. They offer a resounding “Yes” to the generations that follow. That is their legacy and gift.
When the season is right, when we have been tempered sufficiently by the heat of life, we are asked to take up the mantle of elderhood as the most ordinary of things. Nothing special about it. It is ordinary to know loss and sorrow, to be pulled 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 wash, 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 blinded 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.
-
This is how elders are crafted: tempered between the heat of loss and the weight of loving this world.
-
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 hand. Each of us is fated to leave this shining world, to slip off this elegant coat of skin, to release our stories to the wind and return our bones to the earth. Saying goodbye, however, is not easy or something we give much thought to in our daily lives.
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, of pomegranates and walks on the bluff? 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.
- Rumi
Grief and loss touch us all, arriving at our door in many ways. They come swirling on the winds of divorce, tucked into the news of the death of someone dear, as an illness that alters the course of a life. For many of us, grief is tied intimately to the ravages we witness daily to watersheds and forests, the extinction of species, the collapse of democracy and the fading of civilization. Left unattended, these sorrows darken our days. It is our unexpressed sorrows, the congested stories of loss that, when left untouched, block our access to the vitality of the soul. 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. This requires an apprenticeship with sorrow. Learning to welcome, hold and metabolize sorrow is the work of a lifetime.
Our apprenticeship begins as we come to understand that grief is ever-present in our lives. This is a difficult realization, but one that carries the opportunity of opening our heart to a deeper love for our singular life and for the wind-swept world of which we are a part. We begin by simply picking up the shards of grief that lie littered on the floor of our house. Nothing special. Nothing heroic. Not unlike young novices entering an apprenticeship with the master teacher, we begin humbly—sweeping the shavings, mixing the pigments, cleaning the brushes, tending the fires. We begin the process by building our capacity to hold sorrow in the womb of the heart. Through this practice, we become able to welcome the pervasive and encompassing presence of grief.
-
Grief works us in profound ways, reshaping us moment by moment in the heat of loss.
We are also asked to work grief and to take up our apprenticeship with fidelity and love.
-
Tremendous psychic strength is required 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 more than an emotion; it is also a faculty of being human. Grieving is a skill that must be developed or we will find ourselves migrating to the margins of our lives in hope of avoiding the inevitable entanglements with loss. It is through the rites of grieving that we are ripened as human beings. Grief invites gravity and depth into our world. We possess the profound capacity to metabolize sorrow into something medicinal for our soul and the soul of the community. The skill of grieving well enables us to become current—to live in the present moment and feel the electricity of life. We gradually turn our attention to what is here, now, and less to our need to repair history. We remember we are more verb than noun, more a jumpy rhythm, a wild song, a fluid leap than a fixed thing in space. As Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma said, “I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.”
-
This apprenticeship is, at heart, about the shaping of elders, the ones capable of meeting
the pain and suffering of the world with a dignified and robust bearing.
-
After years of walking alongside grief, working with its difficult cargo, we gradually come to see how we have been reshaped by this companionship. We see how we have cultivated a greater interior space to hold more of what life brings to us. 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 patiently crafts 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. What was learned was not meant for us alone, but was meant to be tossed like seed into a fertile mind, a waiting community, a hungry culture.
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. Elders have 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 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 frees them to radically receive the stunning elegance of the world.
Ultimately, each elder is a storehouse of living memory, a carrier of wisdom. Theirs are the voices that rise on behalf of the commons, at times fiery, at times beseeching. They live outside culture yet are its greatest protectors, becoming wily dispensers of love and blessings. They offer a resounding “Yes” to the generations that follow. That is their legacy and gift.
When the season is right, when we have been tempered sufficiently by the heat of life, we are asked to take up the mantle of elderhood as the most ordinary of things. Nothing special about it. It is ordinary to know loss and sorrow, to be pulled 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 wash, 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 blinded 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.
-
This is how elders are crafted: tempered between the heat of loss and the weight of loving this world.
-
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 hand. Each of us is fated to leave this shining world, to slip off this elegant coat of skin, to release our stories to the wind and return our bones to the earth. Saying goodbye, however, is not easy or something we give much thought to in our daily lives.
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, of pomegranates and walks on the bluff? 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.
The Values of Soul: The Gifts of Restraint ©Francis Weller

In a series of talks I offered in early 2018, called Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters, I shared multiple ways to see the daily manifestations of soul, how it reveals itself through our encounters with wounds, images, creativity, friendship, grief, the ancestors and more. Underlying these epiphanic displays are the values that soul holds, values that were shaped over thousands of years and which emerged as central to our survival as a species. In these times of disorientation and uncertainty, recovering these essential nodes of being may help us navigate the coming challenges in a more considered way.
We begin our exploration of the values of soul in a somewhat unexpected territory: restraint. The choice is intentional. In an age of instant gratification and excessive consumption, the value of restraint must come acutely into view. We are drowning in our possessions and our garbage. We are exhausting the very fabric of the world, consuming the equivalent of 1.7 earths every year. The depletion process is far outstripping the regeneration capacities of the planet. Restraint, however, is one of the least developed soul values we have. It may not be as sexy as courage and boldness. Nor is it the most popular at the party. Exuberance and abundance get that award. Restraint is more introspective, contained, held back. It is a bit austere, preferring not doing to doing.
There are both internal and external forms of restraint.
Internally, 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, 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. We need to hold, contain, cook the material before sharing it with the world. It must be allowed to go through its own process of distillation prior to being revealed to questioning eyes. The value of restraint acknowledges this truth and creates a space where something can take shape according to its nature.
Our constant management and manipulation of all things psychic, reveals a lack of faith in the movements of soul. It is essential to practice non-interference, letting the deep work of soul go on without our interventions. As the great German mystic, Meister Eckhart said, “We must let go and let God.” Or as Jung said, paraphrasing Eckhart, “We must let go and let be.” Restraint is a form of trust in the deep workings of soul.
When we honor the value of restraint, the door to genuine receiving opens. 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 opens the aperture where we can be found.
There is a marvelous tempering of psyche by the heat generated through non-action. It is a via negativa; a path of negation. To restrain means “to bind back” and “to hold back.” This creates heat through the tension of resistance. It is this heat that creates contour and shape to our interior lives. You can feel it when you hesitate to act on some impulse, desire or craving. Space is created when we let go of something. It requires strength and fortitude, commitment and devotion. It is a move toward holding steady, allowing the deeper and often hidden rhythms of soul to emerge.
The lyrical poet of Duende, Federico Garcia Lorca called us to live in the dynamic tension between discipline and passion. 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.
We place a great deal of emphasis on desire, longing, expression, and wildness in our lives. All of this is beautiful and necessary. Without its other side, however, we lack the tempering that is provided through the tension of restraint. It’s possible, that holding back is as necessary as action is to the soul.
Restraint offers a powerful antidote to our self-focused psychologies and our consumptive economics. It loosens the tight grip of the self as the sole signifier of importance. Through the agency of restraint, we can attend to the needs and voices of others, human and more-than-human, in our concerns. Many traditions practiced gestures of restraint, such as fasting, as a means of returning the individual, again and again, back to the ground of humility.
Externally, at the heart of restraint is an awareness that our well-being is entangled with all others. Many myths and fairy tales speak of the necessity of restraint, particularly in terms of our relations with our plant and animal kin. These wisdom tales warn of the dangers that accompany selfishness, greed, and taking more than necessary. To practice self-control is to maintain the tender equilibrium between the worlds. In many of these tales, the animals would withdraw their consent to be offered to the human world when we acted out of balance. Consequently, the game disappeared, and the people suffered. Their intuitive knowledge was meant to prevent wholesale depletion of what it was they required to survive. We have forgotten this life-preserving value in our times. Overfishing, mountain top removal, clear-cutting of forests, loss of topsoil, emptying and poisoning of aquifers, are all outgrowths of the failure to practice restraint.
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. It is rooted in an embedded truth that we have endured together. Our survival is possible only in collaboration with the many others with whom we share this stunning world.
The Iroquois Confederacy in the Northeast territory of the continent practiced a principle of considering the 7th Generation in their deliberations. Any action they took, would have to be sustainable for those generations yet to come. This is the embodiment of cultural restraint.
There is a potent connection between restraint and humility. The action/non-action of restraint suggests that there is a value in holding back, of 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—another word not praised in our no-limits culture. 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. We have forgotten the primary satisfactions* in our lives and have been left with a deep absence in our core.
Restraint, along with patience, offers a pause, a moment of reflection where we can take in the needs of another. In the space of holding back, we recognize that our well-being is intricately entwined with the health of the commons. To act in a selfish manner is to put our own lives in jeopardy. To take too much disturbs the delicate balance of watersheds and communities. Restraint asks us to cherish the fact of our mutually entangled lives. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us.
In the coming years, we will inevitably be required to reduce, not only our consumption, but also our sense of needing so much to live a rich and soulful life. Let us come to see the value of restraint, of creating space through the practice of not doing. It may be there that we find ourselves escorted into the chamber of what it is the soul truly longs for.
* Primary satisfactions are the undeniable and irrefutable needs of the psyche that were established over the long journey of our species and are imprinted in our beings as expectations awaiting fulfillment.
The primary satisfactions are the elemental constituents of a healthy psychic and physical life. These included matters such as: adequate and available touch; comfort in times of grief and pain; abundant play; the sharing of food eaten slowly; dark, starlit nights; the pleasures of friendship and laughter. They also are centered on a rich and responsive ritual life that addresses concerns central to our lives such as initiation, healing and other major transitions; continual exposure to and participation with nature; storytelling, dancing, and music; attentive and engaged elders; a system of inclusion based on equality and access to a varied and sensuous world.
We begin our exploration of the values of soul in a somewhat unexpected territory: restraint. The choice is intentional. In an age of instant gratification and excessive consumption, the value of restraint must come acutely into view. We are drowning in our possessions and our garbage. We are exhausting the very fabric of the world, consuming the equivalent of 1.7 earths every year. The depletion process is far outstripping the regeneration capacities of the planet. Restraint, however, is one of the least developed soul values we have. It may not be as sexy as courage and boldness. Nor is it the most popular at the party. Exuberance and abundance get that award. Restraint is more introspective, contained, held back. It is a bit austere, preferring not doing to doing.
There are both internal and external forms of restraint.
Internally, 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, 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. We need to hold, contain, cook the material before sharing it with the world. It must be allowed to go through its own process of distillation prior to being revealed to questioning eyes. The value of restraint acknowledges this truth and creates a space where something can take shape according to its nature.
Our constant management and manipulation of all things psychic, reveals a lack of faith in the movements of soul. It is essential to practice non-interference, letting the deep work of soul go on without our interventions. As the great German mystic, Meister Eckhart said, “We must let go and let God.” Or as Jung said, paraphrasing Eckhart, “We must let go and let be.” Restraint is a form of trust in the deep workings of soul.
When we honor the value of restraint, the door to genuine receiving opens. 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 opens the aperture where we can be found.
There is a marvelous tempering of psyche by the heat generated through non-action. It is a via negativa; a path of negation. To restrain means “to bind back” and “to hold back.” This creates heat through the tension of resistance. It is this heat that creates contour and shape to our interior lives. You can feel it when you hesitate to act on some impulse, desire or craving. Space is created when we let go of something. It requires strength and fortitude, commitment and devotion. It is a move toward holding steady, allowing the deeper and often hidden rhythms of soul to emerge.
The lyrical poet of Duende, Federico Garcia Lorca called us to live in the dynamic tension between discipline and passion. 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.
We place a great deal of emphasis on desire, longing, expression, and wildness in our lives. All of this is beautiful and necessary. Without its other side, however, we lack the tempering that is provided through the tension of restraint. It’s possible, that holding back is as necessary as action is to the soul.
Restraint offers a powerful antidote to our self-focused psychologies and our consumptive economics. It loosens the tight grip of the self as the sole signifier of importance. Through the agency of restraint, we can attend to the needs and voices of others, human and more-than-human, in our concerns. Many traditions practiced gestures of restraint, such as fasting, as a means of returning the individual, again and again, back to the ground of humility.
Externally, at the heart of restraint is an awareness that our well-being is entangled with all others. Many myths and fairy tales speak of the necessity of restraint, particularly in terms of our relations with our plant and animal kin. These wisdom tales warn of the dangers that accompany selfishness, greed, and taking more than necessary. To practice self-control is to maintain the tender equilibrium between the worlds. In many of these tales, the animals would withdraw their consent to be offered to the human world when we acted out of balance. Consequently, the game disappeared, and the people suffered. Their intuitive knowledge was meant to prevent wholesale depletion of what it was they required to survive. We have forgotten this life-preserving value in our times. Overfishing, mountain top removal, clear-cutting of forests, loss of topsoil, emptying and poisoning of aquifers, are all outgrowths of the failure to practice restraint.
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. It is rooted in an embedded truth that we have endured together. Our survival is possible only in collaboration with the many others with whom we share this stunning world.
The Iroquois Confederacy in the Northeast territory of the continent practiced a principle of considering the 7th Generation in their deliberations. Any action they took, would have to be sustainable for those generations yet to come. This is the embodiment of cultural restraint.
There is a potent connection between restraint and humility. The action/non-action of restraint suggests that there is a value in holding back, of 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—another word not praised in our no-limits culture. 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. We have forgotten the primary satisfactions* in our lives and have been left with a deep absence in our core.
Restraint, along with patience, offers a pause, a moment of reflection where we can take in the needs of another. In the space of holding back, we recognize that our well-being is intricately entwined with the health of the commons. To act in a selfish manner is to put our own lives in jeopardy. To take too much disturbs the delicate balance of watersheds and communities. Restraint asks us to cherish the fact of our mutually entangled lives. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us.
In the coming years, we will inevitably be required to reduce, not only our consumption, but also our sense of needing so much to live a rich and soulful life. Let us come to see the value of restraint, of creating space through the practice of not doing. It may be there that we find ourselves escorted into the chamber of what it is the soul truly longs for.
* Primary satisfactions are the undeniable and irrefutable needs of the psyche that were established over the long journey of our species and are imprinted in our beings as expectations awaiting fulfillment.
The primary satisfactions are the elemental constituents of a healthy psychic and physical life. These included matters such as: adequate and available touch; comfort in times of grief and pain; abundant play; the sharing of food eaten slowly; dark, starlit nights; the pleasures of friendship and laughter. They also are centered on a rich and responsive ritual life that addresses concerns central to our lives such as initiation, healing and other major transitions; continual exposure to and participation with nature; storytelling, dancing, and music; attentive and engaged elders; a system of inclusion based on equality and access to a varied and sensuous world.
Some People Wake Up: Reflections on Initiation ©Francis Weller

Again and again
Some people wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
And they emerge according to broader laws.
They carry strange customs with them,
And demand room for bold gestures.
The future speaks ruthlessly through them.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Dear friend. No doubt you have noticed that we are living in turbulent times culturally and as a planet. All pretense of immunity is collapsing as we realize how completely entangled our lives are with one another, with kelp beds and calving glaciers, with refugees and the dreams of young people everywhere. The disequilibrium shaking the world feels like a continual tremor on the fault lines of our psychic lives. Very few things feel stable. It is like a fever dream. It may be that this is the initiatory threshold we require to wake us up. Whatever is happening, much will be asked of us if we are to make it through the whitewater of this narrow passage. We do not know what lies ahead, but one thing is sure: This as a time for bold gestures. It is time to wake up and humbly take our place on this stunning planet. The future is speaking ruthlessly through us.
_________________________________________________________
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. Traditionally, these were the ones who had successfully crossed a series of initiatory thresholds and had come through as protectors and carriers of the communal soul. They were the ones whose artistry and wisdom kept the current of culture alive. We live in a society that has all but abandoned rituals of initiation. Consequently, we are languishing from the absence of mature and robust adults.
How do we become seasoned adults, a true human being? This is not a given. Traditionally this was the work of culture. Through the long labors of multiple initiations, individuals were gradually crafted into persons of substance and gravity. The process yielded someone more attuned to responsibilities than rights, more aware of multiple entanglements than entitlements. They were initiated into a vast sea of intimacies; with the village, star clusters and gnarled old oaks, the pool of ancestors and the scented earth.
Through the sustained attention of culture, individuals were ripened
into adults capable of sustaining culture: A marvelous symmetry.
We are meant to cross many thresholds in our lifetime, each a further embodiment of the soul's innate character. Yet many of us carry the uncomfortable thought that we are unsure of our place in the world, still anxious about our sense of value and our right to be here. The unfinished business of adolescence haunts us and makes it hard to live into the larger arc of our lives.
Crossing the threshold from adolescence into adulthood requires an ordeal, a tempering of the individual that begins the process of ripening. There is no easy passage. Many traditional cultures escorted their youth into the world of adulthood and the sacred through an elaborate series of rituals. These rituals occurred in nature, in the holding space of forests and caves, savannas and bush. It was a space outside the ordinary world of the village, apart from the community and often took place over many weeks and even months. It was a time of tempering the young ones with intense ritual ordeals that took them beyond their capacities to endure. Something died in the process. Something needed to die in the process. And something needed to come forward. Some new shape of identity that was wedded to the silt and slope of the land, that spoke the feathered and furred language of the creatures and the song of the dawn. This new identity was co-mingled with the holy topography. They became one and the same.
Underneath and holding up this initiatory process was a deep and abiding relationship to the wild world and the spirits of place. This passage was rooted in a nearly endless succession of generations that had come to learn the necessity of such a transition. The awareness for this is essentially universal: our souls must be shaped by a process of intense ritual encounter, communal reflection, and immersion in the natural and supranatural worlds. In other words, to become an adult, certain gateways needed to be crossed for that territory to be fully embedded within the person.
What we witness daily in the litany of injustices and exploitation of others and the world are the actions of uninitiated individuals. It is not difficult to see how questions of adequacy and inclusion are often portrayed in gross exaggerations of power and force. Nor is it a stretch to see how the persistent hunger in the unripened psyche of so many is at the heart of our violent consumption of the planet.
Initiation is an entrance into a place, a terrain. It is a courtship of a large dreaming animal. It is not an abstract ideal of psychological accomplishment, but rather an entrance into the specificity of locale, of geography, of rhizomes and crab thought, mercurial imaginings, moon cycles, and seasonal rhythms, with eyes that regard these as sacred. Through these intimacies, a grand landscape comes into vision: a world riddled with spirit, ancestors, community, cosmos and the dreams of those yet to come.
Initiation, in its deepest traditional sense, was meant to keep the world alive. The purpose was not individual, but cosmological in scope. It was never for the individual. This is very hard for us to get our minds around, having been conditioned within a psychological tradition that fixates everything upon the “self.” It is always about me and my growth! Here’s the truth, however: Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater circle of life into which the initiate is brought and to which they now hold allegiance.
Can you feel your longing for just such a knowing?
At the same time, initiation profoundly affects us as individuals. It activates and authorizes the particular soul thread we came to offer the waiting world. Much like those seed pods that only germinate in the heat of fire, the soul seed we carry responds to the heat generated by initiation.
The soul is fully aware of the reciprocal relationship it has with the wild world, with the worlds of spirit and the ancestors. Soul recognizes the innate requirements for maintaining these connections. It was the role of mature individuals to honor our place in the family of things by carrying out the rituals of gratitude and renewal that sustain our relations with the breathing, animate world. Initiation embeds in us a fundamental requirement of being human:
We are meant to feed Life in an ongoing way!
As we mature, we are asked to come into a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. We are called to develop the manners which help sustain the body of this exquisite world. Values such as respect, restraint, (our least developed spiritual value) 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.
It is not difficult to see how far we live as a culture from these practices. The central question is, how can we, once again, recognize the transforming cadence of initiation in a time of amnesia, a time in which the old forms have been abandoned?
The truth is initiation is not optional. Every one of us will be taken to the edge, pulled by the gravity of soul to engage the rigors of ripening us into something substantial. No one is exempt. Imagine if we could see the circumstances of our lives as the raw material necessary for the movement across the threshold into our adult lives. This could free us in radical ways. From a mythic perspective, these are the conditions that can cook the soul and bring us closer to the mystery of our own singular incarnation. The rough initiations of loss, trauma, defeats, betrayals, illness, become the Prima Materia, the beginning matter, for undertaking the crossing into our more encompassing life. So much depends upon how we perceive what it is that is happening in our world. Taking a mythic view enables us to see our circumstances as necessary, even required, for the work of deep change to take place.
The need is clear: we must cultivate a robust collective of adults whose primary fealty is to the life-giving world upon which we depend. We must be able to feel our loyalties to watersheds, migratory pathways, marginalized communities, and the soul of the world. We must feel the bedrock of our aliveness, and the reality of our wild and exuberant lives. Initiation tempers the soul, drawing out its hidden essence and calls forth the medicine we came to offer this stunning world. It is time to wake up!
Some people wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
And they emerge according to broader laws.
They carry strange customs with them,
And demand room for bold gestures.
The future speaks ruthlessly through them.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Dear friend. No doubt you have noticed that we are living in turbulent times culturally and as a planet. All pretense of immunity is collapsing as we realize how completely entangled our lives are with one another, with kelp beds and calving glaciers, with refugees and the dreams of young people everywhere. The disequilibrium shaking the world feels like a continual tremor on the fault lines of our psychic lives. Very few things feel stable. It is like a fever dream. It may be that this is the initiatory threshold we require to wake us up. Whatever is happening, much will be asked of us if we are to make it through the whitewater of this narrow passage. We do not know what lies ahead, but one thing is sure: This as a time for bold gestures. It is time to wake up and humbly take our place on this stunning planet. The future is speaking ruthlessly through us.
_________________________________________________________
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. Traditionally, these were the ones who had successfully crossed a series of initiatory thresholds and had come through as protectors and carriers of the communal soul. They were the ones whose artistry and wisdom kept the current of culture alive. We live in a society that has all but abandoned rituals of initiation. Consequently, we are languishing from the absence of mature and robust adults.
How do we become seasoned adults, a true human being? This is not a given. Traditionally this was the work of culture. Through the long labors of multiple initiations, individuals were gradually crafted into persons of substance and gravity. The process yielded someone more attuned to responsibilities than rights, more aware of multiple entanglements than entitlements. They were initiated into a vast sea of intimacies; with the village, star clusters and gnarled old oaks, the pool of ancestors and the scented earth.
Through the sustained attention of culture, individuals were ripened
into adults capable of sustaining culture: A marvelous symmetry.
We are meant to cross many thresholds in our lifetime, each a further embodiment of the soul's innate character. Yet many of us carry the uncomfortable thought that we are unsure of our place in the world, still anxious about our sense of value and our right to be here. The unfinished business of adolescence haunts us and makes it hard to live into the larger arc of our lives.
Crossing the threshold from adolescence into adulthood requires an ordeal, a tempering of the individual that begins the process of ripening. There is no easy passage. Many traditional cultures escorted their youth into the world of adulthood and the sacred through an elaborate series of rituals. These rituals occurred in nature, in the holding space of forests and caves, savannas and bush. It was a space outside the ordinary world of the village, apart from the community and often took place over many weeks and even months. It was a time of tempering the young ones with intense ritual ordeals that took them beyond their capacities to endure. Something died in the process. Something needed to die in the process. And something needed to come forward. Some new shape of identity that was wedded to the silt and slope of the land, that spoke the feathered and furred language of the creatures and the song of the dawn. This new identity was co-mingled with the holy topography. They became one and the same.
Underneath and holding up this initiatory process was a deep and abiding relationship to the wild world and the spirits of place. This passage was rooted in a nearly endless succession of generations that had come to learn the necessity of such a transition. The awareness for this is essentially universal: our souls must be shaped by a process of intense ritual encounter, communal reflection, and immersion in the natural and supranatural worlds. In other words, to become an adult, certain gateways needed to be crossed for that territory to be fully embedded within the person.
What we witness daily in the litany of injustices and exploitation of others and the world are the actions of uninitiated individuals. It is not difficult to see how questions of adequacy and inclusion are often portrayed in gross exaggerations of power and force. Nor is it a stretch to see how the persistent hunger in the unripened psyche of so many is at the heart of our violent consumption of the planet.
Initiation is an entrance into a place, a terrain. It is a courtship of a large dreaming animal. It is not an abstract ideal of psychological accomplishment, but rather an entrance into the specificity of locale, of geography, of rhizomes and crab thought, mercurial imaginings, moon cycles, and seasonal rhythms, with eyes that regard these as sacred. Through these intimacies, a grand landscape comes into vision: a world riddled with spirit, ancestors, community, cosmos and the dreams of those yet to come.
Initiation, in its deepest traditional sense, was meant to keep the world alive. The purpose was not individual, but cosmological in scope. It was never for the individual. This is very hard for us to get our minds around, having been conditioned within a psychological tradition that fixates everything upon the “self.” It is always about me and my growth! Here’s the truth, however: Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater circle of life into which the initiate is brought and to which they now hold allegiance.
Can you feel your longing for just such a knowing?
At the same time, initiation profoundly affects us as individuals. It activates and authorizes the particular soul thread we came to offer the waiting world. Much like those seed pods that only germinate in the heat of fire, the soul seed we carry responds to the heat generated by initiation.
The soul is fully aware of the reciprocal relationship it has with the wild world, with the worlds of spirit and the ancestors. Soul recognizes the innate requirements for maintaining these connections. It was the role of mature individuals to honor our place in the family of things by carrying out the rituals of gratitude and renewal that sustain our relations with the breathing, animate world. Initiation embeds in us a fundamental requirement of being human:
We are meant to feed Life in an ongoing way!
As we mature, we are asked to come into a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. We are called to develop the manners which help sustain the body of this exquisite world. Values such as respect, restraint, (our least developed spiritual value) 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.
It is not difficult to see how far we live as a culture from these practices. The central question is, how can we, once again, recognize the transforming cadence of initiation in a time of amnesia, a time in which the old forms have been abandoned?
The truth is initiation is not optional. Every one of us will be taken to the edge, pulled by the gravity of soul to engage the rigors of ripening us into something substantial. No one is exempt. Imagine if we could see the circumstances of our lives as the raw material necessary for the movement across the threshold into our adult lives. This could free us in radical ways. From a mythic perspective, these are the conditions that can cook the soul and bring us closer to the mystery of our own singular incarnation. The rough initiations of loss, trauma, defeats, betrayals, illness, become the Prima Materia, the beginning matter, for undertaking the crossing into our more encompassing life. So much depends upon how we perceive what it is that is happening in our world. Taking a mythic view enables us to see our circumstances as necessary, even required, for the work of deep change to take place.
The need is clear: we must cultivate a robust collective of adults whose primary fealty is to the life-giving world upon which we depend. We must be able to feel our loyalties to watersheds, migratory pathways, marginalized communities, and the soul of the world. We must feel the bedrock of our aliveness, and the reality of our wild and exuberant lives. Initiation tempers the soul, drawing out its hidden essence and calls forth the medicine we came to offer this stunning world. It is time to wake up!
BAPTIZED BY DARK WATERS ©Francis Weller

“I have faith in nights”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
There are times, more akin to seasons, when we are brought down into the terrain of shadows. These times are not caused by something happening in our day-lit world, nor by history or genetic inheritance. It seems we are required to periodically surrender and meander in the vast uncharted terrain of the underworld. These are times initiated by soul. Most of us will have times like this. They will descend upon us, as they say, “out of the blue.” In truth, it is more blue bending toward black.
In Alchemy, these seasonal migrations were called times in the Nigredo, or the Blackening. This is helpful to see that 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. We are taken down to the ground and asked to “dance the wild dance of no hope!”
Anyone who has ever been escorted into the underworld, knows full well how uncharted this place feels. We are without fixed stars, known destinations, familiar markers or guideposts. The Nigredo was called the “subtle dissolver” in alchemy and was viewed as a necessary element in the great work of creating the philosopher’s stone. The work could only commence through the attainment of the Nigredo. Only when the familiar structures were eroded was it possible for something new to arise. It is difficult for us to see our time in the underworld as something required for the deepening of our soul life. One major challenge to this understanding is that we are highly conditioned to strive for the light, to rise above everything and overcome every obstacle. Not so when soul pulls us downward.
We meet a different self in this grotto of darkness, someone closer to the dream world and comfortable in shadowed places. This one knows about melancholy and hasn’t been swept up in the pursuit of the light. We need to know this other one who is more kindred with the nature of shimmering moonlight and soul than the brilliant sunlight of consciousness. This self sees through the layers of conditioning we all endure that oppress and domesticate. This one expresses something true and alive whether through the complex rhythms of the blues, in shades of nuanced speech or in the tender intimacy of vulnerability. This other is inclined to silence, the night sky, the poetry of Neruda and Machado and the friendship of solitude.
When we find ourselves walking through the ink-black night of the underworld, we quickly begin looking for the exit door. The old myths and the teachings of alchemy suggest we take a different direction. The work, they say, is to move closer to the heart of the darkness. The alchemists said it clearly; the work is to make the black, “blacker than black,” the “color of a raven’s head.”
Not exactly the news we were hoping for.
Our attempts to leave the loom of night too soon, however, may deprive us of the work being done in the dark, often without our awareness. Much happens in this underground domain outside of our attention and control. What is missing is our engagement with the black threads of soul. This is a time of courage and faith, but not necessarily one of hope. Courage that we may keep our hearts open. Faith that this is a place of value, a terrain filled with richness—not unlike the black earth—something capable of nourishing new tremulous pieces of soul into life. Coming to understand that much happens outside of our conscious 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.
Our sojourn in the darkness, while difficult and painful, is also a time of alteration and change. The process of change, however, is not one of addition and growth, but rather one of letting go, decay, subtraction and death, what the alchemists called putrifactio. It is a via negativa. Like nature, it is a returning rhythm of slow movements or stillness, repetitive thoughts and feelings, memories that arise again and again. We come to see that this season is necessary for any spring to unfold. With a measure of fidelity to the work, this season of uncertainty is gradually digested into something dense and full. When we are able to carry these times with faithfulness, it yields a gravitas, a tincture of wisdom for the waiting village.
Our times in the underworld brings us close to sorrow. Our grief carries love in it; love darkened by loss; of friends, homes, marshes, marriages, children, animals, dreams. It is this particular mode of love that leads us toward the black tones of duende. It is 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 activated in the deep cavern of soul when duende move 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.
The great Spanish poet and eloquent writer on duende, Federico Garcia Lorca, wrote that whoever is touched by duende, is “baptized by dark waters.” This is a potent image that intimates that these are holy waters that arise when we find ourselves moving through the terrain of the underworld. This baptism is one in which we are washed by the waters of our own tears, the very salt of the soul, and united with the realm of the sacred. It is no wonder that we often return from our time in the arms of grief, changed and ripened. “The duende’s arrival,” Lorca says, “always means a radical change in forms.”
It may be that the “most important secrets hide in the shadows,” as Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax writes. To find them, we must be willing to enter the darkness and discover what is waiting there to be brought back to the hungry world. Dive deep!
Reflection Question: Recall a time when you found yourself in an unexplained darkness: A mood that settled upon you for an extended period that crowded out the light. Sit with this memory, not so much to figure it out, what it meant, but more, what affect did this time have upon you? What was asked of you in this time of shadows? Write for 15 minutes.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
There are times, more akin to seasons, when we are brought down into the terrain of shadows. These times are not caused by something happening in our day-lit world, nor by history or genetic inheritance. It seems we are required to periodically surrender and meander in the vast uncharted terrain of the underworld. These are times initiated by soul. Most of us will have times like this. They will descend upon us, as they say, “out of the blue.” In truth, it is more blue bending toward black.
In Alchemy, these seasonal migrations were called times in the Nigredo, or the Blackening. This is helpful to see that 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. We are taken down to the ground and asked to “dance the wild dance of no hope!”
Anyone who has ever been escorted into the underworld, knows full well how uncharted this place feels. We are without fixed stars, known destinations, familiar markers or guideposts. The Nigredo was called the “subtle dissolver” in alchemy and was viewed as a necessary element in the great work of creating the philosopher’s stone. The work could only commence through the attainment of the Nigredo. Only when the familiar structures were eroded was it possible for something new to arise. It is difficult for us to see our time in the underworld as something required for the deepening of our soul life. One major challenge to this understanding is that we are highly conditioned to strive for the light, to rise above everything and overcome every obstacle. Not so when soul pulls us downward.
We meet a different self in this grotto of darkness, someone closer to the dream world and comfortable in shadowed places. This one knows about melancholy and hasn’t been swept up in the pursuit of the light. We need to know this other one who is more kindred with the nature of shimmering moonlight and soul than the brilliant sunlight of consciousness. This self sees through the layers of conditioning we all endure that oppress and domesticate. This one expresses something true and alive whether through the complex rhythms of the blues, in shades of nuanced speech or in the tender intimacy of vulnerability. This other is inclined to silence, the night sky, the poetry of Neruda and Machado and the friendship of solitude.
When we find ourselves walking through the ink-black night of the underworld, we quickly begin looking for the exit door. The old myths and the teachings of alchemy suggest we take a different direction. The work, they say, is to move closer to the heart of the darkness. The alchemists said it clearly; the work is to make the black, “blacker than black,” the “color of a raven’s head.”
Not exactly the news we were hoping for.
Our attempts to leave the loom of night too soon, however, may deprive us of the work being done in the dark, often without our awareness. Much happens in this underground domain outside of our attention and control. What is missing is our engagement with the black threads of soul. This is a time of courage and faith, but not necessarily one of hope. Courage that we may keep our hearts open. Faith that this is a place of value, a terrain filled with richness—not unlike the black earth—something capable of nourishing new tremulous pieces of soul into life. Coming to understand that much happens outside of our conscious 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.
Our sojourn in the darkness, while difficult and painful, is also a time of alteration and change. The process of change, however, is not one of addition and growth, but rather one of letting go, decay, subtraction and death, what the alchemists called putrifactio. It is a via negativa. Like nature, it is a returning rhythm of slow movements or stillness, repetitive thoughts and feelings, memories that arise again and again. We come to see that this season is necessary for any spring to unfold. With a measure of fidelity to the work, this season of uncertainty is gradually digested into something dense and full. When we are able to carry these times with faithfulness, it yields a gravitas, a tincture of wisdom for the waiting village.
Our times in the underworld brings us close to sorrow. Our grief carries love in it; love darkened by loss; of friends, homes, marshes, marriages, children, animals, dreams. It is this particular mode of love that leads us toward the black tones of duende. It is 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 activated in the deep cavern of soul when duende move 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.
The great Spanish poet and eloquent writer on duende, Federico Garcia Lorca, wrote that whoever is touched by duende, is “baptized by dark waters.” This is a potent image that intimates that these are holy waters that arise when we find ourselves moving through the terrain of the underworld. This baptism is one in which we are washed by the waters of our own tears, the very salt of the soul, and united with the realm of the sacred. It is no wonder that we often return from our time in the arms of grief, changed and ripened. “The duende’s arrival,” Lorca says, “always means a radical change in forms.”
It may be that the “most important secrets hide in the shadows,” as Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax writes. To find them, we must be willing to enter the darkness and discover what is waiting there to be brought back to the hungry world. Dive deep!
Reflection Question: Recall a time when you found yourself in an unexplained darkness: A mood that settled upon you for an extended period that crowded out the light. Sit with this memory, not so much to figure it out, what it meant, but more, what affect did this time have upon you? What was asked of you in this time of shadows? Write for 15 minutes.
THE GRANDEUR OF THE SOUL ©Francis Weller

During the Renaissance, when the world still possessed a sense of enchantment, when animals and the dreaming earth spoke and were worthy of our attention, poets and philosophers conjured an image to depict the grandeur of the soul. What they came upon was the night sky. That is how vast and mysterious we are. That is how unfathomable and beautiful we are. Pause and think about this. Breathe it into yourself. This is our true inheritance: the wild, undulating majesty of soul. When we let this larger reality fall upon us, we drift into the grand expanse of the soul. This is what we long for and it is nested in the heart of our ancestral memory. Soul as root, as well, as heartbeat, the perennial ground that binds the human and the more-than-human worlds together.
The emphasis in our time, however, is upon the self. The “me” that we most often identify with inside our definitions. It is curious that we often feel small and isolated when embedded solely in this identity. That may be because the self is experienced as insular, interior, segregated and partitioned off from others in the world. Matters of boundaries and individuation abound. Specialness, mastery and self-improvement flood the psychological landscape. And yet, for all the offers of psychological development, the feelings of separation still linger. 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.
I am not denying the presence of a self, an identity that gives each of us a bearing in the world. What I am calling our attention to, is that without soul, the self remains marooned in its isolated hut of interiority. It is soul that leads us into the wild interplay between self and world, between self and ancestors, the Dreamtime and spirit, and the profusion of images arising continuously from psyche. Soul is there, betwixt and between, eliciting connections and intimacies. We fall into the world via soul’s erotic desire for this sensuous life.
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, whispers shared deep in the night between lovers. To step into the domain of soul is to enter a rich and vibrant terrain riddled with images and eruptions of affection. It is to step across a threshold and find ourselves enraptured by the deep story of the soul displayed in myths, metaphors, and mystery.
Soul is a shape-shifter, wearing many coats. While the self prefers 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 extensive array of images found in these wisdom tales reminds us that 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 these wider strands of soul life binds us with the dreaming earth, the soul of the world. Loneliness abates and the edges of our identity thin and become permeable. We remember our expanded self and find ourselves at home.
When we look up into the bowl of night and take in the exquisite beauty of the stars, we are catching a glimpse of the eternal and a mirror of our own immense lives. We have been gifted with this stunning life and along with this comes an innate responsibility to live it fully. And since the soul is at home with all the manifestations of this world, from joy to sorrow, despair to astonishment, and everything in between, let us risk seeing ourselves as part of the grandeur of the soul.
Exercise: Take some time one of these nights and lie out under the canopy or stars. Let your imagination go and let it invite you into a reverie that suggests that what you are seeing is also a reflection of your own vastness. What if that is true? What if you are large and contain multitudes? How might you walk differently in the world? How would your story of yourself change to account for the larger and wider sense of identity? Write about this for 15 minutes or share with a friend.
The emphasis in our time, however, is upon the self. The “me” that we most often identify with inside our definitions. It is curious that we often feel small and isolated when embedded solely in this identity. That may be because the self is experienced as insular, interior, segregated and partitioned off from others in the world. Matters of boundaries and individuation abound. Specialness, mastery and self-improvement flood the psychological landscape. And yet, for all the offers of psychological development, the feelings of separation still linger. 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.
I am not denying the presence of a self, an identity that gives each of us a bearing in the world. What I am calling our attention to, is that without soul, the self remains marooned in its isolated hut of interiority. It is soul that leads us into the wild interplay between self and world, between self and ancestors, the Dreamtime and spirit, and the profusion of images arising continuously from psyche. Soul is there, betwixt and between, eliciting connections and intimacies. We fall into the world via soul’s erotic desire for this sensuous life.
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, whispers shared deep in the night between lovers. To step into the domain of soul is to enter a rich and vibrant terrain riddled with images and eruptions of affection. It is to step across a threshold and find ourselves enraptured by the deep story of the soul displayed in myths, metaphors, and mystery.
Soul is a shape-shifter, wearing many coats. While the self prefers 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 extensive array of images found in these wisdom tales reminds us that 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 these wider strands of soul life binds us with the dreaming earth, the soul of the world. Loneliness abates and the edges of our identity thin and become permeable. We remember our expanded self and find ourselves at home.
When we look up into the bowl of night and take in the exquisite beauty of the stars, we are catching a glimpse of the eternal and a mirror of our own immense lives. We have been gifted with this stunning life and along with this comes an innate responsibility to live it fully. And since the soul is at home with all the manifestations of this world, from joy to sorrow, despair to astonishment, and everything in between, let us risk seeing ourselves as part of the grandeur of the soul.
Exercise: Take some time one of these nights and lie out under the canopy or stars. Let your imagination go and let it invite you into a reverie that suggests that what you are seeing is also a reflection of your own vastness. What if that is true? What if you are large and contain multitudes? How might you walk differently in the world? How would your story of yourself change to account for the larger and wider sense of identity? Write about this for 15 minutes or share with a friend.
The Art of Soul Making

"Premise #3. Soul work requires containment.
Our third reflection on soul work centers on the image of the vessel. The idea of the container is one frequently referred to in therapy. The thought suggests that psychic work requires a holding space, a secure vessel, within which the deep work of psychic change can take place. This vessel must be able to withstand the pressure generated in the course of psychological work.
The image of the vessel is ancient and was most notably developed in the work of alchemy. Carl Jung reclaimed alchemy from obscurity when he discovered hidden within the arcane imagery of the alchemists, a profound description of the processes of psyche. He recovered a stunning array of images, metaphors and operations that offer us a way of approaching the work of soul that is immediate and tangible rather than abstract and conceptual. Images of kings and queens, fountains and snakes, peacocks and ravens, dragons and furnaces, filled the depictions of alchemical texts. They worked with the materials of the physical world—lead, iron, sulphur, mercury, salt—all inferring an interior resonance with the ways of psyche. We have all felt leaden from time to time; slow, heavy, weighed down by life. And we have all tasted the bitterness of regret, the raw salt mines of our wounds which we return to over and over again and bathe with our salty tears. The rich metaphors offered by alchemy lend themselves to a more imaginative psychology, one alive with soul.
Central to the work of alchemy was the image of the vessel. As one noted alchemist, Albertus Magnus stated, “If God had not given us a vessel, His other gifts would have been to no avail.” Without the vessel, the work cannot proceed. But what is this vessel and what does it offer to us in terms of soul work?
To the alchemist, the vessel was a literal container, usually made of glass, within which the physical operations of transmutation took place. It was in the vessel that the base materials were placed. They were then subjected to heat and various modes of change, moving them toward the goal of the stone or lapis, often referred to as gold. In order to aid these processes of transformation, the alchemists would subject the material to various operations such as separatio, calcinatio, mortificatio, and coagulatio among many others. Each operation intended to hasten the work of nature, which the alchemists said was the movement from base metal to the Philosopher’s Stone. In psychological language, it is the work of redeeming the complex in service of the soul. James Hillman says it this way:
"The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in and day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly and disguised."
All of this happens in the vessel. The vessel, however, must be carefully tended. There are frequent warnings in many alchemical texts about the need to pay rigorous attention to the condition of the vessel in order to assure the success of the effort. In particular, they were concerned about the ability of the vessel to tolerate the effects generated by the various operations—pressure, heat, rising vapors—so as to not spoil the work through a failure of the vessel.
The 17th century alchemist Philalethes wrote,
"Let your glass distilling vessel be round or oval…Let the height of the vessel’s neck be about one palm, hand-breadth, and let the glass be clear and thick (the thicker the better, so long as it is clear and clean, and permits you to distinguish what is going on within)…The glass should be strong in order to prevent the vapours which arise from our embryo bursting the vessel. Let the mouth of the vessel be very carefully and effectively secured by means of thick layer of sealing wax." (From the Hermetic Museum, vol. 2)
His guidelines suggest much for our work with soul. First, we are told that we must attain some clarity in order to note “what is going on within.” We must be able to see through our projections and defenses, our strategies and fictions in hopes of seeing things as they are. No small feat! A degree of courage is in order here asking us to look into our psychic lives with a clear and discerning eye.
Secondly, we are instructed that the work requires a degree of strength; that the “glass should be strong” so that in the course of our efforts, it does not break. We all have known times when we were broken by the events in our lives. We felt shattered and fragile, the vessel compromised. It takes strength to engage the energies emerging 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. In fact, that is one of the central goals of the work. 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. Again, not an easy achievement.
The poet, Federico Garcia Lorca declared that our ability to engage this work requires, “Disciplina y pasion,” discipline and passion to move the work forward. 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. We only need to think of many of the ones we have lost over the years—Monroe, Joplin, Holiday, Hendricks, Morrison, Cobain—burning brilliantly but without sufficient containment, reduced to ash. Part of the strength we require to do the work of cultivating soul, is relational. We cannot do this work in isolation. As Jung noted, “The soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’”
And lastly, we can hear in the old alchemist’s words, the dictum, “Let the mouth of the vessel be very carefully and effectively secured.” This is the essential practice of restraint, one which we often struggle to follow. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung writes, “The vas bene clausum (well-sealed vessel) is a precautionary measure very frequently mentioned in alchemy…the idea is to protect what is within from the intrusion and admixture of what is without, as well as to prevent it from escaping.” What is cooking in the vessel must not be allowed to escape or leak nor is it good to add to the material once the work has been engaged. If this occurs we run the risk of diluting the work or spoiling it all together. We often share an insight too soon or expose a newly inspired project to others prematurely and suddenly the idea fades, the insight withers. Learning to seal the mouth and “treat the work-in-progress as a secret,” is a vital necessity in the work. Let it simmer, ripen, mature. Let the material become what it desires to become, not for our sake, but for the sake of soul.
Vessels separate as well as contain, offering us a way to identify the particular piece that is presenting itself and calling for our attention. In a very real way, we cannot cultivate a psychological or soulful life without containment. Hillman, once again, reminds us that “Psyche appears to be only what it contains.” In other words, without our capacity to notice and attend, reflect and witness, engage and love, we would be bereft of any psychic life. When we practice these arts of vesseling, we extend an intimacy to what is moving in the soul. This happens through slow, continuous building of the vessel. Think of therapy, for example, and the ongoing repetition, hour-upon-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.
The next issue of the newsletter will continue our exploration of the vessel. In particular, we will examine the emptiness in the vessel that makes the work possible.
Our third reflection on soul work centers on the image of the vessel. The idea of the container is one frequently referred to in therapy. The thought suggests that psychic work requires a holding space, a secure vessel, within which the deep work of psychic change can take place. This vessel must be able to withstand the pressure generated in the course of psychological work.
The image of the vessel is ancient and was most notably developed in the work of alchemy. Carl Jung reclaimed alchemy from obscurity when he discovered hidden within the arcane imagery of the alchemists, a profound description of the processes of psyche. He recovered a stunning array of images, metaphors and operations that offer us a way of approaching the work of soul that is immediate and tangible rather than abstract and conceptual. Images of kings and queens, fountains and snakes, peacocks and ravens, dragons and furnaces, filled the depictions of alchemical texts. They worked with the materials of the physical world—lead, iron, sulphur, mercury, salt—all inferring an interior resonance with the ways of psyche. We have all felt leaden from time to time; slow, heavy, weighed down by life. And we have all tasted the bitterness of regret, the raw salt mines of our wounds which we return to over and over again and bathe with our salty tears. The rich metaphors offered by alchemy lend themselves to a more imaginative psychology, one alive with soul.
Central to the work of alchemy was the image of the vessel. As one noted alchemist, Albertus Magnus stated, “If God had not given us a vessel, His other gifts would have been to no avail.” Without the vessel, the work cannot proceed. But what is this vessel and what does it offer to us in terms of soul work?
To the alchemist, the vessel was a literal container, usually made of glass, within which the physical operations of transmutation took place. It was in the vessel that the base materials were placed. They were then subjected to heat and various modes of change, moving them toward the goal of the stone or lapis, often referred to as gold. In order to aid these processes of transformation, the alchemists would subject the material to various operations such as separatio, calcinatio, mortificatio, and coagulatio among many others. Each operation intended to hasten the work of nature, which the alchemists said was the movement from base metal to the Philosopher’s Stone. In psychological language, it is the work of redeeming the complex in service of the soul. James Hillman says it this way:
"The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in and day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly and disguised."
All of this happens in the vessel. The vessel, however, must be carefully tended. There are frequent warnings in many alchemical texts about the need to pay rigorous attention to the condition of the vessel in order to assure the success of the effort. In particular, they were concerned about the ability of the vessel to tolerate the effects generated by the various operations—pressure, heat, rising vapors—so as to not spoil the work through a failure of the vessel.
The 17th century alchemist Philalethes wrote,
"Let your glass distilling vessel be round or oval…Let the height of the vessel’s neck be about one palm, hand-breadth, and let the glass be clear and thick (the thicker the better, so long as it is clear and clean, and permits you to distinguish what is going on within)…The glass should be strong in order to prevent the vapours which arise from our embryo bursting the vessel. Let the mouth of the vessel be very carefully and effectively secured by means of thick layer of sealing wax." (From the Hermetic Museum, vol. 2)
His guidelines suggest much for our work with soul. First, we are told that we must attain some clarity in order to note “what is going on within.” We must be able to see through our projections and defenses, our strategies and fictions in hopes of seeing things as they are. No small feat! A degree of courage is in order here asking us to look into our psychic lives with a clear and discerning eye.
Secondly, we are instructed that the work requires a degree of strength; that the “glass should be strong” so that in the course of our efforts, it does not break. We all have known times when we were broken by the events in our lives. We felt shattered and fragile, the vessel compromised. It takes strength to engage the energies emerging 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. In fact, that is one of the central goals of the work. 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. Again, not an easy achievement.
The poet, Federico Garcia Lorca declared that our ability to engage this work requires, “Disciplina y pasion,” discipline and passion to move the work forward. 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. We only need to think of many of the ones we have lost over the years—Monroe, Joplin, Holiday, Hendricks, Morrison, Cobain—burning brilliantly but without sufficient containment, reduced to ash. Part of the strength we require to do the work of cultivating soul, is relational. We cannot do this work in isolation. As Jung noted, “The soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’”
And lastly, we can hear in the old alchemist’s words, the dictum, “Let the mouth of the vessel be very carefully and effectively secured.” This is the essential practice of restraint, one which we often struggle to follow. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung writes, “The vas bene clausum (well-sealed vessel) is a precautionary measure very frequently mentioned in alchemy…the idea is to protect what is within from the intrusion and admixture of what is without, as well as to prevent it from escaping.” What is cooking in the vessel must not be allowed to escape or leak nor is it good to add to the material once the work has been engaged. If this occurs we run the risk of diluting the work or spoiling it all together. We often share an insight too soon or expose a newly inspired project to others prematurely and suddenly the idea fades, the insight withers. Learning to seal the mouth and “treat the work-in-progress as a secret,” is a vital necessity in the work. Let it simmer, ripen, mature. Let the material become what it desires to become, not for our sake, but for the sake of soul.
Vessels separate as well as contain, offering us a way to identify the particular piece that is presenting itself and calling for our attention. In a very real way, we cannot cultivate a psychological or soulful life without containment. Hillman, once again, reminds us that “Psyche appears to be only what it contains.” In other words, without our capacity to notice and attend, reflect and witness, engage and love, we would be bereft of any psychic life. When we practice these arts of vesseling, we extend an intimacy to what is moving in the soul. This happens through slow, continuous building of the vessel. Think of therapy, for example, and the ongoing repetition, hour-upon-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.
The next issue of the newsletter will continue our exploration of the vessel. In particular, we will examine the emptiness in the vessel that makes the work possible.
The Art of Soul Making 10/10/16
Over the course of the last issues of the newsletter, I shared some basic premises on soul work. I have gathered these thoughts over three decades of working in my practice and in my many community workshops and I share them here with you. There will be more to come.
Premise #1: Approach the work aesthetically.
Approach the work aesthetically rather than moralistically. Come to the work with an eye toward how it affects you, touches you, moves you, like a painting or a moving piece of music. Many works of art are not pretty, but they are powerful and touch us in deep ways. Coming to our experience with an appreciation for its dark beauty opens us to seeing it in a vastly different light. It invites curiosity and even affection.
When we approach the work moralistically, we often reduce it to a value of good or bad, right or wrong, and any material that we judge as bad and wrong requires correction and improvement. The subtle and not so subtle message is that it must be repaired in order for it to be welcomed. This attitude is oppressive to the material we are working with and is in service to an image we are trying to hold up to the world. We end up reinforcing the heroic ego but not the soul.
When we come to the work with an eye toward the aesthetic, we extend a courtesy to the psyche that recognizes beauty even in what is difficult. Now the work can begin.
Practice: Notice your attitudes toward the unresolved issues in your life. Sense into how you hold these places, how you approach this material. Imagine for a moment, looking at it for its strange beauty, how it holds the light, touches your heart and moves your imagination. As Rumi says, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
Premise #2. Approach with reverence.
I wrote an article some months back that featured a quote by John O'Donohue, Irish poet, philosopher and former priest. The passage said, "What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach... When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us."
This is a fundamental premise for soul work: Approach the material with reverence. We are highly conditioned by the norms of acquisition, the economics of possession. We want to own everything. In regards to soul work, this can foster an attitude of extraction: What can I get/take from this dream, this insight, this image? It can be conveyed in our language of interpretation or in methods of analysis. We want to mine the ore of psyche for its precious material. At times we seem to colonize psyche in service to our own self-image.
There may be a time for this style, but I have found it wise to begin with an attitude of restraint and reverence. Come to it with an etiquette of respect that poses a different question from which to begin. Rather than "What can I take away from this dream," wonder, "What does the dream ask of me? What does it want from me?" In other words, how can I serve the dream and the dreamer? This shifts the focus of concern away from "the relentless industry of self," and returns it to psyche/soul; a major re-ordination in our minds. We are no longer grasping at the material to possess it, to subdue it to meet our needs, but rather, we are honoring it and in a very real way, are in service to it. In this way we foster a relationship with soul instead of seeking to claim it.
There is an old alchemical idea that supports us here. The idea is that the work of alchemy was to further the material--the lead, sulfur, salt or mercury--and serve the material in a way that fostered its advancement. It was not about the alchemist making him/herself better or wiser--it was the about the material, which in our case, is soul.
And so we return to O'Donohue's passage, which suggests that when we approach with reverence, great things will decide to approach us. I have seen this repeatedly in my work over the decades. Coming to the dream or the feeling that is arising, the memory or insight with attention and affection, allows something to approach us. One of the main goals of this work is to become more spacious psychically. Our work is to be able to hold more and more of our experience and what emerges from psyche with a greater capacity, thereby connecting us intimately with more of life.
Practice: Jung suggested that images are alive. This intuition is ancient, calling up traditions from many indigenous cultures. When you wake in the morning, or are aware of an image as it arises during the day, pause and check in with the image to see what it is calling to your attention. In other words, what is it asking of you? Stay with it for some time and let it inform you. Practice a reverence of approach with your soul work and see what comes to you wanting your affection.
Premise #1: Approach the work aesthetically.
Approach the work aesthetically rather than moralistically. Come to the work with an eye toward how it affects you, touches you, moves you, like a painting or a moving piece of music. Many works of art are not pretty, but they are powerful and touch us in deep ways. Coming to our experience with an appreciation for its dark beauty opens us to seeing it in a vastly different light. It invites curiosity and even affection.
When we approach the work moralistically, we often reduce it to a value of good or bad, right or wrong, and any material that we judge as bad and wrong requires correction and improvement. The subtle and not so subtle message is that it must be repaired in order for it to be welcomed. This attitude is oppressive to the material we are working with and is in service to an image we are trying to hold up to the world. We end up reinforcing the heroic ego but not the soul.
When we come to the work with an eye toward the aesthetic, we extend a courtesy to the psyche that recognizes beauty even in what is difficult. Now the work can begin.
Practice: Notice your attitudes toward the unresolved issues in your life. Sense into how you hold these places, how you approach this material. Imagine for a moment, looking at it for its strange beauty, how it holds the light, touches your heart and moves your imagination. As Rumi says, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
Premise #2. Approach with reverence.
I wrote an article some months back that featured a quote by John O'Donohue, Irish poet, philosopher and former priest. The passage said, "What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach... When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us."
This is a fundamental premise for soul work: Approach the material with reverence. We are highly conditioned by the norms of acquisition, the economics of possession. We want to own everything. In regards to soul work, this can foster an attitude of extraction: What can I get/take from this dream, this insight, this image? It can be conveyed in our language of interpretation or in methods of analysis. We want to mine the ore of psyche for its precious material. At times we seem to colonize psyche in service to our own self-image.
There may be a time for this style, but I have found it wise to begin with an attitude of restraint and reverence. Come to it with an etiquette of respect that poses a different question from which to begin. Rather than "What can I take away from this dream," wonder, "What does the dream ask of me? What does it want from me?" In other words, how can I serve the dream and the dreamer? This shifts the focus of concern away from "the relentless industry of self," and returns it to psyche/soul; a major re-ordination in our minds. We are no longer grasping at the material to possess it, to subdue it to meet our needs, but rather, we are honoring it and in a very real way, are in service to it. In this way we foster a relationship with soul instead of seeking to claim it.
There is an old alchemical idea that supports us here. The idea is that the work of alchemy was to further the material--the lead, sulfur, salt or mercury--and serve the material in a way that fostered its advancement. It was not about the alchemist making him/herself better or wiser--it was the about the material, which in our case, is soul.
And so we return to O'Donohue's passage, which suggests that when we approach with reverence, great things will decide to approach us. I have seen this repeatedly in my work over the decades. Coming to the dream or the feeling that is arising, the memory or insight with attention and affection, allows something to approach us. One of the main goals of this work is to become more spacious psychically. Our work is to be able to hold more and more of our experience and what emerges from psyche with a greater capacity, thereby connecting us intimately with more of life.
Practice: Jung suggested that images are alive. This intuition is ancient, calling up traditions from many indigenous cultures. When you wake in the morning, or are aware of an image as it arises during the day, pause and check in with the image to see what it is calling to your attention. In other words, what is it asking of you? Stay with it for some time and let it inform you. Practice a reverence of approach with your soul work and see what comes to you wanting your affection.
The Reverence of Approach 4/1/15

Several years ago, I came across a passage by the Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue. His words profoundly impacted my thoughts and have become somewhat of an interior anthem in my life. It feels fitting that we begin our series of reflections with his words. In his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, O’Donohue writes, “What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach… When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.”
This passage is so rich with implications. As I have sat with it over the years and offered it to others in my therapy work and in workshop settings, I have continually seen its wisdom and value. For example, 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. Over thirty years in my psychotherapy practice, 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. Clearly, how we approach our inner life profoundly affects what comes to us in return.
What we encounter, recognize or discover, depends on the quality of our approach. An approach of reverence invites revelation. To pause and reflect on this can make all the difference between living in a cold, detached world, populated primarily by judgements and cynicism, and living in a world riddled with intimacy and offers of communion. When our approach is one of reverence, we find ourselves falling into a deeper embrace with all that is open to encounter, both internally and in the surrounding, breathing world. If we approach superficially or from a perspective of what can I get out of this exchange, then the encounter will be limited, what I recognize will be thin and what I discover will be nothing at all. I will simply be meeting my own well-rehearsed stories in the moment.
There is an intimation in O’Donohue’s passage: He tells us that great things will approach us when we practice the etiquette of reverence. It is as if the aperture of our perception widens when we bring reverence to bear. We become able to recognize the holiness that exists in the moment, as I experienced this morning on my drive to work. As I came around a bend, winding through vineyards and meadows, the mist was threading its way at the base of the hills and in that glimpse something great approached me. I was moved by the vista, brought to tears through the intimacy shared between my heart and the world.
An approach of reverence establishes a foundation ripe for amazement. We are readied for surprise and awe by a posture of reverence. It is a stance of humility, recognizing that the otherness that surround us—that infuses the world—is vast and powerful and yet curiously open for connection. An approach of reverence invites the mystery of encounter where two solitudes meet and become entangled, creating a Third Body, an intimacy born of affection. All true intimacy requires an approach of reverence, a deep regard, an unknowing of who or what we are meeting. It is our bow honoring the exchange.
O’Donohue advises us, however, that “The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” We must be able to step out of the frantic and breathless pace that consumes much of our days. Reverence requires a rhythm akin to prayer. We are asked to slow down and rest in the space of silence and deep listening. There is a saying in the Zen tradition, “Not-knowing is most intimate.” When we suspend our preconceptions and static stories of who we are, or who our wife, husband, or partner is; when we let go of our predetermined expectations of how it all should be, then we come into a place of reverence, of deep respect and the freshness of the encounter is once again available to us. When we pause and notice, we are free to drink in the delicious thickness of the moment and all that it offers.
Reverence, rather than expectation or entitlement, acknowledges we live in a gifting cosmos and that we do best honoring creation by singing praises. As the poet Rilke said, “To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise // comes toward us like ore out of the silences // of rock.” Reverence acknowledges that what we are seeing or seeking is holy; that we depend utterly on this world to breathe and to dream.
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.
Exercise:
Inner work: Experiment with reverence over the coming days. Be mindful of how you approach your inner world. Is it characterized by criticism and judgement? Imagine coming to your experience with reverence, especially around our more vulnerable states like fear or grief. Notice the difference when you come to your experience with reverence. Take ten minutes and write about your experience.
Outer work: Take a walk and let something call to your attention—a tree, a rose, a budding maple, an old barn. Soften your gaze and let the qualities of reverence fill your being. Simply notice what takes shape between the two of you. Allow the connection to come full and then offer your gratitude for the encounter. Remember, everything is open to the conversation. Take ten minutes and write about your experience.
This passage is so rich with implications. As I have sat with it over the years and offered it to others in my therapy work and in workshop settings, I have continually seen its wisdom and value. For example, 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. Over thirty years in my psychotherapy practice, 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. Clearly, how we approach our inner life profoundly affects what comes to us in return.
What we encounter, recognize or discover, depends on the quality of our approach. An approach of reverence invites revelation. To pause and reflect on this can make all the difference between living in a cold, detached world, populated primarily by judgements and cynicism, and living in a world riddled with intimacy and offers of communion. When our approach is one of reverence, we find ourselves falling into a deeper embrace with all that is open to encounter, both internally and in the surrounding, breathing world. If we approach superficially or from a perspective of what can I get out of this exchange, then the encounter will be limited, what I recognize will be thin and what I discover will be nothing at all. I will simply be meeting my own well-rehearsed stories in the moment.
There is an intimation in O’Donohue’s passage: He tells us that great things will approach us when we practice the etiquette of reverence. It is as if the aperture of our perception widens when we bring reverence to bear. We become able to recognize the holiness that exists in the moment, as I experienced this morning on my drive to work. As I came around a bend, winding through vineyards and meadows, the mist was threading its way at the base of the hills and in that glimpse something great approached me. I was moved by the vista, brought to tears through the intimacy shared between my heart and the world.
An approach of reverence establishes a foundation ripe for amazement. We are readied for surprise and awe by a posture of reverence. It is a stance of humility, recognizing that the otherness that surround us—that infuses the world—is vast and powerful and yet curiously open for connection. An approach of reverence invites the mystery of encounter where two solitudes meet and become entangled, creating a Third Body, an intimacy born of affection. All true intimacy requires an approach of reverence, a deep regard, an unknowing of who or what we are meeting. It is our bow honoring the exchange.
O’Donohue advises us, however, that “The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” We must be able to step out of the frantic and breathless pace that consumes much of our days. Reverence requires a rhythm akin to prayer. We are asked to slow down and rest in the space of silence and deep listening. There is a saying in the Zen tradition, “Not-knowing is most intimate.” When we suspend our preconceptions and static stories of who we are, or who our wife, husband, or partner is; when we let go of our predetermined expectations of how it all should be, then we come into a place of reverence, of deep respect and the freshness of the encounter is once again available to us. When we pause and notice, we are free to drink in the delicious thickness of the moment and all that it offers.
Reverence, rather than expectation or entitlement, acknowledges we live in a gifting cosmos and that we do best honoring creation by singing praises. As the poet Rilke said, “To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise // comes toward us like ore out of the silences // of rock.” Reverence acknowledges that what we are seeing or seeking is holy; that we depend utterly on this world to breathe and to dream.
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.
Exercise:
Inner work: Experiment with reverence over the coming days. Be mindful of how you approach your inner world. Is it characterized by criticism and judgement? Imagine coming to your experience with reverence, especially around our more vulnerable states like fear or grief. Notice the difference when you come to your experience with reverence. Take ten minutes and write about your experience.
Outer work: Take a walk and let something call to your attention—a tree, a rose, a budding maple, an old barn. Soften your gaze and let the qualities of reverence fill your being. Simply notice what takes shape between the two of you. Allow the connection to come full and then offer your gratitude for the encounter. Remember, everything is open to the conversation. Take ten minutes and write about your experience.
Windows to Eternity: The Erotics of Time 12/20/13
This is the true nature of Eros, the ability, no, the celebration of the senses wherein we are invited to know the world in a bodily way, taking it into who we are so that we are the continuing expression of what it is we have tasted and touched. We become the scent of roses and jonquils, we are the taste of mint and lemon, we are the continuation of their lives within our cells till we in turn, in time, become the scent of roses again. As Mary Oliver says, “There's nothing so sensible, as sensual inundation.”

“Life is too short to hurry.” African saying
It is a week out from the winter solstice and it is a brilliant day. The sun is low in the sky, casting long shadows across the hillsides. Still, the light is dazzling and I sought out its warmth while I ate my breakfast. Sunlight is amazing, 93 million miles away; just the right distance and we feel bathed in warmth. To notice, to feel, to let the sunlight penetrate takes time; enough time to slow down if not outright stop. I love the feel of sunlight on my skin. It is a most sensuous bath enticing us to slow down, to doze, to rest. It is heavenly when those unhurried moments arise and we have nothing to do, nowhere to go and we can simply be.
How rarely we do this in a culture dictated by speed. We are among the ultimate hyperactive cultures, 24 hour a day convenience stores, whatever we need is always, always available. This consume on demand cycle requires no waiting, no reflection and now with non-stop shopping via the Internet, no restraints.
How seldom we linger, purposefully moving at a pace that would help us hold the moment close. This is important. We often outpace the present and miss entirely what is registering in the subtle awareness of our body. The only time the body knows is the present; it is our root anchor to Now, it is home.
Time is a central element in reclaiming the indigenous soul. Ironically, its importance to indigenous people was minimal in the sense of how it is defined in our culture. In fact many traditional cultures have no word for time. Time instead was a round, a fluid returning cycle that embraced the people and all of nature. It was not used or seen as a marker of productivity, a measurement of worth. Time is money was not the core axiom of traditional people.
The soul moves at geologic speed. Our ancestors knew this in part because they walked everywhere. This pace afforded the heightened participation of the senses. The world is able to penetrate into us at the pace of walking. I often feel sad when I am out walking and I see people with head phones stuffed into their ears come reeling past me, power walking. There is nothing wrong with this, but the insulation from nature cuts us off from the surrounding world and its array of beauty.
Gary Snyder tells a story of being in the bush in Australia traveling cross-country with an Aboriginal elder. This journey was being made in a jeep and every so often the elder would break into animated rapid speech that was difficult to decipher. After a while, Gary asked what was happening and he was told that they were crossing the songlines and the elder was reciting the story that is associated with that place, only they were traveling so fast that he had to tell the story quickly. These stories were traditionally told while walking across the land and at a pace that allowed the telling of the tales in full while crossing the songline. Snyder's tale is humorous, but also instructive. What is the cost of this fast, breathless pace world that we have created?
I am not advocating a return to the days before cars, (maybe not) but I am imploring us to walk without destination from time to time, in part to elude our culture's fiction and imprisonment of time. What I mean by this is that we need time that is not one directional, not pre-determined to be productive. Blake, once again reminds us, “Every day has a moment that opens a window to eternity.” Idle time, time without purpose, wandering, wondering, wistful time where what we are about is being in this moment. These are the times when time stretches and seems to stand still. We all have had moments like this and they are precious. To recognize these moments however, required an essential ingredient: that we were moving slowly, ambling, able to touch our world with hands and eyes and ears, taking in the particular fragrances of the day and perhaps even taste what was being offered by the day -blackberries, wine, apples, cinnamon, figs, or any number of amazements. This is the true nature of Eros, the ability, no, the celebration of the senses wherein we are invited to know the world in a bodily way, taking it into who we are so that we are the continuing expression of what it is we have tasted and touched. We become the scent of roses and jonquils, we are the taste of mint and lemon, we are the continuation of their lives within our cells till we in turn, in time, become the scent of roses again. As Mary Oliver says, “There's nothing so sensible, as sensual inundation.”
We need to feel lost from time to time, to not be directing our life, to find ourselves inspired, renewed, enraptured. Now that's a good word: enraptured. It comes from the Latin, rapere, which means” to be carried away.” You know those moments, those times when we are filled with ecstasy and we are carried away into some eternal place where beauty and the senses take full delight, where imagination and wonder can flourish. We are hungry for those times when we can replenish. We call it recreation, but it is actually re-creation. It takes down time, time without agendas, PDA's, day planners, appointments to keep, in order for us to re-create ourselves. We keep putting out, but at times we need to take in and be remade.
The indigenous soul resonates with time in a far less linear and historical manner than our modern selves do. It responds more completely to what writer Jay Griffiths calls, “wild time.” It is this unbounded, untamed time that is more thoroughly familiar to the indigenous soul. Time that is revealed by eons, long time, time immemorial, the time before time, mythic time, the Dreamtime of the Aboriginals. It is time shaped by the earth, by nature, by cycles and turnings, by rhythms born of the body, not by machines directing the world, uniformly blanketing the universe in industrial manacles, imprisoning the wildness of time into controllable units. Our relationship with wilderness is deeply connected with our visions of time. Both apparently need to be tamed and controlled. We fear each, for at the bottom of wild time, Griffith's notes, “is death itself.”
We are insatiable in our efforts to dominate the world with this dress code of hours and seconds, time leashed and collared which ironically in turn controls and dominates our lives. I remember the young men in Burkina Faso wearing wrist watches, which were often not working, so they could be more like us knowing what time it is really. They had no need of these watches in the village. (Curious name for these devices, whose watching whom?) Nothing was decided by clock time, but by sacred time, by nature's time, by wild time.
Time as a fixed and precise measurement of the world is a fiction, a construct. Calendars are agreed upon, but here's a secret, they don't really exist. There is no January in the wild, no Friday, no millennium, no weeks, but we are harassed by them daily. They absolutely have their use as they make it possible for so many things to happen, appointments to get our haircut or car serviced or airplane flights to visit family. I have no problem with clock time or calendar time, except our turning them into facts that determine our freedom. Let us use them for our convenience, not the other way around!
Time has become regimented, preparing us to punch time clocks, to follow schedules, to respond to whistles and bells, everything geared towards productivity and conformity. But wild time sows a bit of anarchy into the mix, tossing the day planner into the river, like Shams throwing Rumi's books into the pond. We need days where we are free to know the moment, to be astonished.
Astonishment! Please don't rob me of it.
Don't always tell me of tomorrow's weather.
Let me be rained upon
by an unexpected storm.
~Tony Crispino
Time has been tethered to speed in our culture. When time is money, there is no time to waste; yet those are the days that we relish. We crave time off. We need time that is free and unchained to productivity, to efficiency, to control. Speed rushes us by these moments as if they were unnecessary and pushes us towards our real purpose, which is to make money. But oh the loss of those moments, the rich textured day with little or nothing to do, when the day stretches out in front of us inviting us to unfold. But this takes time. We may be a little uncertain of this kind of time however, as it simultaneously invites an awareness of our internal world. We may find ourselves facing the emptiness I wrote about and this can become uncomfortable. I would encourage you to face this empty place and to allow the spaciousness that accompanies open time to gradually woo you deeper into the moment, into the world. Even the discomfort can be something holy, something entirely revelatory. See what is awaiting you in the quiet, in the slow times, in the not doing of your life.
When time and speed become interwoven, the result is not good. We become restless, anxious, and fearful of entering into those timeless moments. So we stay busy and always doing something. Idle hands, you may recall, are the devil's workshop. How we fear being still. Brother David Stiendl-Rast shared at a talk he gave that the Chinese word for busy is spelled with two ideograms which mean “heart” and “killing.” Shockingly instructive! We pride ourselves on how busy we are and call those not motivated to move with haste through their lives, lazy and worthless. Yet all of our hyperactivity is seemingly designed to afford us leisure time. The irony is extreme. I recall how uncomfortable I was for the first few days in Africa when we often didn't do anything for hours but sit and track the shade. Was I bored or restless or simply unaccustomed to stillness? I believe it was the latter. I have since practiced not doing and I am pleased to say, I have become much more comfortable with not filling up my time.
There are times when we gather to do ritual over the course of numerous days when we notice changes in the way we move. Something is recovered during this time outside of our daily lives. We slow to soul time and things no longer carry a sense of urgency, only a sense of timing; when to begin, when to finish, what needs our attention, and on and on. People will often comment on how they just arrived after a couple of days of being there, feeling just how long it took to truly adjust to the rhythm of nature, the community, the rituals, to the moment. It takes that type of space to stop the world as we are conditioned to experience it and to feel it as it is being offered to us now.
Time, as I am speaking of it in the old ways, is also connected to our capacity to love. When we move quickly, rashly, hastily through the day or through a lifetime, we do not stop to meet the other that is present before us. I frequently have couples in my office, caught in the gyre of having too little time for their relationship. Somehow everything else takes priority. Intimacy requires slowing down. It takes time to listen to one another, to hear the intricacies behind the words of our partners. It takes time to feel into the sorrows and longings of one another. It certainly takes time to fully make love and enter the tangled nest of Eros. Love is the central experience of being human, yet we grant it so little space and time in our daily lives. The same is true for the ever-expanding arc of love as it is cast out into the world encompassing trees, stones, sand and sky. Every relationship requires maintenance, requires time in order for its fullness to be encountered. Kenneth Rexroth touches this place of time and love in his poem, Lute Music.
The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents-
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once-
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts-
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses-
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
Let us celebrate the daily recurrent nativity of love! What an exquisite invitation to renew the bonds of loving daily, discovering the fresh territory of your lover, the ground, the air. Eros requires a slowing down and entering into that time outside of time. This does not always mean taking an entire day off from activity; what it means is allowing those moments when Eros is present to register, to touch you and to slow you down. Eros is the principle of connection and in our hyperactive modes of connection via email and text messaging; it is the actual touch and feel of our day that allows the “endless epiphany of our fluent selves.”
My daily practice is to wake and bring to my awareness the statement, “I am one day closer to my death. How will I live this day? How will I meet those with whom I come in contact? I don't want to have wasted this day.” This practice draws me into a heightened awareness of this moment and how every moment invites me into full presence.
To the indigenous soul, time is a fluctuating and mercurial presence, not fixed or solid. It is indeed wild, inviting connection, play, imagination, silence, stillness, reverence and a sense of presence. To touch the eternal in the ordinary movements of the day requires that we attend to the meandering stream of time as it flows through our life joining us simultaneously with what was and what will be, knowing they are all available in the now. The challenge is not to fill our time with activity and allow the moments to be what they are, invitations to connection: All in good time.
It is a week out from the winter solstice and it is a brilliant day. The sun is low in the sky, casting long shadows across the hillsides. Still, the light is dazzling and I sought out its warmth while I ate my breakfast. Sunlight is amazing, 93 million miles away; just the right distance and we feel bathed in warmth. To notice, to feel, to let the sunlight penetrate takes time; enough time to slow down if not outright stop. I love the feel of sunlight on my skin. It is a most sensuous bath enticing us to slow down, to doze, to rest. It is heavenly when those unhurried moments arise and we have nothing to do, nowhere to go and we can simply be.
How rarely we do this in a culture dictated by speed. We are among the ultimate hyperactive cultures, 24 hour a day convenience stores, whatever we need is always, always available. This consume on demand cycle requires no waiting, no reflection and now with non-stop shopping via the Internet, no restraints.
How seldom we linger, purposefully moving at a pace that would help us hold the moment close. This is important. We often outpace the present and miss entirely what is registering in the subtle awareness of our body. The only time the body knows is the present; it is our root anchor to Now, it is home.
Time is a central element in reclaiming the indigenous soul. Ironically, its importance to indigenous people was minimal in the sense of how it is defined in our culture. In fact many traditional cultures have no word for time. Time instead was a round, a fluid returning cycle that embraced the people and all of nature. It was not used or seen as a marker of productivity, a measurement of worth. Time is money was not the core axiom of traditional people.
The soul moves at geologic speed. Our ancestors knew this in part because they walked everywhere. This pace afforded the heightened participation of the senses. The world is able to penetrate into us at the pace of walking. I often feel sad when I am out walking and I see people with head phones stuffed into their ears come reeling past me, power walking. There is nothing wrong with this, but the insulation from nature cuts us off from the surrounding world and its array of beauty.
Gary Snyder tells a story of being in the bush in Australia traveling cross-country with an Aboriginal elder. This journey was being made in a jeep and every so often the elder would break into animated rapid speech that was difficult to decipher. After a while, Gary asked what was happening and he was told that they were crossing the songlines and the elder was reciting the story that is associated with that place, only they were traveling so fast that he had to tell the story quickly. These stories were traditionally told while walking across the land and at a pace that allowed the telling of the tales in full while crossing the songline. Snyder's tale is humorous, but also instructive. What is the cost of this fast, breathless pace world that we have created?
I am not advocating a return to the days before cars, (maybe not) but I am imploring us to walk without destination from time to time, in part to elude our culture's fiction and imprisonment of time. What I mean by this is that we need time that is not one directional, not pre-determined to be productive. Blake, once again reminds us, “Every day has a moment that opens a window to eternity.” Idle time, time without purpose, wandering, wondering, wistful time where what we are about is being in this moment. These are the times when time stretches and seems to stand still. We all have had moments like this and they are precious. To recognize these moments however, required an essential ingredient: that we were moving slowly, ambling, able to touch our world with hands and eyes and ears, taking in the particular fragrances of the day and perhaps even taste what was being offered by the day -blackberries, wine, apples, cinnamon, figs, or any number of amazements. This is the true nature of Eros, the ability, no, the celebration of the senses wherein we are invited to know the world in a bodily way, taking it into who we are so that we are the continuing expression of what it is we have tasted and touched. We become the scent of roses and jonquils, we are the taste of mint and lemon, we are the continuation of their lives within our cells till we in turn, in time, become the scent of roses again. As Mary Oliver says, “There's nothing so sensible, as sensual inundation.”
We need to feel lost from time to time, to not be directing our life, to find ourselves inspired, renewed, enraptured. Now that's a good word: enraptured. It comes from the Latin, rapere, which means” to be carried away.” You know those moments, those times when we are filled with ecstasy and we are carried away into some eternal place where beauty and the senses take full delight, where imagination and wonder can flourish. We are hungry for those times when we can replenish. We call it recreation, but it is actually re-creation. It takes down time, time without agendas, PDA's, day planners, appointments to keep, in order for us to re-create ourselves. We keep putting out, but at times we need to take in and be remade.
The indigenous soul resonates with time in a far less linear and historical manner than our modern selves do. It responds more completely to what writer Jay Griffiths calls, “wild time.” It is this unbounded, untamed time that is more thoroughly familiar to the indigenous soul. Time that is revealed by eons, long time, time immemorial, the time before time, mythic time, the Dreamtime of the Aboriginals. It is time shaped by the earth, by nature, by cycles and turnings, by rhythms born of the body, not by machines directing the world, uniformly blanketing the universe in industrial manacles, imprisoning the wildness of time into controllable units. Our relationship with wilderness is deeply connected with our visions of time. Both apparently need to be tamed and controlled. We fear each, for at the bottom of wild time, Griffith's notes, “is death itself.”
We are insatiable in our efforts to dominate the world with this dress code of hours and seconds, time leashed and collared which ironically in turn controls and dominates our lives. I remember the young men in Burkina Faso wearing wrist watches, which were often not working, so they could be more like us knowing what time it is really. They had no need of these watches in the village. (Curious name for these devices, whose watching whom?) Nothing was decided by clock time, but by sacred time, by nature's time, by wild time.
Time as a fixed and precise measurement of the world is a fiction, a construct. Calendars are agreed upon, but here's a secret, they don't really exist. There is no January in the wild, no Friday, no millennium, no weeks, but we are harassed by them daily. They absolutely have their use as they make it possible for so many things to happen, appointments to get our haircut or car serviced or airplane flights to visit family. I have no problem with clock time or calendar time, except our turning them into facts that determine our freedom. Let us use them for our convenience, not the other way around!
Time has become regimented, preparing us to punch time clocks, to follow schedules, to respond to whistles and bells, everything geared towards productivity and conformity. But wild time sows a bit of anarchy into the mix, tossing the day planner into the river, like Shams throwing Rumi's books into the pond. We need days where we are free to know the moment, to be astonished.
Astonishment! Please don't rob me of it.
Don't always tell me of tomorrow's weather.
Let me be rained upon
by an unexpected storm.
~Tony Crispino
Time has been tethered to speed in our culture. When time is money, there is no time to waste; yet those are the days that we relish. We crave time off. We need time that is free and unchained to productivity, to efficiency, to control. Speed rushes us by these moments as if they were unnecessary and pushes us towards our real purpose, which is to make money. But oh the loss of those moments, the rich textured day with little or nothing to do, when the day stretches out in front of us inviting us to unfold. But this takes time. We may be a little uncertain of this kind of time however, as it simultaneously invites an awareness of our internal world. We may find ourselves facing the emptiness I wrote about and this can become uncomfortable. I would encourage you to face this empty place and to allow the spaciousness that accompanies open time to gradually woo you deeper into the moment, into the world. Even the discomfort can be something holy, something entirely revelatory. See what is awaiting you in the quiet, in the slow times, in the not doing of your life.
When time and speed become interwoven, the result is not good. We become restless, anxious, and fearful of entering into those timeless moments. So we stay busy and always doing something. Idle hands, you may recall, are the devil's workshop. How we fear being still. Brother David Stiendl-Rast shared at a talk he gave that the Chinese word for busy is spelled with two ideograms which mean “heart” and “killing.” Shockingly instructive! We pride ourselves on how busy we are and call those not motivated to move with haste through their lives, lazy and worthless. Yet all of our hyperactivity is seemingly designed to afford us leisure time. The irony is extreme. I recall how uncomfortable I was for the first few days in Africa when we often didn't do anything for hours but sit and track the shade. Was I bored or restless or simply unaccustomed to stillness? I believe it was the latter. I have since practiced not doing and I am pleased to say, I have become much more comfortable with not filling up my time.
There are times when we gather to do ritual over the course of numerous days when we notice changes in the way we move. Something is recovered during this time outside of our daily lives. We slow to soul time and things no longer carry a sense of urgency, only a sense of timing; when to begin, when to finish, what needs our attention, and on and on. People will often comment on how they just arrived after a couple of days of being there, feeling just how long it took to truly adjust to the rhythm of nature, the community, the rituals, to the moment. It takes that type of space to stop the world as we are conditioned to experience it and to feel it as it is being offered to us now.
Time, as I am speaking of it in the old ways, is also connected to our capacity to love. When we move quickly, rashly, hastily through the day or through a lifetime, we do not stop to meet the other that is present before us. I frequently have couples in my office, caught in the gyre of having too little time for their relationship. Somehow everything else takes priority. Intimacy requires slowing down. It takes time to listen to one another, to hear the intricacies behind the words of our partners. It takes time to feel into the sorrows and longings of one another. It certainly takes time to fully make love and enter the tangled nest of Eros. Love is the central experience of being human, yet we grant it so little space and time in our daily lives. The same is true for the ever-expanding arc of love as it is cast out into the world encompassing trees, stones, sand and sky. Every relationship requires maintenance, requires time in order for its fullness to be encountered. Kenneth Rexroth touches this place of time and love in his poem, Lute Music.
The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents-
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once-
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts-
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses-
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
Let us celebrate the daily recurrent nativity of love! What an exquisite invitation to renew the bonds of loving daily, discovering the fresh territory of your lover, the ground, the air. Eros requires a slowing down and entering into that time outside of time. This does not always mean taking an entire day off from activity; what it means is allowing those moments when Eros is present to register, to touch you and to slow you down. Eros is the principle of connection and in our hyperactive modes of connection via email and text messaging; it is the actual touch and feel of our day that allows the “endless epiphany of our fluent selves.”
My daily practice is to wake and bring to my awareness the statement, “I am one day closer to my death. How will I live this day? How will I meet those with whom I come in contact? I don't want to have wasted this day.” This practice draws me into a heightened awareness of this moment and how every moment invites me into full presence.
To the indigenous soul, time is a fluctuating and mercurial presence, not fixed or solid. It is indeed wild, inviting connection, play, imagination, silence, stillness, reverence and a sense of presence. To touch the eternal in the ordinary movements of the day requires that we attend to the meandering stream of time as it flows through our life joining us simultaneously with what was and what will be, knowing they are all available in the now. The challenge is not to fill our time with activity and allow the moments to be what they are, invitations to connection: All in good time.
A Beautiful and Strange Otherness 10/7/2013
"When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing."

I was recently in the pine forests of Northern Minnesota to teach at the Minnesota Men’s Gathering. I was invited to the gathering to speak about the role of grief as it related to the conference theme: Dark Talk with Screeching Pines: Why Men Listen to Nature’s Voices. The land was familiar to me, shaped by ancient glacial activity as it receded at the end of the last Ice Age. Having lived the first twenty-two years of my life in Wisconsin, I recognized the terrain immediately. It was in my body and it spoke a familiar language.
The first thing I did when I arrived at the conference was to ask Miguel Rivera to introduce me to the Spirit of the Lake. While the land was familiar to me, I was unknown to the place and I wanted to step onto this land in a respectful way. We walked out on the pier and with tobacco and sweet words in Mayan, Lakota, Spanish and English, we said hello and offered our greetings to this place. I brought greetings from the redwoods, the salmon people, madrone and Douglas Firs, the familiars from my coastal Northern California home. In beauty, it had begun.
The first night we stepped immediately into ritual. It was clear to me that these men were carrying something deep and powerful. This was no mere conference, but an established ritual ground whose intention it is to dream and feed a new culture, one invigorated by ancient practices like ritual and renewed by the vital waters of myth and story, poetry and singing. I was walking onto sacred ground. Some part of me felt deeply at home and grateful to find another place devoted to the mending of culture and the culture of mending men’s souls.
I was asked to prepare a couple of talks which would be shared over the week. I realized I had a good deal of material on one topic and that it would probably fill the two times I would be invited to teach. My talk was called, “A Beautiful and Strange Otherness.” The title comes from a passage of human biologist, Paul Shepard that occurred in the course of an interview. He was asked what role the “others” played in our development as a species. The others here referred to the animals, plants, rivers, trees; the entire surrounding field that was the ongoing reflection we encountered for hundreds of thousands of years. Shepard’s response was stunning, ending his thought with a sentence that has captivated me ever since I first read it many years ago. He said, “The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”
As is always the case when I share that quote, there is an immediate request to repeat it slowly as everyone scrambles for pen and paper. After I shared the passage, I said, “We could spend the rest of this gathering metabolizing the gravity of this one sentence.”
The weight carried by this phrase astonishes me. We were meant to have a life-long engagement with a beautiful and strange otherness. It was meant to be an ongoing presence, not an exception or something that we capture on our cameras while on vacation in Yellowstone or by watching it on the Nature Channel. Shepard spoke adamantly and repeatedly how the others shaped us and made us human; how the lessons of coyote and rabbit, mouse and hawk taught us core values and how to live here in a sustainable way. Animal images were the first to appear in recesses and cave paintings, the first to be conjured in myths and tales. Their ways were integral not only to our survival, but to the very shaping of our souls.
Now, in the shortest wisp of a moment, the perennial conversation has been silenced for the vast majority of us. There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jay. They myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, the cleverness of fox have fallen cold. The others have retreated and have essentially vanished from our attention, our minds and our imaginations. What happens to our soul life in the absence of the others? Shepard says that what emerges is a grief-laden emptiness. How true. He was wise, however, to recognize our tendency to attribute the emptiness to a “failure in our personality.”
Nearly every day in my practice, I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is more akin to what Shepard is suggesting? What if what we are experiencing is the deep silence, a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red tail 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?
“We are born,” wrote psychiatrist R.D. Laing, “as Stone Age children.” Our entire psychic, physical, emotional and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what we expected. Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning calls this original enfoldment in the natural world The Primal Matrix. We were entangled, embedded in this matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception. It was an unmediated intimacy with the living world with no trace of separation between the human and the more-than-human world.
What was once a seamless embrace has now become a breach, a tear in our sense of belonging in the world. 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, hyper-vigilance, disconnection, as well as many others. We are left with a profound loneliness and isolation that we rarely acknowledge. It is as if we have completely normalized our condition. And yet, this feeling of separation profoundly affects the range of our reach into the world, the ways we participate in the landscape and sense our allegiance with the living world. 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 “relentless industry of self.”
Sigmund Freud recognized the reduction in our life that accompanies the process of enculturation. He wrote:
Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed all embracing—feeling which corresponded to a once intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.
We did not come here to be a shrunken residue of a formerly intimate life. This “beautiful and strange otherness” was also meant to be seen in one another’s eyes. 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. The wild within and the wild without are kin, the one enlivening the other in a beautiful tango.
When we pause and allow our separation from the living earth to rise, we feel the “grief and sense of loss” that begins Shepard’s phrase. When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.
The question we now hold steadfast in our attention today and every day is: How do we re-enter the deep conversation with the Beautiful and Strange Otherness? I will write about this in Part II.
The first thing I did when I arrived at the conference was to ask Miguel Rivera to introduce me to the Spirit of the Lake. While the land was familiar to me, I was unknown to the place and I wanted to step onto this land in a respectful way. We walked out on the pier and with tobacco and sweet words in Mayan, Lakota, Spanish and English, we said hello and offered our greetings to this place. I brought greetings from the redwoods, the salmon people, madrone and Douglas Firs, the familiars from my coastal Northern California home. In beauty, it had begun.
The first night we stepped immediately into ritual. It was clear to me that these men were carrying something deep and powerful. This was no mere conference, but an established ritual ground whose intention it is to dream and feed a new culture, one invigorated by ancient practices like ritual and renewed by the vital waters of myth and story, poetry and singing. I was walking onto sacred ground. Some part of me felt deeply at home and grateful to find another place devoted to the mending of culture and the culture of mending men’s souls.
I was asked to prepare a couple of talks which would be shared over the week. I realized I had a good deal of material on one topic and that it would probably fill the two times I would be invited to teach. My talk was called, “A Beautiful and Strange Otherness.” The title comes from a passage of human biologist, Paul Shepard that occurred in the course of an interview. He was asked what role the “others” played in our development as a species. The others here referred to the animals, plants, rivers, trees; the entire surrounding field that was the ongoing reflection we encountered for hundreds of thousands of years. Shepard’s response was stunning, ending his thought with a sentence that has captivated me ever since I first read it many years ago. He said, “The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”
As is always the case when I share that quote, there is an immediate request to repeat it slowly as everyone scrambles for pen and paper. After I shared the passage, I said, “We could spend the rest of this gathering metabolizing the gravity of this one sentence.”
The weight carried by this phrase astonishes me. We were meant to have a life-long engagement with a beautiful and strange otherness. It was meant to be an ongoing presence, not an exception or something that we capture on our cameras while on vacation in Yellowstone or by watching it on the Nature Channel. Shepard spoke adamantly and repeatedly how the others shaped us and made us human; how the lessons of coyote and rabbit, mouse and hawk taught us core values and how to live here in a sustainable way. Animal images were the first to appear in recesses and cave paintings, the first to be conjured in myths and tales. Their ways were integral not only to our survival, but to the very shaping of our souls.
Now, in the shortest wisp of a moment, the perennial conversation has been silenced for the vast majority of us. There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jay. They myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, the cleverness of fox have fallen cold. The others have retreated and have essentially vanished from our attention, our minds and our imaginations. What happens to our soul life in the absence of the others? Shepard says that what emerges is a grief-laden emptiness. How true. He was wise, however, to recognize our tendency to attribute the emptiness to a “failure in our personality.”
Nearly every day in my practice, I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is more akin to what Shepard is suggesting? What if what we are experiencing is the deep silence, a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red tail 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?
“We are born,” wrote psychiatrist R.D. Laing, “as Stone Age children.” Our entire psychic, physical, emotional and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what we expected. Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning calls this original enfoldment in the natural world The Primal Matrix. We were entangled, embedded in this matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception. It was an unmediated intimacy with the living world with no trace of separation between the human and the more-than-human world.
What was once a seamless embrace has now become a breach, a tear in our sense of belonging in the world. 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, hyper-vigilance, disconnection, as well as many others. We are left with a profound loneliness and isolation that we rarely acknowledge. It is as if we have completely normalized our condition. And yet, this feeling of separation profoundly affects the range of our reach into the world, the ways we participate in the landscape and sense our allegiance with the living world. 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 “relentless industry of self.”
Sigmund Freud recognized the reduction in our life that accompanies the process of enculturation. He wrote:
Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed all embracing—feeling which corresponded to a once intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.
We did not come here to be a shrunken residue of a formerly intimate life. This “beautiful and strange otherness” was also meant to be seen in one another’s eyes. 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. The wild within and the wild without are kin, the one enlivening the other in a beautiful tango.
When we pause and allow our separation from the living earth to rise, we feel the “grief and sense of loss” that begins Shepard’s phrase. When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.
The question we now hold steadfast in our attention today and every day is: How do we re-enter the deep conversation with the Beautiful and Strange Otherness? I will write about this in Part II.
The Generous Heart: The Gift of Self-Compassion 08/19/2013
"Bringing compassion to our suffering is an act of generosity. It helps us remember that we too, are part of this breathing, pulsing world and worthy of compassion. We are reminded that, by the mere fact of our being here, we qualify for the soothing waters of compassion. We can then come out of our sheltered world of self-scrutiny and make our way back into the fuller embrace of our belonging."

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha
At the heart of every spiritual tradition, we find the teaching of compassion. Through the gate of compassion we are invited to enter the wider conversation with all life. Compassion binds us with all things through the shared encounter with suffering. Compassion: From the Latin, com patti, “to suffer with.” It is through our shared experience with loss, sorrow and pain that we deepen our connection with one another and enter the commons of the soul.
But how are we with self-compassion? Too often our caring is reserved for those outside of ourselves, as though we haven’t earned the right for kindness. We struggle with judgments and resist offering gestures of mercy to ourselves. Yet, every one of us knows loss and defeat, loneliness and failure. We hurt and harm others, are hurt and harmed by others; we close our hearts to the world and often choose self-protection as a way of life.
Bringing compassion to our suffering is an act of generosity. It helps us remember that we too, are part of this breathing, pulsing world and worthy of compassion. We are reminded that, by the mere fact of our being here, we qualify for the soothing waters of compassion. We can then come out of our sheltered world of self-scrutiny and make our way back into the fuller embrace of our belonging.
When I work with groups on the topic of self-compassion, I often begin by describing our time together as a project in “non self-improvement.” 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, whoever arrives at the interior door of our soul’s house. We don’t often get to decide who or what shows up 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.
This is not to say that we do not seek change. At a recent gathering, a man said to me, “I noticed that you don’t talk about progress in your work.” I said, “No. I don’t see the soul moving in a linear way, from Point A to Point B. Sometimes it moves downward or sideways, sometimes it regresses and at other times it holds still and doesn’t move. Progress is one of our cultures 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 in this moment; what it is asking us to pay attention to at this time.”
He then asked if I was okay with having goals. I said, “Well, I’m not real comfortable with goals either, but if I had to use that language, I would say that the goal of this work is to extend the level of participation of the soul as widely and deeply as possible. 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.” This is the change we truly long for.
The foundations of self-compassion arise from the fertile ground of belonging. Belonging confers a feeling of worth and value, which in turn filters into our whole being as a blessing. This gently translates into a relationship with oneself that is respectful and caring. Herein lies our problem: For many of us, the experience of belonging has been fractured and frustrated. We often feel as though we are living outside the warmth of a recognizable welcome. In this state of exile and loneliness, we feel unworthy of compassion or kindness. I have heard countless times in my practice someone saying, “I feel unlovable.” It is very challenging to cultivate a feeling of compassion for oneself in an atmosphere of self-judgment and hatred.
Nearly everywhere I go to teach, there is an ongoing call for some dressing to heal the wounds around belonging. Fortunately, most every one of us has been able to forge some friendships, small circles of welcome, even if we feel they are provisional. This can be enough to help stimulate the practice of self-compassion. One of the working definitions that I am playing with is that self-compassion is the “internalized village.” Pause for a moment and think about how we tend to respond to a friend who is suffering. Usually we feel an immediate opening in our hearts of caring and sympathy towards their pain. We don’t typically recoil in judgment or condemnation and yet, that is often how we respond to our own moments of pain. Imagine instead, that these dear people in our lives are dwelling inside of us, that the little village in our world has been taken into our hearts. Now, when suffering arises, our interior friend can say to us, “Be gentle. Be kind. Be compassionate with this suffering part of your life.” It is soothing to imagine the village residing inside our chest. Perhaps the Golden Rule needs an addendum: “Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.” This pilgrimage of friendship towards our own life is essential to any move we wish to make into the larger and more fulfilling life that awaits us.
Self-compassion is a fierce and challenging practice. 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. I recently invited a group of men to share in a ritual where we turned towards these outcast parts of our lives with compassion and apology. The ritual was deceptively simple. We placed five large stones on the ground near the base of an immense ancient oak. As I drummed and we all sang, men approached the stones and knelt on the ground and slowly lifted one of them off the ground. In their minds and imaginations, they were seeing an outcast brother lying under the stone. He had been weighed down under it and unable to stand upright again until this gesture of kindness was offered. Men wept as they lifted the stone off of these parts of themselves and slowly welcomed the fragments of life these brothers carried for them. It was beautiful and healing.
Lifting the stones off the backs of these parts of our lives, may help to restore what poet David Whyte calls a state of innocence. I cautiously use this term as well, not to insinuate some childlike state of purity, but to suggest that through self-compassion, we are offered the possibility of new beginnings. No part of us releases in a state of judgment. The overly critical mind creates a state of contraction, whereas compassion softens and makes possible a state of beginning, a fresh and unshaped ripeness. Rebecca del Rio offers this poem as an invitation to renewal and beginnings:
Prescription for the Disillusioned
Come new to this
day. Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.
Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.
Self-compassion is not an event, but an ongoing daily practice. It is the root practice for our inner life and also for our relational lives. I remember giving many talks on shame and sharing how we want to be in loving relationships, while simultaneously hating ourselves. Our ability to receive love is proportional to our capacity to welcome all of who we are. Self-compassion is a skill that needs to be exercised and developed regularly in order for us to remain open and available to life. It is the gift of a generous heart.
At the heart of every spiritual tradition, we find the teaching of compassion. Through the gate of compassion we are invited to enter the wider conversation with all life. Compassion binds us with all things through the shared encounter with suffering. Compassion: From the Latin, com patti, “to suffer with.” It is through our shared experience with loss, sorrow and pain that we deepen our connection with one another and enter the commons of the soul.
But how are we with self-compassion? Too often our caring is reserved for those outside of ourselves, as though we haven’t earned the right for kindness. We struggle with judgments and resist offering gestures of mercy to ourselves. Yet, every one of us knows loss and defeat, loneliness and failure. We hurt and harm others, are hurt and harmed by others; we close our hearts to the world and often choose self-protection as a way of life.
Bringing compassion to our suffering is an act of generosity. It helps us remember that we too, are part of this breathing, pulsing world and worthy of compassion. We are reminded that, by the mere fact of our being here, we qualify for the soothing waters of compassion. We can then come out of our sheltered world of self-scrutiny and make our way back into the fuller embrace of our belonging.
When I work with groups on the topic of self-compassion, I often begin by describing our time together as a project in “non self-improvement.” 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, whoever arrives at the interior door of our soul’s house. We don’t often get to decide who or what shows up 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.
This is not to say that we do not seek change. At a recent gathering, a man said to me, “I noticed that you don’t talk about progress in your work.” I said, “No. I don’t see the soul moving in a linear way, from Point A to Point B. Sometimes it moves downward or sideways, sometimes it regresses and at other times it holds still and doesn’t move. Progress is one of our cultures 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 in this moment; what it is asking us to pay attention to at this time.”
He then asked if I was okay with having goals. I said, “Well, I’m not real comfortable with goals either, but if I had to use that language, I would say that the goal of this work is to extend the level of participation of the soul as widely and deeply as possible. 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.” This is the change we truly long for.
The foundations of self-compassion arise from the fertile ground of belonging. Belonging confers a feeling of worth and value, which in turn filters into our whole being as a blessing. This gently translates into a relationship with oneself that is respectful and caring. Herein lies our problem: For many of us, the experience of belonging has been fractured and frustrated. We often feel as though we are living outside the warmth of a recognizable welcome. In this state of exile and loneliness, we feel unworthy of compassion or kindness. I have heard countless times in my practice someone saying, “I feel unlovable.” It is very challenging to cultivate a feeling of compassion for oneself in an atmosphere of self-judgment and hatred.
Nearly everywhere I go to teach, there is an ongoing call for some dressing to heal the wounds around belonging. Fortunately, most every one of us has been able to forge some friendships, small circles of welcome, even if we feel they are provisional. This can be enough to help stimulate the practice of self-compassion. One of the working definitions that I am playing with is that self-compassion is the “internalized village.” Pause for a moment and think about how we tend to respond to a friend who is suffering. Usually we feel an immediate opening in our hearts of caring and sympathy towards their pain. We don’t typically recoil in judgment or condemnation and yet, that is often how we respond to our own moments of pain. Imagine instead, that these dear people in our lives are dwelling inside of us, that the little village in our world has been taken into our hearts. Now, when suffering arises, our interior friend can say to us, “Be gentle. Be kind. Be compassionate with this suffering part of your life.” It is soothing to imagine the village residing inside our chest. Perhaps the Golden Rule needs an addendum: “Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.” This pilgrimage of friendship towards our own life is essential to any move we wish to make into the larger and more fulfilling life that awaits us.
Self-compassion is a fierce and challenging practice. 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. I recently invited a group of men to share in a ritual where we turned towards these outcast parts of our lives with compassion and apology. The ritual was deceptively simple. We placed five large stones on the ground near the base of an immense ancient oak. As I drummed and we all sang, men approached the stones and knelt on the ground and slowly lifted one of them off the ground. In their minds and imaginations, they were seeing an outcast brother lying under the stone. He had been weighed down under it and unable to stand upright again until this gesture of kindness was offered. Men wept as they lifted the stone off of these parts of themselves and slowly welcomed the fragments of life these brothers carried for them. It was beautiful and healing.
Lifting the stones off the backs of these parts of our lives, may help to restore what poet David Whyte calls a state of innocence. I cautiously use this term as well, not to insinuate some childlike state of purity, but to suggest that through self-compassion, we are offered the possibility of new beginnings. No part of us releases in a state of judgment. The overly critical mind creates a state of contraction, whereas compassion softens and makes possible a state of beginning, a fresh and unshaped ripeness. Rebecca del Rio offers this poem as an invitation to renewal and beginnings:
Prescription for the Disillusioned
Come new to this
day. Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.
Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.
Self-compassion is not an event, but an ongoing daily practice. It is the root practice for our inner life and also for our relational lives. I remember giving many talks on shame and sharing how we want to be in loving relationships, while simultaneously hating ourselves. Our ability to receive love is proportional to our capacity to welcome all of who we are. Self-compassion is a skill that needs to be exercised and developed regularly in order for us to remain open and available to life. It is the gift of a generous heart.
Three Movements (An Excerpt from my next book, A Trail on the Ground) 05/15/2013
"I have found a lasting faith in the ways of the indigenous soul, in the deep structures of the psyche that harbor the bedrock of our inherited success as a species. It is here that we will find the ways back to our sanity. This is what is required of us: Deep gratitude and gestures of acknowledgement that everything is a gift offered to us freely. May we remember these root practices and once again recall our place on this sacred ground."

How do we find our way back to our indigenous soul, back to the trailhead? What do we need in order to recover the scent of the trail, to remember that there is another way of knowing how to live here? There are three movements that feel imperative to the times. The first is to remember our primary satisfactions. The second is to uncenter the human and the third is to recover our original perceptions. Each of these movements works to shake off the dust of forgetting, the amnesia that has settled in our minds distorting our relationships with the world. What has always been experienced as a seamless and intimate web of connections is now felt as a split, a tear, a separation between the human and the living earth. We need to understand that we are dying is this gap.
The first movement involves restoring our primary satisfactions. These are the basics of our lives, matters essential to our wellbeing: how to welcome our children into the world, how to give thanks, how to help our youth move through the whitewater of adolescence into adulthood, how to grieve together, and how to replenish and renew the world. These practices address how we can assure an adequate measure of belonging in one another and how to maintain an intimacy with our inner and outer worlds. When these basics are met, we are at ease in our bodies and connected with the others in the world sensing that all these lives are co-mingled with ours. These basic requirements are our primary satisfactions. They are the undeniable and irrefutable needs of the psyche that were established over the long journey of our species and are imprinted in our beings as expectations awaiting fulfillment.
The primary satisfactions are the elemental constituents of a healthy psychic and physical life. These included matters such as: adequate and available touch; comforting in times of grief and pain; abundant play; the sharing of food eaten slowly; dark, starlit nights; the pleasures of friendship and laughter. It also centered on a rich and responsive ritual life that addressed concerns central to our lives such as initiation, healing and other major transitions; continual exposure and participation in nature; storytelling, dancing, and music; attentive and engaged elders; a system of inclusion based on equality and access to a varied and sensuous world. In these matters, traditional earth-based cultures were highly attentive to the ways they provided their people what it was that the soul required to feel at home, at ease and known. Through meeting the basic needs of the soul, these cultures survived, thrived and endured. This was a level of contentment that is seldom known in our modern civilization.
We must address the requirements of the soul for primary satisfactions in order to heal our individual and collective ills. In the end, the primary satisfactions are what we want, what each of us longs for. Culturally, we have forgotten these basic needs of the soul and instead have followed the pathway of secondary satisfactions such as power, rank, wealth, and status, and have lifted these up as goals to attain. To the soul however, these hold virtually no value. In reality, these secondary pursuits have added to the chronic sense of emptiness in many people. Emptiness has become an overriding experience in this culture. It drives unconscious consumption, addictions of every sort, and is the basis for our relentless drive towards empire. We always want MORE. Resolving this crisis in soul hunger is at the core of our work and is indispensable in the healing of our planet. Nearly all of our critical challenges, from environmental degradation to economic injustice, racial and gender divides, are driven by the emptiness that arises from the neglect of what the psyche needs to be whole.
When the primary satisfactions are adequately provided, we find ourselves relaxing into the world and leaning into the others with whom we share this extravagant terrain. We are able to move into a more unselfconscious relationship with the earth, enabling us to uncenter the human. To uncenter the human is of prime importance. This challenging phrase rises from the poem, Carmel Point, by Robison Jeffers. He says,
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
The idea is radical and is a move that could undo centuries of damage caused by the myopic view of the human as center of the universe. To uncenter the human places the others and the earth back into the circle of what is attended and listened to, what is appreciated and valued. With this turn the wrens and the larks have something to say and the foxglove, violets and comfrey can offer their beauty to the conversation. The voice of the earth returns when we uncenter the human; a move that eases our isolation and softens our sense of loneliness. This move helps to restore the ancient accord between our bodies, our souls and the earth. We are wired to know the full range of relationships with the world. Uncentering the human widens the aperture to once again recognize the lushness of the world, of which we are a part.
The world grows larger when we relinquish the center and invite the others to become known again. Unfolding our cloistered minds that have been preoccupied with human concerns allows us to discover a vivid landscape of otters and clematis, sorrel and osprey. Our senses are once again free to roam the earth in appreciation and recognition of the sacredness that we breathe in and which breathes us, all in the same moment. We walk again in an animate world where everything speaks, inviting intimacy and conversation. Can you feel how necessary this is? Can you feel how this move enables us to know the other from inside their experience and not merely as an extension of our mind? As environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore writes in her elegant book, Wild Comfort,
There was a time when humans could breathe the shape of strawberries and the presence of children, when we could breathe lions and sweet tubers, when the whole effervescent world poured into our consciousness like music. (pg. 9)
This porous exchange between the world and our soul enlivens both the world and our soul! This is the agreement by which the all things get preserved. This move allows for the blossoming of relationship. Rather than a singular center rotating around our personal histories, we enter a multi-centric world where everything possesses an interiority worthy of knowing.
A friend of mine shared recently that he spoke on behalf of the steelhead at a local meeting determining the fate of a few tributary streams in the Salmon Creek watershed. The fingerlings were trapped in their streams as the drought had dried up their waterways back to the main current. He wept as he shared his concerns over the fate of the steelhead. I could feel that he was their voice; that he was inside of steelhead dreaming feeling them fully. It was a moment of beauty seeing him uncentering himself and becoming a voice for the steelhead.
When we are able to uncenter the human, the natural movement of the mind to engage the world is released. We fall into the ongoing conversation with all things when we are no longer preoccupied with things that are only personal and internal. While psychology tells us to get centered, our souls often crave a more immediate and intimate knowing of the world that requires that we forget the personal center from time to time and leap into the multi-centric world that places everything at the center. Each thing becomes a speaking, a presence capable of being known and of knowing us.
The mind that participates in the world is at home in the world. The blessing that comes when we uncenter our minds is that we realize that we are a part of this wild, breathing, sensuous dance erupting around us and within us constantly. We are no longer isolated in the privacy of our inner world. We join the life that surrounds us, of which we are a part. We are not diminished when we uncenter our lives. Rather it is a restoration, a freeing up our humanness to once again participate in the sheer beauty of the animate world; we recall our place in the world.
As we uncenter the human, a third shift becomes possible enabling us to recover our original perceptions. As a species, our original ways of seeing were entwined with the living world, entangled with the landscape and the more-than-human surrounds of animals, trees, rocks and rivers. In that direct embrace, our perceptions were interactive and participatory, placing us in the living experience of the land. Our original perceptions were mingled with the world. They were shaped by the earth and those whose lives were sharing the same ground. This level of perception was intimate, direct and immediate. The world was alive, covered with significance and beauty and everywhere we looked and walked was filled with presence. This perception was not naïve or childish, but a deeply developed realization of the world as sacred, requiring awe and respect.
Our original perceptions granted us a way of seeing the world as sacred. As the fiery poet William Blake reminds us, “If the lens of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is; infinite.” So what is clouding our lens of perception? In Blake’s days, it was the soot of industrialism encroaching on the landscapes of England. Today our perceptions are clouded by a dense fog of ideologies that are rooted in a way of seeing that distances us from the animate earth. Perceptions such as progress and individualism, domestication, literalism and materialism all distance us from the ground, from each other and from our own souls. The world as revelation, as sacred, has receded in our minds. We are left spinning and alienated from the earth.
Progress is unquestioned holy writ in this culture and is an inherent component of civilization. It assumes that what lies ahead is always better than where we have been; the new and improved future. Progress relies upon domination to enforce this new and better imperative. Progress however, thinly veils the discontent that arises as a matter of not having our primary satisfactions met. Individualism isolates us in a prison of self-consciousness. We are stripped of the covering of true community and instead we find ourselves walking naked through the world wary, fearful and uncertain of our welcome, trusting few and often known by none.
Domestication denies the heat and howl of our animal selves. We feel eviscerated and gutted, made tame by rules and conditioning that blankets the world with uniformity and mediocrity. This reduction in vitality and vividness simultaneously induces ignorance and rage. It is domesticated animals and humans that carry a lethal level of violence in them. Literalism mutes the poetry and music of the world, flattening the articulated and nuanced rhythms that accompany all living things, what poet Garcia Lorca called, the canto hondo, the deep song of the world. And Materialism simply breaks our hearts. The earth we once knew as magical and sacred has been turned into a strip mall with price tags on everything. These are ways of seeing that dim the vibrant perception of the earth as enchanted and sacred. And we are emptied.
Can you see how our perceptions effect the ways we greet the world? How our ways of taking in the world either opens us to amazement or reduces us to a cool, detached observer? Our perceptions, even when they are generous, often see the world through the eyes of observation, measurement and detachment. We rarely glimpse the world through the perception of beauty and intimacy. Our ways of seeing are more akin to the statistician gathering data on the sample; the number of elephants remaining in Tanzania, the percent of whales left in the oceans, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere causing global warming. While these are valuable, they are not values that connect us with the earth. If these measurements and statistics were sufficient to touch the heart and make us realize our folly, then by all means, more numbers please.
But clearly this isn’t the case. In spite of all the data that has been generated, we persist in moving towards an ecological meltdown. Why? In part because our way of perceiving the world encourages a split between our psyches and the earth where there is none.
To recover our original perceptions we do not have to look to the past or to indigenous cultures. (Although this helps!) These ways of seeing are with us all the time, diminished perhaps, but present. We arrive here carrying in our bodies, minds and hearts a way of perceiving that is relational, automatically seeking out signals of contact, with the eyes of our mothers, the skin of her body, the embrace of the others close to us and the gradual movement beyond the immediate body of our mothers, onto the ground, to the other mother. Every one of us threw ourselves onto her body countless times taking into us the memory of contact and the sensation that we are held by this larger body. This original perception is woven into our minds and hearts. We are, by nature, open and ready for the intimate exchange of wonder and appreciation. We are longing to perceive what poet Kenneth Rexroth calls “the holiness of the real.” How do we recover our original perceptions? Fall on your knees and kiss the ground. Hold the leaves of the maple, the feather that you found on your walk today or a stone that drew your attention and then listen. Annie Dillard wrote a beautiful book called, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Maybe we should consider that it already knows how to speak. Perhaps it is time for the earth to teach us to listen once again. Original perception is mutual, entangled and alive pulling us deeper and deeper into the breathing world.
These three movements help us return to the world and find our place here again sustainably; not in a strictly economic or a resource management sense, but in the grander sense of living within the world as one among many. When we uncenter the human, recover original perception and restore the primary satisfactions, we return to a way of living that is within the means of the earth to sustain. We return to a way of living that regards the others of the world as equals and restores ways of living that modulate our impact dramatically. We return to the trail on the ground.
These movements are necessary due to the shape of the world that we find ourselves living in. We are suffering from a disease called civilization. This may seem an extreme statement, but I say this from the perspective of one who has spent his entire adult life treating individuals in my practice as a psychotherapist. This has been my field work, my research base. Beyond that, the symptoms of this culture are readily diagnosable and these patterns of disease have been the subject of much commentary over the past many decades, if not centuries. Each of these writers and thinkers, from Lewis Mumford and Sigmund Freud, Eric Erikson and R. D. Laing, John Zerzan and Jerry Mander, Kirkpatrick Sale and Paul Shepard, Vandana Shiva and Winona LaDuke, Chellis Glendinning and Derrick Jensen, and many others, have all come to a similar diagnosis. The overall consensus is that the very form that civilization takes is pathogenic to the life ways of the planet and for our souls. I encourage each of you to read these writers and determine for yourself the validity of their arguments. I have found their analysis compelling and offering me another vantage point from which to view the symptoms that arrive in my office daily.
My concern, however, has less to do with the diagnosis of the problem than it is with the treatment. How do we recover from the conditions characterized by dissociation, trauma, disconnection, addiction, emptiness, shame and fear? How do we heal the patterns of consumption and addiction that ravage both inner and outer worlds? These psychic components mirror the at large symptoms of economic strain, ecological collapse and social unrest. The patient is now the culture as well as each one of us. We are deeply affected by the culture we live within and the pathology of the system is to be found everywhere. How could it be otherwise? It is one way the soul of the culture is attempting to have its suffering addressed. Any attempt to speak of healing must include the recovery of the commons as well as our individual lives. They are bound together in a seamless web of interconnection.
Whatever happens in the years and decades ahead, one thing is true: we will not be saved from our discontent and our sense of loneliness by more sophisticated technologies, more efficient communications devices or by programs that modify our damage of the environment. None of these will recover what we lost when we left the trail. It is the act of returning to the trail that I feel most hopeful about. My deepest prayer is that we end up choosing to return to the trail on the ground rather than being thrown to the ground in a major upheaval. To fall with grace now would be a wise and caring forethought. We must act in ways that offer the greatest possibility for the earth to maintain diversity in her bioregions. That must become our primary allegiance, our devotion and conviction.
I have found a lasting faith in the ways of the indigenous soul, in the deep structures of the psyche that harbor the bedrock of our inherited success as a species. It is here that we will find the ways back to our sanity. This is what is required of us: Deep gratitude and gestures of acknowledgement that everything is a gift offered to us freely. May we remember these root practices and once again recall our place on this sacred ground.
The Alchemy of Identity or Who Are We When Everything Falls Away 03/08/13
"The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication --the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we can step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging."

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of co-leading a seven-day retreat for cancer patients at Commonweal with Michael Lerner. It was a powerful experience of focus and intensity we rarely encounter in our day-to-day lives. I witnessed a form of beauty that moved me deeply; a transparency of soul that was refreshing and enlivening. There was no one trying to hide during our gathering; no one wanted to. The conditions were created to call to the foreground everything that was present--fear, sadness, grief, love, longing, regrets, hopes, laughter, tears, panic--the entire range of experience concentrated like a tincture into a condensed essence. It was a sacred time.
What struck me over and over again, were comments people made about how their illness had undone their sense of self; that they no longer knew themselves as they once were. This sense of loss and confusion was not transitory, but lingered with them for a long period of time. I was reminded while sitting with them, what Jung said after his heart attack. He wrote that he felt as if he were in a "painful process of defoliation" in which "everything I aimed at or wished for or thought... fell away or was stripped from me."
This is what I was hearing from these people. They too, felt stripped bare, like Inanna in the Babylonian myth, and were left with little to cling to in terms of who they thought they were. This can be a frightening time when the familiar stars disappear, when the narrative we have clung to for a lifetime fades like a dream and we are left naked and unsettled. This is a time of letting go.
Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Healing Path, remarked in an interview, "Healing must answer the questions disease raises." Here was a group of people sitting with an essential question that their cancer was asking of them: Who are you now? Their illness brought them to an initiatory threshold, propelling them into a sacred crisis where they had to learn to let go and allow everything to fall like leaves in autumn, even the stories they had held onto about who they thought they were. In truth, what was thrust upon these individuals as a consequence of a life-threatening situation, is our fate as well. We will all be taken through a gateway where our personal sense of self will need to be released and allowed to compost into something more real and gritty.
The question that remains for me is this: If illness can so thoroughly undo our sense of identity, then out of what are we shaping our sense of self? More to the point: How is it that this sense of self can fade like a dream when the unexpected arises? It seems as if our experience of identity is not as fixed and settled as we are led to believe.
We need to revision our sense of self. Identity in our culture is often predicated on roles we play; familiar patterns of behavior that give a feeling of continuity to our being. These repetitions of gestures, thoughts and feelings, combined with a narrative of history slowly evolve into a convincing tale of identity: I am Francis, born in 1956 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, youngest of eight. I am a father, husband, friend, writer, therapist...all helping to convince me of being, well, me. Identity in this configuration becomes fixed and rigid, a static and lumbering thing pushing its way through life. But what if, just what if, we were more verb than noun, more a jumpy and erotic rhythm than a concrete fixture--a song, a pulse, a poetic string of imagination than a conditioned and flattened explanation that captures us like a photograph? Can you see how essential it is for us to question our ways of identifying ourselves? How we see ourselves, the very way we sense our being in the world, determines how we encounter life. The encapsulated self, the self of Western culture, is cut off from the living world and as such we often experience a level of isolation and anxiety that permeates much of our lives. We live uncertain of our belonging, our place and our relationship with the living presence that is this world.
In this state of fragmentation we become vulnerable to consumerism with its promise of filling up our experience of emptiness with things. We become obsessed with image, with specialness, with rank and power, with wealth and possessions. We find ourselves tenaciously holding onto ideologies in an attempt to offer a sense of solidity in an otherwise uncertain existence. We partition the world into who's in and who's out, forming pockets of inclusion such as gangs, cults and militia groups. When we are cut off from the tangible experience of relationship with the cosmos, we cling to whatever we can to keep ourselves from feeling the isolation inherent in our cultural fabrication of the self.
Fortunately, there are other ways of knowing the self. The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication--the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging; we return to the living fabric of which we have always been a part.
For us to express who we are in this life, to embody the unique thread of this lifetime, requires that we step into the living world and encounter the animate earth. Identity is a wild alchemy, a blending of inner and outer, the most recessed and the most extended. Our psychological and spiritual traditions place great value on the deep interior of our lives. This is important. It is necessary to know the landscape within us. A great deal of richness is found there in dreams, images, intuitions, memories, wounds, sensitivities, feelings, longings, an entire panoply of psychic material affecting our moment to moment experience. I am often amazed at the inner lives of those working with me in psychotherapy. They reveal a storehouse of wonder, beauty, magic and a bit of mayhem as well. This inner life, however, is not separate from what goes on out there, in the world of traffic and bills, of family and work life, nor is it separate from clouds and rain, moonlight and birdsong. They mirror one another, reflecting what it is we take in and to what we offer our attention. When we embody this more inclusive reality, self and world permeate one another, offering an ongoing exchange that keeps it all alive. Here are Rilke's thoughts on this overlap between inner and outer:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Living into this wider sense of identity is a work of art. We are asked to simultaneously engage the domains of sovereignty and intimacy, of autonomy and affiliation. Both areas of our lives must be developed leading to a resilience that affords us the strength to stand in solidarity with our own knowing and in allegiance with the greater community to which we belong. It is in this ongoing state of exchange between the inner and the outer, between what is alive within and without that we find the most vital self we can be.
What struck me over and over again, were comments people made about how their illness had undone their sense of self; that they no longer knew themselves as they once were. This sense of loss and confusion was not transitory, but lingered with them for a long period of time. I was reminded while sitting with them, what Jung said after his heart attack. He wrote that he felt as if he were in a "painful process of defoliation" in which "everything I aimed at or wished for or thought... fell away or was stripped from me."
This is what I was hearing from these people. They too, felt stripped bare, like Inanna in the Babylonian myth, and were left with little to cling to in terms of who they thought they were. This can be a frightening time when the familiar stars disappear, when the narrative we have clung to for a lifetime fades like a dream and we are left naked and unsettled. This is a time of letting go.
Marc Ian Barasch, author of The Healing Path, remarked in an interview, "Healing must answer the questions disease raises." Here was a group of people sitting with an essential question that their cancer was asking of them: Who are you now? Their illness brought them to an initiatory threshold, propelling them into a sacred crisis where they had to learn to let go and allow everything to fall like leaves in autumn, even the stories they had held onto about who they thought they were. In truth, what was thrust upon these individuals as a consequence of a life-threatening situation, is our fate as well. We will all be taken through a gateway where our personal sense of self will need to be released and allowed to compost into something more real and gritty.
The question that remains for me is this: If illness can so thoroughly undo our sense of identity, then out of what are we shaping our sense of self? More to the point: How is it that this sense of self can fade like a dream when the unexpected arises? It seems as if our experience of identity is not as fixed and settled as we are led to believe.
We need to revision our sense of self. Identity in our culture is often predicated on roles we play; familiar patterns of behavior that give a feeling of continuity to our being. These repetitions of gestures, thoughts and feelings, combined with a narrative of history slowly evolve into a convincing tale of identity: I am Francis, born in 1956 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, youngest of eight. I am a father, husband, friend, writer, therapist...all helping to convince me of being, well, me. Identity in this configuration becomes fixed and rigid, a static and lumbering thing pushing its way through life. But what if, just what if, we were more verb than noun, more a jumpy and erotic rhythm than a concrete fixture--a song, a pulse, a poetic string of imagination than a conditioned and flattened explanation that captures us like a photograph? Can you see how essential it is for us to question our ways of identifying ourselves? How we see ourselves, the very way we sense our being in the world, determines how we encounter life. The encapsulated self, the self of Western culture, is cut off from the living world and as such we often experience a level of isolation and anxiety that permeates much of our lives. We live uncertain of our belonging, our place and our relationship with the living presence that is this world.
In this state of fragmentation we become vulnerable to consumerism with its promise of filling up our experience of emptiness with things. We become obsessed with image, with specialness, with rank and power, with wealth and possessions. We find ourselves tenaciously holding onto ideologies in an attempt to offer a sense of solidity in an otherwise uncertain existence. We partition the world into who's in and who's out, forming pockets of inclusion such as gangs, cults and militia groups. When we are cut off from the tangible experience of relationship with the cosmos, we cling to whatever we can to keep ourselves from feeling the isolation inherent in our cultural fabrication of the self.
Fortunately, there are other ways of knowing the self. The self that appeals to me is the self that has not been conditioned solely by culture, whether family, religion, education, or economics, but rather the one found under these systems of domestication--the wild self, the self at once sovereign and entwined with the living world. It is this self that can extend its reach into the surrounding rings of connection--with vacant lots, watersheds, returning salmon, with children and struggling communities--and sense its intimate bond with all of them. This self is co-mingled with all the others that share this shining planet. When we step into this wider and wilder state of identity, our isolation falls away and we return to a state of participation and belonging; we return to the living fabric of which we have always been a part.
For us to express who we are in this life, to embody the unique thread of this lifetime, requires that we step into the living world and encounter the animate earth. Identity is a wild alchemy, a blending of inner and outer, the most recessed and the most extended. Our psychological and spiritual traditions place great value on the deep interior of our lives. This is important. It is necessary to know the landscape within us. A great deal of richness is found there in dreams, images, intuitions, memories, wounds, sensitivities, feelings, longings, an entire panoply of psychic material affecting our moment to moment experience. I am often amazed at the inner lives of those working with me in psychotherapy. They reveal a storehouse of wonder, beauty, magic and a bit of mayhem as well. This inner life, however, is not separate from what goes on out there, in the world of traffic and bills, of family and work life, nor is it separate from clouds and rain, moonlight and birdsong. They mirror one another, reflecting what it is we take in and to what we offer our attention. When we embody this more inclusive reality, self and world permeate one another, offering an ongoing exchange that keeps it all alive. Here are Rilke's thoughts on this overlap between inner and outer:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Living into this wider sense of identity is a work of art. We are asked to simultaneously engage the domains of sovereignty and intimacy, of autonomy and affiliation. Both areas of our lives must be developed leading to a resilience that affords us the strength to stand in solidarity with our own knowing and in allegiance with the greater community to which we belong. It is in this ongoing state of exchange between the inner and the outer, between what is alive within and without that we find the most vital self we can be.