Reflections on Soul and Soul Loss

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Down the Rabbit Hole by Kbetart, CC BY NC-ND 2.0

One morning in the fall of 2021, as Mary and I walked the dogs in a nearby park, we turned a corner, and at the other end of a parking lot, saw several police cruisers pulled up next to a pickup truck with a camper shell. The area was cordoned off with caution tape. The pickup was there almost every morning, so although we had never seen or spoken to the owner, we assumed it was one of the homeless men who spend their nights in the park. We chose another path to continue our walk, and I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of police to bust a guy for sleeping in his car.

The next day we learned the man had hanged himself from the tree next to his truck.

It’s impossible to grasp the full extent of suffering and the death toll of the pandemic years, and just as the world did after the 1918-19 pandemic, we seem hell bent on trying to act like things are back to normal, but out of all the statistical and personal losses, this man’s death continues to haunt me. Potentially, there was help nearby if he had been able to reach out. There’s a megachurch, with various outreach programs, visible from the place where he died. A twelve-step group met several days a week that year in the park near the spot where he parked. Other homeless people sometimes gathered in the evenings for company or to share a pizza, but this man he never seemed to have joined them.

Most of us know what it’s like to get stuck in a dark place, where there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Most of us might also agree that the culture, the nation, the world are in a parallel state. In earlier times, in shamanic cultures, “soul loss” was the diagnosis for conditions we now call Anxiety Disorders, Dissociative Disorders, PTSD, and in general, the feeling of being “outside oneself,” “beside oneself,” or “not all there.”

But what kind of soul is it that can be lost and found? This has been a world-wide concern of shamans, spiritual seekers, and poets for millennia and has resurfaced for modern psychotherapists like Carl Jung and James Hillman.

Soul eludes precise definition, though I suspect everyone has a sense of it. Somehow it relates to depth, to intensity, to vibrant experience. Contact with soul, for an individual or a group, involves a sense of connection to an inner wisdom, an inner compass, like touching “the still point in the turning world,” to borrow Eliot’s phrase. To be out of contact with soul was reflected in a line from Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

At the end of 2016, a lot of people in the Bay Area were upset by the election of Donald Trump. I was invited to a two day soul-retrieval ceremony in the Bon Tradition of Tibet, which dates back thousands of years and has shamanic roots. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a contemporary Bon meditation master, wrote that “In the context of the Bon soul-retrieval practice, the soul…is understood as the balance of the subtle energies and related qualities of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space.”

At the end of the second day, the presiding lama performed a traditional test of this ceremony’s success. The result was about 50% effective, and that’s what it felt like subjectively – nothing had really changed. I found the result disappointing though not surprising. The ceremony grew from indigenous roots, among a people who shared the same consensus reality, a condition that no longer exists in America, where it feels like our 20th worldview is gone and the future is not yet in sight. Also, regardless of our conscious beliefs, at deeper levels, we are steeped in the imagery of our native culture, and other iconography, no matter how attractive, remains more distant. As Garrison Keeler once quipped, “In Minnesota, even the atheists are Lutherans because it’s a Lutheran God they don’t believe in.”

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively of the Grail Legends, which became popular in Europe during the liminal time between the dissolution of the medieval world and the emergence of the Renaissance. The mysterious Grail, which could heal individuals, the kingdom, and the land, was something mystical, sometimes imagined as the cup of the last supper, and at other times, as a stone, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy. A key feature for Campbell was that every seeker of the Grail had to enter the wilderness alone.

“Haunted Wood” by Arthur Rackham. Public Domain

In the Grail stories, a single hero (in some versions, Galahad, in others, Parsifal) finds the sacred object which redeems the kingdom and the king. No single hero or culture or nation can solve the issues as complex as those which confront the entire planet during our time of cultural dissolution. Solutions that seemed to work in the past are the very source of the problems that face us now.

Like it or not, every individual now living has the choice of clinging to nostalgic fantasies of an imagined idillic past, or of looking within to see what our individual soul and the soul of the world need from us now. The time of the winter solstice and the New Year is conducive to such reflections. “Peace and an hour’s time” are needed for creativity, according to photographer, Edward Weston, though he admitted that neither are easy to attain. How to get there is worth reflection as the new year dawns, and worth considering in the new year at greater length here.

Meanwhile I wish you all Happy New Year, with peace and time to enjoy it.

This too…

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During a recent zoom teaching, Anam Thubten, a Tibetan meditation master I’ve written about before, told a traditional story to illustrate the Buddhist concept of “Impermanence:”

In ancient times, a certain wise king welcomed scholars, philosophers, theologians, astronomers, and so on, to his court. One day he gathered them all and requested that they tell him something that is true under every possible circumstance. The wise men and women conferred among themselves, and after deliberations, returned to the king with the one truth that met his criterion: “This too shall pass.”

That’s a comforting truth at times, but over the last few years we have all been traumatized by the constant passing and threats to too many things we love.

We’ve all known people who have sickened or died of covid. The hope for “herd immunity” has faded as new variants proliferate and reinfections become common. Our past ways of living and socializing are gone and won’t be back. I see hundreds of people online who share a personal story as well, the loss of a beloved animal who brought joy during the early days of the shutdown but whose beautiful presence is no longer with us as the bad news grinds on and on.

Our nation continues to tear itself apart and our “Supreme” court has become a mere instrument of a party that no longer bothers to hide its autocratic ambitions. Passing and past are the days when decent people could feel a genuine pride in their country as its birthday approaches.

These days too, when I go to the grocery store, I think of the words Lakota warriors would sometimes say before battle: “Today is a good day to die.” (1) Sacramento had one of the 246 American mass shootings recorded as of June 5. I remember my relief in learning it was gang related – a “reasonable” motive, as opposed to some teen with a weapon of war who was having a sad.

So what do we do in response? I’m sure we all have ideas that come and go. “Talk to people with differing views,” is a “rational” response that crops up now and then, but the day a homeless man in the park, who survives on Social Security and Medicare, told me that Democrats are trying to ruin the country, I had nothing to say.

The other problem with “rational” responses is that they miss the subtle, or hidden, or archetypal forces in operation now, as they seem to have been during other times of collapsing empires.

One statement sticks in my mind. In the Winter, 2012 issue of Self-Realization Magazine, Paramahansa Yogananda was quoted as saying, “Your love must be greater than your pain.”

In a world that hungers for the quick-fix, this statement at first did not seem satisfying. but thoughts that simmer gain power. Yogananda was fully aware of the power of ideas to change the world. As a friend of Gandhi, he witnessed one of the 20th century’s most dramatic examples of the power of Truth and Compassion in action.

“Your love must be greater than your pain,” is a far more fertile idea to live with than the mass of what passes for news as it floods us every day.

The Day the Blue Dog Turned Pale

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George Rodrigue in his studio, 2009. CC By-SA 4.0

George Rodrigue, 1944-2013, was a Louisiana born artist of Cajun descent, best known for his “Blue Dog” paintings and prints. The series began when he received a commission to illustrate a Cajun ghost story. He chose the legend of the loop-garou, the werewolf, and modeled the image on a photo of Tiffany, a little dog who had been his studio companion and had recently died. The Blue Dog become his signature image and won him an international following.

“People who have seen the Blue Dog painting always remember it,” [Rodrigue] was quoted as saying. “They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers.” (1)

On the night of September 11, 2001, when the nation was reeling after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Rodrigue went to his studio and began a painting which he finished at 5:00 am the next morning. He called it God Bless America and created an edition of 1000 large silk screen prints from the painting. He donated all the revenue from the print sales, $500,000, to the Red Cross.

“I first thought to paint the dog black, as if in mourning,” he said on September 12. “Instead I painted it without color at all, the blue joy drained by shock and grief. (Some people have commented that the lack of color reminds them of the television footage of debris-covered people running on the streets of New York City.) For many years the dog has had yellow, happy eyes. On this day, however, the eyes are red, indicating a heavy heart.“

I am proud to be from the United States of America. It is our spirit, strong in the symbol of our flag, which will mend our broken hearts and allow us to use these events to strengthen our courage and compassion.”

Mary and I drove to Carmel in November of that year, in part to escape the news cycles. While we were there, we stopped by Rodrigue’s California gallery and saw these prints. I’ve never forgotten the image of the pale dog with its haunted eyes.

It was beautiful on the coast that fall. For a time, the nation was united and most of the world stood with us. When Randy Jackson almost single handedly led the Diamondbacks to their first World Series win that week, in (as far as I know), the first Series played in November, it was easy to pick up Rodrigue’s sense of optimism. Miracles could happen. Yes, our broken hearts would mend, and yes our courage and compassion would grow. Except things did not turn out that way.

George Rodrigue died in December, 2013, at the age of 69, of lung cancer. He blamed his use of powerful solvents in a small, unventilated studio when he was starting out as an artist. It’s sad to think of the work he was never able to give the world. At the same time, it’s almost a blessing that he never saw how we, as a nation, squandered the unity and goodwill that was ours in the wake of the first disaster of the new century.

I’ve long thought that as individuals and as groups, most of our learning comes either from wisdom or disasters. Wisdom is in short supply these days, and if a million dead of covid is not a big enough disaster to make us stop and question what we’re doing, it’s not pleasant to ask what comes next.

George Rodrigue is no longer here, but the pale dog remains. He hasn’t regained his color, and the happy yellow of his eyes seems a long way away.

New Leaves

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There’a a miasma of negativity in the air these days that can sometimes seem like a toxic fog or something choking, like the smoke from last year’s wildfires. It’s almost that tangible. This is one reason I haven’t posted anything recently. No need to add to the glut of opinions on where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going, when nobody really knows. Looking through some old posts, I see that I already weighed in on several occasions, most recently in the summer of 2019.

In a series of posts called, Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part1, Part2, and Part3, I discussed some prophetic statements that Paramahansa Yogananda made in 1940, which were later published in a pamphlet called World Crisis. He spoke of the kind of upheavals we are now facing. The good news is, that in his view, things will end well. The bad news is, that ending won’t come anytime soon.

Yet even during times of chaos and fear, Spring comes. I was reminded of this recently by new leaves on the maple trees.

A year ago, a long-suffering linden tree in the back yard died. Due to our poor soil, a tree service recommended replacing it with maples. Two in the front yard, planted a decade ago, are thriving, so we picked out two saplings at a large local nursery and planted them in the back. Unfortunately, the man who sold us the trees also recommended what proved to be a large overdose of starter fertilizer. As a result, from May through late October, the leaves that appeared would soon burn. All through that first season, the trees looked like they were dying.

An expert at a another nursery told us the trees would survive. I was hopeful but not convinced until I saw the new buds begin to unfold this year.

My pleasure at watching these leaves appear brought to mind “a lowly and unlearned man by the name of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine,” who later became known as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, one of the most appealing but little known figures in the literature of world mysticism.

Born in 1619 to a peasant family, poverty forced him to join the army as a teen during the 30 years war. “At the age of 16, he saw a leafless tree in the middle of a battlefield. Realizing that the tree would be in full leaf and flower in a few months, he saw the tree as a symbol of God’s ability to transform the human heart.” (1)

Ten years later, after leaving the service wounded, and then working as a footman, he followed his vision and the example of an uncle and joined a Carmelite monastery in Paris as a lay brother. He lived there until his death in 1691. This unlearned man drew the attention of poor people, other monastics, and religious scholars because of the aura of peace that surrounded him. Abbé Joseph de Beaufort, a noted cleric, held numerous conversations and exchanged letters with Brother Lawrence, and published a selection of these after his death in a small volume, The Practice of the Presence of God, a spiritual classic of only about 60 pages.

There are not many accounts of such conversions or enlightenment moments, and most of those I have seen come from the east. In one story, a Tibetan seeker lay on his back on a hillside next to his spiritual teacher to gaze at the night sky. His moment of awakening was sparked by the sound of a barking dog. An Indian guru conveyed enlightenment to his disciple with a sudden blow to the head with his sandal, not out of anger, but to open his crown chakra when the moment was right.

All of us have seen bare trees bloom and heard dogs bark, and many of us have had too many blows to the head, but without experiencing any profound awakening. A common point in these stories is that these moments come when the mind is free of all habitual thoughts, emotions, assumptions and meanings, when awareness is clear so something new can arise. Both of the eastern seekers in these stories had spent years practicing spiritual disciplines with their teachers. Brother Lawrence’s vision came at a moment of stillness after a pitched battle. Saint Francis’s conversion also followed military service, after a serious illness during his year as a prisoner of war, and later, when a vision came after he set off on another campaign (1).

Events of the last two years have shocked millions of us out of our “habitual thoughts, emotions, assumptions, and meanings,” but with one major difference from the previous accounts. Brother Lawrence, Saint Francis, and the two eastern seekers lived at times when a coherent world view, Christian and Buddhist respectively, shaped people’s lives, their cultures, and the meanings they gave to powerful “breakthrough” experiences.

We no longer have anything of the sort. Yet we still have the changing skies and seasons, the bees and geese returning, and squirrels scampering along power lines. And we have leaves reappearing on bare trees. Paying attention to these “small” messages from the natural world seems like a good place to start looking for something deeper and more nourishing than the next headline or trending hashtag.

Remembering Robert Bly

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Robert Bly, at “Poetry Out Loud MN,” March, 2009, by Nic’s Events, CC BY-SA 2.0

Robert Bly died on November 21, at the age of 94, but I didn’t find out until yesterday. The local paper published an obituary the week after his passing, but I missed it. Bly never got much media coverage, and when he did, it was often dismissive, accusing him, in his own words,of telling men to “run around in the woods and beat drums.”

He was an activist, author of more than 50 books of poetry, an editor, and a translator, but he’s best remembered as the author of Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990. The book grew out of a series of men’s conferences he co-hosted with James Hillman and Michael Meade. Those gatherings, along with the Power of Myth conversations between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, mark the 80’s as a rare time when large numbers of people were attuned to story, dream, myth, imagination, and soul.

Perhaps noting how quickly the moment had passed, in 1996 he published The Sibling Society, in which he argues that we have become a nation of adolescents who resist growing up because it’s too hard. The book wasn’t well received by critics, who faulted his discussion of causes and solutions as fuzzy, but it’s impossible to look at the headlines of even the past week without recognizing the core truth of his premise.

Robert Bly created a life in which he could follow his passions and inspire those able to read his work as expressions of soul and imagination. He lived to be 94, and according to his son, died peacefully, surrounded by family.

His was a life well lived!

Spirits

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On Sunday, a 39 year old man drove an SUV through the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Five people are dead and many more injured, including 18 children between the ages of 3 and 16, who suffered abrasions, broken bones, and serious head injuries. I remember the joy of a Christmas event like that when I was about 4, that climaxed with Santa arriving by helicopter. Will Advent and Christmas ever be joyful again for the people of Waukesha?

The media mostly glossed over the event. If the killer had used a gun or had a political motive, it would have been front page news, but apparently regurgitated opinions on the Rittenhouse trial got more clicks than another massacre in America.

As of this morning, we know the accused man was on bail after allegedly running over the woman who claims to be the mother of his child at the start of the month. On Sunday, he was involved in a “domestic altercation” before plowing into the crowd. One of the few comments I saw the night of the attack came from Marianne Williamson, who said “an evil spirit” was loose in Wisconsin, and we needed to pray.

Williamson evoked some mockery during the 2019 Democratic primary debates for statements like that, but hers was the one comment I still remember from those events. She said “No amount of policy wonkiness can overcome all the hate in this country.” More recently she echoed words I’ve heard from other leaders in other spiritual traditions that, “There are no political solutions for what ails the nation.”

I’ve been thinking about belief in spirits, both good and bad. Some acts are so heinous it’s hard to believe that “mere” human malevolence lies at the root – the Manson murders and Jonestown come to mind. As far as I can tell, only western culture since “the Enlightenment,” has refused to acknowledge the possibility of non-material influence on our behavior. Belief in spirits was part of original Christianity, and “distinguishing between spirits” was listed as a gift of the Holy Spirit by St. Paul (1Co 12:10 NIV). When you’re hearing voices, it’s good to know if they’re trustworthy!

We can call them spirits or call them neuroses, but at times like this, it’s dangerous to call ourselves invincible. In a more peaceful time, when the Star Wars movies first came out, everyone knew the Force was good and wanted it, without taking it literally. It’s worth remembering now that all it takes to turn us to the Dark Side is anger and hatred.

A Family Ghost Story Revisited

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Because Halloween is coming and because I’ve been looking at old family albums, I decided to re-post a story I first published in July, 2010, a month after I started blogging. It concerns the “family ghost story” my great-grandmother used to tell. Except it may have been a “rural legend” once told widely in the midwest. Since the timeframe was the 1880’s, it really doesn’t matter. The story still evokes the mystery and excitement of my childhood Halloweens…Enjoy!

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I heard this from the time I was little, a story told by my great-grandmother, Hannah Shook Outwater. I was ten when she died at the age of 88. Her gift of a hand puppet for my third Christmas was a huge catalyst in sparking my lifelong love of making and telling stories, but that is a tale for another time.

Hannah Outwater in her 20’s

When she was seven, Hannah, the seventh of eight children, rode with her family in a covered wagon from Ohio to Michigan. Her younger brother, Freddy, age two, didn’t survive the trip. They say he was flat on his back in the wagon with fever, but the evening he died, he sat up with a beatific smile and reached out his arm to angels no one else could see.  At least that’s the family legend. When I was young, Freddie’s child-sized fork lay in the silverware drawer.

When they reached Kalamazoo, Hannah’s father, Isiah Shook, rented a farm. Then the incidents began.

Hannah’s older sister was of the age to go courting. The family would hear the wagon drive up bringing her home, open the door and find no one there. Some nights the family heard such a commotion in the barn it sounded like the animals were about to kick it down. When they ran out to investigate, they found the cows and horses asleep and everything quiet. Then there was the reddish stain on the guest room floor they could never scrub out…

You have to imagine my great grandmother pausing to look around the room.  She knew how to build suspense.  It might be halloween – it was certainly winter, with the lights turned low.  Those were the days before the SciFi channel and Freddy Kreuger.  Before CSI and the horrendous headlines that have become all to common.

The old lady would lean forward and speak in a low voice so we would have to lean in too.  “Once we needed to move a big old chest in the cellar.  That’s when we found it.  Mind you, those were the days of dirt cellars, but in the far corner was a single patch of cement about six feet long.”

She would let that sink in, and then say, “We had been there about six months when my father heard the story.  The neighbors said a wealthy horse dealer came through town and spent the night with the people who lived there before you.  No one ever saw him again.  The couple who lived there said he left before dawn.  Funny that they moved away two months later.  We never understood where they got the money to up and go so suddenly.”

Hannah’s family moved not long after. And “No,” she said, they never quite dared to dig and see what was buried under the cement slab.

AFTERWARD

My sister and I and our friends grew up with that story, and after Hannah was gone, my mother told it. Some ten years ago, however, while spending the night in a vacation cabin, I found a stack of American Heritage magazines, and one of them had an article on legends common in rural America a century ago – and there was the family ghost story! Or so I think, because I didn’t have the sense to write down the magazine date, and later attempts to find it again in libraries or used bookstores never panned out.

Was it pure legend?  Was it born of a scandalous crime that was the talk of the midwest in the era before TV and tabloids?  Was it like certain crimes that became the stuff of ballads that are still sung hundreds of years later?

When I first found that copy of American Heritage, I thought it was very important to find out what kind of story it really was – exactly how true.  Now I don’t think it matters.  For me the story will always be true, whether it happened or not.

The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens

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Path through the Woodland Garden

“For me beauty is the primary proof of the existence of God. Beauty is sublime, transcendent, and fulfilling. It takes us to the very edge of our capacity for knowledge…The world considered without its beauty is a world perceived without its God.” – Thomas Moore

“You must protest, you must protest, it is your diamond duty; ah but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.” – Phil Ochs

James Hillman often railed against psychology’s “medicinal complex.” He looked to Greece and the Renaissance for inspiration as he championed a psychology of soul, image, and eros, in which “the primary value is beauty,” (A Blue Fire). A lack of beauty is pathological, he said, both in the lives of individuals and cultures. I thought of this often during this seemingly unending summer, with its record heat, smoke from another disastrous fire season, and a resurgent pandemic, set against a backdrop of too much traffic, too many angry drivers, and too many miles of billboards and decaying strip malls. For those, and other reasons, in mid-September, we set out for the coast, which we hadn’t visited since 2018.

Begonia Pavillion

Two days before we left, the temperature hit 106, so the 60 degree days alone would have made the trip worthwhile, but there was more than just a preview of fall in Fort Bragg, where we hadn’t stayed before. There were independent restaurants, coffee shops, a marine museum and the Skunk Train terminal, in the “downtown” area along the coastal highway. A few blocks away, wide streets and and quiet neighborhoods invited evening walks in glow of the coastal evening light. But the real surprise and most inspiring feature of the trip was the Mendocino County Botanical Gardens, just a few miles south of Fort Bragg www.gardenbythe sea.org.

We spent portions of two days at the gardens, which was only enough time to begin to explore, but that didn’t really matter. When a place mirrors the landscape of the soul, feeling like home on a deep level, it’s enough to just be there, and rest, and pay attention, letting the sense of presence arise.

“The flowers had the look of flowers that are looked at.” – T.S. Eliot

In the Dahlia Garden

Multiple paths meander through multiple groves, gardens, and open spaces, opening onto new vistas a every turn. Huge old trees bend and twist as if synchronized to the smaller plants that surround the trunks.

I’ve always enjoyed Japanese gardens, which blend the natural world with design and draw us into stillness. Here, there’s a wildness at the center of the garden designs, like an echo of the wildness of the ocean. The result is to draw us into wonder.

Memorial benches border the paths, with small plaques given by families of people who loved or supported or worked on these gardens. What a wonderful tribute that seems as one sits, surrounded by the beauty of the place they helped to create!

“The soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life.” – James Hillman

It rained the second day we went to the gardens, but everyone there seemed to enjoy it, both those who live on the coast and those, like us, visiting from inland. The clouds and rain added an extra shimmer to the foliage.

These gardens are an inspiring place to visit if you get a chance to visit the Mendocino coast. They brought to mind at least one similar feature near home that I haven’t explored in some time, and must get back to. Tt was also rewarding to pot several of the succulents we brought home. Just a small thing, but nothing that feeds the soul is ever too small.