Pause at the Threshold
I decided to take to heart this idea that the gods want to know that you are serious. What you are reaching for will be supported by your undivided attention and fervor. So I packed a suitcase and some supplies, shut down my email, and found a retreat in easy driving distance.
All the old stories of setting out on an adventure have three parts: severance, threshold and return.
I. Severance
We aren’t alone. It is a relief when I remember that there are intelligences that are non-human. Other voices are trying to reach us, to teach us, to guide us. Sometimes I need to get away from busyness and my usual routine in order to hear. All of you have had moments when the veil briefly lifts and there is a timeless moment of clear perception. This joy, this moment of belonging to everything … isn’t that what we all reach for? And what human can take credit for this?
So, pulling myself away from the ping-bing of stimulation, and the ties to duty, I set out. It seems that part of removing myself from the hurry-hurry is deciding that I will miss out on certain things. And I will be better for it in the end.
The motivating factor for my retreat was the voice inside me asking about my book: if not now, when? Many of you have prodded and encouraged me. For the first time, the book is beginning to have a shape that I can see.
II. Pause at the Threshold
I took a break from my writing retreat and went to the St. Louis Museum of Art. I wandered until a painting captured me: “Sandstorm” by Alice Rahon. The painting was done in 1947. When I discovered this “new” artist, I was as delighted as a child. This is a practice I enjoy at exhibitions — to sit and ponder one painting. This process awakens a kind of seeing that restores me.
I had no idea that Alice Rahon was also a poet who felt the kinship between painting and poetry, and the search for the “marvelous.” She was a lover of mythology.
She is also a companion in her devotion to the cave paintings. In 1933 she visited the Caves of Altamira in Spain. The presences in the prehistoric paintings had a profound influence on her work.
When I was teaching in the Dordogne region of France, I got to visit the Rouffignac cave, famous for the number of Woolly Rhinos and Mammoths on its walls. What impressed me most were the vertical lines from floor to ceiling behind the paintings. This organic pattern, this background motif, was made by the cave bears sharpening their claws. There are also huge hollows on the floor where the cave bears hibernated, long before humans ever arrived.
Like Michelangelo, the Paleolithic artists must have worked lying on their backs, painting the ceiling. The place is a haven for meaning-making. The surface of these paintings, the limestone itself, has a curatorial power that preserves the pigment. The immediacy and timelessness of these paintings is something I return to again and again. There is a vital, primeval sense of invocation that can still be felt after thousands of years. That’s it, invocation. Summoning what wants to come. The underneath, like the lines from the cave bears, beneath the surface.
Believe that something wants to come forth, wants you to go forth. Wants you to listen.
What comes to mind is Joseph Campbell talking about the ancient stories, religions and art from cultures all over the world that proclaim: Thou art That. This claim takes at least a lifetime to unravel, but expresses the idea that consciousness is not plural, rather, it is singular, it permeates everything. We are not divided from this invisible field, but part of it.
III. Return
I returned home with some new ground under me, and the conviction to make time to listen, and dive into my book. So this morning I convinced my divided mind to leave behind everything and go to the woods and listen. The leaving everything behind part is my way of letting the gods know that I am serious. There is a field with wild flowers three feet tall. I laid down on my back facing the blue air and cumulus clouds. I was cloaked in blue and yellow flowers. I closed my eyes. When I opened them I saw a hawk flying high in the sky — white and black. Pure white and pure black. I did not recognize this bird. But what I received was a pure moment delivered from questions and answers. Later I remembered the Bushmen saying that any animal with black and white on the same body is magic — the dark and the light together, an image of wholeness. Thou art That.
I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,
but I don’t know whose flute it is.
A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.
A lily pad blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!….
Who is it we spend our entire life loving?
— Excerpt from The Kabir Book, Versions by Robert Bly
What are you reaching for? How do you let the gods know that you are serious? I’d love to hear from you.
