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.”

——

         

New Spiritual Musing: "The Power of Story"

The Power of Story

The idea for today’s spiritual musing hovered above my head like a heavy rain cloud waiting for the right atmospheric conditions to set its refreshing life-giving moisture free, and the right conditions came with the addition of more thoughts and insights that added to the specific gravity of the idea of my spiritual musing, the simple idea of “story.”

Penny and I were having coffee in my writing room early one morning, as we always do, and she put the book she was reading down and said to me, “This is boring. I’m tired of reading this kind of stuff. I’d rather read a good story instead—”

She was reading Robert Moss’s The Boy Who Died and Came Back, Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse, an autobiographical account of his near death and dream experiences which I had read, along with four or five other books by Moss.

“Why?” I asked, intrigued by the abruptness of her comment, as though she had just had her fill of that kind of literature. “Why would you prefer a good story instead?”

“Because I get more out of a good story than this stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t read these kinds of books any more. I like your writing. It doesn’t bore me like this stuff, but I’d rather read your stories instead. I get more out of a good story.”

That did it. The cloud burst and the idea for today’s spiritual musing on story possessed me with daemonic imperative, and I had to explore it…

I had just finished writing My Writing Life, Reflections on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, an unexpected sequel to my memoir The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, unexpected because the call to write this sequel came with a surprise Christmas gift of an Indigo Hemingway Notebook from Penny’s sister which called me back to creative writing that I kept putting off, like my book of short stories Sparkles in the Mist, my allegorical novel The Gadfly, and several other novels that are still waiting to be polished and published; so Penny’s comment hit home, because I could no longer hold back what I had come to realize about story upon completing My Writing Life.

I love Hemingway more for his short stories than his novels, but story is story and a short story simply concentrates the teleological meaning of the human condition more succinctly than a novel; that’s why I was called back to my high school hero and literary mentor with my sequel to The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, because I could no longer put off writing the stories that have been calling me for years. But not until Penny’s comment about her preference for reading a good story over those other kinds of books of which my library shelves are burdened, did I finally get the message; and before I jump in with both feet into creative writing, I have to explore the intrinsic power of story in today’s musing.

I tried one more time to draw Penny out, but she could not express why she felt she got more satisfaction out of reading a good story than those other kinds of books that Robert Moss and Carolyn Myss and Neale Donald Walsh and Thomas Moore and Gary Zukav and Dr. Wayne Dyer and kindred inner-directed truth-seeking people have written, and I have no choice but to abandon to my creative unconscious to explore the allure of story in today’s spiritual musing; but I fear that this may be a dangerous musing.

A dangerous musing dares to say the unsayable, and I hate being called to explore an idea that will take me beyond the edge of thought because I know it will defy logic; but such is the nature of story, whose teleological purpose is to nourish the soul and resolve the inherent paradox of man’s dual nature. That’s the danger, because how can one expect anyone to believe that man is both real and false, that he is and is not what he is?

It took me a lifetime to resolve the paradoxical nature of the dual consciousness of man, the being and non-being of man’s individuating reflective self-consciousness which has been the central theme of all my writing; but it wasn’t until Penny, in her exasperation with Robert Moss’s book The Boy Who Died and Came Back, blurted out that she got more out of reading a good story than those other kinds of books did it dawn on me why; and as simple as it may be, she got more out of reading a good story because story has the power to resolve the paradoxical nature of man’s dual self that those other kinds of books can only point to.

That’s a big statement. Big enough to explore in a whole book, which curiously enough I’ve already done in books like The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, Gurdjieff Was Wrong But His Teaching Works, and especially in my book The Pearl of Great Price; so I need not explore it in today’s musing. My point here is to explain what Penny meant by saying that she got more out of reading a good story than she did out of those other kinds of books; so, just what is it about story that satisfies this longing in one’s soul for—what? Just what is it exactly that a good story satisfies if not personal resolution of one’s paradoxical nature?

That’s the epiphany that came to me when Penny said that she got more out of reading a good story than those other kinds of books that she now found boring; but just what did she mean by those other kinds of books? And why cannot they satisfy that longing in one’s soul for resolution of one’s real and false self, soul’s longing for wholeness?

I’ve been reading those other kinds of books my whole life, ever since I was called to find my true self by Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge in high school more than half a century ago, and if I were to define what Penny meant by those other kinds of books I would say inner-directed books, books that address the author’s own journey of self-discovery, like The Seven Storey Mountain by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Shirley MacLaine’s Sage-ing While Age-ing, Victor Frankl’s remarkable book Man’s Search for Meaning, C. G. Jung’s even more remarkable “confrontation with the unconscious” that he chronicled in The Red Book, and Proof of Heaven, by Doctor Eben Alexander.

The marketplace is flooded with those other kinds of books, with new ones coming out every time someone feels compelled to tell their “amazing” story of self-discovery, which often translate into self-help books of spiritual awakening, each person’s story being but another path to one’s true self little realizing that all paths lead to Rome eventually (I’m still waiting for Shirley MacLaine’s next book just to see how far her journey of self-discovery has taken her); and that’s the gist of today’s spiritual musing—the simple fact that every person’s life is the way to the resolution of one’s dual nature, one’s personal path to wholeness and completeness. That’s the power of story that Penny intuited…

“But they all serve their purpose,” I replied, coming to the defense of all those other kinds of book which, incidentally, I love to read. “Those books point to the way, each according to the author’s personal journey of self-discovery; like Robert Moss’s book The Boy Who Died and Came Back. But I guess when you’ve read enough of those books they can get boring,” I added, assenting to Penny’s literary ennui.

“Well they bore me now. My next book’s going to be a good story,” Penny said, and when she finished reading Moss’s book (Penny is stubborn, and she will finish every book she starts, including James Joyce’s ponderous Ulysses) she came into my writing room for our morning coffee with June Callwood’s Twelve Weeks In Spring, “…the inspiring story of how a group of people came together to help a friend, and in doing so discovered their own unexpected strength and humanity,” which Penny found on one of my shelves and which, ironically, bridged those other kinds of books to a good story with the personal story of sixty-eight year old Margaret Fraser’s death by cancer which she did not have to face alone because her writer friend June Callwood and a group of friends helped see her through to the end; but I have not shared this irony with Penny yet. I’ll wait until she finishes reading Twelve Weeks ins Spring first; then I can share with her why a good story can be so satisfying.

 The irony of course is that life itself is the way to one’s real self; and by way, I mean the natural individuation process of man’s paradoxical real and false self—which makes every story, whether biographical or fictional, one’s personal way to wholeness and completeness, the only difference being that a good story satisfies soul’s longing for resolution much more than those other kinds of books that only point to resolution. That’s why when I pressed Penny again to explain why she got more out of reading a good story than those other kinds of books, she replied: “A good story pulls me in, and I experience the story as I’m reading it. Those other kinds of books don’t do that for me. They only scratch the surface.”

“That’s because a good story is about becoming, which is the teleological purpose of man’s existence. You experience your own becoming when you read a good story, and this nourishes soul’s longing for wholeness. This is why you find stories more satisfying.”

“Much more satisfying than those other kinds of books,” Penny replied, with a note of triumph in her voice, thus bringing closure to today’s spiritual musing.

———

New Poem: "A Desperate Man"

A Desperate Man

In twenty-four months his father died,

his wife’s mother died, his mother died,

his wife’s father died, two of his first cousins

died together in a plane crash on a fishing

trip, and his wife suddenly fell out of remission

and died of cancer, lucid to the end; but nothing

ever dies, he said; energy just changes form.

He couldn’t speak fast enough, pouring his life

into every word; but his voice betrayed his

desperation. He believed in physics like his

wife’s doctor friend (and his lover) who had

a scientific tradition to uphold, and he fought

back his tears. Fear stalked him, but he could

not discard his soulless mirror and listen to the

voice within quietly whispering, “The only

death is the death of ignorance.”