The calendar this morning reads, “21st anniversary of spinal transformation.” Sometime later today, in relative time, the clock hand will pass that same moment that it did 2.1 decades ago when the tire blew, delaminated, and seconds later when I entered a space of curious darkness and luminosity.
I have recounted this moment elsewhere, but will take the moment to notice again a visit to a liminal space, a fork in the path, leading on one hand to death and beyond, and on the other to this life I have seen since that day. In that luminous darkness, the “choice” was mine, though that word seems small and borders on the insignificant in the context to which I refer.
I can hear Daniel P Brown recounting about the freedom found through meditative awakening, “free to serve all sentient beings, which is a lot of responsibility,” he said with a chuckle.
Similarly in that moment beyond the veils, the choice was mine to continue here or move on, and yet the observation of choice was less a rumination on my own preferences and aversions, and more a glance to something “more true.” It was as if, in a larger “community” of wisdom, the only eye through which could be discerned the right path was that defined by the boundaries of myself. The eye was no more the source of the vision, but must be opened and directed to observe that new dawn.
The experience was brief, almost perfunctory. Crash; Tumble; Darkness; Awakening in liminal space; Question; Check; Answer; Return.
Seven years prior to that, the birth of my daughter. Three times seven now have since elapsed and again the moment appears significant in the sense of pending transformations afoot.
Seven years ago almost to the day (Tuesday next,) I met with the financial advisors, who had been managing the proceeds of settlement from our case with Ford and Firestone, and in that conversation decided to take over the accountability for those funds on my own. The purpose of that decision, explicitly at the time, was to engage more directly with that aspect of my life for the practical real-world experience and learning first-hand the flows of value, investment, and risk.
I do not believe I was shortchanged in that education.
As I look back over these seven-year cycles, my patternmaking mind can fit them nicely into distinct courses of study and learning.
The seven years prior to that (2009-2016) represented a period of relationship, to myself, creativity, my daughter, housemates, love interests, and creative partnerships.
The previous seven had to do with re-entering into a new body, learning ground and grounding, basic accounting and accountability, establishing self and householdership.
Another piece of my coursework over the last septennial — an aspect nurtured above all by my relationship to Daniel P Brown — has been a path of integrating my “spiritual,” or perhaps better said, awareness practice with my literal felt sense of being in the world. In particular, the latter four years have been a time of intense material pressure; health, sufficiency of care, finances, and all the trappings have dashed like storm waves on the rocks, forcing an inner disposition of peace and equanimity to deepen and refine, or perish. I am grateful and honored to say that it had the former effect.
In this state of a greater appreciation for the economics and the wealth of being, I find myself on a precipice, ready to step a new into the world for what may be a next phase in this journey of the soul’s education and refinement. What may be this coursework?
Every day of late, the conversation is lapping at my shores; this Anthropocene, the poly crisis, a metacrisis, a window of global transformation, and how does one rise to meet this I wonder? What shape and disposition of self allows the greatest natural expression of love, harmony, and beauty to pour through?
In conversation with a community of peers yesterday we asked the question, “What if we don’t make it?; Touching into the wisdom of hospice…” Of course the lovely Tucker brought us back to the ground of the question, “what is this we, and precisely what loss do we mean to describe?”
With six of nine planetary boundaries crossed, countless species extinctions each day, so much life kept in abject misery, and global finance and economics driving hard and fast towards the cliff, it’s easy to imagine catastrophic and unavoidable impending loss, destruction, and failure. In contrast, the conversation led me to something quite simple…
Be mindful to condition the space of my existence with love and gratitude.
Engage with others to evoke from and support them to do the same.
The first I see as a matter of conscientious and gentle awareness, drinking in the profound ephemerality of present moment, and wakefulness to the beauty that pours through in the subtlest of ways.
The latter as an opportunity for artwork, conscientiousness to the dance of passing through the world, and creative possibility for simple moments and expansive complexity of expression across scale, even to the global and beyond.
As many close to me (and perhaps not so close ;-) have observed, this journey has grown increasingly precipitous, with levels of stress and uncertainty appearing often on the threshold between management and surrender to existential dread. With much help and community, we have managed to find our way to the better of those steps and recent events, profoundly serendipitous and fortuitous in nature, suggest we may be passing out of the fire and perhaps graduating to a new octave of growth into and with the world.
I have been longing many times these past years, and have even written about it, to share some enduring sense of good news.
Countless individuals and families have come forward in friendship and solidarity, offering financial contributions large and small that this journey may be sustained. For years now, all I have had to report, is that I am still here, still opening my heart, still showing up to the struggle and piercing through it with my eyes to see the beauty and the majesty all around.
All the while I have been working, shaping, refining some story of what “good” may come of all this. Today that project is front of the desk.
We are just the sum of our experiences, and the question is, can we make them into something that is useful to ourselves and others… I hold that statement to be true (albeit lowercase t) and there is a work in Life as Art. This work is defined by that deep unique, mysterious, and majestic beauty in the shape of our lives and craft it into an expression that can evoke from our fellow beings, that sense of joyfulness, loveliness, and gratitude that it can be to realize ourselves alive.
For me, today, perhaps at this outset of another seven year journey, that artwork is in being skillful, strategic, playful, and wise, in collaboration with others to nurture and evoke that underlying force of life that moves through all of this, striving in spite of harsh circumstance and unlikely conditions, to flourish and bloom a new.
I feel I have been growing through dark soil, the dry earth above has been hard and rough to push through, but I think I can see the light piercing now, driving down with its warmth and full being luminosity to encourage the birth of fruits that had been forming in me in accordance with the time and seasons of the world.
The reader seeking more concrete descriptions of this experience may still be lingering back at that prior and ambiguous statement of “fortuitous events,” frustrated by a lack of explicitness, and wishing I might just say what I meant. But alas, my superstition prevents me from pointing too directly at events still so nascent and formative in their nature.
I could say that my body feels fragile today, a low-grade autonomic dysreflexia (feels like fever sweats, but without the fever) permeates the moment. I have been up and down from bed the last week and some days, infirmity lapping at the shores of my well-being. Infection has been properly noted and some treatment begun, leaving me in the discomfort of antibiotics, or weather, or infection, or any combination of those or something else.
Kind friends have undertaken a fundraising effort on my behalf and we are scheduled now to make it, perhaps to the new year.
What to say, when the concrete realities of our lives seem to take a second seat to something more mystical, deeper perhaps? Surely the sun and the rain and the wind and the stone can play some affect in steering our body across the cosmos through this journey of life; it seems also though that there are things more esoteric, unseen and with quite a very different substance to the touch and yet no less compelling in their evolving geography.
I have had an interest in astrology for many years, what my friend Daniel calls “the highest of the lower mysteries,” and what Carl Jung is reported to have wished he’d studied more intently. I have found the “predictions,” or rather the guidance of this perspective to be of waxing and waning value through my life. Over the past month however, it seems a bit red hot, not so much catalytic, but rather remarkable in its mirroring of my on the ground felt and concrete experience.
So I sit today, perhaps on a threshold in my own journey. I will attend carefully to this fragile body. I will work diligently to meet and nourish those opportunities presenting themselves. I will step, like an artist, into the studio of life once again, new degrees in hand, a sense of greatness, faith, power, and gracious humility to meet this season of Earth’s humanity.
Won’t you join me in the celebration? :-)