Day: August 14, 2014

On the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm Thursday, the writer Jennifer Bowman (Finding The Trailhead), wrote about what she called soul hunger, the search for meaning in her life, a search that often takes her into the wilderness. Eventually, she wrote, this quest would bring her to an alligator.

I thought of Joseph Campbell, and his widely-quoted and often misunderstood plea to his students to “follow your bliss,” and go wherever it took them. Follow your bliss, he said, and the universe will open doors where there were only walls. I have long felt the pangs of soul hunger, I think it is a common enough itch for people who want their lives to have purpose and meaning in a world built around money, people who wish to exist for something other than to pay their bills and retire comfortably and safely. The American idea of security is cold and empty to me, I’m on a different path.

Like Jennifer Bowman, I am forever in search of what feeds my soul, and my soul is forever hungry, a ravenous beast all of its own.

The creative soul is restless, and so is the spiritual self. What we seek we can most often never really find, we just never stop wanting it and looking for it. After awhile, I came to see that it is the search that is the bliss.

In the Power Of Myth, Campbell explores the idea more deeply and powerfully. He believes the purpose of myth, the point of a spiritual life, is to awaken a sense of awe in us before the mystery of being.

“The absolute mystery of life, “he writes, “the transcendent reality” – cannot be captured directly in words and images, only symbols and metaphor. Thus, the power of myth. The mystery of life for me is not about discovery, but revolution. Revolution is not about smashing something or taking to the streets, it is intensely personal and individual. If you spent your time and energy thinking about that which you dislike and are attacking, you are bound to it, you will become what  you hate.

For me, revolution is about finding the zeal in yourself – the search for the wilderness, perhaps – and bringing it out, pursuing it.

I carry this quote by Campbell in my wallet: “That is what’s given you, one life to live.”

Cable news teaches us to blame the left or the right for our frailties and failures, for a hollow and fearful life. Freud taught us to blame our parents,  psychics teach us to blame the stars, the Facebook teaches us to blame our bosses.  I believe the only place to look for blame is within. You either do or do not have the courage and strength to bring up  your full moon, to seek your own wilderness, to feed your own soul and live the life that is both your potential and your purpose.

The basic story of the hero journey – as Campbell describes –  involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure and then coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization. Then, if you survive,  returning, or trying to return, to the normal field of life. Always, the realm of adventure is one of one kind of wilderness or another, of unknown forces and unknown powers. If you are fortunate, magical helpers in the form of animals or people, appear to take you through the darkness and back into the light.

Then there is the refusal of the call. The summons to the hero journey is heard but for one reason or another, aborted, cut off. There is always a reason for not going, not changing, not adventuring. Sometimes this is called a life of regrets.

My soul is hungry for awakening. I live in awe of the mystery of being, the absolute mystery of life. It is, I imagine, beyond knowledge or words, but I have pledged to myself to heed the call, to open doors where there were only walls. Every day, I hear the call to life. That is what has been given me.

 

Central Park has enriched life in New York for more than 150 years. I know many of you reading this have been to the park where the horses work,  but most have not had the opportunity to see this spectacular achievement, mostly the vision of Frederick Law Olmstead, the brilliant designer who created it.

For those of you who cannot see the horses there, I wanted to say that of all the things you see in the park today – pedicabs, joggers, bicyclists, food and water vendors, artists doing sketches, homeless men and women sleeping, popcorn vendors, cars, taxis and buses,  park rangers and police officers on horseback, runners and baseball players, kids with cellphones and tourists and families with video cameras – the carriage horses are the most beautiful and natural things in the park, apart from the trees and gardens and magical landscapes.

Olmstead wrote that he designed every single bridge in the park to accommodate the big and beautiful horses, so that they would have room, could be seen by and move among the masses of people moving into the great city. Every road they ride on, every bridge they move over, every big path they turn on was built for them, and with them in mind. And from the first day the park opened, and every day since, the horses have been a part of life  in the park, a way for people to see it, a thing for people to see. The horses are as organic to the park as the trees, as natural and appropriate.

The sound of their hooves rises – it always makes itself heard – among the great din, honking, sirens and exhaust of the defiling cars. As if they are sending their own messages in their own way.

I often wonder what Olmstead would make of a city 150 years later where, of all of the disparate and discordant things in the park – the carts, the pedicabs, the cars and buses, the city government has chosen to try to ban the horses, the first conveyances ever to be in the park, the most beautiful and most popular. How would he come to understand the idea that the work of these horses, prized so much and valued so highly that he built the park in part for them,  is suddenly intolerable,  abusive and cruel? Hundreds of pedicabs swarm the roadways, and for most of the day, taxis and cars and cards, dogs and bicycles  clog the roads through the park. No one has suggested banning or curtailing them, only the horses would be banned by the mayor.

It seems that everything about the carriage horse controversy is a moral inversion, the crazed logic of the White Rabbit. The spirit of and will of Olmstead is so very clear. Every bridge was built so that every person walking in the park could look up and see the big and beautiful horses pulling their carriages through the park. Is New York City really a place where cars and taxis stay forever but the horses in the park will never be seen again?

Olmstead’s spirit can join the other voiceless victims of this sad campaign – the tourists, the children, the lovers, the people who truly love animals and wish them to remain in our world – they challenge us to understand right from wrong and truth from lies and keep the horses in the city and the park, which was built for them. Sometimes it seems that they are the only living things that truly belong there.

I think Red has another Zelda on his hands, Deb is quite cool around him, she generally ignores him, at least until he gets a couple of feet away. He is always able to get her to move eventually, I imagine he will soon give her a Red lesson in sheepherding.