Dumpster Diving

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.