THIS CROOKED PATH
Apprenticeship to Love, Chapter 259, August 24, 2024
TODAY'S MEDITATION
I started this day, after asanas, reading. And here I paraphrase one of the gifts of this early morning: The reason for my existence is found in my compassionate experience of the stranger who opens my heart with her mystery.
Another teacher might put it this way: A man's consciousness is awakened through a practice of opening to wonder and awe.
What I told my beloved: Loving you is a powerful and transformative part of my path. I am so grateful.
...
Several days ago I wrote about two teachers and their advice to men, with regard to the three stages of our adulthood. The third stage for one is the stage of preparing to die. For the other, the third stage is to be in service to love. In many respects, they are the same, seen from different perspectives. I might also see them as the stage where I begin to perceive the paradox of being at the same time in my most uselessness and my most usefulness to this life.
Today while I spend time with my daughter and my mother, while I experience myself as father and as son, I will feel this paradox, acutely. To be so necessary, and to know that I have nothing to give except my radical nothingness.
Meanwhile, the one I love stands in her silence and calls me to become more of myself, this nothingness. And so I learn to serve love, to be the husband I could never be.
...
Everything leads to this point. I have gathered all of these experiences —and I have a prodigious memory for my experiences and my reflections on them— so that I may know this: I am both the one whose experiences matter the most, and the one whose experiences matter the least. And like WB's angel, I am rushing backward into the future. Aware only of the wreckage I have wrought, the mistakes I have made, the successes I haven't achieved, and the thread of love that leads through it all to my heart and —through the back of my heart— into a future I cannot know, except in the shadows and lights of my dreams and intuitions.
My life, to borrow from SJ, is not a template. Not an example. Let not these contents teach you anything, except this: there is a method, a way to live through the wreckage and regret to know how the heart yearns and breaks and mends, only to yearn and break and mend again. Grief —and yearning— these are the two sides of what it means to love. If anything, my life may offer others an example of becoming comfortable on the knife-edge. To welcome the stranger, and the dying that is required in me to be open enough to receive her gifts.
....
We spent several days together. This is unusual. The masters of polarity teach that becoming familiar is the dying to the gifts we bring each other. A few days together is, in my experience, not enough to test this teaching. She remains a stranger to me. Perhaps more so. And I too myself as well.
Still, it was, as a dear friend suggested, a test of my teaching about the practice of "no expectations" and "welcoming the stranger." I noticed my yearning and my desire to push. I noticed that I was able to slow myself. To become quiet, reverential with the moment as it was offered to me, as I offered myself. As I created the emptiness for her strangeness to become full, sure enough to offer her gifts.
Once upon a time I thought I knew what I wanted, and what I needed. I am less sure now. Perhaps a little wiser.
She once said to me, You are always surprised. Perhaps today I am a little less so? Perhaps today I am more able to be in a state of "wonder and awe?" More reverential? More ready to receive as holy whatever this stranger and her strangeness brings to me? More able to welcome her disquieting and discomforting gifts?
...
I am not here to change. Or to be changed. Or to change you or the world we live in. I am here to be more of the man that I am. The father. The son. The brother. The friend and colleague. The teacher and student, the artist and writer. The dancer.
The husband. This, I think, is the hardest thing for me to be. To be husband to this always-stranger. My impulse is to become familiar. To think I can know, and in that knowing make less-strange. To domesticate a wilderness I need more than I may ever know. To bypass that strangeness that is the gift that unlocks more of myself, and the world, not a riddle to be solved. Instead, a mystery to be cherished. Savoured.
I am here to recognize the stranger. To welcome her. To be safe enough and still enough and powerful enough to hold her strangeness, gently. So gently and with such reverence that she experiences herself seen, attended to. Then, in whatever way she knows to offer, to be so ready that as she offers her gifts I become aware of myself dissolving —even as I know myself to be ever more aware and ever more rooted in my powerful presence. Only here and now, in my dissolution, do I begin to receive her strangeness as blessings.
(SJ draws my attention to "blessing" as rooted in "bloodied." There is a blood-price to what I experience as good and true. And so my capacity to receive what I know as blessings, and especially of the gifts of the stranger, is born of my dying into this moment. My blood makes me worthy of the gift she brings.)
...
We spent several days together. There was a beautiful moment where, as she quietly slipped into the vulnerability of confusion and clarity of her vision, where I was called out of myself. A few moments of intimacy.
And then, whatever came after, nourished by these moments. Not a chasing after the experience. Not a forcing of the flowers and fruits of these strange labours of our vulnerability. None of that. Only a feeling of contentment. Not comfort or familiarity. But a trusting in the strange ferment that we'd stirred.
...
I've been asked three times in the past week about my intentions here. People who know me in different ways have asked about my commitments, about whether I am being nourished, about where I see myself in 15 years.
I'm not sure I've been good at forecasting. But I do know that the only things that I've known to be true and good for me have been the fruit of my commitments. Not my forcing of a plan or imposition of a vision. This way has always failed me. What seems to be most useful and true for me is to follow the path that reveals itself. Almost always by way of gifts unbidden, gifts from strangers, things that I am warned about because they are unknown. Strange.
I am, today, most truly myself and most truly aware of the bloodied gifts of husbandry than I have ever been. And I stand here, yearning and grieving and allowing my heart to feel itself drawn into the unknown. It is a strange beauty that I experience. I am knowing myself through my love for this woman, a strange creature who reminds me, whenever we are together, to much time has been wasted in trying to make crooked ways straight, when it is the very crookedness and strangeness that leads me most directly to the gifts of life, of joy, of love.
TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS
🌀…the reason for existence is found in the experience of existence . . . (Guru Singh & Guruperkarma Kaur)
🌀 When we stay stuck in the mind this can leave us feeling afraid or insecure, because our minds want to know in order to feel safe. These moments are inviting us to step from the desire of understanding from the head into the trust of our Knowing Heart. It’s in this trusting we can find the inner peace we long for. (Kundalini Yoga School, Knowing Heart, day 7)
🌀A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis IX)
🌀 Soul, if you want to learn secrets, you must forget about shame and dignity. You are God’s lover, yet you worry what people are saying. (Rumi)
🌀 The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)
🌀Thank you. I appreciate you. (My beloved)
TODAY’S QUESTIONS
What does YOUR divinity mean to you? Are willing to embrace whatever your divinity might mean?
What ideas about yourself are holding you back from truly embracing your divine nature?
What ideas about the Divine are keeping you away from a direct experience of your true Self?
(from Kundalini Yoga School, The Knowing Heart sadhana)
TODAY'S SUGGESTED SHORT PRACTICE
My practice today: 5am, asanas; pranayama and meditation later in the forest
My suggestions for your practice today, to breathe and feel the confusion of life —the tension, pressure, friction, and stress that makes everything possible— and then allowing this confusion to become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine.
Please read through first, then ...
- Set two alarms, for times of the day when you have a five-10 minutes to become conscious of who and how you are in this day.
- When the alarm sounds, wherever and however you are, take a few moments and:
- What mistakes do I still need to forgive myself for? What would I do, or stop doing, right now in my life if I would drop all fear of making mistakes?
- Then, follow the short practice here:
- Stand, or sit, or lay yourself down, and bring your attention to your body.
- Feel the ground beneath you. Allow the earth to hold you with gravity. Feel how dense and heavy you are. Feel also how lightly you sit or stand or lay on the earth. Feel yourself between the pull of earth's gravity and the subtle but persistent pull of the sun, the stars.
- Slow your breathing so that it is long and deep into your belly. Slow the inhale to a count of four or six. Slow your exhale to a count of six or eight or ten. Repeat three to five cycles of breathing, going a little slower with each cycle. Continuing to notice yourself held by the earth, raised by the sun and stars and sky above. Feel the subtle tension and pressure and friction and stress that allows you to be and rest and move in this body.
- When you’re done, take another minute or two, breathing gently, slowly filling and emptying your belly. Here, as you breathe into your fullness, ask yourself, Am I willing to embrace my divinity?
What ideas about myself are holding me back from truly embracing my divine nature?
What ideas about the Divine are keeping me away from a direct experience of my true Self? - Notice if your body-mind feels somehow changed. And whether you notice a change or not, be content with yourself, exactly as you are in this moment.
- Continue with your day until the next alarm sounds, and repeat.