Tucson, Arizona “If the young are not initiated into a village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.”—African proverb
“I just want to burn it down,” said a controversial millennial in the media, recently. “Burn the whole thing down." This is a battlecry turning into a mantra. The mindset of many people is that the world is in a terrible place, and they want to salvage it from a crash and burn. They want to naively go backward or forward, but somehow there is a prevailing zeitgeist that most of our present existence must be destroyed from within or from without, first. From zombiepocalypses to robot overlords, the fiction and film of our times is filled with dystopias following cataclysms. These images are exported to the rest of the world, with brief subtitles lacking nuance. The heroes are the destroyers.
Illustration of the final scene of "Fight Club". A schizophrenic pyromaniacal nightmare provides solace to the uninitiated.
I believe that this is because the effect of 9/11 at the turn of the millennium captured the hearts and minds of a global generation much more viscerally and immediately than the indistinct image of an indefinite "bridge to the future" that would spread ideals of democracy. Unchecked capitalism didn't result in freedom and independence, but rather economic and societal collapse. We have epidemics of drug abuse, violence, mental illness, disengaged materialism and the rise of online exhibitionist hungry ghosts. There is a vast disintegration of authority and people are burning up with paranoia. The entire nature of reality and its facts are challenged on a daily basis.
Whenever you see humans creating chaos, you are seeing an outer reflection of their inner state. When chaos reigns externally, the internally chaotic become self-possessed, as they feel relief of the two states finally reflecting one another. The inner life will always find a way to express itself, whether or not a person or a people is conscious of this work. Like an emerging color, this expression is a primary declaration of existence of the soul. It must assert itself, and it will continue to do so, regardless of the surroundings over which it finds itself expanding.
By contrast, to live in a compressed and limited body is to be mostly fragmented from the self that you used to know, the one that feels older than time and apart from things. No matter what direction you take, the soul is finding its way home every day. It knows the difference between going in circles and coming full circle.
Reclamation of the self seems to me to be a great portion of what our life here is about. It’s as if we were thrown out of something we knew well, and in the new place we have to find our way forward. We have to say, No, not this, and Yes, to that, until we discover this is the way; I feel more myself as I go in this direction. As I go, the shattering is coming back together, and with each step I mature. With each maturity, I heal. With each healing, I mature. Wholeness propels us forward with steady momentum.
Coming Upon the Central Point of the Self: Listening As An Antidote to Labyrinthitis
Whether you turn to the right of to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying,
"This is the way; walk in it." ~ Isaiah 30:12
Much of what we need to do in order to heal and to mature is to reclaim our innocence. But, how is this possible after so much experience? And what about the wisdom that comes with experience? Throwing out wisdom, in order to feel young, is feckless vanity dressed up as “being alive.” Wisdom is sober, but not somber. Wisdom can hold the absurd within it and laugh. Wisdom can be childlike. Innocence, then, can be a newly recovered perception that all is not what it has seemed to be, so there is still room for wonder and exuberance. This eases the painful but necessary release of illusions and fantasies of control. With release, innocence and wisdom can clasp hands as they are initiated into a changed world.
This surrendering of illusion and control can bring innocence in new forms. Despite how world-weary we may feel, we haven’t experienced all that there is, so we can become curious and interested and inspired all over again. There truly is a constant and ageless interchange between discovery and recovery and they operate to bring about our reclamation.
When will all this happen and how? That is an unknown to anyone at any time, but the unknown is a requirement for innocence and also for hope. Another requirement is renunciation, a forgotten rite of initiation. With both surrender to the unknown and renunciation of the tried and failed, we get to participate and help to shape our recovery, rather than rely on rigid formulas that create fevered anxiety about their effectiveness and a forcing of the drained will. Instead, we can wisely and judiciously examine what we were given and what we no longer require, all with gratitude. We can set ourselves to rights, without setting someone else to wrongs.
"A Wishing Well and the Unexpected Demise of Its Pail" by Inspirefirst.com
"You need to reclaim the tools necessary to penetrate to the depths of your fellows. Then the bonds you build will be as timeless and inexhaustible as the Well that nourishes them." –from the I Ching
Maybe life set your house on fire, and you had to throw out the good to try to save it from the flames. Or maybe you, yourself, set it on fire and threw everything out in several acts of desperation to make some kind of change, any change. Maybe you ran like a house afire back to familiar but dried-out wells full of glitter and sand. They couldn’t sustain you before, and unsurprisingly, they never respected your thirst to begin with. Rather, they expected you to make it rain for them. Emptiness is notorious for false advertising.
"Rain on Water" by Jennifer Quick, acrylic on canvas, Lynwood, WA
God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water but fire next time." ~ James Baldwin
We have to find ways to cool down our existential inflammation and droughts. We're our own rainmakers. We have to make decisions of what to claim and reclaim, and what to let go into the riptide. We will not be prepared for the next stage of the soul until we have gathered within ourselves only what we need to carry forward. Complete. Not perfect, just no longer missing in action.
"Real World" by Matchbox 20, a song for the disillusioned, discouraged and disenfranchised
Dedicated to my brother, who will never read these words, but who has been claimed and is now complete in his innocence. You were a true guitar hero.
