Darkness has long been associated with evil and suffering – as in dark forces and dark night of the soul.  The season reminds me of another darkness – a darkness at the center of our being – a profound silence, the fertile emptiness of an eternal now, a haven, an oasis, a womb that - moment by moment - nurtures, births and transforms us.

       As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, we are invited to rest in this deep, gentle, healing quiet.  At 2am this morning, a poem came.

Befriending Darkness

The season of darkness

calls us inward

calls us home.

A cozy home

awaits us

warms us

wombs us.

The season of darkness

calls us inward

calls us home –

our mansion with many rooms.

Some we visit often.

Some we seldom enter.

Some we’ve yet to discover.

We enter the darkness

as we enter life –

not knowing the future.

Ego peers ahead

predicting, planning

feigning control

seeking escape from unknowing.

We enter the darkness

as we enter life –

not knowing the future.

Wisdom softens, listens

musters integrity

and heart

for just the next step.

The season of darkness

calls us home –

gently, tenderly.

Its cozy vastness

cocoons us.

Its silent emptiness

incubates fullness.

The season of darkness

calls us home

calls us to presence

calls us to now

whispers “everything’s here,

everything’s fine.”

The darkness births light.

Trust the darkness.

Trust your home.

Let it hold you

and behold you.

Let it birth you

and free you.

Befriend the darkness.

A Soul Story

        In the tradition I was raised, All Soul’s Day (November 2) is a time to remember and celebrate those who have gone before us.  During Thursday night’s group, through guided meditation, story sharing and candle-light ritual, we connected with loved ones on “the other side” – the other side of what I believe is a very thin veil separating us.

      In honor of the occasion today, I share portions of something I wrote a good dozen years ago, exploring ideas about soul and the human condition.

Softening to Mystery:

A Story of Us

         …Softening to mystery means saying “yes” to apparently contradictory things, to accept paradox, to live with ambiguity and a “not knowing” that does not allow us to pin life down, or to pin ourselves down.  It means opening to darkness and light, the infinite and the infinitesimal.  We cannot be easily sized or sized up.  In this story, we humans are mysterious indeed.  We exist in three levels:  Personality, Individual Soul and God Soul.

         The level of personality includes the material body with all its physical attributes and chemical quirks, the mind with its habits and patterns, and the ego identity with all its characteristics and attachments.  Even at the level of personality, where we are the most obvious and observable, we are quite the mystery.  Biological and social scientists spend their lives trying to make sense of us at this all-too-human level, where we are a mass of contradictions.  With all our weirdness and goofiness here, our capacity for the heroic and horrific, there is one constant:  we are finite beings.  The ego is going to die – and it knows it.

         While the personality is unique and temporary, the individual soul is timeless.  It is the uniqueness of us that transcends time.  God speaks creation in the eternal now.  Each of us can be viewed as a word in God’s vocabulary – all interconnected, part of one lexicon, each distinct.  At the level of individual soul, we are unique, eternal, and many.

         There is only one God Soul.  In some mysterious way, we all share It.  At this level of being, which I believe is our core, we are one with God.  Mystics in every spiritual tradition speak of this oneness.  Here, we are infinite, divine, and one.

         Softening to mystery invites us to include and integrate all of who we are.  In this story, each level of being is true of us.  Each has its unique reality.  And all three are woven together in seamless wholeness.  There is oneness in this “three-ness”….

          There’s an often-told Zen story about a monastery that was floundering.  Membership was dwindling in a climate of bitterness and back-biting.  Somehow, a rumor began spreading that one of the monks was Buddha reincarnated.  There was much speculation about who that person might be.  Soon, the monks started treating each other with new gentleness and care.  After all, no one wanted mistreat the Buddha.   The monastery grew to be a center of joy.  It flourished, attracting new members from miles away.

         In grade school, I remember being taught that we are children of God.  Many religious traditions and spiritual practices invite us to cultivate an awareness of our divine origin and connection.  As we soften to this aspect of the mystery, a reverence for ourselves and for others grows quite naturally.  We may even remember that, at the level of soul, we are deeply in love with each other and always have been.

         In this story, no matter how hatefully we behave, we still have a divine spark.  No matter how holy and evolved we become, we’re still goofy.  In us, both the sublime and the ridiculous find a home.  Softening to the mystery of the human condition invites reverence and compassion, humility and humor….

       Please enjoy playing with the mystery of who we are.  Story it in any way that feels right to you.  Just don’t expect to solve it.

Fall into Gratitude

       Autumn has long been my favorite season.  The colors and crisp air invigorate.  Recent morning runs through the woods take me over an endless carpet of reds, oranges, yellows and browns – through trees in various states of undress.  On this morning’s jog, a young deer kept right on nibbling, 15 feet away as Joanie and I stopped - motionless, watching.

       During these times in nature, the inner hamster settles down.  I remember gratitude.

       And, later, I remember the psychological research that connects gratitude and happiness. 

Sliver Moon Lessons

       It’s the first night of a recent boundary waters trip with my friend, Rich.  We’re camped on an island, sitting after supper on a large, flat granite outcrop twenty feet above the lake.  We’re facing west, watching a silver sliver of young moon chase the sunset. 

       It’s following the orange-red ribbon that stretches across the western horizon and highlights the dozen or so scraggly pines towering over their neighbors – shorter, younger poplars that dominate the shoreline a few hundred yards away. 

       The silver sliver never catches the descending ribbon of red. The journey, however, changes them both. 

       The ribbon gradually shortens.  The rich orange-red gradually fades – softening toward purple gray.  The sliver of moon gradually changes color as well – moving from silver to gold and finally to orange.  It thickens near the end, before disappearing behind a tree line barely silhouetted by the darkening sky.

       Stars pop out, shining unhindered in the wilderness night.  The cup edge of the big dipper points to the north star, the last star in the handle of a little dipper we could actually see.  I remember reading somewhere that, at the north pole, the north star is always directly above.

       I sit in gratitude for the beauty of this balmy, bug-free autumn night.  I’m reminded how chasing rarely leads to catching, how the journey changes us, and how we all have an inner compass quietly orienting us to true north.

       I’ve long been intrigued by the paradoxical nature of the human condition.  At the level of personality, we are goofy, complex, noisy, cantankerous, vulnerable to upsets of all sorts.  At another level, sometimes called the level of soul, we are simple, serene, safe, sure-footed and deeply wise partners with God, beings of love.

       We are challenged to make space in our sense of self for the goofiness and the grandeur – to make room for mystery, within us and around us.

       I’m reminded of a short poem I wrote, perhaps a dozen years ago.

Oddly One

If we follow

Our uniqueness,

We’re all

A bit weird.

Odd ducks

In God’s pond.

Oddly One.

Life’s Loving Cleverness

       In my work with couples lately, I’ve been admiring the ingenuity of life as it unfolds its growth agenda within us through the power of our primary relationship.  A deep inner wisdom propels us to pick just the right person to aggravate our unhealed wound – bringing it to light and to our attention, so it can be healed.

       At first, of course, we fight life’s healing agenda.  We try really hard to get the partner to stop activating our wound, so we can go back to pretending it’s not there.  Fortunately, our partner rarely cooperates with that effort.  Likewise, we frustrate our partners, so they get to face their wounds, as well.

       When all goes well, we eventually let go of the struggle, surrender to the grace of life’s agenda and do the work ourselves.  Doing the work leads to a new freedom, a new energy.  We begin to experience our heart’s desire and the promise of happiness we thought we were partnering for in the first place.

       Life is so clever – so maddening – and so lovingly persistent.

Beyond Self-Protection

       Pema Chodron’s approach to spirituality inspires courage and self-compassion.  In a book of short meditations, The Pocket Pema Chodron, she invites us to move beyond self-protection.

       “We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves.  The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated.  We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole.  This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest us.  Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer.  Yet when we don’t close off and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.”    (p. 123)

       Her words remind me of Michael Singer’s passionate encouragement in The Untethered Soul to keep the heart open, no matter what.

       “Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.  Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over.”   (p. 47)

       Spiritual courage and self-compassion meet in an open heart.

       Joanie and I just finished a four-day backpacking adventure, hiking through woodlands and along ridgelines roughly paralleling Lake Superior.  Carrying 45 pounds up and down steep inclines is a wonderful way to slow the pace of life and shift one’s experience of time.  A couple nights ago in the tent, camped next to rippling waters, during that inner twilight just before sleep, this came to me.

Always Now

Hurry Hurry

Eat Fast

Work Fast

Go Fast

You Say

You Have

Less Time

Life Says

You’re Timeless

Always Now

.

       P.S.  When the busy-ness gets overwhelming, we may be tempted to conclude there’s just no time.  What if, in some deeper way, we’re right about that?

Softening to Beauty

       Joanie and I and our dear friends Kirk and Dee recently returned from a two-week adventure in Alaska – an immersion in some of the most visually stunning scenery I’ve ever encountered:  majestic snow-streaked peaks, the azure blues of glacier ice, aqua-green glacial pools, vibrant hues of wildflowers everywhere, a circle of bubble-feeding humpback whales simultaneously breaching water’s surface with mouths agape, the impish smile of a harbor seal sunning on an iceberg, salmon struggling up a shallow sparkling stream to spawn, two weeks without darkness and countless shades of light.

       The sensory delights were not just visual.  We were treated to bracing breezes, the pure crisp taste of glacial ice and snowmelt stream water, birdsongs galore, trumpeting of whales, the roar of rushing waters, and the sharp, reverberating crack of glacier expansion.

       For the first few days, I was absorbed in the awe of this amazing beauty.  At some point, I noticed I wasn’t taking it in.  Awe was slipping away.  Even great beauty was becoming commonplace.  Apparently, it’s not just in the routine of daily life that beauty gets overlooked.  Even in Alaska, appreciation can dull.  Experiencing beauty, then, may have more to do with what’s in here than it does with what’s out there.

       I wondered if I had become saturated.  Had I reached some sort of limit on how much I could receive?   If so, how might I expand my capacity to receive, to stay engaged?

       Over the next days, I made regular efforts to be present and aware.  I noticed our traveling companion, Dee, finding delight everywhere she looked.   I marveled at her capacity to enjoy.

       Near the end of the trip, while in one of the more remote wilderness areas, we signed up for a 70-minute airplane ride which took us over mountains, alongside peaks and down through glacial valleys.  Breathtaking beauty was present in a highly concentrated form – coming at me faster than I could manage.  From my vantage point in the co-pilot’s seat, I looked intently - forward and down and right and left - trying to capture and hang onto as much as I could.  I wanted to grasp the beauty and hold it, memorize it, claim it in some permanent way.  And I couldn’t.

       Finally, all I could do was breathe and relax and allow it to flow through me. 

       I’m left with musings about how we relate to beauty – beauty in nature, beauty in the people around us, the beauty of life itself.   How do we stretch the capacity to connect with beauty, to more fully enter it and let it enter us, to more deeply feel it, to let it change us and, at the same time, to relax in its presence - releasing the desire to possess or control it and maybe even the need to name it or understand it or describe it or write about it.

       Softening to beauty.  Attending.  Noticing.  Making room.  Allowing a flow.  Trusting the flow.

       And, in this case, trusting Kirk and Joanie to take gorgeous photos we can enjoy for years to come.

Little Self, Large Self

Little self chatters – constantly

Large self observes - quietly

Little self looks for danger

Large self knows we’re safe

Little self stories dramatic

Large self gently smiles

Little self thinks s/he’s alone

Large self knows we’re all one

Little self agitates for attention

Large self patiently presides

Little self loves and loathes

Large self only loves.

Little self – young and growing

Large self – ancient and ageless

Both inner companions

Are real versions of us

Can’t rid either - ever

Can choose either – anytime

The more we choose one

The easier that choice becomes.