Opening and closing and the search for meaning.

I love writers who you know have endured their own dark nights of the soul and lived on to learn and find meaning as well as an art form of some kind for expressing their understanding, perspective and wisdom. Today I read in Thomas Moore’s book Dark Nights of the Soul that poetry is often one form this process shaping and making of meaning makes and poetry is an art form that author and cancer survivor Mark Nepo uses a lot.

Today my attention was grabbed from reading the chapter The Career of Awakening in his book The One Life We’re Given : Finding the Wisdom That Waits in Your Heart. What I love about his writing is how rich with feeling and soul it is. In his writing he talks of his battle with cancer and how it forced him to open and the subject of opening and closing around painful life changing or dramatically life altering events is addressed in that chapter. He tells the story of two brothers who survived so much loss during the Iraq war and how one opened and found meaning through and from the losses sustained while the other closed, but he also mentions how both then, in some strange way helped the other. In the chapter he also talks about the oscillation and flows, the peaks and troughs of experience and soul life… How different it is when we just expect people to stay on an ‘even keel’ and not exhibit these dramatic ups and downs or swings of energy.. We may attempt to label them but as Thomas Moore notes in his book, often it is our reactions and eccentricities that in marking us out from the crowd also identify us as different.. In the end its all about a shift of perspective.

In AA we were always told to look for the similarities and not the differences, sometimes it is necessary to see standing before us just another human heart that longs for love but has a had time expressing that longing in direct ways… even if that is pissing us off at the time. Alternatively standing before us may just be another human being fighting hard for space, understanding the right to individulise amidst a host of disparate forces or claims on their energy.

States of being awake and asleep emotionally and spiritually speaking can oscillate, as can the state of feeling dead and alive or beseiged or liberated. Such oscillations maybe labelled as bi polarity when they are actually all part of formerly repressed life energy beginning to move or transform.

Experiencing phases in which we have to build ourselves up or break ourselves apart may dictate the way we negotiate certain life passages.. At times we may have to destroy something only so we an create an open space for something new to emerge.

What at times, too can feel hard is to follow the call of our own heart, when the intellect says something else.. I know someone who wants to be acknowledged for the sharpness of their mind but inside them I so often a feel a heart full of pain that is shouting so loud to be heard but in a more indirect way.

Mark Nepo talks in that chapter about a commitment to being alive.. Just such a commitment is what is lost when we are captured by a deep depression, but the breakdown and inertia of a sustained depression may also be generative, as so often we grow through the darker dips and cycles in wisdom rather than knowledge. Sometimes things have to go through a period of decay inwardly so that we can transform and find a new direction. And as he points out each of us has a unique bond not only with life but with an inner soul life as well as one of the spirit.. Some of us may have struggled to express that spirit in the world, we may have had our young wings clipped or torn off by harsh treatment at the hands of caregivers.. and yet there is always within us a potential to grow them again as long as we can make meaning of such experiences and find a thread of connection to the atropied muscles or parts of our flesh that are ripe to grow some more.

Today I have been thinking of the times I chose to close down and run away from an experience that would have helped me grow, had I had the courage to face it.. Today I have been thinking about my own fall into inertia following a bad head injury as I make a bit of a frenzied effort to fight against the current entrapment I feel of the approach Mars retrograde square to Saturn…and today I have been thinking about the emotions that sometimes lead me to close or turn away, as well as of the times, when they began to open up, this was seen as threatening to loved ones and they treated me badly giving the message it may be unsafe to be open.. I am also thinking of the times I was too scared to get really angry and be authentic due to a fear of rejection or ostracism as well as of the times I was able to and it even though it upset people I ended up feeling better for having been authentic.

So many opportunities to open and close in this life, so many opportunities to shut down and close but maybe what is best of all to remember is that in living we are never permanently trapped in a state of being that expresses only one polarity of the duality…. for life is flow and flux as well as crisis and change, and in the end its how willing we are to ride the tide as well as track and tack to the alternating breeze that dictates how much forward movement and growth in wisdom and experience we wil be able to open ourselves to encompass following all of those derp dives or arrests we endure along the path of life.