New Spiritual Musing: "What's Life For?"

What’s Life For?

(Inspired by the movie Before I Fall)

“As each plant grows from a seed and in the end becomes

an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought

to get there but most get stuck.”

—C. G. Jung

Quantum physics theorizes that parallel worlds exist, and if they do exist so too would parallel lives, something that the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) posited as a central concept in his most popular book Thus Spoke Zarathustra and which the writer and student of Gurdjieff’s teaching P. D. Ouspensky explored in his novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, as well as the contemporary novelist Kate Atkinson with her novel Life After Life; but what if this theory were true? This is the conceit of the movie Before I Fall, a fascinating story of eternal recurrence and self-redemption that is worth exploring…

It was Boxing Day, and Penny and I watched the Netflix movie Before I Fall, based upon the best-selling eponymous novel by the prescient 26 year-old Lauren Oliver, a movie based upon the principle of eternal recurrence not unlike the movie Groundhog Day when Bill Murray keeps waking up to the same day, only in Oliver’s story her protagonist Samantha (Sam) Kingston not only wakes up to the same day for seven straight days, but she explores her life with moral impunity and then finally comes to the realization that to give her life meaning she has to improve and make her life better, a captivating story of self-redemption that called for a spiritual musing on parallel lives and the Sisyphean struggle; but where did the mind-boggling idea of living our same life over again originate?

This idea goes back to the pre-Socratic times, but the idea of living our same life over again came to Nietzsche in a moment of inspired thought on August 1881 while out on a walk alongside Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland, and which he creatively introduced as aphorism 341, entitled “The greatest weight,” in Book IV of his book The Gay Science: 

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! 

“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

For Nietzsche, this inspired idea became a thought experiment that he made central to his prophet-like figure Zarathustra’s teaching, a philosophy of amor fati (love of one’s fate), a life-affirming yae-saying to life as opposed to Christianity’s life-denying nay-saying ethos because Christianity sees this world as inferior to another and this life as mere preparation for a life in paradise; but in the mind of imaginative writers like Ouspensky, Atkinson, and  Oliver one can change the recurring pattern of one’s life and move on to a more perfect life, which opens up this spiritual musing to the terrifying issue of moral relativism that haunted me for years, because for the life of me I could not see where society was going given that modern man was now free to posit his own personal sense of right and wrong, a ticking time-bomb that keeps exploding in the terrorism on social order and decency; but I finally brought this issue to personal resolution in my spiritual musing “The Stupidity of Moral Relativism,” which I’ve included in my book The Armchair Guru and need not explore here.

Suffice to say that moral relativism resists the teleological imperative of our destined purpose, which is to realize our wholeness and completeness; this is why the omniscient guiding spirit of our creative unconscious has introduced the principle of redemption through the concept of eternal recurrence in the medium of literature and movies, with the anti-Nietzschean twist that we can change the soul-crushing recurring pattern of our same life if only we are willing to heed the redemptive principle of our destined purpose.

Our destined purpose is to become who we are meant to be, and I don’t believe it was a coincidence that the motto BECOME WHO YOU ARE was shown on a poster in the high school student Kent’s bedroom in the movie Before I Fall, which caught Sam’s attention on one of her recurring days (and which quite possibly sparked her desire to improve her life and become who she was meant to be), and neither do I believe it was  a coincidence that the high school teacher in the classroom that Sam keeps returning to on the morning of the same day writes on the blackboard the word HISTORY in caps (implying that history repeats itself) and the word Sisyphus underscored, and then says to his class: “Sisyphus. Not an STD (sexually transmitted disease). What’s he like? What does it mean when something is described as being Sisyphean? Does it mean pointless? Brave? Late? (Kent just walked into the classroom late.) What’s his character like? Does he learn from pushing that boulder—” (just then three girls walk into the room delivering roses for Cupid’s Day, the day before Valentine’s, and the story now has its theme of eternal recurrence that Albert Camus made famous by allegorizing Sisyphus’s fate with the drudgery of man’s daily struggle in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” the theme of Samantha Kingston’s recurring daily struggle.

Was there a point to Sisyphus rolling that rock up a hill only to have it roll back down of its own weight where he was fated to rolling it back up again, for eternity?

Albert Camus couldn’t see the point. The gods that condemned Sisyphus “thought that there was no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor,” wrote Camus, presumptuously comparing Sisyphus’s fate with man’s daily struggle, and he brings his iconic essay to ironic resolution with philosophical opprobrium, arrogantly thumbing his nose at the gods: “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” which I could never do, because life for me was neither pointless nor absurd; it was the way to who we are meant to be, which Samantha finally figured out as she returned to live the same day over again, and she broke the pattern of her recurring life and was on her way to becoming who she was meant to be, her true self whole and complete, thereby resolving the conundrum of the Sisyphean struggle that she faced every morning of her recurring life.

But the question arises: why did Samantha want to redeem herself? What inspired her to change her recurring day into one that improved her life? Why not continue to live the same day over again doing whatever she wanted? Why improve her life, which she finally ended up doing, and by improving she meant becoming a better person?

Lauren Oliver answers this question in a letter that she wrote for the special enhanced edition of her novel Before I Fall; but before I reveal her answer, let me say something first about the creative spirit of a writer’s life, the all-knowing daimon of one’s creative unconscious that is infinitely wiser than our cognitive mind which Lauren Oliver makes clear in her inspiration for her novel Before I Fall, an inspiration that came from a childhood and adolescent ritual of putting herself to sleep when she had trouble sleeping by going over in her mind what made for a perfect day, a ritual which engaged the redemptive principle of life that seeks to reconcile one’s existential outer life with one’s destined inner purpose of realizing wholeness and completeness of self, a playful nighttime ritual that evolved into the idea of living one’s life over and over again to improve and better one’s life, which became the dynamic theme of her refreshingly iconoclastic, life-affirming novel Before I Fall.

Upon reflection on her novel years after she wrote it, Lauren Oliver came to realize that Samantha Kingston (her fictional self) was looking for personal meaning, what really mattered to her and what she wanted to be remembered for when she died, and she found this meaning by improving her life and becoming a better person; that was the driving aesthetic of her imagined but essentially autobiographical novel Before I Fall; but why meaning? Why not happiness and well-being? Material comfort, good health, pleasure, fame? Why meaning?

“Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?” asked Ecclesiastes, essentially the same question that Samantha asked as she relived her same day over again, and the answer that she came up with was that she had to improve and perfect her life because this would give her life the meaning for which she wanted to be remembered; but why?

That’s what the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes was trying to figure out, and every other person who asks the question, “What’s the point of it all, anyway?”

The philosopher and Nobel Laureate Albert Camus couldn’t figure it out, (he came close in his novel The Fall) and he relegates life to an absurd fate not unlike the futile and hopeless labor that Sisyphus was condemned to by the gods. But Lauren Oliver came to a different conclusion, and she did so by allowing her daimon, the wisdom of her creative spirit to work it out for her in her novel Before I Fall, an imagined, but intuitive expression of the redemptive principle of life in Samantha’s desire to become a better person, to make her recurring day as perfect as possible, which she did by acknowledging the worth and goodness in others; that’s how she gave her life the meaning she needed. But this is a very difficult concept to convey, which I've explored in other musings; suffice to say today that Before I Fall is a story that addresses what we all ask, What’s life for? To become who we are meant to be, our true self intuited the author Lauren Oliver; that’s what life’s for.

         

——

         

POSTSCRIPT

It occurred to me as I edited and reworked this musing that Lauren Oliver’s novel Before I Fall is an ironic, albeit unconscious literary response to Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, the story of a French lawyer racked with guilt at the vanity, selfishness and duplicity of his former life. Camus’s protagonist Jean-Baptiste-Clamence falls from grace and spends the rest of his remorseful life in Amsterdam wallowing in despair. Clamence recounts his story of woe and guilt to a stranger in a friendly bar called Mexico City in the red-light district that Camus metaphorically compares to “the last circle of hell,” hence the title of his novel The Fall. In Lauren Oliver’s novel Before I Fall, her protagonist Samantha Kingston safeguards her fall from grace by improving and bettering her selfish life. I’m only surmising, of course; but in my experience of how the creative spirit of a writer’s personal daimon works, it has an omniscient quality that can draw upon the collective unconscious of the human psyche to make the point of the writer’s story with an unconscious but all-knowing creative imperative, as it did with both Albert Camus and Lauren Oliver, only with Camus the point was the absurdity of life, and with Oliver the point was the meaning of life, two distinctly opposite perspectives, but one no less valid than the other, as I spelled out in my spiritual musing “The Two Ends of the Stick: Shania Twain and P. D. Ouspensky.” Both novels express the dual consciousness of human nature, one positive and one negative; and the choice is ours to make, as the young Samantha comes to realize in her recurring life of seven days.

On a curious note, I wanted to know how Lauren Oliver came up with her title, and in the special enhanced edition of Before I Fall she informs us that after she and her editor and agent went through a long list of titles, her editor Rosemary Brosnan “dreamed” (Oliver’s italics) the title Before I Fall, which just happened to be the opposite end of the stick to Albert Camus’s novel The Fall, confirming for me once again the guiding wisdom of the creative unconscious. I never cease to marvel at how synchronicity works!

New Spiritual Musing: "A Room of My Own"

A Room of My Own

I’ve been meaning to write a spiritual musing on my writing room for years, but the idea never possessed me until I read Lindall Gordon’s biography, Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life, while I was in the middle of painting my writing room this summer; and, of course, the idea was set free by Virginia Woolf’s Victorian convention-breaking comment that sparked a fire in the soul of women everywhere and set the stage for the modern feminist movement, and which became the theme of her iconoclastic little book A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

That would apply to any writer, and if they have the money to be free to write all the more power to them; but life doesn’t work like that. Ask Alice Munro, who had to squeeze her writing time between household chores (she was married with two small children); but she persevered and wrote and wrote and wrote, and at the respectable age of 82 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for her “mastery of the contemporary short story.”

Which suggests much more than having a room of one’s own to write in, and the money to be free to write one’s fiction; it suggests that a writer will write no matter what the circumstances, because if they do not write they will feel they have betrayed themselves, something that my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway explored in his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and which haunted me most of my life also because my call to creative writing was superseded by my call to find my true self, and only when I had satisfied the longing in my soul for wholeness and completeness was I free to devote more time to creative writing, which brings me to my writing room in the house that Penny and I built in beautiful Georgian Bay, Southcentral Ontario…

I’ve always wanted a room of my own to write in, and I went out of my way three  times to  build a room of my own; the first time when I built an addition onto my parents home in Nipigon, Northwestern Ontario when I opted to stay at home for my mother’s sake after I left university to start my own contract painting business, and for the next fourteen years I stayed at home in my attached but separate apartment unit and worked my trade and read and wrote until my father died; and the second time I built a room of my own was in the triplex that I built in Nipigon by converting the loft of the top apartment unit of our triplex into my writing room where I wrote every morning for fourteen years until Penny and I built our new home in Tiny Beaches, Georgian Bay (on a street called Stocco Circle, no less) in which I converted the empty space above our double garage into my writing room but which I never got to finish painting until this summer, fourteen years after our house was built.

So, a room of my own to write in was precious to me, despite the fact that my writing room was my sanctuary and haven of safety in my quest for my true self which began in high school when Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge struck me with the immortal wound that called me to become a spiritual seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry Darrell; and I did most of my seeking through reading in the privacy of my writing room until I found my lost soul that I had come into this world to find and which I wrote about in my memoirs The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price. And after I found myself and wrote all the books that my quest called me to write (the last being my twin soul books, Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity), I was finally free to do justice to creative writing that I was called to in high school by the writer who became my literary mentor, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway who, ironically, I’ve just finished writing about again in My Writing Life, which was inspired by the gift of an Indigo Hemingway Notebook that I got from Penny’s sister last Christmas and which creatively morphed into a sequel to my literary memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway that I wrote three years ago.

Not that I didn’t write creatively all these many years (my novel Tea with Grace is still my favorite of all my inspired fiction writing), I simply could not devote all of my precious time and energy to creative writing (which, as any writer knows, demands one’s full attention to do aesthetic justice to writing poetry, short stories, and novels); I had to work my trade to make a living first and foremost, and I had to also heed the call to write the books that my quest for my true self demanded of me, which to date numbers fifteen and counting.

But now that I’ve finally told the story of how I found my true self, I am free to write all the poetry and short stories and novels that I am called to write (not to mention my spiritual musings which always come to me unbeckoned, like today’s musing on a room of one’s own); and, in all honesty, I couldn’t wait to finish painting the boring primed walls of my writing room because after fourteen years it deserved to be dignified with a color best suited to the creative writer in me, a colour that my life partner Penny Lynn chose—HOPEFUL BLUE.

          And why did Penny choose this colour, other than the fact that we both loved it? As she said to me, without a trace of irony: “I just hope it gets on the walls, that’s all.”

          I just love her sense of humor!

———

New Spiritual Musing: "Diarrhea of the Mind"

Diarrhea of the Mind

          The highly respected staff writer and book critic for The New Yorker James Wood said something to the inveterate book lover Michael Silverblatt on a Bookworm podcast interview that called out for a spiritual musing. I don’t remember the exact words, but in essence he said, ‘When an apprentice gets hurt on a job, there’s an old saying that the trade is entering his body,’ which instantly reminded me of Leo Tolstoy’s comment about writing his novels in his own blood, as illustrated by the oft-quoted line from his tragic novel Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In effect, we pay for the gnostic wisdom of our life’s path, which I can vouchsafe with the blood I spilled (literally and metaphorically) learning my own trade of drywall taping and painting (my vocation) and the craft of creative writing (my avocation); but as I listened to James Wood talking about literature, which for him was the closest thing to religion, I got the same feeling that I got listening to another iconic literary critic, Professor Harold Bloom, that literature wasn’t enough to satisfy our longing for wholeness and completeness; and an old quandary popped into my mind, the existential dilemma of modern life.

I cannot for the life of me get a read on Social Media, especially the daily posts on my Facebook feed that desperately cry out for attention like an Andy Warhol painting, as if the more “Likes” one gets on their posts the more relevant they will be to the universe, and I cannot fathom whether society is overwhelmed with too much existential reality or too little, and I keep asking myself: are we drowning in the deep end of the pool of life, or in the shallow end? Has our life become a reality show for Social Media, an endless quotidian stream of routine everyday living like the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “hypnotically spellbinding” (James Wood’s words) six volume autobiographical novel My Struggle? I cannot tell, and I have to explore my quandary in today’s spiritual musing. But in all humility, I don’t know where to begin, and I have to call upon my Muse to assist me…

I woke up this morning with a spiritually fatiguing issue on my mind, the archaic mediaeval face-covering niqab and burqa apparel that a minority of Muslim women insist on wearing for “religious reasons,” a politically sensitive issue that has polarized the people of Quebec, and I can’t help but feel that this is my entry into my musing; but what does it mean?

I’ve already written a spiritual musing on this issue (“A Tempest in a Teapot,” which I’ve included in The Armchair Guru, my fourth volume of spiritual musings), and I could quote it here and make my point about our journey through life much easier; but I feel I have to explore my quandary from a new angle for a more contemporary perspective, and the only way to do that would be to revisit my feelings on the dilemma of the irreconcilable outer and inner journey of our life, the conflicted nature of our being and non-being.

What I’m getting from Social Media is an endless stream of information on the outer journey of contemporary life, that aspect of society’s preoccupation with the existential dimension of reality—politics (sexual harassment is the hot topic of the day), entertainment, religious beliefs, personal relationships, nostalgic memorabilia, always new selfies and endless recipes and health tips and cartoonish re-posts and other trivia, what in his creative genius the writer of his own contemporary world John Updike would have called “lower gossip” were he on Social Media, leaving one with the strongest impression that this fleeting life is all we have and we’d better make the most of it, and dread possesses everyone.

Life has been sped up beyond comprehension with ever-advancing digital technology, and whatever happens “out there” is instantly vented (and vetted) on Social Media, giving one the nauseous feeling that “the world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth wrote in his eponymous poem in the materialistic throes of the First Industrial Revolution more than two hundred years ago: another vicious terrorist attack and raging forest fires in Southern California and consequent social upheaval that’ll take years to recover from, blaming religious zealotry, climate change, and recalcitrant karmic obtuseness; every day a new catastrophe, the world going to hell much more quickly than anyone expected, and we grasp at life a little tighter as writers like Knausgaard vainly try to make sense of the human condition: the outer becoming the inner and the inner the outer, a never-ending dialectic of self-individuation teleologically driven to personal wholeness and completeness but never quite getting there.

After listening to James Wood on Bookworm (who, incidentally, helped launch Karl Ove Knausgard’s career in the states with his optimistic review of the first volume of My Struggle), engaging in his charismatic erudition but no less disappointing than the great Professor Bloom’s sublime nihilism, I listened to Michael Silverblatt talking with the new literary genius of Infinite Jest and messianic hope for literature before Knausgaard came along with My Struggle, David Foster Wallace, who also could not find a way to reconcile his outer and inner journey and was driven to suicide at the age of 46 to end the pain of his existential dilemma and crippling depression, I shook my head and said, in comic jest, “It’s all a pouring from the empty into the void.” Actually, the phrase that came to me was, “diarrhea of the mind.” But I took creative liberties, because that’s what writers tend to do.

——

A Christmas Parable: "The Puzzled Father"

The Puzzled Father

Their father was puzzled by me. He was talking with his friend Jack and kept looking over to where his boy and girl were actively engaged in a conversation with me under the shade of our maple tree beside the bird bath with the stone eagle. The boy was ten and his sister twelve, and we were so involved that their father, whose family was staying for the weekend with his friend Jack and his family at Jack’s wife’s family cottage, had to walk over to meet me when his children were called in for the second time by their mother for dinner.

“I had to come over and talk to you. Anyone who can hold my kids’ attention as long you can must have something special,” said the puzzled father. “That’s a man I have to meet, I said to myself,” he added, and I couldn’t help but break into a mirthful chuckle.

“It happens all the time,” I said, which didn’t seem to surprise him.

“I know. Jack told me his kids can’t get enough of you.” Jack was our cottage neighbor whose three children, Christian, Luca, and Alexander were the joy of our life when they came up every summer. Penny and I watched those boys grow up, until one of Jack’s wife’s siblings (her brother) who had inherited one third of the family cottage insisted on selling it; and now our new neighbor is a Ukrainian lady from Toronto who comes to the cottage infrequently. She bought it with her mother’s help for retirement. She’s single and has a twenty-six-year-old son who is trying to make a living as a musician who comes to the cottage and hibernates for three or four days at a time and then leaves. We never see much of him.

Penny and I miss Jack’s children and we all cried when they left. I have pictures of us on my Facebook page, but what did I have that these children couldn’t get enough of? This mystery has puzzled a lot of people, and continues to do so; but it’s not a mystery to those that have been initiated into the secret way of Christ’s teaching.

When the disciples came to Jesus and asked him why he spoke to the public in parables, Jesus replied to them in his cryptic manner: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that he hath” (Math. 13: 11-12). Which begs the question: what did his disciples have that they would be given more of with Christ’s teaching? “But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again,” said Jesus. “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4: 14).

Was it the water of eternal life? Is that what I had that those children couldn’t get enough of? But water of eternal life is so deeply esoteric that it’s metaphysically abstract and impossible to grasp. I prefer the word “virtue,” that special energy that one realizes by practicing the noble virtues of life, especially the sacred virtue of Goodness.

But this isn’t something one should talk about, because it invites the wrong kind of energy from the wrong kind of people. Fortunately, the puzzled father of those two children who were drawn to me like bees to honey wasn’t one of those people.

Still, I couldn’t tell him my secret. That would have been foolish, and not “the way of the sly man.” Instead I gave him one of my books to read, Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, and maybe, just maybe he would figure it out on his own, as everyone must who wish to enter the gates of the sacred kingdom of heavenly bliss; but what did the children and I talk about that puzzled their father so much? Why were they so engaged with me?

As I often do, I asked the children what they wanted to be. I do this just to see if they have been called by life, and both of the puzzled father’s children knew what they wanted to be when they grew up; and so, I pursued my line of inquiry. And they talked and talked, telling me how much they loved what they wanted to become, and I encouraged them to talk about themselves and by telling them that the happiest people in the world  were people who loved what they did in life; and I went into the house and got the girl a jar of peach jam and the boy a jar of plum jam that Penny and I had just made the week before, just to give them what Gurdjieff called a “reminding factor” every time they ate peach and plum jam.

But I never told their father that. I said to their puzzled father. “I just listened to them, that’s all. I asked them what they wanted to be, and they told me.”

But that wasn’t good enough for him. He knew something else was going on, and he pressed me. He said I had something they wanted, and he compared that to his fascination with Ayn Rand’s philosophy that he got pulled into in his middle twenties.

“Ayn Rand?” I said. “That’s a dangerous path. Her philosophy will take you to a dead end. It’s not a good path to become the person you’re meant to be. It’s all about rational self-interest, not love for your family and fellow man—”

“I know!” he burst out, surprising me. “That’s why I stopped reading her when my daughter was born. She changed my whole life. I couldn’t live Rand’s philosophy any longer. It wasn’t all about me. I had to live for my wife and family. That’s what my daughter’s birth did for me. And my son’s birth confirmed it. I love my wife and kids. They’re my life now. I agree with you completely. So, you know Ayn Rand?”

“Yes, I’ve read Rand. But what else can you expect from an self-centred atheist?”

“Who do you read now?” the puzzled father asked, more intrigued than ever.

“You want to know what makes me tick, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, and stood up. “I’ll give you one of my books to read. It’ll give you everything you need to know about me,” and I went into the house and got a copy of my third volume of spiritual musings, Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God, and gave it to him. “But fair warning. This is my philosophy of life, and not an easy book to read.”

He looked at the cover, intrigued by a cartoon figure being frazzled by an electric current, a metaphor for what the holy current of life can do to the uninitiated. “Thanks,” he said. “So, if I read this it’ll tell me what makes you tick?”

“It’ll tell you more than that. It’ll tell you what makes you tick,” I said, and broke into a hearty laugh. That was another reason why he kept looking over when his children and I were talking, he couldn’t get over all the laughter; but, “except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” said Jesus, and I smiled at the puzzled father who had caught a glimpse of the sacred mystery as his children and I talked under the shade of the maple tree beside the bird bath with the stone eagle.

——

THE GNOSTIC WAY OF LIFE: Chapter 29: "A Slice of Heaven"

A Slice of Heaven

It doesn’t matter how old they are, he calls everyone “kid.” He’s eighty-five, but I met him fourteen years ago when Penny and I relocated to Georgian Bay and I dropped into Johnson’s Market on the outskirts of Midland where I met the owner, “Chicken Coop Johnson.” That’s what they called him when he played hockey for the North Shore Hockey League (which comprised of four towns on the north shore of Lake Superior, my hometown of Nipigon, Red Rock, Terrace Bay, and Marathon); and Jimmy, as I preferred to call him, played for the Marathon Mercuries. It was a curious coincidence meeting him.

One day when I was in Johnson’s Market, I noticed a picture of a hockey team on one of his back shelves and saw that it was the Marathon Mercuries, and I asked why he had that picture on his shelf. “I used to play for the Mercuries,” he replied.

“No kidding? Which one are you?” I asked, and he pointed himself out in the picture, and then it hit me—

“I remember you!” I said, excitedly. “You were a feisty little bastard! You were always getting into fights,” and a big smile came over his impish face; and that’s how we became—not friends, but good acquaintances; and I dropped into his vegetable and fruit market just to say hello because I loved the man for being the person that he was; besides, I loved his freshly picked yellow beans and sweet corn, and I always got my field tomatoes from him.

Jimmy was not a big man, which made me wonder how he could be so feisty on the ice; but he never backed down from anybody. That was his character. And every time I dropped in, we talked a little more; and he told me about himself, how his grandfather had started the market garden business which his father took over and passed on to him, and every summer he’d drive his truck full of produce to Marathon for one or two long days of selling and also to the Sault where he sold his produce, and he had been doing that for years and couldn’t see himself retiring. “What else am I going to do?” he said.

“Why not?” I said. “As long as you enjoy what you’re doing.”

“I’ve been doing this all my life, and I like it. I like meeting people.”

“So do I. I’ll bet you met some real characters here, haven’t you?”

“Sure have,” Jimmy said, with an impish smile. I loved that smile. It told me he was still the mischief maker that I saw years ago on the ice when he played for the Marathon Mercuries. “You never know what kind of people you’re going to meet, and that’s the fun of it,” he said. “I can’t see myself doing anything else.”

“Die with your boots on, Jimmy; that’s the only way to go,” I said, and we talked about his family and other things and got to know each other as well as could be expected in such short visits; and the more we talked, the more I loved him for his spunk.

Then Penny and I dropped in one day and I asked her to take a photo with her cell phone of Jimmy and me with him holding his hockey team picture, and we had it blown up and framed at Walmart and I gave it to Jimmy the next time I dropped in, and he gave me a sweet smile and proudly placed it beside his hockey team picture.

That’s how it went for a number of years, and then I dropped in one Saturday morning and I asked the lady how Jimmy was doing and was surprised to learn that he had been in the hospital for heart surgery. “No kidding?” I said. “What happened?”

“He was having trouble breathing.,” the lady replied. She was an elderly woman who worked for Jimmy for years and always filled in when he was away. Jimmy also had several Mexicans who came up every summer to do his picking, and he must have been good to them because one had been coming up from Mexico for over twenty-five years.

“Did he have by-pass surgery?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the lady said. “But he’s out now and doing okay. He wanted to come to work today, but I told him to forget it.”

          But the following weekend he was back and we had a lot to talk about because now we had something in common. I had open-heart surgery also, and we shared our experience like old veterans sitting in the Legion hall. It would have been nice to share our experience over a cold beer or a cup of Tim Hortons coffee, which I would gladly have picked up just up the road in Midland, but Jimmy told me he did not drink coffee or tea, never did his whole life.

“No kidding?” I said. “Your whole life you never drank coffee or tea?”’

“Nope. Never did, kid.”

“What do you drink then. A beer now and then?”

“I like beer, but I don’t drink it much. I drink vegetable cocktail. I like that. And milk. I grew up on milk. I always have milk here and two or three jugs of vegetable cocktail. That’s good for you. You ever drink it?”

“Yes. I always pick four or five Mott’s Garden Cocktail when it goes on sale.”

“Me too,” Jimmy said, and this led into food and Jimmy gave me a list of the kinds of foods he liked to eat, and his cuisine was simple but hearty just like Jimmy. And as we talked he would greet people coming in with, “How you doing kid?”

What I loved about Jimmy was his authenticity. He was what he was and didn’t pretend to be anything else, like my cottage neighbor Tony, and I absorbed his gnostic wisdom like I absorbed Tony’s; like the time he was telling me about a new supermarket going in at Marathon which he felt was going to cut into his produce sales.

“I don’t think it will, Jimmy. You’ve been going up there for years. You must have your loyal customers.”

“Don’t mean a damn thing. They’ll leave you for a quarter,” Jimmy said.

“You’re right. I should have known better. If there’s one thing you can be certain about life, it’s that people will always disappoint you,” I said, with a wry snicker.

“You got that right, kid,” Jimmy said, dead serious; and the next time I saw Jimmy he had already made two trips up to Marathon, but on his last trip he fell ill and had to be taken to the hospital, which really got his dander up. “I almost lost my driver’s licence,” he said, still angry over the whole incident. “I had to get a medical report to prove there was nothing wrong with me, and I had to go for a driver’s test.”

What happened was simple enough, but it got complicated. He hadn’t eaten all day, he was so busy selling his produce, and when he went to the restaurant that evening he fainted and someone called for an ambulance and the paramedics took him to the hospital. The doctor wanted to keep him overnight and didn’t want to him drive his truck, but he did.

“There’s was nothing wrong with me,” Jimmy said. “I think it was something I ate. I think I got food poisoning. I got a bit sick in my stomach and fainted, and some guy called 911. I wish he would’ve minded his own business. I almost lost my licence because of that.”

But he’s back on his feet now, and he made another one or two trips up to Marathon and the Sault; but the last time I dropped in I experienced another one of those miraculous moments of grace that lingered for days, if not weeks.

It was innocent enough, and totally unexpected. In fact, I only vaguely remember what we were talking about; but for some reason, Jimmy opened up to me like never before, and I leaned on his counter and just listened to him tell me his story.

Jimmy had an old chair that he sat on near a propane heater, which was turned on because it was fall and a bit cool, and he’d get up and serve his customers, greeting them as they came in the door with his customary “How you doing, kid,” but continued with his story (he was telling me about his daughter and son and grandchildren), sounding almost like a summation of his long life, like his own eulogy, and as he spoke I could feel the goodness of the man flowing out of him, and I couldn’t hold back my emotions and welled up with tears.

Jimmy talked for another few minutes, and when he brought his story to resolution I said to him, “You’re quite the man, Jimmy. I love talking with you.” And I picked up my two bags of produce and extended my hand for Jimmy to shake.

“It’s been a slice of heaven, son,” he said, with a warm smile and a look in his watery little blue eyes that brought more tears to mine; and on my drive home I couldn’t get over the effect my visit with Jimmy had upon me.

“It’s been a slice of heaven,” I repeated to myself. “Now, that’s grace!” I exclaimed, and broke into a burst of joyful laughter.

Work-in-progress: THE GNOSTIC WAY OF LIFE, Chapter 28: “Moments of Grace.”

Moments of Grace

In his book Soul Moments, Phil Cousineau writes that “an experience of synchronicity is a soul moment, an electrifying experience, as sudden as a visitation by a god, a palpable inrush of grace and power, one of the defining moments in life, a sudden conviction that we might move beyond fate and realize a hint of our destiny.”

I’ve experienced many meaningful coincidences in my life, and I can attest to these same emotions, which I explored in my twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity; but I’ve also experienced moments of grace when I’m in the presence of someone special, someone whose fate is closely aligned with their destiny and is more himself or herself than most people. My neighbor is such a person, and I wrote a poem to capture a moment of grace that I experienced with him one day last spring:

Lunch with a Friend

I stopped in just to say hello to my friend

and neighbor who had come up from Toronto

to his cozy cottage in Georgian Bay that he

had built with his own hands. Born in Calabria

where I came from with my family when I

was five, Tony and I made wine together last

summer and shared it over the winter and

spring, and we’ll be making wine again in

the new season, and when I dropped in from

my bike ride he was roasting some lamb on

his barbeque, along with mushrooms and

red peppers, and he invited me to lunch with

him and Maria whose husband died of cancer

a few years ago. My friend’s wife dropped

dead of a heart attack while building the cottage,

and after five or six years of a bad relationship

with a Sicilian widow who couldn’t control her

drinking, he met Maria at a wedding reception

for a mutual Italian acquaintance, and now

they live together for companionship as many

widows often do, which took their children

time to get used to; and with each passing year

they grow more intimate and respectful of each

other’s quirks and habits and even laugh at

them now in front of me. Lunch was a simple

feast of love of food and sharing, an Italian

custom like no other, and I had to politely stop

Maria four or five times from over-serving me,

reminding her of my mother saying to guests

at our family table, “Manga, manga.” I loved

the freshly-picked asparagus risotto with the

barbequed lamb, large-capped mushrooms,

and long red peppers, and the simple lettuce

salad with salt and pepper and oil and vinegar

dressing, and crusty Calabrese bread just like

my mother used to make every Wednesday

morning to soak up all the juices from my plate,

and a glass of red wine to toast our lunch and

friendship; and, what I really enjoyed because

Penny and I don’t drink it at home, a tiny cup

of espresso coffee with a drop of Anisette and

a tiny spoonful of sugar, and after lunch Tony

and I sat in his garage with the door wide open

soaking up the spring sun and talking, I mostly

listening to his life story, wishing that my father

had been as adaptive and resourceful, and I

couldn’t have asked for a nicer neighbor in

our new home in Georgian Bay.

Life is for living, which my neighbor did in full, always doing something to keep himself busy; that’s how he grew in his own identity, forever initiating the natural process of self-individuation by doing, doing, and more doing. That’s why he loves his cottage.

If he wasn’t in his garage working on something (he loves to collect things by the side of the road that cottagers put out, old barbeques, lawnmowers, snow blowers, tables, cabinets, whatever and clean them up and fix them if they were fixable), or tending to his garden, mowing the lawn (for years he mowed the lawn for two or three cottagers), or building (closing in his back deck, putting in a washroom in his basement, shingling his shed, helping his children renovate their homes and doing little jobs for friends, myself included, always finding something to work on), foraging mushrooms every fall, making tomato sauce with Maria in August, and wine in September, always doing, doing, doing.

And in doing, Tony grew in gnostic wisdom. That’s why he loved to quote proverbs and sayings (all Italian), which astounded me for their relevance, telling me that he had lived through the experience and confirmed the proverb or saying that he quoted. Hardly ever did we have a conversation that he did not quote an old Italian proverb or saying, and I marvelled at his gnostic wisdom. That’s why I loved talking with him, and why one day this summer when I saw him in his garage working on something I dropped in to say hello.

I had just finished my morning writing and was out for a bike ride when I dropped in, but after fifteen minutes of talking I attempted to leave several times but he kept on talking, and I willing gave in and said, “Tony, why don’t we ask Maria to make us a cup of coffee?”

His face lit up and we went into the house for one of those tiny Italian cups of espresso, which I love with Anisette, but Maria was preparing lunch and they invited me to join them, which I did for Tony’s sake but did not partake because I had already eaten.

Maria of course insisted, but I lied and told her that I had scrambled a couple of eggs with ricotta cheese and was full (actually, I only had toast and peanut butter) because I didn’t want to give them the impression I had conveniently dropped in for something to eat; but just in case I changed my mind, Maria put a plate in front of me, and Tony poured us a glass of wine and we talked, again me mostly listening because Tony needed my company, and at some point, while Tony was flavoring his pasta dish with just the right amount of salt, ground chili, and Reggiano Parmigiano), I felt a quiet and unexpected moment of miraculous grace, and tears came to my eyes, and I listened to Tony tell me the story of when he first came to Canada and was working out of town and he and two fellow workers went to a restaurant for dinner and he refused to eat his pasta dish because it was overcooked, but one of his fellow workers explained to the waitress that he was too polite to tell her that it was overcooked and she took his plate and brought him a new plate of fresh pasta to Tony’s liking, and then—gosh, I wish I could remember it, he quoted another Italian saying that captured the gnostic wisdom of his experience, and I was blessed with another infusion of grace and more tears came to my eyes, and then we had a tiny cup of espresso (Tony liked his straight, with no sugar or Anisette), and when I felt that he was sufficiently sated, I excused myself and continued with my bike ride; but my blessed moment of grace lingered all day…

How does one explain these blessed moments? What do they mean? I’ve experienced many such moments of grace, especially with children who are full of joy and innocence, and the more I thought about it the more I saw that infusions of grace are the fruit of our individual gnostic way, which unbeknown to us will open us up to the creative life force that nourishes our soul to grow in its divine nature. That’s how life satisfies the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness, and it’s all commensurate with the values that we live by, of which I have found the virtue of goodness to be the most rewarding; but again, moments of grace are a mystery which have to be experienced to be appreciated. 

New Poem: "The Lady Is a Christian"

The Lady Is a Christian

Tethered to the fence post of propriety,

      her home, property, and religion bind her

her freedom from the open spaces of her soul.

      A kind lady without, a cautious lady

within, she speaks her mind because she has

      earned the right; but she can never admit

that she may be wrong, and stretches the hubris

      of her tether to the snapping point.

She does not believe in the Virgin Birth nor in

      the stain of Original Sin, and cannot buy

into the Resurrection of Jesus, but she maintains

      that she is a Christian. She believes her soul

will live forever, but cannot fathom how her soul

      cannot exist before its birth in time; and

this confuses her Christian mind and stretches

      the tether of her hubris to the snapping point.

She serves Jesus daily on the altar of her home,

      lawn, and gardens, and before she goes to bed

at night she prays for strength to live another

      day because her life is incomplete. She

desperately wants the key to spiritual freedom,

      which lies in her own heart; but her mind

keeps getting in the way, and she stretches the

      hubris of her tether to the snapping point.

A tireless widow of eighty, she’s the envy of all

      her peers, cleaning her immaculate home daily,

mowing her lawn, tending to her flower and

      vegetable gardens, and walking three miles

every day; but she loves smoking cigarettes

      and justifies her habit by calling it her only

vice and stretches the hubris of her tether

      to the snapping point.

She attends Bible classes every week to learn

     the way, the truth, and the life, but her pastor

has lost his faith and wears his collar for daily

     bread alone; and the evening wears thin as she

listens to his agnostic gruel. And on behalf of her

      savior Jesus Christ she stretches the hubris

of her tether to the snapping point, because in

       her heart the lady is a Christian.

Re-post of spiritual musing: The Mystery Behind Joni Mitchell's Song "Both Sides Now"

The Mystery Behind Joni Mitchell’s Song “Both Sides Now”

Life is a mystery, and it only gives up its secrets occasionally, like it did to Joni Mitchell, a young twenty-one-year-old artist who wrote her signature song “Both Sides Now” that Rolling Stone ranked #171 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; but how could such a young artist write a song that speaks to the human condition with such profound wisdom and wistful melancholy? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

The seed for today’s musing was sown six or seven months ago while watching a PBS membership drive one weekend; they were featuring music by some of the classical favorites, like Joni Mitchell, and something that one of the volunteer hosts said alerted me to attention, because it spoke to the mystery behind Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now.”

He was in his late thirties or early forties, and well-versed and articulate on the music they were featuring to solicit donations from viewers, but upon listening to Joni’s 2000 life-seasoned rendition of “Both Sides Now” he made a personal comment that addressed the mystery of the lyrics that speak to the enantiodromiac nature of the human condition—the being and non-being dynamic of our becoming.

This is a deep, deep mystery which has taken me a lifetime to unravel; but as I listened to Joni singing “Both Sides Now” on the PBS membership drive, I “saw” the archetypal pattern of the human condition play itself out in the lyrics, and I had to laugh to myself when the volunteer host humbly confessed, “I get it now. I finally get it.”

He had listened to “Both Sides Now” for years, but not until that moment did the mystery of the lyrics give themselves up to him, and he attributed it to the fact that he was married now with a young family, and as he listened to Joni’s emotionally rich rendition of the song that she wrote when she was only twenty-one  he was somehow magically awakened to the inscrutable mystery of the enantiodromiac process of his own life—the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the pains and the joys, and all the loves and hates that we’re all subject to as we wind our way through the many twists and turns of life.

“I guess you have to be older to get what Joni meant by both sides of life,” he revealed, with a self-conscious smile; and I laughed at his epiphany, because until we experience both sides of life how can we possibly appreciate the mystery of man’s paradoxical nature?

Joni tells us how the song came to her: “I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.” How could she? She was only twenty-one years old, and her lyrics spoke to the whole emotional drama of life; but why did life give up its mystery to such a young artist?

It may be abstract, and possibly much too tenuous for anyone to believe, but I had an experience in my early twenties that speaks to Joni’s inspired creation of “Both Sides Now.” Like my own inspired moment on the loneliest night of my life in Annecy, France when I wrote something that foretold my own becoming, Joni’s song foretold her life also; because in that moment of inspired thought she became ensouled with the archetypal spirit of the human condition, and although “Both Sides Now” spoke to the enantiodromiac process of every person’s life, it also set the symbolic pattern of Joni’s own becoming.

Late in her life, after many highs and lows and loves and losses that she transformed with creative integrity into songs that reflected the individuation process of her own becoming, Joni revealed the impenetrable secret of the paradoxical nature of man in “Both Sides Now” that had prophetically foretold her own growth and individuation: “I thrive on change. That’s probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They’ll be going along on one key and I’ll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that’s how my life is.” Being an artist, Joni Mitchell’s life symbolized the archetypal pattern of change that is inherent to the human condition; that’s why life gave up its mystery to her, so she could reveal the mystery of enantiodromia to the world in the lyrics of her songs, as art is wont to do.

 The psychologist Carl Jung borrowed the word enantiodromia from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which simply means that over time everything turns into its opposite, which speaks to the archetypal pattern of change in “Both Sides Now” that puzzled Joni throughout her life; but why did her unconscious burst through on the plane that day when she wrote the song that has touched the hearts of so many people? Had she just given up her baby daughter for adoption? Was this the loneliest time of Joni’s life, too?  Was she so vulnerable that God smiled on her with the lyrics to the song that soothed her soul and opened up the door to her career?

“I've looked at life from both sides now /From up and down, and still somehow /It's life's illusions I recall /I really don't know life at all,” wrote the prescient young artist; and she went out into the world to live out the archetypal pattern of her own becoming being so true to herself that she set the holy standard for other artists, just as I went out into the world and lived out the archetypal pattern of my own becoming after I wrote what I did that lonely night in Annecy, France.

I was only twenty-three years old, and I had gone to France to begin my own quest of self-discovery, and I was desperately alone and lonely from my precipitous departure from my safe and comfortable life in Canada when I came in from my walk that evening. I sat at my desk in my one room apartment with my pen in hand and wrote the following words which came as a gift to me from the same place that Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” came from, the all-knowing creative unconscious that is the source of man’s creative genius: “Steadfast and courageous is he, who having overcome woe and grief remains alone and undaunted. Alone I say for to be otherwise would hardly seem possible, for one must bear one’s conscience alone. He must fight the battle, and he must win the battle, odds or no odds; he must win to establish the equilibrial tranquility of body and soul, and sooner or later he will erupt as a volcano of unlimited confidence which will purpose his life thereafter. And having given birth to such magnificence he will no longer be alone alone, but alone in society; and he will see the mirror of his puerile grief in the eyes of his fellow man.”

These words burned themselves into my memory, and as desperate and lonely as I felt that night those words gave me so much solace that all I had to do was repeat them to myself to give me the strength I needed whenever self-doubt possessed me; and from year to year they kept the fire in my soul burning until I “squared the circle” and resolved the paradoxical dynamic of my own becoming.

That’s why Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” makes me cry every single time I hear it, because it brings me back to the impossible dilemmas of my life that gave me so much pain and sorrow; until, that is, I mastered the secret of how to transcend myself with what William Wordsworth called “the spirit of self-sacrifice.”

Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” is so sweetly melancholic because it cannot resolve the perplexing mystery of “life’s illusions.” And yet, even though “something’s lost” in what we do, there’s always “something gained in living every day,” because this is the nature of the enantiodromiac process of our becoming; and Joni was called to write this song that introduced her to the rest of her life, and to the world.

Destiny called Joni on the plane that day when she looked down at the clouds and wrote the lyrics to “Both Sides Now,” which she described as a meditation on reality and fantasy; and when Judi Collins made it into a hit, Joni’s destiny was sealed. Her song came as “an idea that was so big it seemed like I’d barely scratched the surface of it,” but it was an idea so true to the enantiodromiac process of the human condition that it became a standard for many singers. As one interviewer said, “the song knows where it’s meant to go, and it knows what to do when it gets there.”

——