This post was inspired when thinking of my new friend,
Rebecca Stauffer, and my nephew, Asa Taccone, I can feel them both pulled to
follow the aliveness.
I was realizing this morning that my spiritual journey has
resembled dumpster diving more than it has any sort of “path;” random digging
for what I needed when I needed it. I’ve
dug through more ideas and perspectives than I can even count, occasionally
hitting a jackpot where I spent a long time gleaning everything I could, such
as the decade of being enraptured by Ken Wilbur and the last decade captivated
by Sri Aurobindo’ s poem, Savitri. Today it dawned on me that this plebian and
apparently random process has produced results that I don’t commonly see
elsewhere and hence there may be some usefulness, or at least novelty, in
sharing some of the conclusions I’ve come to.
Fully alive, the pull to act has a particular flavor; it is
juicier, more vibrant, and more vivid than everything surrounding it. For me, keenly feeling the inadequacy of all
the ways I knew how to act and frustrated with the cultural conventions pulling
at me, I was compelled to struggle to find a way to authentically navigate marriage,
parenting and working. I needed to
figure out what it meant to really love.
I grasped at every hand hold I
could find that felt real and alive, even if I didn’t understand why or how it
could help. This journey wasn’t easy or
painless but it was convincing and it led me to deeply trust the reality I am
embedded in and to feel at home and at ease.
I suspect the pull of
the real has different flavors for different people, as it should. Yet there is something absolutely universal in
the pulse of aliveness. If you follow it
through its myriad paths it leads you home, to the authentic, the important,
the deeply satisfying. But the goal is
not some hypothetical wonderland; it is to the ever changing, effervescent
manifestation of the most unique part of you.
From that place, life connects seamlessly with everything that is and
the journey takes on a lovely lilting perfection.
There are tricks. We
think we need to run from pain, to protect ourselves, to move away from
anything that hurts or that deeply challenges us. We think we need to move toward what feels more
familiar, more comfortable, more at ease, satiated at least for a moment. But if you really pay attention, life
sparkles more vividly when you dive in, when you allow yourself to meet each
moment as it is. Some moments are simple
and beautiful, some moments are painful and scary, some are oddly empty or
boring, some are heartbreaking, some are sad, some are joyful, and some are
exhilarating. But each moment holds a
treasure when you can meet it as it is, as you are. There is nothing to change, nothing to fix,
nothing to do but to ride the real where it takes you, to let it pull you into
the open free spaces where what is begging to manifest is calling, pulling,
inviting.
Often the path is not clear and there are moments when the
wave crashes over you, darkness and no way to breathe. It is these moments where you must kick for
the surface, push your head up into the light and air and take a deep
breath. There are other moments when you
are locked in a closet and it’s too dark to see the door and you have to listen
deeply to the silence until you hear the hint being whispered in your ear, the
hint that tells you which way to go, what rope being dangled in front of you is
the one that is important for you to pull yourself up with.
At other times, the dance moves at a dizzying pace all
around you and your head is spinning so fast you can no longer think. The center calls and you can feel for the
still point from which all the spinning comes, the still point where it can all
rush by you, but you are solid, you are still, you are held in the embrace of
the whole.
The wonder is that if we struggle through all the layers of
fog and confusion and come to the place that is uniquely home, we are all at
the exact same place, we can smile, relax, drink a cup of tea and laugh
together about how something so simple could have ever looked so hard.
