Search Results for: Inner Rings And Acceptance

My friend Eve Marko asks an important question on her  blog: “Are You A Failure Because You’re Unhappy?” I hope not, because I have been unhappy for much of my life, sometimes deeply and painfully, and I have often felt like a failure because of it.

Eve is writing beautifully about her mother’s somewhat critical insistence that she was unhappy as a child. “As  a Zen student,” she writes, “I felt perfectly free to share my ups and downs with my peers. Most of us had gotten  into meditation because we needed it, because things had gone South, career and relationships soured, and Zen practice compelled us to finally sit down and look for the answers inside rather than running around looking for them out(side). As I usually say when I talk to others about my own meditation practice, I sat down in 1985 and never got up.”

I imagine almost everyone reading this is unhappy at times, and has perhaps felt like a failure because of it. The culture worships happiness, it is supposed to be the goal and the purpose of life, happiness and security. The Buddhists believe that life is suffering, we never quite get what we want, at least not all of the time, something is always troubling or disappointing or threatening. Almost every form of spiritual practice preaches acceptance: let things be as they are.

You find love, but you lose all your money. You have a great morning, but your computer crashes or your dog dies or you have a fight with someone you thought was your friend. Life moves and stumbles in lurches, almost never in straight lines. You take your morning walk, and end up in the hospital having your heart re-constructed.

I can’t speak for Buddha, but in my life I have come to see happiness in perspective. It is painful, but it has nothing to do with success or failure. Success in life does not come from never being unhappy, it comes from learning how to deal with the inevitable suffering and confusion life brings.

It is the unhappy who seek answers, who so often turn to creativity to understand their struggles. It is the unhappy who turn to meditation, to therapy, to true friends, to change to ease their suffering and work to improve and understand the world and  themselves. It is a strange thing to say, but the people I know who always seem to be “happy” also seem to me to be hollow, I rarely connect with them or seek to know them better.

The world is a difficult place, and it is the people who are unhappy with suffering who set out to ease suffering.

It is the unhappy people who are my soulmates, my tribe. And to be unhappy does not mean to be grim. Most successful comedians are neurotic and often miserable, their humor is often born out of suffering, as is so much of my work and my writing.

If I were not unhappy, I would never have known Maria. I would never had moved to a farm. I would never have become a writer. I would never have had a life with dogs and animals. I would never have started my blog. I would never have taken a photograph. I would never left my unhappy life, or had the strength to change. Was I a failure to be unhappy there?

If Maria had not been unhappy she would never have loved me, never fulfilled her dream to be an artist, never stopped going to those family dinners.

At this point in my life, I feel I am the happiest I have ever been or hope to me. I waited a long time for it, as I get older, I see how every good thing in my life, ever bit of love, wisdom, insight and accomplishment, has been born out of my unhappiness, was forged and shaped by it.

Unhappiness unchecked is a sad thing. Unhappiness acknowledged and understood is something else, a window and a door. If we think about it, we learn every day not to let the conventional wisdom of others shape our self-esteem None of us can ever be as happy and secure as we are told every day we ought to be. That is a dark road to travel.

I understand what the Buddhists mean, suffering is an integral part of life, as is loss and death, and it is important to accept it, but it is not the whole story, it is not for me, the point. For me, suffering is a mid-wife. If I accept it and understand it’s place in the world, it so often helps me to give birth to the purest happiness I have ever imagined. It is not failure to be unhappy, it is a door that opens wide.

And what is mysticism?

It is the art of the spiritual life.

For the past decade, I have been working as a writer, in one way or another, to answer the call of Henry Beston for a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals than we now possess in our culture.

In our society, our view of animals is narrowing, we are increasingly blinded to the reality of the animal world, we see them only in selfish terms that make us feel better, not that tell the truth about them.

We are understanding them only in terms  of the cruelty and abuse that is sometimes directed at them, but which is, in fact, a very small part of their reality. This makes us feel better about our sorry selves, it does them great harm.

Animals, healers and companions of people, are increasingly objects of division, persecution and hatred. The animals are being driven from our world.

The New York Carriage Horses gave me a path to a better and wiser understanding of animals that Beston, an author and naturalist called for in his famous work “Outermost House” a century ago.

In New York, our disconnection from the animal world and the lives of horses, humanity’s greatest animal partner through time, has never been more evident. We have turned the truth about them upside down, we have abandoned them to people who know nothing about them and care nothing about us.

Some say the horses are abused, but they are treated well. Some say work is abuse, but the real abuse comes from depriving them of it. Some say the work for the horses is cruelty, but indefensible cruelty and abuse are directed every day at the people who live with the horses, work with them and love them. In the great city, government seeks to take away work, way of life,  freedom and property, not to protect them.

There, they claim that horses are less friendly to Mother Earth than big and expensive cars and there, they claim the horses are dangerous when they are, in fact, the salvation of so many. There, they would take the horses away and kill them and send them into danger so that they can be saved. In this Orwellian world, this is called morality and animal rights.

The truth about the real lives of horses and other animals chokes under a cloud of lies and misinformation, ignorance and confusion. It puts the horses in harm’s way when they are safe. We need a better way than this, than seeing animals either as ignorant beasts of burden or as piteous and fragile beings in desperate need of our rescue, the new way to exploit them.

Blue Star Equiculture is the opposite of hatred and ignorance, and it’s antidote. Their message is powerful and true.

I am sorry to write that tragedy and mysticism are linked, and Paul Moshimer’s death at Blue Star last week has given new meaning to understanding animals, it has drawn attention to the power of the place, to it’s mystical, even hallowed meaning. Death and life are siblings, one makes the other possible, and Blue Star is full of life  – and now, tragedy – in all of it’s crisis and mystery. Whatever his intentions, Paul Moshimer’s life speaks for itself. He is a martyr to compassion now, and to the horses, a warrior for a gentler and more loving way.

Mysticism is a galaxy, a constellation of practices, connections, discourses, traditions, institutions and experiences aimed at human transformation. This transformation is sought by almost every tradition on the planet, defined differently by many of them. Blue Star is a place of human transformation. People come from everywhere to be transformed by the horses, to experience what we have forgotten, but which every ancient culture in the world knew: the animals are essential to human existence and to the future of Mother Earth, man cannot live in healthy ways or in harmony without them.

Nor can any person of conscience ignore the wounds of Mother Earth, who cries out to us through the souls of the animals, her children.

The Blue Star ethos is born of this idea of new beginnings, of harmony and community, of the partnership between people and animals, it is in the air, the ground, the eyes of the horses, the faces of the people who are drawn there. It is in the beautiful and mystical tree where Paul Moshimer took his own life, and where the horses gathered to say goodbye to him.

Mysticism was in brilliant, even wrenching,  evidence this weekend as all kinds of people – police and corrections officers, construction workers and artists, poets and hairdressers, children and old men and women, the rich and the poor, millionaires and Native-American seers, students and teachers, animal lovers and recovering drug addicts, the broken and the whole, the seekers and the priests – came to mourn the death of Paul Moshimer who felt the mysticism of Blue Star and has now come to be a symbol of it. It felt like a shrine to me, the people who came to mourn Paul were on a pilgrimage.

We are at a crossroads. Animals are vanishing from the earth, our world is bleeding to death. It is time, say the Native Americans, for people to come together in harmony, and with the animals of the world, or to perish together. Mystical humanism calls to us. It is, says philosopher Evelyn Underhill, is “the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order, whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood.”

At Blue Star – you can see this in the photographs taken there, almost everyone who comes brings a camera – mysticism takes the form of new ways of knowing and loving based on different states of awareness in which our own differing ideas of God becomes present in our inner acts, and in our interactions with animals.

At Blue Star, animals are not driven away from us by people who are strangers to them, they are permitted, encouraged,  to speak to us, listen to us, enter our consciousness and transform our lives. This is the common experience of Blue Star, it can be seen every day there, and felt.

There, the animals are respected, not trivialized, honored, not condescended to, saviors, not victims of us, heard, not ignored. And so they respond to us, they teach us that mysticism, in it’s purest form, is the perception of the universe and all of it’s diverse and disparate parts into a unified whole bound together by love and compassion and acceptance.

This has been missing from our understanding of animals, this absence is the barrier to understanding them, the greatest danger they face, the pathway to a cold and joyless world without magic or inspiration or true love.

You can see this for yourself at Blue Star, you can go there and see the horses, you can see it here.  You can help restore the bond and awaken the lost world of the imagination.