Following is the 4th and final installment of Rick’s series, The Gate of Power and the Flame of Life. An unmistakable energy of inclusion, cohesion, and re-creation has been unleashed–not only in the U.S., but globally–with yesterday’s presidential inauguration. The loom is prepped for a new tapestry of participation to emerge, into which we may weave our vibrant threads of individual expression and contribution. May you feel encouraged to pick up your thread and work (or at least playfully experiment) with it! Life is less about ‘finding’ something than it is about creating it. This post seems tailored to the moment.
Fertile blessings to all ~ Whitehawk
The flame of ignition is brilliant, sometimes spectacular in its bursting aliveness, but it needs much support, not only to generate the threshold energy to start, but also to maintain itself. A good and constant supply of fuel is needed, as well as shelter from wind, rain, and other factors that may block the blissful burning. Many of these factors can translate into the power of belonging: the whole complex of interrelatedness that we bring to what we do. Belonging is not “do I belong to this club” but a deep sense of participation that is the very root of power, strength, and abundance.
In pre-industrial cultures, where a deep sense of tribal identification was the norm, the worst thing that could happen to someone would be to be shunned. When a person or people were cast out of their communities, they would not be able to physically survive. Likewise, the discussions in psychology about the differences between monkeys brought up with and without touching, affection, and the like attest to this same issue. And while belonging may indeed begin with good mothering, it continues on into the fabric of our days. To doubt whether one belongs (as James Joyce does in Finnigans Wake when he puns on his homeland Dublin as “Doyoubelong?”) is to tear the fabric of existence; and yet this is something that has happened to many of us. Perhaps it may have to happen. The tear, the rip, the fall from childhood grace, and the need to recreate a sense of belonging is one of the challenges of our post historical era, in which most people do not have table altars filled with pictures and mementoes of the last five to seven generations of ancestors.
Of course, there are many realms of belonging. One could say, for example, that you do not belong to this society if you do not have capital, a bank account, a retirement plan, insurance, and a mortgage, and people without these things might appear to be as bereft as people who were shunned in other cultures. The popularity of television shows like “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” that model cute dysfunctional communities that somehow work, reflect the desire for a place of belonging.
Perhaps we are being asked to revision and rediscover belonging in new ways. A sense of commitment to a place, or a neighborhood is one such way, a sense of belonging to an institution was once a way in which work gave one a sense of belonging, but with athletes sold to the highest bidder and companies regularly swallowing one another, it is increasingly difficult to have a sense of loyalty to an institution. The vocational sense of belonging is a bit different; it is an inner prompting if not certitude that I am here to do something, and that path is a way of belonging in the world. And such a path flowers when connecting with a community that can mirror one’s sense of calling.
There are those who experience a pervasive feeling of not belonging, not to a church, a family, a nation, or what have you. This level of alienation often produces marginal drifters, loaners, and the like, but it can also lead to the discovery of a deeper level of belonging, belonging to life itself: to be able to thrive in nature, to read the signs of the wind as well as one’s dreams, is to participate in a most profound way. I once attended a Native American sweat lodge in a state park. On the second day of the ceremony, a very black man appeared out of the forest, out of nowhere. I do not think he knew the sweat lodge people personally, but he had such a sense of belonging that everyone acted as if they knew him well.
What is often dubbed “the sense of meaning” is actually a sense of belonging. It has just become deracinated from a community and its participation mystique, like the modernist detour to find meaning in literature and art without religious commitment and the post modern dissolution of meaning altogether; are we to all just go back to church? This takes us back to the “pursuit of happiness” and to the radical idea that this can occur, in its most authentic sense, through the free conscience of each and every individual. A culture that offers you the possibility to be anything you can dream of and then qualifies those dreams according to their marketability will not sustain the flame of desire.
Belonging deeply to life, on the other hand, sidesteps the ego-inflation of needing a “life mission” and offers “the rapture of being alive,” as Joseph Campbell put it. Great ambitions, as well as great salaries, may be but literal “compensations” for the loss of this deepest sense of belonging in which nature, society, and soul weave themselves together in an offering of fullness.
Entering this first gate is entering a precinct of power. A power emerging from the full support of nothing, from vast emptiness becoming vast openness, the world as a field of possibility, the constant, ongoing encounter with the regenerate possibility, with the greatness of the imagination. Abundance then is the natural evolution from the material of your own life as in Rilke’s letter to a young poet
“Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you without trying to interpret it.”
This rooting of the flame, this abundance of acceptance, is the direct opposite of speedy acquisitiveness. What you can do better than anyone else is to be you; but since you don’t know yourself, the only alternative is to constantly surprise yourself. Here, the first gate, the struggle of the individual is to emerge out of the matrix of the collective, and the willingness of the individual to continually morph and integrate into new form.
