"We had the experience but missed the meaning..." T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
"You're such an egomaniac," a family member said to me many years back. Her accusation sounded true.
After all, I had done so many things to make myself stand out in the world. All those things, I thought, must have come from the endless desire of my ego to satisfy itself.
We swallow what the ego serves up. But, it's the fountain of wisdom from which every caregiver can drink (though not as easily as the cardinal from the birdbath.)
The work to quench our spiritual thirst can be so exhausting that one day we surrender, perhaps landing for the rest of our lives on the island of the wrong answer.
Yet, this mystery is resolved with another kind of surrender.
First, do you really want to escape your ego's grasp? Second, how do you do that?
The reason I've always wanted to move to another place is that my ego grows in the garden of fear.
One way I've found over the fence and into Love's garden is described by a genius poet named Stephen Dunn in his poem: "Meaninglessness."
"He'd learned, but forgotten,/ the pointlessness of seeking;/ he was, after all, alive,/ and desire often sent him aching/ toward some same mistake."
Minton Sparks sometimes tells her audiences that our lives are made up of "the bundle of stories we tell ourselves."
We want to explore these stories, not escape them. They are the fabric of our lives.
Yet, that fabric is also woven with threads that scar our spiritual skin.
This need not be so if we can find a way to see our lives from a new story spoken from the loving heart of our Being.
For example, as a little boy, I was often told that I was bad and should be "ashamed" of myself. To the degree that shame has tainted my "bundle of stories" I need to hear those stories from a different point of view.
Can I do this? I'm not sure. But, it seems worth trying because I don't want the word "shame" hanging around my neck any longer.
I'll take responsibility. But, shame is poison mixed in the laboratory of fear.
Our Being has a purity about it. The joy that rises from it grows from the verdant garden of Love.
Walk over the bridge from Fear to Being. From there, your old stories may appear, now, as a new-made quilt that comforts rather than torments.
-Erie Chapman
Photograph: Garden & Cardinal - copyright erie chapman 2012
NOTE: I want to bring to your consciousness the most powerful video I have yet seen. It's from TED.com and is worth every second of its 16 minutes. Here is the link: http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
