Here’s something I’d like to know:  How many people don’t feel on the outside of something?  I mean something they wish they could be a part of.  Cause if the answer is nobody, I think something could change for the better in me.

Last night I had a minor meltdown.  I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say they pertain to a potent little box of issues I like to keep hidden way back in the furthest corner of my inner closet.  I like to forget it’s there.  I like to live blissfully unconscious of the ways it sat open on my lap most of my life, tormenting the heaven out of me.  “You’re ugly,” it liked to say.  “You’re way too tall.  You don’t look like a woman.  You’re laughable, actually.  If your friends weren’t so nice, they’d probably point and laugh at you.”  That kind of thing.  And much, much more.

Well, the box got dislodged last night and spilled all over the place, and today I have the pleasant task of cleaning up the mess.  I have enough distance from the issues to be able to recognize their “truths” as bullshit, and their voices as far more to do with some twisted kind of self-protection than any accurate portrayal of my beauty or worth.  But that doesn’t keep me from feeling their weight, and the weight of the effects they’ve had on so much of my life.  They’ve made me feel like a pitiful outsider.

They’ve made me feel like an outsider of some desirable club of people who are beautiful and confident and clever and outgoing and world-wise and SHORT.  People who know how to dance and dress stylishly and say just the right things.  People who look good without a shower, who’ve read the right books and somehow know all the people I don’t.  And they like to travel.  They like to travel and they actually do it, and they’re completely unintimidated by new situations and cultures and people.  They thrive on such things.  They don’t have very much they need to hide.  They’re good with a camera.  They always have close friends available to hang out with them and when they get together they sip on wine that they didn’t pick just because the bottle was pretty.

Oh, I could go on.  And isn’t this what’s laughable, really?  Who belongs to this club?  How many people?  Any at all?

I have this hunch that if it could sink deep into my bones that we’re all feeling like we’re not in the club, I’d actually feel…part of it.  Does that make sense?  I’d feel like I’m on level playing ground, finally, with everyone.

So tell me the truth:  is there anyone who feels like they’re actually on the inside?  And if so, have you discovered their secret?

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

"Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we’re listening or not.  It is a note that only we can hear.  Eventually when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us find our way home." 

                                                                                                           ~ Rachel Remen

I’ve been thinking about this the last couple days.  Thinking about how many voices most of us have in our lives competing with that song.  Voices of those we most admire, voices of friends, voices of family members, employers, employees, children, reason – even people who have died, or who aren’t physically present to us anymore.  Voices don’t have to be literally audible to be heard and have their say.

It’s in the midst of all these voices that our little souls sing.  Our integrity calls to us, asking that we live less divided from who we are:  from what we value most, from the questions we most need to ask, from the things we fear and trust and want to imagine and make real.

I’ve been working my tail off in recent years to try to listen to that voice, to coax it out of hiding and make safe enough space for it to really get some wind.  And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this ordeal, it’s that listening, and even more so, acting in response to what I hear, is really hard work.  It’s really hard work.  I’m sure that’s why so few do it.

Because let’s be honest:  isn’t it much easier to let inertia do its thing?  In our marriages, our friendships, our beliefs, our self-perceptions, the jobs we pursue?  It’s so much easier to dance to the pounding of driving drums and raucous choruses than learn to move gently and gracefully with much more quiet chords.  How can we even begin that path if voices within and without are demanding that we don’t?

For me the answer has been that last little phrase, “helping us find our way home.”  I want to be home. 

I want to be at home in my vocation, at home in my marriage, at home in my friendships and my very own skin.  I want to not pretend I’m someone I’m not to try to make friends or impress people or keep from disappointing those with opinions about who or what I should be.  I want to put my trust in a Sacred that feels deep and strong and good – not one I feel bullied into trusting.  And not one that would ask me to distrust that lovely voice inside.  That voice that really does have my best in mind, and the best of our interconnected planet.  That voice that is wise and balanced and can hold a lot in tension while still keeping course.  The voice that says changing directions is sometimes healthiest for all involved.  Or sticking with something hard.  That voice that recognizes I’m a community of people and desires inside, and that knows when each part needs air time, needs honoring, needs grace to be just where it’s at.

So it’s home that pushes and pulls me from inertia.  It’s home that makes the struggle worth it and soothes me when I’m out in the storm.  It’s the thought of it that warms me, the sips and draughts I’ve had of it that stick in my memory when I’m not there.  It’s home that helps me listen past that cacophonous drone for the voice of my deepest integrity.  And yours.  Because I’ve a hunch it isn’t just mine I need to hear.  Or the world needs to hear for that matter.  I’ve a hunch it’s all of our integrities we need.  I want to conspire with the world, as Remen puts it, to help us all be ready to listen.

I like the way Rachel Remen defines integrity as undividedness within ourselves, as staying true to the things we value most.  I like the way she names what I hope is the path I’m on…

"Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not.  It is a note that only we can hear.  Eventually, when life makes us ready to listen, it will help us find our way home."

On my way to the farmer’s market today I had to stop mid stride.  Suspended there above some shrub, waving slightly, glinting sun, was one of the most perfect spider webs I’ve seen.  It was breathtaking.  Right at the center, right where all those angles meet, sat the architect.  I shook my head in wonder.  “I salute you,” I said, almost wanting to bow.

I love the way life keeps you on your feet like that – doling out order when you come to expect chaos, for example.  True, for all that spider’s work, if she’s successful, she’ll have a torn-up home by night.  But for those moments, those moments when her craft is complete and she sits at its center, its core:  all is straight lines, symmetric proportions, geometric calm.

I’d like to honor those moments in my life.  The moments before my webs get broken.  Webs like figuring out how to stay centered in the midst of difficult people or feelings or conversations.  Webs like feeling good physically, like discovering rituals that make me happy and whole, like getting into a good groove in my writing or actually having the house clean.  I want to accept that the moments before the strands get broken, before order starts to fray – those are every bit as real as what comes after.  Every bit as worth honoring and paying attention to.

Chaos is not all of nature.  A tiny artist showed me that today.

For months, now, I’ve been meaning to buy a copy of Rachel Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings.  I saw her speak sometime last winter, left absolutely dazed by how loved and inspired and happy she made me feel, and have had a number of dreams since then telling me to BUY HER BOOK.  Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do it.  Is it not the hugest irony that I accidentally put half of our old address and half of our new one on the order for it?  By some miracle it showed up on my porch today.

Anyhow, one of the first stories she tells is of her grandfather telling her, as a very young child, the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the Holy.  I read it out loud to N and couldn’t get through half of it without crying.  Here’s the two paragraphs I love the most:

I was very puzzled by this story.  How could it be that one might confuse an angel with an enemy?  But Grandfather said this was the sort of thing that happened all the time.  "Even so," he told me, "it is not the most important part of the story.  The most important part of the story is that everything has its blessing."

Looking back on it, I have wondered if my grandfather, old and close to the time of his death, had not left me with this story as a compass.  It is a puzzling story, a story about the nature of blessings and the nature of enemies.  How tempting to let the enemy go and flee.  To put the struggle behind you as quickly as possible and get on with your life.  Life might be easier then but far less genuine.  Perhaps the wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and courageously as possible and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything.

I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week.  Profound book.  The first half is the author’s story of survival in Nazi concentration camps.  The second is a more explicit description of an approach to psychotherapy (logotherapy) the author developed because of his death-camp experiences (he was a psychiatrist before and after the war).

I’ve spent a lot of energy in my life searching for meaning, so not surprisingly, I’m enjoying the book.  And particularly since it’s so indelibly shaped by suffering.  I’m deeply moved and heartened by those who have walked through hell and found (or been given) a way to actually come out on the other side…those whose wisdom and grace and inner quietness reflect that journey.  Frankl is truly a gift.

One of the observations he makes about the human quest for meaning (a quest he thinks all of us are on) is that there is no “meaning of life” that’s universally true.  He says, “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion:  ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’  There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.  The same holds for human existence.”

To find the meaning of life, he says, think of the question the other way around:  what if instead of asking the question of life (or books/philosophers/friends/nature/religion/etc., in other words, things outside yourself), you take it as a question that life is asking you.  What is the meaning of your life?

I suppose one might get all uptight at that thought, feeling pressure to give a respectable answer.  I can imagine conjuring up the image of a stern, white-haired god, calling us to account. 

But what if the question doesn’t have to be asked with judgment or sternness at all?  What if the question is more playful, more artful than that?  What if it’s asking that you notice what’s growing in the garden that is you.  What seeds have been planted there?  What’s tended or left wild?  What might be time to prune?  Maybe these are the meaning of life.  For you.  Right now.  And possibly into the future.  Whether what’s growing there is plump with fruit or quiet in a winter dormancy, it’s there.

I cannot know all my life will grow or mean, but by the end of it, I’d love to look back and see a pattern of awakening.  A pattern of learning to love self and others well.  A pattern of rich engagement with people and emotions.  I want to see reverberations of a woman becoming more comfortable in her own skin – ripples into other lives, where because of that process going on in me, others feel it happening in themselves, too.  I want to tend the garden of a healer, a namer, a noticer and celebrator of beautiful things.  Things that call courage and hope into being.  I want to walk gently with fellow souls.  These are what I want to conspire with in that swirl of plants and sun and rain and seasons that is me.  That is me in this world.  Today.

If all of this is the meaning of life, of my life, I think my existential angst might be pacified.  If this is the meaning of life, life makes me smile, and want to throw my arms around it all.

Friday night my husband and I enjoyed a delightful meal out (thank you M and C for the gift card we finally found buried after all this time!).  Our conversation danced around before settling, finally, on thoughts about parenthood.  A friend had asked recently what I was thinking or feeling on the topic, and it confused me to have to answer, “…well…very little.”  As my husband and I talked on Friday, we realized that the natural fears that come with anticipating parenthood were keeping us, at least in part, from thinking too deeply about it.  About parenthood.  We decided we wanted to change that.

So yesterday we did a ritual.

First we spent some time journaling individually – stream-of-consciousness stuff about our baby, about mother and fatherhood, about things in our lives that we imagine will change with baby’s arrival.  We took our pulse.  What’s going on in there? we asked ourselves.  What’s stirring around in these weeks before birth?

Both of us are deeply drawn to eucalyptus trees – their power, their beauty, their smooth-rough elegance.  For us they’re spiritual and richly symbolic.  So after we journalled, we drove to a grove of eucalyptus not far from where we live.  We parked in the shade of one of the older fellows (this fellow pictured here; click on the image to enlarge), rolled down the windows, and watched.

We watched.  We listened.  We breathed deeply.  We noticed how many birds there were, singing and flitting about.  Bees and dragonflies zig-zagging through brush.  We noticed thistles.  And other kinds of vegetation, too.  We stared up into the trees, near and far, and laughed at a ground squirrel foraging for food.  And a long-necked crane, strutting past us on the road.

And we talked about what all of this was saying to us.

We talked about joining, through parenthood, a worldwide pulse toward life.  The pulse of bugs and trees and birds and animals and microorganisms we can’t even see, to procreate.

We talked about being held in the ongoing weave of those who have gone before us and those who will come after, and how comforting it is to feel like we’re part of something so much bigger than ourselves.  We talked about the miracle of this baby that’s inside being a combination of genes that stretch back centuries.  About how the trees surrounding us speak of this in all their stages of birth and life and death and decay, their very bodies becoming the stuff from which future generations grow and get nourished.

And we talked about the thistles.  And the flowers.  And how we feel our arms opening wide to the Whole – to all of it – to the ways that being parents will have painful, gut-wrenching trials and moments when sunshine falls gently and butterflies mark the way.  We said yes to it all, including the thistle stuff.  Including our fears.  

And we blessed our baby boy.  We blessed him to be a boy surrounded by love – one who gives and receives lots of it.  We blessed him to be strong in body and soul.  We blessed him to be soulful and find ways of integrating his deepest spirit with the ways he lives and thinks and acts and feels in the world.

My heart feels deeply nourished by it all.  My soul finds rest.  And my belly, right this minute, is bouncing with this life that’s inside. :)

Rachelle Mee Chapman posts a really nice reflection on light, and invites her listeners/readers at the end to reflect on their own stories of light…letting the image roll around inside, doing what it will.  The priming in her post combined with my recent thoughts on ritual made my mind go quickly here:

One of my most dependable childhood rituals happened every Easter.  Easter mornings, before the sun was up (5:30?  6:00?), one or the other of my parents would open my bedroom door and say in that crazy mix of excitement and grovelly morning-voice, “He is risen!”  This pulled me out of sleep and into clothes and car, and we’d drive – my parents, sister and me – to the neighborhood park.

On our way to the softball diamond, we’d often disturb the sleep of someone homeless, whose bleary-eyed blinks were met with the same exuberant greeting:  “He is risen!”  (The thought now makes me laugh out loud.  What could they have thought we meant by that?) 

We’d sit huddled on the bleachers and sing a hymn or two (at that time of day my dad an amazing bass and the rest of us willing warblers).  One of us would read the story of Jesus rising from the dead.  And pretty soon, that thing we came to see would happen.

Across the darkened city, brushing tips of trees and rooftops, beams of light would spill.  We’d stare in silence til our eyes were glowing sun.  “He is risen,” my parents said.  “He is risen indeed,” we’d say back.  And we’d sing another hymn about night and death and mourning getting changed into light and hope and life.

I love that ritual.  I love all the things it symbolized, and the images it etched into my bones: of waiting for light, watching for it, honoring its presence when it comes and celebrating, even before it does, the hope and light of people through the ages.  This is “redemptive hegemony” at its best, I think (as mentioned in my last post) – a choice, in a world where there is much darkness to recognize, mourn, and expect, to consciously watch for and celebrate the opposite.

I let my mind wander, after reading Rachelle’s post, from the bleachers of that diamond to the expanses of Uganda, where Carl Jung traveled midlife.  In his autobiography (pp 266-9), Jung tells a story of ritual that happened there.

At the end of that palaver an old man suddenly exclaimed, “In the morning, when the sun comes, we go out of the huts, spit into our hands, and hold them up to the sun.”  I had him show me the ceremony and describe it exactly.  They held their hands in front of their mouths, spat or blew vigorously, then turned the palms upward toward the sun…

The old man said that this was the true religion of all peoples, that all Kevirondos, all Buganda, all tribes for as far as the eye could see from the mountain and endlessly farther, worshipped adhista – that is, the sun at the moment of rising.  Only then was the sun mangu, God.  The first delicate golden crescent of the new moon in the purple of the western sky was also God.  But only at that time; otherwise not.

Evidently, the meaning of the Elgonyi ceremony was that an offering was being made to the sun divinity at the moment of its rising.  If the gift was spittle, it was the substance which in the view of primitives contains the personal mana, the power of healing, magic, and life.  If it was breath, then it was roho – Arabic, ruch, Hebrew, ruach, Greek, pneuma – wind and spirit.  The act was therefore saying:  I offer to God my living soul.  It was a wordless, acted-out prayer which might equally well be rendered:  “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

To Light, to Life, to Hope, to Resurrection:  yes, to these I commend my spirit, too.  Like my own little family on those cold wooden bleachers, staring at the sun.

Jung writes more, and while I could give my own commentary on all the ways his words here speak to me as symbols, I think I’ll simply quote the words.  If your soul wants to take them elsewhere, let that be.

The sunrise in these latitudes was a phenomenon that overwhelmed me anew every day.  The drama of it lay less in the splendor of the sun’s shooting up over the horizon than in what happened afterward.  I formed the habit of taking my camp stool and sitting under an umbrella acacia just before dawn.  Before me, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark, almost black-green strip of jungle, with the rim of the plateau on the opposite side of the valley towering above it.  At first, the contrasts between light and darkness would be extremely sharp.  Then objects would assume contour and emerge into the light which seemed to fill the valley with a compact brightness.  The horizon above became radiantly white.  Gradually the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of objects, which became illuminated from within until at last they shone translucently, like bits of colored glass.  Everything turned to flaming crystal.  The cry of the bell bird rang around the horizon.  At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple.  It was the most sacred hour of the day.  I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy.

Near my observation point was a high cliff inhabited by big baboons.  Every morning they sat quietly, almost motionless, on the ridge of the cliff facing the sun, whereas throughout the rest of the day they ranged noisily through the forest, screeching and chattering.  Like me, they seemed to be waiting for the sunrise.  They reminded me of the great baboons of the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt, which perform the gesture of adoration.  They tell the same story:  for untold ages men have worshiped the great god who redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ritual, trying to understand how I define it and what role it plays in my life.  I’ve been reading some interesting stuff on the topic.

One guy defines rituals as “repetitive human activities that reduce the raw and seemingly random stuff of experience to manageable proportions” (Aidan Kavanagh in Roots of Ritual).  I like this definition because it admits that reality doesn’t come in nice packages.  It’s messy and chaotic and on its own doesn’t make much sense a lot of the time.  Rituals help us feel like we can handle that.  Through some of my most difficult seasons, it’s been mundane tasks (rituals) that have helped keep me sane:  exercise, washing dishes, preparing food, morning and evening hugs.  I’ve a hunch kids need routines every bit as much as adults do for this same reason; in a world like ours, we all need tactile things we can trust, expect, and depend on.

Sages in the Vedic tradition take this thought even further.  They say creation is always only begun.  As humans, we’re like artists handed roomfuls of media:  pens and pencils, canvas, clay, all assortments of colors and paints and brushes.  And all we’re implicitly told is, “Go for it.  Make something of it.”

In cosmological terms, what is merely procreated by the creator god is not a cosmos or a universal whole made up of ordered parts.  The origins of true cosmos are found not in this primary generative act but rather in a secondary operation – a ritual act that lends structure and order to a chaotic creation…[Rituals are] the workshop in which all reality is forged (Brian Smith in Reflections on Resemblance, Ritual, and Religion).

This way of seeing ritual resonates well with my recent thoughts on religion.  In many ways, religions seem like offspring of this “secondary operation.”  Every artist is different; even if working with the same materials, each one creates something unique.  And this is true of those sharing similar worldviews, as well as those inhabiting entirely different cultures, geographies, languages, contexts.  The reality forged by an ancient, disillusioned Indian prince will be quite different than the one forged by a Semitic prophet, or a Roman king.  And too the rituals established to sustain those realities.

I’ve been thinking about the rituals in my life and in the culture around me, asking what reality they’re creating and propping up.  I’m not a member of a religious community per se, but I participate daily in rituals that for all intents and purposes are religious.  Is consumerism not a type of religion?  Or science, or novel-writing? Or marriage, friendship, pregnancy?  Each part of my life has a set of assumptions and values and beliefs and expectations that I share with people beyond myself.  Each one has rituals to sustain such things.

But here’s the rub (isn’t there always one of these?):  a life of devotion to this many “religions” begins to feel a lot like chaos again.  For all the rituals involved, order, as created by each “religion,” can only go as far as the boundary of each “religion.”  When my religions are all on relatively equal terms, which voice do I listen to?  Whose reality gives me that necessary comfort that all is not chaos, that over-arching, undergirding meaning can be found?  Or created.

I miss the simplicity of my childhood faith, and the ways it so completely ordered my universe.  I miss nestling into rituals created by other people who I trusted understood the cosmos fully and had full grasp of Life and God and humanity.  In many ways, I miss being a child. Is it not the blessing and curse of a mindful, adult life to find peace with the fact that nobody knows it all; that owning one’s faith and values takes time and a lot of hard work; that no matter what big groups of people say, there still exists an inner Voice, beckoning us to be and say and become who we uniquely are?

Catherine Bell says rituals can create a form of “redemptive hegemony able to exercise some dominance over other activities in the world” (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice), and maybe that’s what I’m looking for.  A “redemptive hegemony” I can trust.  A redemptive hegemony that can help me make order from the chaos of my little life.