Control and Surrender: fear and courage at the threshold.

And... something about Keats's 'negative capability' and Eliot's stillness.

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I find myself at that place of change where many of my familiar structures have strangely dissolved... almost like the land between my feet and the horizon fell away. My old familiar job in academia ended; I couldn't take the politics of research management or it couldn't take me, and I seem now set to devote myself full-time to my practice. To train a bit further in Jungian ideas and methods, to deepen my approach to Homeopathy. But, I find myself standing at this threshold quite terrified.

Lines from Mary Oliver come through -

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves…

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These old ways that still feel familiar, but just don't work for me anymore; like I hit a brick wall and was crawling on my knees; I just couldn't perform anymore. Perhaps I had been crawling on my knees for a long time and hadn't noticed quite how bad it was. I started to think about old patterns and the safety that they bring; those old goal-oriented ways of being that mean control, or the illusion of it. Fighting the fear with lists and structures, five year plans and the false arrogance that that sort of control brings only seems to increase the suffering… like we're trying to wrench our lives into some sort of shape from which we can then predict the future? The funny thing is…this comes with such a deep feeling of emptiness, disconnection, a kind of sterility. Almost a loss of soul and it all comes back to my fear of the unknown, of being uncertain about some steps I was taking, those into being my full and whole self. I love being with people as they heal; to accompany them is for me the most enormous privilege, almost like watching the Divine principle in action. I've always thought that we do this healing thing together, not alone; we need each other…. as witness to our movement, to the effort and the pain that it seems to demand… but really we need the love that we bring for each other.

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Letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves sounds so simple, but we've forgotten how to do it, we feel we have to repent for who we are; we cannot just be and I think we start even to lose all sense of that inner voice and being. Hearing it again, sitting still long enough to listen to the whispers seems almost impossible... and is not really seen as useful, certainly in our world. That place where it all stops, the space almost of pure being... TS Eliot...

...I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

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The Buddhists, I think, call this emptiness where the craving, the needing, the trying all stop. We are terrified of it, that 'eternal silence of these infinite spaces' that Pascal speaks of. He also said that all man's problems come from not being able to sit in a room alone..! It's that dreaded silence in a conversation that you just want to fill.

I've found myself intensely restless these days, I want to turn away from this demand.. anything, a folk concert, another trip to the sun. But, maybe, if I sit still just long enough...I'll hear it or feel it or sense it somehow. Is the courage then in the sitting, when there is nothing, when all there is, is the no-ground in front of me? Paul Tillich said "The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt". I've sat with people, patients, in these times...with the silence and this is when I hear those gems, those symptoms that unlock the case, something oddly unique to that person that gives the key to their remedy. Perhaps Keats was right in his idea of "Negative Capability," which he described as the capacity of abiding "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". The capacity of abiding, of dwelling, remaining in that space, the emptiness, holding the just being... I thought of a line from the film 'The Big Lebowski'... The dude abides... indeed he did. Perhaps that's why he was The Dude.

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So, what do I now do in this place, this threshold I find myself at... as I sit with the prospect of uncertainty. I abide in the stillness. There is a freedom there, a sense of openness, of opening up to possibility, being something other or just always being open... as long as I can hold the uncertainty.

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"There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, (unglamourous) ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

David Foster Wallace

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So, I return to that wonderful poem (Wild Geese) by Mary Oliver that seems to get to that feeling of needing to live a certain way where we are literally on our knees, that it is not required. All we have to do is surrender to our being, to let our selves, myself, love what I love…. My God, what a relief… is that all I have to do? Perhaps the journey of a life is just this, this sense of return to the peace in who I am.

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...Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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