Beginners!
When I was a green girl of fifteen, I was first
introduced to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I’ve written elsewhere of the numinosity of
that introduction, but I didn’t mention that one of the poems that most
intrigued me was this one:
Beginners
all, we pay the price. But thinking of this glorious planet we inhabit, the
canopy of stars overhead, our dear fellow travelers on the road, and, as
Whitman put it, “Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come,” it’s
still one hell of a great purchase.
(Originally posted at TerraSpheres)
How they are provided for upon the earth,
(appearing at intervals,)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth,
How they inure to themselves as much as to any –
what a paradox appears their age,
How people respond to them, yet know them not,
How there is something relentless in their fate all
times,
How all times mischoose the objects of their
adulation and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be
paid for the same great purchase.
So here we are. The portentous 2012. “A new
beginning,” say jump time enthusiasts…or, if we heed the Mayan
calendar catastrophizers, “The end.” Nature would undoubtedly answer, “Both,”
since cycles of death and rebirth are Her calling card. Mayan calendar
notwithstanding, each year we Western humans ritualize January 1, right on the
heels of the winter solstice, with its tension between dark and light, as the
place to mark the onset of a new cycle. We take stock, make resolutions, hope
that fate fulfills all the unmet desires and longings left over from the
previous year. At some point, quite a few of us not so metaphorically force
ourselves to dump the sugar-and-buttery leftovers of Christmas or Chanukah or
New Year’s football frenzy into the trashcan in hopes of losing the poundage
we’ve put on over the holidays.
And we seek to begin again. You’d think that making
a new beginning would be fun…easy…the fantasy of what might be, what should
be, not yet bogged down by all those pesky and problematic details. But Whitman
alludes to something else entirely in his poem. Why would beginners need to
inure to themselves? And to what great purchase is he referring?
Some of it, I think, pertains to the dark and light
symbolized by the solstice. We vow to do it differently this year, any year,
not just because life with her complexity has inevitably thrown spanners into
the previous year’s works to defeat our desires – some of those spanners
involving other people, who make us grit our teeth when they just won’t co-op-er-ate.
It’s also because we are conflicted beings, with nature inside us asserting her
own claims, bequeathing us an inner terrain populated by warring desires and
habits that uneasily eye one another like separate species, some herbivorous,
some carnivorous, who don’t necessarily - as the protagonist of my novel The History of My Body observes – do
too well sharing the same watering hole.
I’ve been a latecomer to environmental consciousness - a city girl who spent exactly one night under the stars (Webster Junior High, seventh grade sleepover, Angeles National Forest). You’d be far more likely to find my family members sitting indoors buried in a book than taking a hike or riding one of our famous southern California waves.
I’ve been a latecomer to environmental consciousness - a city girl who spent exactly one night under the stars (Webster Junior High, seventh grade sleepover, Angeles National Forest). You’d be far more likely to find my family members sitting indoors buried in a book than taking a hike or riding one of our famous southern California waves.
Yet, there were glimmers. A five-year-old’s
numinous experience of touching a bush and becoming aware of the
sun-shining-down-on-me-touching-the-bush. Or the morning after my first
adolescent acid trip – yes, Virginia, there was a sixties! - seeing
rainbows in the dew drops lingering on blades of grass. Which takes us right
back to Whitman’s opus. It was he who really turned the key, opening me to the
soulfulness of the natural world. As much as I appreciated his songs of
shopkeepers and soldiers, it was his nature poems that simultaneously lifted my
spirits and broke my heart. One in particular haunts me still: “Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with its poignant suggestion of the
sweetness of death.
Death is, after all, implicit in the making of a
new beginning. As soon as we are born, we embark upon a hopefully long and rich
road toward our dying. As soon as we set out to discover the stuff of which
we’re made, it’s all danger, anxiety, awkwardness, loss, shame, failure,
disappointment…and of course, the occasional carrot of triumph, discovery, or
sheer joy.
Recently, my dear friend Carolyn Raffensperger, eloquent advocate for future generations and the Precautionary Principle, asked us on Facebook to imagine what we’d need to take with us if we were traveling into time to “signal peace to the future ones.” I responded, “Hope. I'm bringing hope. Gratitude for such excellent fellow travelers, for being alive. Maybe a crow's feather. And a few books...real books. Leaves of Grass would be good. Songs. A pen. The willingness to not know, to sniff the wind...if necessary, to be the fool. Calloused feet, some scars, ferocity if it's required, a dowsing rod, fire sticks. And dreams. Lots of dreams.”
Recently, my dear friend Carolyn Raffensperger, eloquent advocate for future generations and the Precautionary Principle, asked us on Facebook to imagine what we’d need to take with us if we were traveling into time to “signal peace to the future ones.” I responded, “Hope. I'm bringing hope. Gratitude for such excellent fellow travelers, for being alive. Maybe a crow's feather. And a few books...real books. Leaves of Grass would be good. Songs. A pen. The willingness to not know, to sniff the wind...if necessary, to be the fool. Calloused feet, some scars, ferocity if it's required, a dowsing rod, fire sticks. And dreams. Lots of dreams.”
What I didn’t mention was an
acceptance of sacrifice, a willingness to endure loss. For it's a given that we lose something – most typically, a heck of a lot
of things - every time we set out on a new journey. I’m thinking now of the
harsh realities that burgeoned from my beginning efforts at writing fiction
twenty-six years ago: the struggle to give halfway decent articulation to the
voices of the fascinating characters urged upon me by my muse; the tedium and
anguish of editing (and editing and editing), losing hard-won phrases and even
whole chapters in service of a tightly-wrought and effective story; finding an
agent after a kazillion rejections; finding a publisher after a kazillion
rejections; proofreading (and proofreading and proofreading); learning how to
promote a book and torturing the introvert in myself by submitting to sound bite
interviews on a.m. radio (which actually, in the person of one Baltimore
preacher, Horace Tittle at WJSS, made mincemeat of my FM snobbism by engaging
me in a fascinating discussion of my book, autism, and spirituality); being
asked a kazillion times, with an eye to the marketplace, “How is the book
doing?” when my soul only wants to know that my Fleur is connecting with
kindred spirits in the world who might be heartened by her story.
No, I didn’t mention sacrifice and loss in my
response to Carolyn’s question, nor did I name innocence, which is truly where
we start every time. Innocence of the costs of breaking with the old. Innocence
of ostracism, disapproval, not being understand. Innocence of what hymens will
tear, what failures will be suffered along the way. Innocence of how much inner
destructive energies and outer ones will be primed to defeat us. In the case of
climate change, the anguished innocence of being modern day Cassandras -
knowing something awful is taking place and about to get much, much worse – but
not being believed.
Carl Jung cleverly pointed out that the human
psyche organizes itself in pairs of opposites. As soon as we approach the
archetype of creativity, archetypal destructiveness is
constellated. Baby Moses comes into the world and the edict is
issued to kill off all the first-born. Baby Jesus can find “no crib for his
head.”
On the other hand, Jung posited that if we can
consciously hold our pairs of opposites – our creativity and our
destructiveness, our liveliness and our numbness, our beauty and our nastiness, our concern for our
planet and our wish to enjoy the
fruits of materialism and fancy techno-gadgets – with a little grace, a new
thing (which he dubbed “the transcendent function”) will be born. Not
unlike the process which, as a Jungian analyst, I frequently witness with great
awe in my consulting room: a finely delineated and developed soul emerging from
painful engagement with personal shit and unique giftedness, despair and
desire, victimhood and resilience, fear and trembling and courage.
The alchemists were right, at least metaphorically.
Lead, or our ample flaws, can produce gold. Our weaknesses and
vulnerabilities, our sensitivity to cruelty and thoughtlessness (not the least
of which, our own!), can lead us in the direction of transformation
and healing. (As in the epigraph to my novel, there is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets
in.) Or, as the quantum physicists such as my novel’s Fleur Robins
are currently tantalizing us with – black holes might just act as wormholes to
multiple universes, darkness leading into expansion and light. (Put that one in
your pipe and smoke it awhile; I certainly am, as I begin to engage in a sequel
to The History of My Body!)
As I say, I’ve been a latecomer to environmentalism. For me, it was a big deal when I first committed to recycling. I struggle to tame my consumerist appetites as much as I struggle with my desire for as many melt-in-the-mouth Christmas sugar cookies as can be downed in one sitting. On the other hand, I use very little gas for an Angelena, live in a certain uncomfortable symbiosis with termites, went to considerable trouble and expense to save a diaspora of bees that located itself in one of my walls, have insulated my roof, and buy local produce as much as possible. Whenever I can, I engage the still-unconvinced in conversations about global warming, sign petitions, donate to green causes, and have been instrumental most recently in helping frame the theme for our upcoming North/South Conference of Jungian Analysts and Candidates as Hanging on a Thread, Our Role and Experience as Jungians in a World Dangling on the Thinnest of Threads.
As I say, I’ve been a latecomer to environmentalism. For me, it was a big deal when I first committed to recycling. I struggle to tame my consumerist appetites as much as I struggle with my desire for as many melt-in-the-mouth Christmas sugar cookies as can be downed in one sitting. On the other hand, I use very little gas for an Angelena, live in a certain uncomfortable symbiosis with termites, went to considerable trouble and expense to save a diaspora of bees that located itself in one of my walls, have insulated my roof, and buy local produce as much as possible. Whenever I can, I engage the still-unconvinced in conversations about global warming, sign petitions, donate to green causes, and have been instrumental most recently in helping frame the theme for our upcoming North/South Conference of Jungian Analysts and Candidates as Hanging on a Thread, Our Role and Experience as Jungians in a World Dangling on the Thinnest of Threads.
I’ve learned with enough lashings of Fate that each
of us beginners can do only what we can. Our contributions are limited…and yet
they hint at the vastness of Being that supports, enlivens, and pushes us to
plumb every little bit of consciousness, unendurable torment, and deep love
that we can. Along the way, we learn and suffer all the prices to be paid for
daring to venture beyond our own collective constraints, despair,
head-in-sand-ism, cowardice, and passivity. Advocating for our Mother Planet,
for the precious species she sprouts, for the quality of our own lives is, for
me, an inextricable part of being an eternal beginner. I want coming
generations to know the unmitigated joy of the
sun-shining-on-them-touching-a-bush.
(Originally posted at TerraSpheres)
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