Row Your Boat

We are supposed to have a foot in this world and one in the spiritual realm: the sphere of God and angels, yes, but more than that: a “place” in which emotion guides us, where inner wisdom/knowing leads the way. Facts and figures are useless there, but we try to find our way with them anyhow, for we have been programmed in this modern world (and by that I mean about the last 2,000 years) to believe that facts and figures will always provide the answers, even when the questions are posed in art, poetry, music, story, the very Soul. What this does is undermine The Story—Our Own Story—and the wisdom contained therein. Here at the surface of life, where we concern ourselves with things like politics, religion, “science,” “history,” economics, technology: the subjects, I guess, we would call “non-fiction” but are hardly that, we wield those notions like weapons to kill intuition and emotion, to kill the Soul. Even worshiping or communicating with God becomes a matter for the rational mind, which gets directed by rules and rubrics of institutionalized religion. We are individuals, each with a unique part to play in the web of life, but schools and churches tell us that there is only one way to do it, and we’d damn well better get it right.

What happens when we don’t, according to the standards set by schools and churches? Whew. Few of us want to look in that dark cellar, but we’re more than happy to point our fingers at those who obviously don’t manage it. So we fully buy in, dropping the thread we are supposed to be following and dedicating ourselves to achieving—not our own destiny—but the worldly accomplishments that earn of the label of Success! We’ll collect the MBAs; the lucrative careers; the “perfect” families; the toys, vacations, and hobbies; the acts of service that get added to our LinkedIn profiles.

Ancient notions of fate include an invisible thread woven through all the events of time. Fate appears as the original web of life, but also as the fine thread that weaves each soul into the world of time and space at birth. Fate comes from the Latin, fata, which can mean a thing spoken by the gods at the beginning of each life. And fate carries the sense of fatality, the presence of death waiting at the end of every life journey. —Michael Meade, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul

In my life, I seem to have been able to get little more than a toehold in each realm, although it may have, at times, looked more substantial than that. Capable of hiding my mistakes and always faking it to please others, few people in my life could get even a glimpse of who I was or what I was doing to myself. Why would they? I was mostly blind to it myself and believed I needed to keep it that way. I knew there was something wrong and seldom was without some sort of self-improvement project, but every one of them was carried out by my rational mind, my ego (which is a liar), my little self. My Soul/Deep Self wanted to come out and play, but my ego kept it locked up and hidden, and nobody in my life wanted to help me find it. They were all too desperate to keep their own Souls behind bars. Distancing themselves with facts and figures, rules and expectations of the material world—which also prescribes how they are to approach (subdue?) the spiritual world—they not only encouraged me to do the same, but demanded that I shut myself off from the stirrings of my Soul. And I was mostly eager to comply, because the road of the Soul is a frightening, lonely one.

Yet my toes never stopped trying to get back to the realm of the Soul and hold on there. Every time I read a story or a poem or even someone’s deep thoughts that contained drops of Soul Medicine, my Deep Self responded, sometimes only for a moment, but it was enough to let me know that She was still alive.

I often wonder what might have been if I had been encouraged to listen to my Soul rather than constantly betray her. I look back and see so many wrong turns, but no matter what “should” have happened, I am here now because of what did happen, and being anything but grateful for that is just another way of falling for the lies of ego and betraying my Deep Self.

So, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, I beat on, a boat against the current, but while I revisit the past to get my bearings, I am not “borne ceaselessly back there.” Instead, the tide I row against is the one most people float on. My destiny awaits, and I will get there, with or without someone else taking a turn at the oars.