Bee After Bee and the Secret
Way
“Watch the synchronicities, the coincidences,
because they will bring you goodness,”
—St. Padre Pio
I love coincidences. I never know when they
will happen, nor does anyone else for that matter (they have a mind of their own); but when they happen, they do so for a
reason, and one happened the other morning to give me confirmation for something
that I already knew cognitively but not quite as gnostically as I would like to have known; hence, the remarkable
little coincidence that confirmed through personal experience what I already
knew intellectually, and as confusing as this may seem, this is the inspiration
for today’s spiritual musing on what C. G. Jung called “the way of what is to come,” which he also called the secret way...
In all honesty, when I’m called to write a
spiritual musing I never know where my oracle and inner guiding principle wants
to take me; and no sooner did I write the first paragraph of this spiritual musing,
and I caught a glimpse of what I had been called upon to explore—the inexorable
mystery of the omniscient guiding principle of the secret way of life that
poets have been exploring for centuries; what Emerson called the “Oversoul” and
“God within.”
“Adventure most unto itself
/The Soul condemned to be; /Attended by a Single Hound— /Its own Identity,” wrote Emily Dickinson. That’s what we’re all
looking for, our own identity, our true self that the secret way of life
points us to through signs, symbols, dreams, meaningful coincidences, and especially
poetry, which, as I came to see after years of living the secret way of life, can
only be found by growing into the person we are meant to be; that’s what made
my remarkable little coincidence the
other morning so timely that it crossed over into what Jung called
“synchronicity,” the word he coined to describe the simultaneous occurrence of
events which appear meaningfully related but have no discernable causal
connection—hence, “meaningful
coincidence.”
If I may, then. While reading David Brooks’
new book the other morning, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, I came upon a passage which
he believed could very well be the “pivotal point” of his whole book. He quotes
the passage from Annie Dillard’s book Teaching a Stone to Talk, a collection of her personal meditations:
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of
which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if
you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our science
cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys
the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil,
the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other and for
our life together here” (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, by David Brooks, p. 64)
This was my experience also, which, by happy
coincidence, I had just written about in my new book The Fourth Corner of the Abyss
that I was bringing to
closure; but because I never heard of Annie Dillard, whose comment Brooks felt
was pivotal to his new book on the quest for a moral life that he embarked upon
five years after he wrote The Road to Character, I had to Google the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, which I did
immediately; and what I found impressed me enough to put two of Annie Dillard’s
books on my Amazon wish list: Teaching a Stone to Talk, and The Writing Life—which
I had to read, because I love reading about what
writers have to say about writing; so I went into Amazon’s Look Inside feature
and started reading Chapter One of The Writing Life
(which she began by quoting Goethe, “Do not hurry; do not rest,”), and that’s when the remarkable little
coincidence happened.
Again, if I may. I was feeling antsy the day
before, and it carried over into the morning; and I was antsy because I had
been watching too much Netflix, YouTube, and TV to avoid my second reading of
Brooks’ new book The Second Mountain, which
I had to read again to refresh my memory and bring my book The Fourth Corner of the Abyss to closure with the final chapter “The Five
Stages of Life” that a symbolic dream that I recently had and Brooks’ new book
had inspired.
This antsy feeling has happened before, many
times in fact, which I’ve come to define as a mild form of spiritual
restlessness that makes me apprehensive, like an annoying little itch that
can’t be scratched; which was how I was feeling when reading the first chapter of
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.
I had to get myself out of my doldrums, but I
didn’t really know how—or, I did know how, but I didn’t want to slug my way
through The Second
Mountain again, because the second half
was mostly padding for the first part; and that’s when Annie Dillard’s name lit
up on me when I read the passage that David Brooks quoted.
So, I Googled her name to find out what I
could about her, and reading something that she wrote in Chapter One of The Writing Life (thanks to Amazon’s Look Inside feature) inspired
the remarkable little coincidence that gave me the inspiration I needed to get myself
out of my doldrums; and here’s Annie Dillard’s insightful passage that did it:
“To find a honey tree, first catch a bee.
Catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen; then it is ready for home. It
is simple enough to catch a bee on a flower: hold a cup or glass above the bee,
and when it flies up, cap the cup with a piece of cardboard. Carry the bee to a
nearby open spot—best an elevated one—release it, and watch where it goes. Keep
your eyes on it as long as you can see it, and hie you to that last known
place. Wait there until you see another bee; catch it, release it, and watch.
Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee
enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book leads
its writer.”
This
was not new information for me, because I’ve been a student of the Sufi
teaching for years, and Sufis have used this metaphor of bees and honey to pass
on the secret teachings (the secret way of life, which flows out of the Sufi poet Rumi in
streams of boundless wisdom), so Annie Dillard’s passage did not take me by surprise in that sense;
it took me by surprise another way, because the timing was perfect—or,
meaningfully coincidental, if you will; and I knew instantly what I had to do
to get myself out of my annoying little doldrums: I had to be like the bee and
go from flower to flower and collect the sweet nectar I needed to nourish my
soul and grow out of my self-inflicted oppressive little mood of apprehension (which I knew would morph into
despair if I didn’t do something about it) that took the joy out of my day; so, I opened up a book by one of my favorite
poets—Ten Windows: How
Great Poems Transform the World, by the American Zen poet Jane Hirshfield, the first “blossom” in my
“honey” quest to cure my spiritual malaise.
Jane Hirshfield brought to my attention that
poetry does our thinking for us, and it does our thinking for us because when
the poet writes a poem, he or she engage what Jung called our “transcendent
function,” which he recognized as our superior insight; and when we engage our superior
insight, or higher function (“God within”), we tap into the creative energy of life,
which is the Logos, the omniscient guiding principle of life that Jung
identified as “the way of what is to come.”
So, I went to Chapter Four of Hirshfield’s
book, which coincidentally enough was titled “Thoreau’s Hound: Poetry and the
Hidden,” and this chapter inspired me to write my very personal poem, “Una Bella Giornatta,” which
led to more reading, writing, and sweet nectar of life.
That’s how I “worked” my way out of my annoying
little doldrums, by tapping into the well of my creative higher self, which we
all have access to if we make the effort; but the trick is to DO something,
because DOING has the power to send those depressing little demons back to hell
where they come from, especially if it is DOING for another, as I did in my poem
“Una Bella
Giornatta” that can be found in my book The Devil’s Hindquarter; hence revealing the puzzling mystery of the
Zen koan that I unpacked in my poem “Chop Wood, Carry Water”—
“Before
enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
After
enlightenment; chop wood, carry water,” says
the old Zen koan. But if life,
as all indications would
suggest, is a journey to
its own destination, (1 plus 2
equals 3, and the
acorn seed becomes an oak tree),
then certainly before and after
enlightenment would
suggest that one has made
the journey to one’s destined
purpose and lives life as
before the journey, only now
one is enlightened of their
destined purpose; that’s the
presumption of this Zen koan,
because one has to be
enlightened to know this. And,
if life’s purpose is to
become itself, what is this
“itself” that this Zen koan
fails to articulate? That’s
the irony of the journey to
one’s true self (whether chopping wood and carrying
water, or
working at McDonald’s); and the mystery
of this puzzling Zen koan is
revealed: the more
we do life, the more enlightened we will
be.
That’s the mystery of “the way of what is to come,”
the omniscient guiding
principle of life that fosters resolution through signs, symbols, dreams, meaningful
coincidences, and the transformative power of poetry that collects the sweet
nectar of life that nourishes our soul’s longing for wholeness and completeness,
which, ironically, was the theme of David Brooks’ new book, The Second Mountain: The Quest
for a Moral Life—proof positive of the
secret way of life exemplified by the author’s quest for self-resolution; and
after I finished reading his book for the second time, I brought my own book The Fourth Corner of the Abyss to happy resolution, and all thanks to one
remarkable little coincidence that opened the door to “the way of what is to come” by way of Annie Dillard’s bee after bee
analogy.
———
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