ThinkLady

Cleaning closets

Ever feel like a failure? Or wonder why, no matter how hard you may try, certain relationships or projects just don’t work? Or why success is so often narrowly defined in this society by a string of degrees, acronyms, what boards one serves on, or the dollar amount of one’s salary?

If you do – don’t feel guilty. Many of us swirl in that place often and wonder how to extract ourselves, discontinue the pattern, the old tapes running in our heads that tell us what we are not, rather than what we are, that tell us what we cannot do rather than what we can.

I have no easy answers to this swirling place of doubt, misery and self-pity. It is a human place, borne of our frailty and imperfection. It is also a teacher, a necessary place, a house of fears we must enter in order to learn and grow and become less vulnerable to the chaos of the roiling Universe.

I have learned that running away is not an option.

Run and the Universe will bite you in the ass, hard, and you’ll come to realize one day you’ve limited your options. Every door you open is a closet stacked high with your unexamined life, accumulated baggage piling up high and in danger of toppling and crushing your spirit.

Your big fat, bristling ego slams the door shut with a loud, “Harumph!” refusing to deal with your frailties, mistakes and rationalizations because it’s very existence feels threatened. This too is human. And so it is that you run ... again ... and the cycle continues.

The thing is, the longer you wait to sort through the closets, the more rotten the baggage becomes.

Many years ago a wise woman taught me this, and one day when I was on the ropes and so tired and felt like my life was ending before it even began properly, I gave in.

I softened for a moment and opened the closets. I took a deep breath and began the seemingly monstrous and unending task of sorting through my baggage, my old tapes, my putrefying pile of tattered relationships, hopes and dreams. This I will tell you is very hard work and truth be told, it never ends.

Each time I go to this house now, and sort through another closet, I’ve learned that although the process is painful, it is much like thinning the plants in your garden. You do so in order to give the remaining plants room to grow. The plant whose life you end is not really ended and certainly not wasted. You either eat it, compost it, or replant it elsewhere, but in any eventuality, its energy returns once again to the field of life.

Likewise sorting through and thinning your baggage is not undoing your mistakes or failures, or killing your dreams and hopes.

It’s simply learning to be with them, to turn them over and over until they unlock, and click into place. When they do, another defense falls, I melt a little more, lose a little more of myself to find a little more of myself.

In the blink of an eye, in this house full of closets, shadows and paradoxes, the baggage shifts, the back wall of the closet falls away, and like the mystical wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’ timeless novel, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” suddenly I see there is a world beyond the shadowy closet. In this world full of light, color, swirls of radiance, hope and dreams shine bright. The dreams are often different than the ones I started with years ago, but they remain the stuff that makes life worth living, the seeds of hope planted. A circle of warm light surrounds me here in the midst of a dark world of pain, and there is peace, perfect peace.

I cannot stay in the circle forever. Like the closet of shadows, the circle is only one place in my journey, a place to be for awhile. Both places and others as well, exist to make me, you, who we are.

Do not be afraid of the shadows, of becoming nothing, of melting away, or of light, darkness and the grey in between. Nothing holds gifts beyond measure.

***

“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate’ (Amor fati). Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’

It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment -- not discouragement -- you will find the strength is there. Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!

This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true.

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.” -- Joseph Campbell

Conforming to nature

“The sun at length rises through the distant woods, as if with the faint clashing swinging sound of cymbals, melting the air with his beams, and with such rapid steps the morning travels, that already his rays are gilding the distant western mountains. Meanwhile we step hastily along through the powdery snow, warmed by an inward heat, enjoying an Indian summer still, in the increased glow of thought and feeling. Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds. If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with a stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for cold than a leafless twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to their expansion.”

-- “A Winter Walk,” by Henry David Thoreau

The Tao of Jane

I read a lot of blogs. I love the creative merging of words, photos, videos, nuances of distinctive personalities, ideas swirling around in the digital universe.

Some blogs make me happy just about every time I read them, even when their subjects are serious, provocative, or fun and silly, and those are the ones I gravitate to on a regular basis. One of those blogs is Jane Fonda’s.

Jane, I use her first name because I think from reading her blog she would want that, is an astute blogger, courageous in sharing her wisdom, her failings, the controversy that still occasionally dogs her life, her journey. She writes about her life with a sense of humor, touching on her professional work and work she does for the common good with eloquence and enthusiasm.

I think Jane is probably a seeker. I see her exploring new ideas with palpable passion, lifting up women and those around her up on a regular basis, regardless of whether they are long-time friends or someone she just met on the street, and while she lives a lifestyle that most will only dream of, she comes across as gracious, inclusive and egalitarian, sharing photos of her life as well as fun times with many celebrities in a way that shows us, her readers, just how human she and her colleagues are. She explores spirituality that in a way that’s rare in the blogging world – she’s non-judgmental, respectful, open, listening – bringing her own learning to bear while at the same time sharing the wisdom of others with unfailing fairness. There’s a twinkle in her voice about herself, an humbleness that given her accomplishments, is refreshing.

I once talked with a writer who’d met and hung out with a lot of celebrities. Because the nature of being a celebrity in our society is challenging, he said some become insulated, wrapped in a removed world where they are the center of their universe, and in some ways this can make them less interesting, less engaging, i.e. there’s little reciprocity in carrying on a conversation that’s only about them.

To be fair I don’t think this is a condition germane to celebrities, but one all of us in one way or another face. We exist in two worlds – our interior and exterior worlds. There’s a tendency, exacerbated by the notion that celebrity status is something desirable along with the ease of sharing our thoughts via the online world and social media, to believe every thought we have in our interior dialogue is significant, luminous, worth sharing. It’s easy then for our world to quickly become all about us, how many followers we have on a blog or on Twitter, how many friends we have on Facebook, how long visitors to our website or blog stay and explore. And then, if we’re not careful, we can become a cult of our own personality, gravitating to the reality of our choosing, constructing a world that reinforces our own beliefs.

It may be safer for fragile human egos and certainly understandable to live in our cocoons this way, but I believe there’s a terrible danger in doing so. When we make our world all about us, our minds start to close and we lose creativity, lose insight into what might make our own lives more joyful or meaningful, lose diversity of thought, become less adaptable and flexible. Once we do that, it’s easy to wake up calcified, judging, uncompassionate, in a dark, disconnected place.

Unless you’re an exceptionally enlightened person – I’m not – I think it’s very hard to stay open to the Universe, to find a balance rooted in thoughtful confidence, compassion and love. And that’s why I enjoy reading Jane, because with all that’s happened to her in her life, she’s models a continual striving for awareness and enlightenment, for balance and openness in a modest, joyful way, and that inspires me to do the same. Thank you Jane.

Garden architecture

A deep, inner crisis of the soul

A very erudite quote from Prince Charles below posits the many crises we face are rooted in an inner crisis of the soul. I totally agree. The Transition movement makes this point eloquently by addressing the need for outer and inner Transition, with the inner transition being a different way of moving and being in the world deeply rooted in Permaculture design principles. 

"When we hear talk of an 'environmental crisis' or even of a 'financial crisis,' I would suggest that this is actually describing the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul. It is a crisis in our relationship with – and our perception of – Nature, and it is born of Western culture being dominated for at least two hundred years by a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us. So I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen."

The Prince of Wales made these comments in a recent speech on Islam and the Environment at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University. Matt McDermott at Planet Green, wrote an excellent assessment of the Prince's speech on Planet Green today, and notes the prince "brings up some themes which continue to be overlooked by the mainstream of the green movement, tragically." Right on Matt!

McDermott writes:

"What hits exactly the right note for me is the Prince's accurate identification at what really lies behind our twinned and ongoing environmental and economic crisis-as-norm. It is constantly searching for external solutions to problems to the exclusion of considering that, at the least partly, the issue is internal to humanity. Put plainly it is always attempt[ing] and expecting the world to adapt to our desires, rather than adapting ourselves to it."

Just imagine what could happen if we all took this kind of transitioning seriously. What an extraordinary sight to behold.

McDermott's full comments on Prince Charles' speech are here.; full transcript of the Prince of Wale's speech is here.