Notes in Winter: Self-Emptying, Surrender and Grief as a Path to Embodiment.

Joni Mitchell wrote "Maybe it's just the time of year, maybe it's the time of man."  It's winter, and I spend less and less time with the news these days.  It's a rare movie that I can sit through from beginning to end.  Romcoms feel too syrupy, dramas too jarring, and in action movies, far too much explodes.  The mantra-like sounds of hindu kirtan or medieval polyphony are the most I can handle musically.  I feel like my senses went off, fought a war, then came back shell-shocked and screaming at each other.

I am at an impasse with myself.  [bxA]I hear the words "search for God," and then attempt it.  I look for God everywhere, and he is nowhere.  I know personally why saints of the past have been driven to the brink of madness by the search, why monks of old needed careful guidance to avoid getting stuck in depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking.  To search for God outside myself is ultimately to allow that search to be compelled by my own insanity, and to see that writ large in the chaos of the world.

Allowing myself to be compelled by chaos--my own or the world's--is the only source of anxiety.  My first forty years have been a carnival of errors here.  All of the wisdom about closing my eyes to withdraw my attachment to the world has been important.  All of the truths about giving up all thought of self, even until I realize the infinite depths of my impermanence--this isn't a spiritual maneuver, it's a way to avoid constant battle with the flow of the universe.  It's the only route that ends in rest.

An old hermit I knew quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel to me once.  I've never been able to vouch for its accuracy, but it stuck with me: "We do not take the Word of God into our mouths," he said. "Rather, we step into the Word, because the Word is bigger than we are."  Evidently, the Logos has a work that it's doing--a work that, once begun, needs to be respected, given space and listened to--and I ignore it only at the cost of my serenity.  The Word is communicating God's intelligence through absolutely everything in the universe.  It forms a single, unified message: that I'm not in charge, that it's safe to give up control, that I have to be gentle to myself and others, walk through life a bit more quietly and reflectively. 

If I want to be free of anxiety, then the only path left for me is introspection, feeling and honesty.  The stream is within, and I've got to follow it to its source.  I don't just think, I have an emotional response to thought.  I'm having one now, about the thought processes involved in writing (it's early, and I'm still crawling inside the secondhand clothes of the new day.)  I don't just have emotions, they point to sensations in the body.  And further, I don't just experience physical sensation: that sensation vibrates and tingles, it's the energy and the sound of simply being.  And I can either listen to that or not, stand outside and examine it or step into its flow.

If I speak to attempt to persuade others, I need something from them: a sense of my own righteousness, a sense of my own appeal--whatever.  It doesn't matter.  The fact remains: if whatever I'm seeking isn't forthcoming, I'm overcome by all kinds of sadness; strong or weak in proportion to my attachment.  Initially, I may run around, saying "I need to be less selfish." But that, too, is an error.  I need to simply be, to notice selfishness causes suffering, to let it "break my heart" and loosen my ego's white-knuckled grasp on its own permanence.  When I am not propping up my ego with affirmation from others, I can encounter them serenely.

At the same time, I can't use "avoiding being a burden" to justify hiding what I'm feeling from people I trust.  The dictum of AA holds true: "You alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone." I have to do my inner work: but I can neither hide from those I trust nor expect them to solve my problems for me.  It's a delicate balance.  I go through long stretches of fouling it up more than I succeed.

It is one thing to talk about these things.  It's another thing to become them.  Only Western cultures recognize a distinction between doing and being.  But "just existing" is an action--it's up to me to do it actively and consciously.  And acting is just a series of "ways of being," a succession of present moments.  This is a truth so infinitesimal and gargantuan and delicate that I can't step into it by willpower.

Surrender is the only destination here, and acceptance the only journey.  But I have to remember that acceptance is the end of a grieving process, and not skip steps, however noble my reasons for doing so are.  The instantaneous breakthroughs that taught me surrender was necessary must yield to a process of being kinder to the parts of my emotional life I'd rather ignore or reject.  Bargaining, Anger, Depression have their day, and they must, if I'm to be thorough.  

I want to mourn more actively: I want to withdraw some of my attention from the constant, chaotic stream of distractions that usually fill each day.  Anger and sadness and depression are more spacious emotions than I would have originally thought, but I have to face how afraid they make me feel, to sit down in them and learn to reclaim my breathing from anxiety.  It's terrible work, but no one's doing it for me and the soul-numbing consequences of neglect are too great.

The fact, in the end, is that I can't complete the process.  But gravity is a wonderful teacher.  If all I can do is throw a snowball off a snowcapped mountain peak, God can turn it into an avalanche.  All Jesus had to do was lay down his life.  Others were responsible for the tomb and the rising.  I don't know the mechanics of this in my own life--not intimately enough to spare me apprehension.  But the beginning and the end are one, as life and death are.  I didn't begin the work--I don't know, maybe I just live in it. And maybe the one who will carry it through to completion is within me, and knowing is a luxury I'm supposed to live without. 

So, what of it? Joni Mitchell would say "I don't know who I am, but life is for learning."  I've long since declared myself a disciple of the logos, but I think I'm just realizing the extent to which that means consciously fasting from stimuli that serve as quick fixes for uncomfortable emotional processes.  Grief is one of those processes, and I've not adequately faced my distaste for the fear that keeps me from making a beginning.  I don't like free fall, and that's precisely how trusting the invisible hits me. 

Ultimately it's about surrendering to the intelligent otherness of a loving deconstruction.  In an attempt to talk about this, I briefly read through some important Zen Koans.  But Torah has plenty of examples for this.  Job most likely ached at the silence, till the whirlwind spoke.  Abraham's son, nearly sacrificed as a boy, spent a good bit of his life afraid--until he faced it and "the fear of Isaac" became a name for God.  I want to ante up to my own, to look straight at it.

When Zechariah heard God's prediction of John's birth, because of his doubt he couldn't speak until they were fulfilled.  I don't know who's supposed to break the silence first.  Maybe God is, maybe I am.  If it's the latter, then these words are a fulfillment.  Let it be so, please God.  Let it be!