Can't run

I think that there is a loneliness that is inherent to the human condition.

And I think that we all RUN from it, as fast and as hard as we can, scattering from one another like tiny creatures in the face of a giant mole monster.

And yet for as much as we try to scatter in avoidance, we still wind up face-to-face with it, the worst of our loneliness, our fear of it, our wrestling with and against it, every day... in our families, in our friendships, in our jobs, in our marriages.

As much as we try to run away from it, we cannot escape it, usually never, not even for much of a few minutes.

Some are better at compensating than others. I am not one of them, I must tell you.

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"Jack pines... are not lumber trees [and they] won't win many beauty contests either. But to me this valiant old tree, solitary in its own rocky point,is as beautiful as a living thing can be.... In the calligraphy of its shape against the sky is written strength of character and perseverance, survival of wind, drought, cold, heat, disease... In its silence it speaks of... wholeness... an integrity that comes from being what you are."
~Douglas Wood

"Every summer, I go to the Boundary Waters, a million acres of pristine wilderness along the Minnesota-Ontario border. My first trip, years ago, was a vacation, pure and simple. But as I returned time and again to that elemental world of water, rock, woods, and sky, my vacation began to feel more like a pilgrimage to me--an annual trek to holy ground driven by spiritual need. Douglas Wood's medication on the jack pine, a tree native to that part of the world, names what I go up north seeking: images of how life looks when it is lived with integrity.

Thomas Merton claimed that 'there is in all things... a hidden wholeness.' But back in the human world--where we are less self-revealing than jack pines--Merton's words can, at times, sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the 'integrity that comes from being what you are.'

My knowledge of the divided life comes first from personal experience: I yearn to be whole, but dividedness often seems the easier choice. A 'still, small voice' speaks the truth about me, my work, or the world. I hear it and yet act as if I did not. I withhold a personal gift that might serve a good end or commit myself to a project that I do not really believe in. I keep silent on an issue I should address or actively break faith with one of my own convictions. I deny my inner darkness, giving it more power over me, or I project it onto other people, creating 'enemies' where none exist.

I pay a steep price when I live a divided life--feeling fraudulent, anxious about being found out, and depressed by the fact that I am denying my own selfhood. The people around me pay a price as well, for now they walk on ground made unstable by my divideness. How can I affirm another's identity when I deny my own? How can I trust another's integrity when I defy my own? A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open--divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within--things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.

But up north, in the wilderness, I sense the wholeness hidden 'in all things.' It is in the taste of wild berries, the scent of sun-baked pine, the sight of the Northern Lights, the sound of water lapping the shore, signs of a bedrock integrity that is eternal and beyond all doubt. And when I return to a human world that is transient and riddled with disbelief, I have new eyes for the wholeness hidden in me and my kind and a new heart for loving even our imperfections.

In fact, the wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection. On July 4, 1999, a twenty-minute maelstrom of hurricane-force winds took down twenty million trees across the Boundary Waters. A month later, when I made my annual pilgrimage up north, I was heartbroken by the ruin and wondered whether I wanted to return. And yet on each visit since, I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness--mine, yours, ours--need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life."

~Quoted from Chapter 1 "Images of Integrity" in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer

"The blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul"
~Leonard Cohen

"There was a time when farmers on the Great Plains, at the first sign of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home in a whiteout while still in their own backyards.

Today we live in a blizzard of another sort. It swirls around us as economic injustice, ecological ruin, physical and spiritual violence, and their inevitable outcome, war. It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference to the suffering of others. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this madness and been separated from their own souls, losing their moral bearings and even their mortal lives: they make headlines because they take so many innocents down with them.

The lost ones come from every walk of life: clergy and corporate executives, politicians and people on the street, celebrities and schoolchildren. Some of us fear that we, or those we love, will become lost in the storm. Some are lost at this moment and are trying to find the way home. Some are lost without knowing it. And some are using the blizzard as cover while cynically exploiting its chaos for private gain.

So it is easy to believe the poet's claim that 'the blizzard of the world' has overturned 'the order of the soul,' easy to believe that the soul--that life-giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness--has lost all power to guide our lives.

But my own experience of the blizzard, which includes getting lost in it more often than I like to admit, tells me that it is not so. The soul's order can never be destroyed. It may be obscured by the whiteout. We may forget, or deny, that its guidance is close at hand. And yet we are still in the soul's backyard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.

This book is about tying a rope from the back door out to the barn so that we can find our way home again. When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world--in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life--as we are called back to our 'hidden wholeness' amid the violence of the storm."

~from the Prelude to A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.