The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to speak clearly or convincingly of things if they aren’t connected  in some way with what I have experienced first hand. Thus, what I have to say about living a symbolic life is unabashedly grounded in the personal, but I think it has general applicability and some general conclusions can be drawn from it.

Let me begin with a quote from James Hollis: ” If one is not to surrender to the easy assurance of the herd…then as Jung said,  ‘ he has to go on a Quest, he has to find out what his soul says.’ ”  Living symbolic lives means listening to what our souls say. The soul speaks in many ways. It speaks to us,  for example, through dreams, events, people, visions, stories, symptoms, nature, music, and art. The soul’s language is often nonverbal and almost always nonlinear. The soul speaks in symbol, myth and metaphor.

I recall first discovering that my soul had a voice of its own when I was twelve. Several years after my mother’s death, my father married a woman who was horrified to learn that his three children had grown up unchurched.A rigorous plan of indoctrination, hymn singing and regular church attendance was promptly initiated. I wanted desperately to belong, to find a home, to gain approval and acceptance. As time went on, I became increasingly aware that all this would come when I was “saved”, when I would walk to the front of the church as the congregation sang “Just As I Am”. I also knew that coming forward would bring me a lot of attention. I wanted all of those things, wanted them badly, but something would not let me  go forward. Week after week passed and I couldn’t do it, and indeed, I didn’t do it. I remember being puzzled at myself. Before then, I had not noticed any particular inability to do what was needed to gain acceptance, approval, and attention, and there have certainly been times since then when I have taken the easy way, when there was not congruence between what I knew to be true internally and what my outer words and behavior conveyed. But not that time. That time, I listened to what my soul had to say. In that case, the soul did not speak through dreams, stories, other people, art, nature, music, or symptoms. It spoke silently but compellingly and the result was that I was strangely unable to do something that seemed to be to my advantage.

My soul and I have been in intermittent dialogue since then. To be honest, much of the time I am not aware of  being offered counsel, guidance, or correction, although dream work, journaling  in the form of letters addressed to Abiding Presence,  and soulcollage have helped me develop a sensitivity to soul and every now and then something breaks through my habitual patterns of thought, emotional reactivity, and behavior and redefines my sense of who I am, who I think others are, and what I believe the world to be.  In tomorrow’s post, I will share a few things disciplined reflection on this experience at age twelve and other experiences since then have shown me about what is required to live a symbolic life.

I have just finished reading Melody Beattie’s book, THE GRIEF CLUB, which brings home the reality of the ever-changing, impermanent nature of life and the accompanying suffering such a reality brings.  Told through the stories of her own experience and those of others, the book left me with compassion and  profound respect for the  struggles we all face as we attempt to come to terms with such a reality. 

In the introduction, she writes, “It is not a book about overcoming. In many ways it is not a classic how-to.  It’s for people in transition, people going through change and loss. It’s for people in pain, people who are numb, and people who aren’t sure what they’re feeling. ..This isn’t a book with a no-pain no-gain theme. It’s about that time in our life when what was familiar disappears, we’re not who we were, and we’re not yet who we’re becoming…One of the darkest places is that place where we don’t get or understand ourselves, and we think nobody else gets us either. We feel lost and all alone. We lose touch with the connection we have to ourselves and each other. It’s this connection that keeps us in Grace. When someone gets us, when they understand us, we understand ourselves. Then somehow the unacceptable becomes okay. We might not be happy about it – whatever it is – but we’ll find peace…Enlightenment isn’t waiting in the mountains of Tibet. It’s in the experiences we’re facing – and often resisting in our lives today. It’s in the changes we didn’t expect, ask for, or want. We can fantasize about the perfect life. It takes courage to have faith with the life we’ve been given and show up for it each day.”

In THE GRIEF CLUB we meet others, like ourselves, who have been initiated into clubs they never meant to join such as The Divorce Club, The Cancer Club, The Bankruptcy Club, The Alzheimer’s Disease Club, and The Chronic Pain Club. Even though we may not have been initiated into their  particular club, hearing the honest account of each person’s experience  connects us more deeply with our own experience as full time members of Humanity’s Club and gives us strength and encouragement. As Ira Progoff says, “This solitary work, we cannot do alone.”

     Yesterday a friend reminded me of something she had read in AWAKENING JOY. The next time we find ourselves thinking or speaking of something we have to do, we can make one simple change and substitute the word “get” for the word “have” and observe what happens. It was a timely reminder.  The past week had been filled with things I “had” to do and I found my resentment increasing. “When,” I asked myself plaintively, “was I ever going to get time for myself and what I wanted to do?”

     So, I immediately tried out the suggestion and I was surprised to find that it made a huge difference.  “I have to stop by the grocery store on my way home,” became, instead, “I get to stop by the grocery store on the way home.”  A whole new perspective opened for me, one that included gratitude that there was a grocery store to be stopped by and that I was physically and mentally able to make the stop. I have tried it out on several things since then and what I find is that this simple substitution broadens my perspective, deepens my awareness and transforms  irritation and resentment into gratitude .  And I didn’t even have to go to a mountaintop in Tibet to come to this awakening.

You gave us more than a minute.

In that southern

drawl you told  us,

“Take what abides.

Let it have its way with you.

Pull out stops, but

hold the tension,

until what lives

upon the page brings you to some-

thing old, now turned

new – a wedding

of  form and feeling.”

                                                      JDG

Tell me, how did those angry words

multiply, add,

or take away?

What did they solve?

When inequalities abound,

when more is less,

and division’s

not short but long,

it may be time to turn the page,

broaden the scope,

and bring to bear

a higher math.

                                                      JDG

Amidst the impenetrable,

the mystery,

the infinite:

Abiding One.

Before and after creation,

in the darkness,

and in the light:

Abiding One.

You are now and always present,

 Ground of my ground,

Breath of my breath,

Heart of my heart.

                                                                JDG

“Dear Abiding Presence,” I write,

knowing you will

gently hold all

I have to say.

I write my darkness out upon

the page: hurts, rage,

gnawing guilt, all

confusion held.

Until at last, once all is said,

a place is made

in me to rest

and maybe hear.

                                                    JDG

The upside is that I have a nifty new toy.  I give to you, the Google Ngram viewer.  This neat little widget searches the text of many, many books published between 1800 and 2000, and will graph the frequency of usage of any words you choose.  I had a great deal of fun with this tonight, playing around with different words and combinations and speculating about why the graphs look the way they do.

For example:

This graph shows the frequency of use of the word “miracle” and the word “disaster” in books between 1800 and 2000. The blue line is “miracle”, and the red line is “disaster”.

You can click the image to go to the website, but you can see from the graph that they sort of swap places in terms of popularity right around 1900.  I don’t know enough about history to be able to really speculate on why that is, but I think it’s interesting.  I played with all kinds of words this way, for about an hour and a half, trying to glean some kind of knowledge or understanding from them.  I admit, I didn’t get very far, but it was fascinating to me anyway.

Here’s the kicker, though.  As interesting as the graphs and the data are, let’s take a moment to talk about how interesting it is that such a gadget exists at all.  What an astounding world we live in today, that with a few keystrokes and a click, I can search thousands of books published over the course of two centuries for specific words and have that information in less than seconds!

I forget, honestly, what life was like before the internet, when writing reports meant trekking to the library and spending time flipping through a paper card catalog looking for research materials, paging through actual paper encyclopedias, gnashing my teeth because someone else had the volume for B-C and I had to wait for them to finish.  Remember microfiche?  I do.

When I finish writing this, it will be automatically posted to Facebook for me, and any one of the hundreds of my Facebook friends can read it, or they all can, at once.  They can pass it on with a click.  This one blog post will be available all over the globe within seconds of me publishing it, and may even be translated automatically into different languages.

At a time when information is so easily accessed, across distance and cultures, when information can be and is shared freely across most of humanity, 24 hours a day, is it any wonder that I often feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff there is to know?  And isn’t it also amazing that, despite the ease of learning about virtually anything, that there’s still so much ignorance in our world?

           Nothing happening here tonight.

No creaking boards

of memories,

no siren’s call.

As silence fills the empty well,

I let sleeping

dogs and children

lie, have their dreams.

No tasks, no words, no thoughts, no noise.

Just me, two cats,

a stretch, a yawn,

the dark outside.

                                                            JDG

Steel curtains drop across my path

won’t let me pass,

no way around.

What now to do?

Unconfined, a woman dances

without complaint,

 not tense,  with grace,

in small, tight space.

Such dream images tug at me,

“Do not attempt

to override.

Just step anew.”

                                                            JDG