Words from the Desert

My life story seems full of clues which, like those in a mystery movie, are only recognized as having significance in hindsight…my bet is that this is true for all of us if we take the time to reflect.  A single star becomes part of a larger constellation that is pointing us to ourselves and our place in the cosmos…

Two years ago I was sitting on a boulder in the desert of Arizona during a five day initiation/vision quest encounter.  It was just months before I remember first noticing the bump which turned out to be cancer, but it is likely that the Melanoma cells were already growing away on my neck, unbeknownst to me.  Surrounded by nothing but wild flowers, red rocks, cactus, and looking directly across a canyon at an ancient Apache village carved into the hillside, I jotted down in a journal a few terse words that I rediscovered a couple weeks ago.

About a week ago, I was spending a full day with eight other men discussing the vision of This Healing Ground. This Healing Ground, or THG as I have heard it called, started as a group of five guys who wanted to address wounds in their lives and in the lives of other men.  THG has put on a number of retreats and workshops for ordinary guys who simply know that they have some kind of pain and rather than continuing to pass it on to the people around them, want for their own sake and the sake of future generations, to do the work of addressing it and transforming it. 

As I sat in the meeting, I brushed the dust off my journal and it to take down some notes.  Instead of writing, I was stunned to stillness, as the words from my time in the desert jumped off the page and into my chest. 

“Die before you die.  Live as if you have only 3-5 years left.”

Could it really be that my sense about how I should live was not just a metaphor but perhaps also an omen?  Was it the cosmos preparing me for a fight which was upon me already?

I remember much of that trip was about me facing my mortality.  Living as if I have 3-5 years to go has a certain significance for me.  It is a short enough of a time frame to make sure that you are making each day, each moment count.  It is short enough that I wouldn’t be preoccupied with 10 and 20 year business or personal plans—I am forced into a more healthy horizon of time.  But it wasn’t so short a time that I can sell everything and take the family on an extended European vacation…3-5 years was long enough that to some level I would have to live in the normal rhythms of work, play, rest, etc, but would do so with a heightened sense of purpose.

It is one thing to live this way when you really believe that in fact you have decades left…it is quite another to have the gift of cancer force you to live into this lifestyle when there is a very good chance that you indeed have only 3-5 years.  And again I’m forced to ponder: was this some divine teaching/preparatory moment, or will this be remembered after I’m dead as some ominous signpost?

Well whatever the meaning, with what has happened since then, I can say that I’ve done my best to experience the prophetic nature of those words…to some level I feel like I’ve died and come back…I’ve let go of my need to be alive here on earth and experienced being more fully alive because of it.

This April, I’m heading back to the same Arizona canyon.  This time however, I’m taking five other men who are brave enough to volunteer for something they know little about, in hopes of encountering the Creator in a way they never have before.  Perhaps you, gentle reader, feel a divine invitation to come too...it may happen.  Mostly I’ll be going back to hold space for these other men.  But there is something more waiting for me in the desert.

At some point during my time, a certain dry creek bed that tumbles down a mountain side will call out to me, and I’ll answer.  I’ll follow its twists and turns upward.  When it deadends in a bottleneck canyon I’ll climb the dry waterfall at the end and continue ever higher, paying attention to see if marks from a previous journey are still there or if they’ve been washed away by a flashflood.  Eventually I’ll find myself sitting on a certain red rock, looking across the canyon at an Apache village, drinking in the paschal mystery seen even in the cactus flowers around me, and staring down at a blank page in the same dusty journal.

...I can't help but wonder: 

What will be whispered through my pen this time?



An Understanding of the Question
Why doesn’t a soul fly when it hears the call?
Fish on the beach always move toward wave-sound.

A falcon hears the drum and brings the quarry home.
Why isn’t every dervish dancing in the sun?
You have escaped the cage. Your wings are stretched out.
Now, fly.

You have slept in sheds and out-buildings so long you think you live there.

How many years, like children, do we have to collect sticks and pieces of broken pottery and pretend they’re valuable?

Leave childhood. Go to the banquet of true human beings. Split open the cultural mould. Put your head up out of the sack.

Hold this book in the air with your right hand. Are you old enough to know right from left?

God said to clarity, Walk.
To death, Help them with discipline.
To the soul, Move into the invisible and take what’s there.

Don’t sing the sadness anymore. Call out that you have been given both the answer and an understanding of the question.

-Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks

Stay up to date

There have been many complaints about the inability for people to easily follow my blog.  I can't explain why blogger's "follow by email" feature doesn't seem to work, but I can do this:

If you want to be emailed every time I post an update rather than relying on some less reliable method, tell me via email and I will send you the link...simply send an email to: nedsgocblog@gmail.com and I will put you on the list myself... 

Living Now

Today is not the first day of the rest of my life, today is the only day of my life.  This moment, right now, is all I have and all I’ll ever have.  It is all I need; now is enough.  There is no future, there is no past, there is only this moment…and yet this moment is the place in time I have the most difficulty living.

Last Friday I spent the better part of five hours laying perfectly still while absorbing immense amounts of energy.  I had fasted of all food and drink before hand to enhance the effects of the session.  By the end of it, I was so pulsing with radiation that I couldn’t be around kids or pregnant women for 10 hours.  If it sounds like some new age healing, perhaps that isn’t too far off, but the machine shooting radiation into me was not treating me, it was peering into body, looking for cancer.  Today I meet the doctor to find out the results.

It is quite peculiar the range of internal reactions I have anticipating the results.  Perhaps the most curious part of it all is the part of me that would welcome the cancer being back.  Seriously. What is that?  I don’t feel the need to assure all of you that I do not have a death wish, that I want to live, but to say that part of me would welcome the cancer’s return is…well strange I suppose.

Amongst the multiple reactions she carries, Jamie finds a similar sentiment, a curious anticipation of that which could limit my lifespan, (yes I know, insert punch line here) …so it isn’t just me…and the more I think about it the more it makes sense and I’m grateful for this voice in me.  It is Wisdom speaking, it is God showing up, it is a voice that should be welcomed, honored and most importantly heeded.  This Siren call, I believe, is present in all of us but is usually overwhelmed by the fear that listening to such a seemingly dark presence will lead down the rabbit hole.  I guess it might lead into a turbulent journey.  But that would not be a bad thing.  And I’m convinced that this comfort with death, is actually Light not darkness.

So what is it?  What is it saying?

This weekend we had some friends drop by.  They are so easy to be with, so relaxing, pleasurable, and by many measures are thriving in life.  Their careers (though demanding) are both skyrocketing, they live in a beautiful home, have a great family—by all accounts we all should be so lucky as to be them.  But he made an interesting side comment in passing: that life seemed to be going too fast.  He reflected that they were so busy with parenting, with work, with the stuff of life, that…well it just seemed to all be going so fast.  I was left with the impression that it was passing him by, like he was watching a movie of his life, that he was so busy that he didn’t have the time/space to experience his experience.  And there was a note of dissatisfaction in this, which perhaps I was projecting into his words, but nevertheless seemed to be there.  As if he was feeling like he had been arriving at a future he had always wanted, but it didn’t feel how he had imagined it would.

Even if I’m wrong about what I think he specifically is feeling (and he’ll forgive me where I’m wrong) I doubt that this isn’t far off of where many of us are.  This is life living in the tyranny of an infinite future.  Living with an eye towards tomorrow, towards what’s next, towards building a better future, is so powerful as to pull us forever from the moment at hand.

It seems that the two easiest ways to miss out on life is to live in the past or in the future.  Many of us end up doing both.  We spend the first half of our lives living for tomorrow, and the second half of life reminiscing about yesterday.  Much if not most of religion only adds to this dynamic.

When I think of Christianity, which is the religion with which I have the most familiarity, many adherents seem to be so preoccupied with some heaven or hell that is occurring in the next life, that they are almost distracted from the life that is happening right here and right now.  Talk about an adventure in missing the point. 

The Teacher seemed to always pointing to what he called The Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God (which was his way of describing this other ethos, this other way of being with each other, this other culture of love).  He seemed to always be saying that it was “at hand,” that it was available now for the taking, that he wanted people to have amazing lives now, that intimacy, love, joy, were not just for some future life.

It doesn’t make sense that people are Christians because of events that they think occurred 2,000 years ago...whatever happened back then is ancient history.  Be a Christian because of God’s interactions with you in your lifetime and even in this very moment, and let that give meaning and shape to the heritage of history.  What good is a God that was interacting with people 2,000 years ago and then went back up into the clouds, waiting for his followers to die so they could join him?  I want mine to abide with me here and now.  If God is not here now, God is nowhere…and God is here, the Christ abides.

It wasn’t just Jesus. All great spirituality, all great spiritual teachers of all manner of faith traditions point to the now as the place where it is all at, where it is all available, where we are to live and breathe and enter the divine mystery. 

“Knowing that all thought is reactive and one step behind the present moment, we may begin to just listen, to observe without reaction. In this quiet, listening mind, something Real has the possibility of entering.”   -Bob Fergeson

This is one portion of the gift of cancer.  This is the gift of having your days numbered.  When you are forced to live in a boundaried space of time, you are forced into the now.  It is so hard to stay in the now on your own, without some outside force being forced upon you. 

This past summer was luminous, it was vivid, the whole of creation throbbed and pulsed in and around me.  Colors were brighter, food tasted better, I was more in union with the world.  Plans of the future were put on the back burner, career goals were subordinated, all that mattered was being present to what was in front of me, to those around me. 

As the risks of cancer subsided so to did those days of luminosity.  It is amazing how quickly they fade.  My goals for 2014 involve a number of future oriented topics, like business plans, visions for helping my community, hopes for being an impactful man, father, husband…all good things, but also things that are too concerned about the days ahead, not the day at hand.  The more I move back into old modes of planning out a long, healthy, prosperous life, the more I feel old anxieties return and the Life Source which was burning hot begins to ebb.  Have I learned nothing?

My Teacher has said to not worry about these things, that who by worrying about them can add a single hour to her life?  He says to not worry about food and clothing, that the flowers in the fields are dressed in beauty and the birds are fed and we are more important and will likewise be taken care of.  Too often I live like this is a naïve, childish, and utterly impractical teaching that doesn’t work in the real world…and yet as I think about the great ones, whether Jesus, Paul, Francis, Rumi, Gandhi, Theresa, perhaps Pope Francis, and many, many more, what was “practical” doesn’t seem to concern them much. 

Both Jamie and I can sense the very real energy that comes from living in the here and now; it is tapping into life itself.  We move from saying prayers to being a prayer, we move and live and love somewhat conscious of the divine DNA that is connecting us to everything and everyone.  This is being in the cosmic Christ that St. John called the Logos that both created the world and then became flesh and blood. 

No wonder the return of cancer has some strange appeal.  We all thrive when we live in the now, no matter what it is that forced us there.  It is why cancer wards are pulsing with life, even while death is a very present reality.  It is why people who are dying often are transformed into more beautiful humans than they ever were for the previous decades, as if they finally have eyes to see what is truly important.  If we fight death and go only kicking and screaming, we may miss the gift.  If we let go and embrace what it offers, we will be lifted up.  But why don’t I remain in Life’s flow volitionally?  For me it has always been three steps deeper into Life and then two big steps back…I wish it weren’t so, that I could enter into Life through Beauty and not suffering, but I guess I ought to just be grateful for whatever path gets me there, even if it is cancer...

I don’t think the cancer is coming back…the scan today showed one swollen node in my neck, but that is hopefully due to a recent cold, not my cancer...time will tell.  If the last few days have anything to say for Jamie and I, we don’t really need the cancer to come back to remind us to live in the now…just having these damn scans on a regular basis will be enough of a reminder for the both of us.

 

QUIETNESS

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You’re covered with thick cloud. Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.

-Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks