I have a mailing address in California now! I’m finding my way through. I am so happy. It’s been such a wild ride and in no ways a disappointment to pursue things I care deeply about. Sometimes life hurts a lot for a long time. Sometimes it feels like nothing will ever change and all there is, is that waking up for the thing you do to get to the next thing that you have to do to get to the next thing that you have to do. The nihilistic expression of a broken heart. What do we do when pleasure fails us if pleasure is our hope? Things get scary. That’s what happens. Healing wounds that strike to the core of me take time. What did I expect? Oh that’s right. I expected to leap up like the sort of miracle I read about as a child. (I believe in those too,) that just hasn’t been my experience with my own journey through reality. I’m getting softer in the ways I’d hoped I would. Being hard is rough. There’s this Rumi poem that I used to use when I was doing centering prayer meditations. I quit doing a lot of the practices I was doing for an extended period of time due to things I don’t feel like sharing here right now. I’m going to put the poem in here because it hit me in a different way when I read it a loud to my friend Levi on a beach in Santa Barbara not that long ago. It comes from a period of my life when I was suffering a lot of emotional trauma and holding onto whatever I could find that brought me closer to whatever “that” is when I was out in the nebulous dispersion.
A Necessary Autumn Inside Each
You and I have spoken all these words, but as for the way we have to go, words are no preparation. There is no getting ready, other than grace.
My faults have stayed hidden. One might call that a preparation! I have one small drop of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean. There are so many threats to it.
Inside each of us, there’s continual autumn. Our leaves fall and are blown out over the water. A crow sits in the blackened limbs and talks about what’s gone.
Then your generosity returns: spring, moisture, intelligence, the scent of hyacinth and rose and cypress. Joseph is back! And if you don’t feel in yourself the freshness of Joseph, be Jacob! Weep and then smile.
Don’t pretend to know something you haven’t experienced.
There’s a necessary dying, and then Jesus is breathing again.
Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.
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I feel like there is so much I could say about this poem. It’s meant a lot to me and I am emotionally connected to it. I appreciate Rumi for a number of reasons. I appreciate his wonder and his radical embrace of what is beyond himself. (What is the self?) If you are unfamiliar and would like to know more about him, I linked the wiki page as a place to start.
I love his sternness in the cautionary statement, “Don’t pretend to know something you haven’t experienced.”
I think that hits me differently this time around. I grew up in a conservative christian environment and lets face it there was a lot that I pretended to know that I hadn’t experienced. I think what makes me sad about that paradigm was that I was seeking with a true heart and there was so much bullshit. I think the softness that I’m talking about now is that I feel like I actually know Jesus now. Like I don’t have this idea of someone I need to push other people towards. Jesus isn’t like that at all. It’s beautiful how there’s sometimes a security that comes in having experienced something. Why would I try to rob anyone else of their journey through this wild, precious life? If there’s anything I believe now more than ever it’s that Jesus is better than I could have ever hoped and he wants me to be the most alive full healed version of myself that can exist. I think Rumi is right and I think there’s a lot of folks pretending to know things they haven’t experienced and it sucks.
The Jesus’ folks that impacted me when I was (out out) were the ones who weren’t pretending to know something they hadn’t experienced. They had heard a sound more beautiful than anything else and they were following in the ways of this lovely one. It wasn’t about making me like them. They were having their experience and doing their life and loving as well as they could. Those folks have made a lasting impression on me. My unasked for recommendation to you is to go towards wonder, curiosity and beauty. I think you’ll find the experiences you’ve longed for in those spaces. Either way though. Don’t pretend to know something you haven’t experienced. Life is better when you don’t.
structures of home 