This isn’t a competition. But this “being,” –this life, is a challenge. Sifted down, the challenge I think, is to learn to be present; there is no other way to love the world. Everything that is “of it,” and that is sincere, does love it. It seems that it is only members of our species that can become so lost that they can’t find that love in the world, let alone in their own particular body. The search often begins during the second half of life, after 44 when things fall apart. As our mortality draws closer, what rises up is the inner desire of this love–call it human completeness, or individuation in Jungian terms. We are made to be whole, and whatever it is that turns us to heal is the thing that alerts us to how we have crumbled, fractured under loss or betrayal. This is inevitable, especially in this economy based on growth, on consumption instead of this love of the world and the essential sacredness of being in it.
We need each other to fill us out, to thrive. Dignity, that draws us up off of our knees, is made between people. Relationships, the scaffolding of a life, can’t happen without an “other,” and love finds its’ spark and ignites yes in the self, and senses the flame in the heart of those to whom we are drawn. John O'Donohue, the Irish poet and philosopher said that “the soul choreographs one’s biography and one’s destiny.” This is your heart he speaks of, not your credit card. Yes, we have to make a living. If you're keen, try Hannah Arendt's book, “The Human Condition,” where she highlights the difference between labor–that which we must do to live, compared with work, which is now tied to never-ending expansion and yielding nothing. In my opinion, it is this “work,” that has divided us, created a mean competition orchestrated by men of questionable integral heft.
O’ Donohue spoke of one of my favourite human nuances–the delight, the mystery of having a conversation with someone “in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew.” I have experienced this, though rarely, and was awake enough to observe myself in it. The same thing is described in a poem by Rumi, “Night Air,” where he writes,
“…and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from ‘my’ chest,
I know that his soul is deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.
And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know ‘him’ from what I say,
and how I say it, because there’s a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”
This is part of being seen in truth by those meant for us in that love that means everything to being human on this planet.
To be clear, “love of self,” is not a narcissistic or selfish action, but instead the justified acknowledgement that we are worthy of healing. This is our best task, the effort rippling into the world around us as the process helps us to release addictions, storehouses of anger and resentment from a body that does not lie as it works in sync with the psyche. An example might be a skin rash, or the sudden onset of heart palpitations used to alert the human to a memory stowed until there is enough psychic strength to deal with it. Carl Jung’s work in archetypes and the psyche addressed work that the shamans, the indigenous had been tending since the beginning. A symptom is not a thing rising only on its’ own, something the medical model is slowly learning. Perhaps the body with the symptom has a psyche stretched so far away from its’ instinctual love of the world that the symptom is a desperate call by the psyche to get the attention it needs.
None of this is new. We have been distracted from it by ideologies that convinced us that we have no power. Knowing this now, though still difficult, there is great potential. Facing what needs to be faced no matter how uncomfortable is what frees us up into future time. I know this from experience that to address failings–because I have many– to be honest about instances where you were not present for whatever reason, is a gift without shame. This requires courage and you wonder if you could stand it, but if the effort is sincere, there is a noticeable shift within.
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
It is better to risk this, to keep lit this sincere spark that, if carried by enough of us will change the world for the better. We know the truth. Our bodies can sense when we are being lied-to and will hold us to account. It is a relief to know this, to surrender to this reality.
“Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time.”
...From Lindsey Stonebridge's “We Are Free to Change the World; Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience.” Hogarth, 2024, p. 299.
The care of our world is up to us, here in the growing climate crisis. To love the world and to love deeply the interiority of the human psyche, the human heart, is key to finding a way through, to grokking where we are; it has always been thus, though it has never been this urgent.
“Wilbur–this lovely world, these precious days…”
Charlotte's Web, E.B. White, Harper & Brothers, 1952