Infillence, Book I, Chapter 4
Trust Your Gut
“I know how slight are the threads that tie me to joy, but it is from those threads I have woven my strongest clothing.” --Yehuda Amichai
Our moments of ontological safety—of psychedelic radiance, pure love, immersion in a task—happen in our bodies and brains and so they are real, but they don’t last and so we think of them as “just brain chemistry,” as unreal illusions. Perhaps we can say that our human disguise, the cloak draped over our light, comes off for a few seconds as we dance naked before the mirror, but then someone comes into the room to notice us, and we feel embarrassed by our own will. And, too, in the fast and heavy breathing of our dance, the mirror clouded up, it obscured some of the beauty and the ontological safety we discovered, moments ago, while we were dancing. Both the cloudy mirror and other people deny our safety and security for a new moment. Paradox returns. Life returns. The storms return. We are back from ontological safety and certainty to the more confusing work of living.
Ontological safety and ontological certainty: Are they the same thing? They are, but only if we take perfection and purity out of discussion. We can have certainty about life (that allows for doubt as the power of longing) and we can safety in life (that allows for the certainty of death)—we can be safe and secure in the world—if we do not hold God (I am That) hostage to an impossible purity. In moments of “I am God” are brain chemical evidence of Essence, we also perceive, as pure or “perfect,” these moments and activities as signals back to us that we are essential. My brain chemistry lights me up with being needed, valued, validated in concert with others or, if I’m alone, with cosmic mirror; either way, in a chemical and mineral dance of safety and security we are smart to analyze the dance of ontology, to mine it for its depth of being and becoming.
But if perfection and purity distract our discussion of God and ourselves, we will remain distant, separate from God, the strength of the universe, and ourselves. Weill think, “I am not perfect or pure, especially my ego: I need to go somewhere else to find God.” This someplace is always receding from us, not the mirror. It is like the sun dropping in the evening sky far away. As we look far away for God, and as perfection and purity are our goal, we will not feel safe where we are in daily life, not aware of our own soul’s worth as we work, live, raise children, have sex, read, walk, sit, argue, play, listen, fight for freedom, and love. Not far away but intimate with reality here, now, wherever we are and in whatever we are doing, is safety and security, certainty and trust; it is life’s blessing, but this faith, this ontological security, eludes us when perfection and purity hijack God, making it seem that “I am God” is impossible.
“Future-tripping” is a term developed by William P. Young, author of The Shack, for ontological uncertainty, for lack of ontological safety. Andre Agassi, a fan of the book, talked about it this way: “We all tend to go to places in our minds where we’re solving problems that don’t even exist. Young’s advice (in The Shack) is to count those times, to catch yourself when you future trip. It happens way more than people think. Regret is the same—living in the past (past-tripping). That’s why my guiding principle is to try to stay a lot more in the present.”
Paradox: Each step we take, each day we live, each meal we cook, each kiss, each hand reaching out for another hand is a journey we need not rush or hurry past to seek the God far away. We can stop to take in what is here, real, now, and feel the joy of I am God. Only when we die will we have stayed in one place and time too long.
The pure past we think we’ve lost “trips us out,” as does the future we project as perfect. Safety does not exist in the past or the future, because they are not perfect, nor are we, nor is God, nor is reality. Perfection is not required for safety, purity is not required for morality; only imperfect truth is required for certainty, because truth is real. Truth is the mysterious horizon of Reality we keep rushing toward that we’ve already reached and already found to be delicate, loving, infinite, and built on freedom if we will stop to notice its magnificence.
But Can Reality in the Moment REALLY Give Us Ontological Safety?
We are saying: Ontological safety, our participation in the infinite, is inherently secure in the present moment, but not necessarily in the past or future where uncertainty exists. It is the present moment that feels most safe because it is real, certain, right now, right here. Even when we are in crisis, immersion in the present moment is the best we can do—not perfect, but the best we can do, a dance, a touch of someone else on our delicate face, a reverie. When we fight oppression and persecution, we attach our essential actions to present time, fighting for ontological safety. We battle evil from the past but do so in the present because evil has seemed to conquer the very time and space in which we can be safe, and we need our safety back right now, right here.
The human mind is an evolutionary tool of this safety and security. It experiments with both doubt and certainty, future-tripping and past-regretting. It learns as it goes in this experiment with “always living in the moment.” It learns that thinking about future outcomes, about perfections and the purity perhaps waiting for us around the corner, both invigorates and debilitates us. “Staying in the moment,” which is the act of remaining in Reality where safety is, focuses our minds on infinite moments right now. Paradoxically, too, “staying in the moment” focuses infinite time on us right here, right now. For a moment of God, we stop time to experience Time and Time stops us to experience Us.
Such is the goal with everything perhaps, if we think about it. The soldier is best at being a soldier when immersed in the war, not when fleeing war’s reality for the past or future. Parents are best at parenting when they are immersed in parenting, not plotting escapes from its reality. The engineer learns best by studying the real subject and objects to be studied. The child’s brain grows best (with the least possible depression, anxiety, and amorality) when immersed in real relationships rather than in artificial screens that mitigate against the resilience-in-time the child will need to face reality as an adult.
The Idleness of Perfection
Ontological safety and certainty come, paradoxically, then, from immersion in what is impure, the moment, because Reality needs me and needs you to be safe in it so that we can perform our essential tasks of living. Infinite Love and Freedom is our most profound instructor in how to do this because it is imperfect. Our imaginations will present new challenges of imperfection every moment that our present lives will have to confront. Our lives may meet challenges with regret for loss of the past; or with strong energy for survival and thriving in the future, differently at different times in our development, but if we continue to make choices in the present, we will not be lost in future tripping or false perfections. We will “live in the moment” much more than we did before, conscious of how essential we are to Reality, despite our awareness of paradox in the background: That other horizon we will never quite reach is the same one we left behind when we were born, the one we leave behind for our children to never quite reach, except when they find our death, our absence waiting for them to return to it.
It is against the background of the life/death paradox we make our choices in the moment. By accepting paradox in our choices we make peace with the moment itself, the Present that is unfolding, without our worry over perfection or purity imposed on it or even our newest suffering imposed by it. When people say we must “face our fears,” they are rightly guiding us to make peace with both glory and emptiness in the present tense. To immerse oneself in the present moment is to make peace with the infinite love and freedom that in each moment has gifted to us. “I am God” becomes an important idea here because it mines the moment for every gift it has, including the most useful, if we’ll notice it (which bears repeating): a moment provides ontological certainty because it reminds us that the only thing we can have absolute certainty about is the existence of the present moment. Infinitude is not abstract—it exists as Moment. God is not abstract but exists as Moment. The thing I can know for sure is that my Being right now is Becoming, too, in this present moment. About the past and future I am not sure, but about the present I can become certain by not only realizing Reality exists in the present moment but also, how essential I am to this present moment…vibrations I feel as I made peace with right here, right now.
“I am God,” then, could be “I am Time in the present moment.” It could be “I am Love in the present moment.” It could be “I am free in the present moment.” Most important to this book, taking the first one regarding Time, understanding the moment with ontological certainty occurs as we commit to focusing on this eternal moment. As we do, we use our power and sentience to make our homes into safe places to protect our families here, now; safety is not of past or future but of the present. When we need help for ourselves, we seek therapy and friends as safe places for vulnerability and healing for the purpose of becoming a better person for family and friends, for functionality in life and at work, in relationships and solitude, in our moments.
We seek help not because we adore the idleness of some already created perfection somewhere else. We seek help as goals of love, of human freedom, built into our existence as potential lights we ourselves carry, lights we need help to carry; like walking at night, I use a flashlight until I enter proximity of streetlamps or moon-glow. Light is my beacon of safety against the issues of the night, the dark voices, the unknowns. Turn on a light and in the moment I become safer. As I walk (and now perhaps with another person beside me) I contemplate mysteries that I may not solve to someone else’s satisfaction but at least to my own. I realize that perfection is not courageous in comparison to life in the mystery. Courage, I see, is a path into a present moment’s exhilaration.
Immersed in the moment’s mysterious and co-equal fullness (being) with light and emptiness (becoming) with light, I am propelled forward in life. At some point, entering the moon’s glow and turning off my flashlight, I will feel immersed in Reality. Now, everything else except the moment will seem like escape or cowardice. The moment of the moon’s glow and my companion near me and the power of light in darkness will surpass the need for perfection and purity—I am here, safe, secure. Future tripping, old perfections, artificial purity will seem an idleness now that I don’t need anymore, one I can’t afford if I want to keep becoming, keep moving forward in the light. The dark mirror of life never leaves us but so, too, the light with which we illuminate God in the dark mirror by our confident dance.
Trust Your Gut
A simpler way to put all this is “Trust your gut.” In these three words hide “I am God. Ontological certainty is “your gut,” it is God. It is the light we hold in our hands no matter our circumstances, no matter our joy or our crisis, no matter our gain or loss. It is our faith that when we look into the infinite mirror at ourselves, we will see light in our own eyes; that our cells are made of light and so, there is an aura around us of body wrapping itself around our cells resiliently dreaming. It is also the idea that light is always surrounded by darkness because light cannot exist without darkness, yet we are fine. That darkness, in fact, frees light to shape itself just as light frees darkness to embrace so many vast spaces. “Trust your gut,” like “live in the moment” are two of the most abstract things you can say to anyone, yet they are also some of the most concrete.
Because of the paradoxes like light-dark, abstract-concrete, we seek paths of trust. Paradox compels courage, confidence, and trust if we will notice this tender force. “I am God” becomes a path of light in darkness like a crevice or cave frightens us, like a hole in the ground can be a snake’s dangerous territory, like the child who jumps onto bed from far away afraid to let his ankles linger against the under-bed’s six inches of darkness that seems unending. “I am God” acknowledges the dark world with the light that our choices and actions bring to that darkness. In this, we can say that light is the tool of revelation but darkness is the reason for the revelation. Our fear is darkness vibrating inside us dreaming for light. Will we trust our gut? “I am God” says, “Yes, I will trust my gut, I will trust Reality in which I am essential.”
But we are more than one darkness and more than one light. We are never just one person or thing, we are multiple emotions and thoughts at once. Our vibrating light lives in the moment of each emotion and thought gathering selves together, seeking anchor and filter, listening to guides to sentience in each darkness of each moment, revealing that each darkness has a time limit: Darkness, not illuminated, exists in the future and the past, but not the present where light is. “In fact,” we realize, “as we make a choice to trust the present moment, there is only light, only illumination, in this moment.”
Thus we can say that “Trust your gut” and “Live in the moment” are infinitude immersing in finite time, they are “I am God.” In the moment, God is certain of coherence with Reality. In the moment, I know who I am, even if temporarily before returning to old motions or discovering new movements. Saying that “Trust your gut” is the same as saying, “I am God” is a parent teaching a child to “trust your instincts.” Parents do this to help the child form the personal habit of being so attuned to reality, so tuned to personal resilience, that choices will be made to fit reality’s needs, thus the choices will be trusted to have purpose. In accepting the wisdom of “Trust your instincts,” a child first trusts parents (Reality) for all sustenance, then gradually learns to trust herself or himself, which is to say, to accomplish self-trust. Parents want this self-trust, this self-discipline, to become sovereign of the child’s future moments.
Translating this to infillent language, “Trust your instincts” or “trust your gut” is non-separation from Reality. It is me trusting Reality to care for me because I am attuned to Reality. Because I am attuned to Reality, to God, Reality is tender with me in concrete moments even as I strive harder and harder every day to march through its mists toward a future. Like my wise parents did with me when they taught me to trust my gut, I am God planting imperfect seeds and trusting that those seeds will grow, not perfectly or purely but so attuned to Reality that they are resilient enough to reach their infinite becoming.
The Artist’s Self-Trust As Analogy for Trust of Nature
“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree,” Thomas Merton wrote more than a half century ago. The tree is a “I am God” in Merton’s infillence. Listen now to the environmental psychologist Patricia Hasbach discuss treatment approaches she developed for artists in therapy. She uses these approaches (to center) “around the development of an environmental identity and the concept of the ecological Self, which is fostered with practices like creating restorative environments in the office, moving therapy sessions outdoors, writing nature prescriptions to encourage direct interactions with the natural world.” God is both tree and Self; nature is direct contact with the fruitful our art of healing. To heal, the tree must trust nature to nurture it; to heal, nature must trust the tree that is broken to revive. Their trust in one another is, then, the same trust—both are trusting themselves. Similarly, a client in nature therapy trusts nature to heal him or her and as the session goes outdoors, nature itself trusts the client walking through the lawns and gardens and forests of nature. The trust won’t always lead to the “perfect” result one or the other might project in future tripping, but the trust will lead to a result emitting from choices each force makes.
Similarly, artists, creating, “trust the gut” as we create. When operating in sync with Reality, the artist succeeds at the mirror of nature, of Reality, as the artist’s constant identity in being and becoming shifts with the tools of nature the artist uses until art reflects infinite love and freedom in the small square of the canvas, the white page, the clay. Like we mentioned previously about inventors, we are all artists at our trades, inventors in our work, artists in our crafts, skills, empathy, and our realization of some dreams and discard of others as we grow. We “work with Reality” by “trusting our gut,” “trusting our instincts” as we immerse in a poem or book while writing it, trust the rebar and stone to perform as it should in nature, parent children toward their own self-trust of page, tree, stone, and natural law.
As we trust instincts and guts against and with the natural wilderness of time and space, we tell our unique story of a human race that is often measurable and yet, still, we are Reality’s immense dream. We trust Reality to activate our minds in our little local world of habits and revelations, of moments in time so complete, in life and art, that they can generate the energy and matter for dreaming, passionately, the next vision. When not creating art, the artist must be equally and passionately occupied with the other myriad life-events and responsibilities like family life, because if it is from Reality that art is created, then family is Reality, too. If the artist does not practice being-present in the art, the art avoids the light of un-muted creation and, most probably, ends up adding blankness or darkness to the human experiment; but, meanwhile, if the artist does not immerse equally in family and other purpose, when not in the artistic mental zone, the art will suffer because it will be isolated from places and moments.
As artists free us rather than build more burden for us, they, like children who learn to trust instincts, trust their guts and possess self-trust so that their series of stories, poems, sculptures, symphonies, painting that record our constantly changing states of nature (instead of creating more endless shame at subsisting separate from Reality) include real life as constant discovery of connection with nature, time, space, Reality. Art is revelation of how it feels for Reality, for God, to experience (after the shock of being) the joy that emits from this habit of self-trust, of self-love, of acceptance that even this hardened creation, this form What-Is is also endlessly Becoming the next story, the next poem, the next invention and art.
But if artists and inventors (and adults) don’t learn to trust their guts, their art will be relatively worthless to an audience because it will not feel real enough to be believed. If inventors don’t live “in reality,” what they invent will be artificial, not real enough to flourish (it may have its fifteen seconds of fame, but that’s it).
Is Life God’s Plan?
A phrase we hear so much that we make it either a custom or a reason for cynicism is, “Whatever happens is God’s plan.” This phrase has real value as wisdom that can highlight our experience of moments feeling potentially new. It is the wisdom of feeling like no day is quite the same walk; that each life is an adventure bringing issues of life and death to us whether on the road more or less traveled by others, because we are attuned to higher being via a sense of plan, of fulfilling our mission in the intimate universe if we trust ourselves, our guts, our instincts, our nature.
I opened the cabin then opened the wood stove this morning to make a fire. In the ashes at the bottom of the stove, I found a dead thrush. Sometime in the last week, the bird must have fallen down the narrow flue (though the flue seems too narrow, to me, for a bird of this size to descend through it). It must have fallen then got trapped in iron world, blood on its beak, talons torn from struggle, wings ruined by crashing against the metal walls of what became an impossible freedom. I took it out of the iron box a bird now dead, this bundle of feathers and cells emptied of light.
Thinking on its pain, I could reprimand the universe with, “What good is ‘I am God’ to this broken thrush?” “What good is ‘God’s plan’ to this bird?” “What good is wisdom in the face of life’s surprising pain and rage at the randomness of Reality?” In these reprimands I could say, “Why say that life makes its best flight when we trust our gut, when we realize that every person and every music is worthy because each one fills a hole in reality?” “Come on, was the brutal death of this bird ‘God’s plan’? Was incineration God’s plan for the Jews at Auschwitz? Wouldn’t it be better to rage against the dying of the light by admitting no pattern?”
In every moment of our lives, we can muster anger, and no one escapes acting like an angry God sometimes, whether we get angry at spouses, children, coworkers, neighbors, politicians, nature, love, or time; yet we are each intended by Reality, hence our actions are not merely random. We belong. My anger at myself for having a fireplace that could brutally kill this thrush, and our human anger at what happened at Auschwitz, and our stress-filled anger at an injustice in our workplace are conduits for connectivity with Reality not just scorn. They are reasons for wonder over God’s intentions, “God’s plan,” even as they create anguish of rejection and death. When we trust our guts and operate from “I am God,” our anger becomes passion driving us to what our place in the face of Reality’s plan might be, rather than rage at all the betrayals we can find in Reality. The thrush died as part of some plan, one mysterious to me, yet I trust Reality to know what we need, and so I trust the guts of the plan.
“God’s plan” and “Trust God to work things out” are often scorned by people who think that the God in question is a faraway or perfect God. Once we realize that we are intimate with God—that we are God—our anger at our children, at the wood stove (and at myself for possessing this bird killer), or a spouse who disappoints us, and other angers, we might now notice, are angers of expectations of perfection, angers lined with feeling betrayed. We feel betrayed because our expectations have not been met. A worthy exercise for every spiritual adult is to trace daily angers back until you find the feeling of betrayal behind them, the child “betraying” the parent’s rules, the spouse “betraying” the spouse’s expectations, the invention of convenience that is betraying a life. Now trace that betrayal back, you’ll find a broken trust of some kind—usually a trust of an expectation. Trace that broken trust back, you’ll find ontological fear, the parent afraid of the child, the spouse afraid of spouse because expectations have not been meant, and so on.
“God’s plan,” “Trust in God’s plan,” “Everything happens for a reason” are not statements made by silly innocence or blind faith; they are “I am God” in which “living God’s plan” means trusting the present moment’s intention as intention of both Being and Becoming—thus, betrayal is minimized because we have no more expectation of perfect being. While it is human to get angry, including at people who do not meet our projected expectations, “I am God” and “Trust in God’s Plan” can place expectations of perfection in a place that does not darken the true value of Becoming. Now we are much freer people for that placement.
Now we are somewhat healed by ontological security. Trust is sanctified. Betrayal is not now a destructive wound but, rather, a test of self-trust we pass by surpassing expectations of perfection—expectations that our small minds can solve the Mystery of life. Now we live that mystery rather than pretending it is in our pocket to pull out when we want it. Now “Trust God to work it out” aligns with “Trust your gut” as we make our plans to include adaptability, work ethic, love, freedom—joys that cannot be betrayed because they trust the future to refine us freely, lovingly, infinitely.
This self-trust will even include death and suffering. They will not now be seen as betrayal of some perfect expectation (that I or my loved one should live forever, or should live longer). Now I will now no longer blame myself for the dead thrush, nor for my writing gone badly today, nor for losing my wife to cancer. Reality’s intentions carry mysteries I cannot fathom (“God works in mysterious ways,” “One door closes, another opens,” “Life happens as it is meant to happen”) and I trust myself and my world as the mystery unfolding in the way it needs to unfold and, in fact, when I trust my gut, in the the way I need it to unfold even if I don’t quite see how in my suffering and grief.
When asked what was the most significant question facing humanity, Albert Einstein replied, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” To realize “I am God” is to realize that, whether the universe is friendly or hostile (it is both) I am needed in it to trust myself so that I can fulfill in time and space, as God, what I am needed for.
When I Don’t Trust Myself
Art exists because the artist trusts paint, palette, music, clay, words, origin of a story and the story itself. The artist’s or inventor’s trust in the power to alter Reality with art or invention is trust that the individual artist’s or inventor’s “creation” carries inherent natural power. The artist or inventor may not think about this, but in fact, this “creation” is society’s proof of God’s existence. It is proof of a collective and evolutionary intelligence (God) that some people, artists and inventors (and, truly, all of us who are constantly creating), learn how to publicly refine as if we are refining Reality—and we are! When someone prays to God, the same art is happening, even if with different a palette.
When we pray to Reality to help us win a war, or a soccer game, are we really praying to a Perfect Other who has a 50/50 chance of disappointing us when we don’t win? Or are we praying to our own collective intelligence, our problem-solving brain, our “I am God” to support us in a future we have chosen to trust? Praying, I experience a feeling of having been intended by Reality, a sense of belonging in an epic battle, a common brutality, but with self-trust as my ally.
I cannot control the outcome of this storm, this game, this war, and I know it, but I don’t wish to be just an afterthought, so I pray to God as both God the receiver and God the sender, interrelated being and becoming; I utilize the power of hope (very Godly), of intention compressed in a prayer that, however it is answered, will be God’s plan, imperfect because the game, war, and activity is not a perfection but an intention of being and becoming.
Not to pray is, in a sense, a lack of trust in myself as God (and all of us as God). And of course, we don’t have to pray to trust ourselves nor do we not trust ourselves if we don’t pray to win a war or soccer game. Praying is an act of goodness like art and invention are--connectivity that bears fruit. I know I am God when I trust Reality which means, also, trusting myself—no separation between Reality and Me—and prayer is just a way of feeling the self-trust in my guts, in my heart and soul.
When you don’t trust yourself, figure out why. This will be very liberating. The predominant reason people come to counseling and therapy is not money-troubles, marital discord, issues with children, unhealed trauma—though all of those things are the primary presenting-impulses that brought people to therapy—the primary reason, the root-pain they bring to us as therapists is lack of self-trust. Whether they present to us betrayal that became anger that became blame that became more betrayal that grew out of deep fear, much of their lives is lived right now at least concomitant with lack of self-trust that the therapist can see relatively quickly. We call it “lack of a sense of self-worth,” “lack of self-confidence,” “fear of failure, fear of success,” “sense of ontological insecurity,” “constant sense of inadequacy,” “comprehensive fear of abandonment.” We counselors exist, at least in part, to help our clients figure out the roots of the lack of self-trust, the root of the client’s separation from God, the cosmic but also very local “why.”
This “why” (multiple whys most likely) involve separateness from Reality that the client thinks is important so that they protect the ego as perfect-separate. Just the opposite is true, of course: if we trust Reality to change us in the ways we need to change and evolve, we are intimate with Reality (with Self, others, nature, life) and, thus, we trust Reality to give us the joy and pain of evolution, of Becoming, that will not destroy us until it is time for this body of transformations to die. This state of mind is self-trust, and we all want it. If we trust Reality, we trust Infinite Love and Freedom and that we are that love, freedom, body that will die but its light continue into a rebirth eternally because evolution is resilient and Reality is eternal. If we don’t trust Reality and ourselves, we falter in mission, purpose, love and freedom.
As a therapist, I help people to trust themselves again (or for the first time) so that, trusting Reality, now, they can “let more things go than before,” “not take as much personally,” “be more patient,” “be more realistic,” “be more humble,” be more successful in the long term because they have solved the problem of Being with confidence in the mysterious plan of Becoming. Very little can derail the person who trusts himself, herself. Even human waste will now have a worthy relationship with insects and plants as we are not separate. Now all my nerve endings are less raw. Now, even when I feel the eternal inner conflict—whether to keep loving in an old way or learn a new way of love, I understand that both are ways of love, one coming before a transformation and one after.
Now “reality check” is a friend to the client and to me not an imposition, because once the reality check is complete, the I remains confidently here. Now, a person may say or do something wrong—in fact I might be living right now in a time of errors with spouse, children, work—but still, I have self-trust and so I know I am a song the universe has been waiting to hear. As Rumi said, “If that dawn rose, you would be released from whatever is holding you.” We are imprisoned, held up in separateness, and thus in lack of self-trust, but then three syllables, three words, “I am God” uttered aloud in a context of infinite love and freedom becomes self-trust. Now the earth around me trusts the intentions of the farmer’s hands. Now the only frowns from other people I will let affect me are those that redirect me to my own true intentions.
Is the Root Separate from the Flower?
And so, when a person comes to the counseling office lacking deep self-trust, one wise therapeutic question is, “Why do you feel that, to survive or thrive, you must remain separate from ‘God’s plan’?” The language might need some context and some explanation, but hopefully the client will see what is meant by it: that the self-trust we help a client develop is faith that intimately refines plans with God’s solitude and God’s precision. Self-trust developed in counseling is the client developing enough faith to allow for refining the tiny thing, the Self, for the sake of constant change of the huge thing, the God eternally resilient.
I like to use the metaphor of the flower because that flower began in darkness: Via our storms and losses, we are first called to do what beauty does, by paying attention, first, to our roots underground. It is in this darkness that God’s intention, the flower, will later be remembered by our loved ones when we die. Our flowering beauty will later be harvested, from our disappearance, as people say “he went to heaven” or “she became God again after her unique needs and energy and vocations evolved infinite love and freedom in her small portion.” She was light that illuminated our family’s, community’s, even perhaps our sworn enemy’s next step in their lives because the flower and root are one plant. He was darkness coming into light to discover the blossoming face of itself and we remember him.
What Will It Take for You to “Be Yourself?”
When root and flower are separated by breakage of branch or stem in a storm, the flower will die more quickly than if the plant or tree stayed solid. On my nature walks, there is a cottonwood branch leaning down toward my path but not obstructing it. When it does sag enough (probably this next winter when it gets weighted down by snow), I will need to cut it back, but not yet. Right now, I leave it unbroken until my wholeness needs its breaking. How will I know the right moment to break it? I will know when its breaking will lead to some kind of evolution, even some healing, inside me.
“She went to heaven” stands with death for me like this. Gail believed: “When I die, I will easily be myself again, I will return to the universe.” There is the implication in her final belief that she had to wait to “be herself” until she died but in life, too, she valued, “being myself.” As a person and therapist she knew: To “Be myself” is to be our own unique form of light, our own individual and collective calling and mission, our vocation and activities, a unique Self that is a bundle of selves composed of intimate and infinite evolution.
It is worth everyone of us, at least once every day, to ask, “What will it take for me to be myself?” Perhaps write down what answer comes. “What I thought of before as God, I met today as a human being,” Rumi wrote about his mentor, Shems, who helped him understand that he, they, and everyone was God “being and becoming themselves.” In love, Gail was tender to me, but also, because she was a free spirit, there were times when her love flamed against me, and I respected that—she helped me become myself. She was an egg of the last century married to a seed of the last century who, after her death, has studied its journey from root to flower with new perspicacity.
What will it take for you to be yourself? One thing it will take is recognition that someone can be the first line of the poem that is, throughout its rhythms and words, only previewing its ending in you. This is love. And what else will it take to be yourself? It will take your trust in the Universe, in Reality, that made these roots, these flowers, these thoughts, these poems, these intimacies. Think of it like giving your financial assets to a financial planner to manage. Except for a few Bernie Madoffs, a few betrayals, most of our trillions of dollars in these financial corporations is handled in trustworthy ways. A system, a base pattern exists, a Reality that subsumes the individual financial planner (Social Security exists in this realm, as well) into its trustworthy and seemingly infinitely growing treasure trove. Gradually we must reach down into it, dig into our assets, raise them up, let them flower as retirement spending so that we can continue being alive and cared for until our deaths. Trust in the huge system is also trust in ourselves just like trust in God is also trust in ourselves.
Why Wait Until You Are Aging to Be Yourself?
At sixty-eight, I want to cry out, “Don’t wait!” and “Live every moment!” Perhaps this is because I have lost Gail and value life even more now or perhaps it is a wisdom of age, advise to everyone around me from a man aging and, thus, approaching another event of reckoning the Self with trust. I am at the age of looking in the toilet bowl to study my own waste. So much closer are we elders to the debilitation of illness, we no longer try to run faster than a storm. We are immersed in the cycle of life, in birth, and in illness, and in a day’s small joys. We lose parents, friends, loved ones and we see better, each time, that our loved ones were Reality intimate with Reality; that when they cried, “In God’s (or Goddess’) name I summon you!” they meant not just their loved ones but their own roots underground.
Aging is a time to notice what perhaps we all mean in our divine utterances. We mean intimacy with resources and systems that trust Reality as a mysterious journey that is imperfect but quite obviously true. We mean: Now I can find a sense of my place in the infinite, not just by having learned how to love and be loved, but also, now, in a new phase of responsible freedom. We also know to look close to home: All of most of the courageous messages come from that safe place, our home that has been waiting for us to choose it.
I trust myself as never before at my age, yet I must do so in the absence of the person who was, for forty years, the reason for my life and my trust. Helping Gail through the grotesque and yet beautiful time of dying, I now notice many positive attributes of “being myself.” I am much less a complainer than I was; I rarely get angry now. I still cry out in fear if I am attacked or, walking through the tall grass, I startle a nest of snakes, but my worry is not ontological—now I live in ontological security. I sense that “what happens is meant to be,” but I don’t use the cliché aloud too much because it might burden the truth. The truth is: Gail’s light and mine were and are inextinguishable, and it was her right to be herself and it is my right to be myself now, going forward, and as always, holding myself to a standard of “Do very little harm.”
Jerry Seinfeld said, in 2024, “All endeavor is chaos. You find YOUR chaos and try to give it some order. That is a life. And while you’re doing it, why not try to make other people feel good? For me, it’s by making them laugh.” Seinfeld fulfills his calling, trusts himself, giving people access to joy with the fine knife, the little wounds, of sarcasm, observational comedy, irony. This is his practice of “I am God” because of the self-trust—not a perfection but a trust—a faith, in his case, a faith in Comedy. Given the reality of chaos, not Jerry Seinfeld nor I nor a prophet can say we are sure of “God’s plan,” but we can live in the experiment with courage, which is the plan anyway, that we trust ourselves because we are the plan, even if unconsciously, we are God even if we must resist perfections, and their betrayals, to understand it.
And so, now, do we see it, the hidden insight? If the plan was perfect, which would mean we could know it in advance, somewhere in the past, would it really be “God’s plan?” If it if perfect or at least perfectly knowable, would it be evolutionary? Doesn’t it have to be imperfect (just like “trust yourself” will go imperfectly) so that the experiment will keep going? Isn’t imperfection what keeps us challenged so that we build resilience in ourselves as we build reflections of the strength of the universe moving through light and darkness? To embrace imperfection is to trust ourselves. To not trust ourselves is to remain terrified of life; to not trust the strength of the universe incarnated into my body as God, the Soul that is safe enough to have the next radiant and evolving moment in the forest or in the city or in our love bed or walking with the things and people we love.
For Contemplation
A Meditation on Humility
There is an arrogance in each of us that often shows up when we complain. It is an anger at the world we can only admit in the deep silence that waits for us between God’s words, anger that begins, actually, in fear, and cannot end except in faith.
Perhaps you’ve felt this anger when your spouse or friend or child disappoints you. “You said you’d do such-and-such for me, but you didn’t.” Perhaps you’ve felt it when someone threatens your portion of life’s material treasures. “Your mistakes cost me money!” Perhaps you’ve felt it when your prayers to God go unanswered. “Things are just not going as I planned!”
The anger of disappointment and insecurity is not the passionate anger we feel at the Nazis for unjustly killing our ancestors. This is another kind of anger, one based in dissatisfaction, a fear of life that leads not to passion of purpose, but instead to self-disguise, then intimate attacks. This is the kind of anger that leads us to cause anguish to others through words or love withheld.
How difficult it is to become silent and listen to the soul’s fear of faith and to the soul’s divine journey.
How difficult to humbly remember that freedom is not only given to the soul by God, but must be taken through humility before God.
How important to say, “I am imperfect, but because I love You, I am adequate.” How beautiful to become grateful to God for ourselves in the creation.
In this silence, will you become beautiful and grateful and whole? In the silence, will you grasp the robes of God and fly to wherever they take you?
In the silence, will you sacrifice all your thousand thoughts for the single silent wisdom of being? Will you let the details of angel’s wings be your subject?
We may live away from the first garden, but our exile is not the real source of our suffering: our suffering comes from paying attention only to the supposed perfection we left behind somewhere. In the silence, contemplate the holiness we are each called, in community, to live right now.
All who pray--you are completely loved. If you become silent and let Eternity shepherd you into a quiet transparency, you will never be alone. Praying, you will hear eternity pouring itself into your material form. Pray silently now and discover the humble process of growing slowly on the side of an infinite mountain.
Feel the incandescence of Nothingness rising to Light such as God made on the first day. Experience the first breath that breathed a map into this world and laid forth a set of trails for love such as we can only feel when we quiet ourselves and open our hearts. Silence is an act of fearlessness before God who loved the Void enough to make from it a world in which Love is actual beyond measure.
Our path of life is holy when in an ancient silence we listen for sudden moments of infinity, and in their beauty, hear the humble part of ourselves breathing, our souls that are God’s breath.