Sandcastles

I've been reading Can Love Last? by Stephen A. Mitchell, and I'm diving into the mystery of erotic energy: how it fuels us, how it excites us, how it's such a channel of life force and vitality. And how it's confusing as fuck.

But even outside the conversation about sexuality, Mitchell turns to Nietzsche's outlook on the human experience: that a life fully lived is both beautiful and sorrowful. Picture someone building sandcastles, over and over, knowing full well the tide is coming. Rather than stopping them, the tide becomes the very reason they keep going, and keep getting better at the craft.

And truly, I think this might be what Gurdjieff was pointing toward in his definition of eternal life: the things of our essence, our knowledge, our bodies, our relationships, that we crystallize before our physical bodies die.

It's the Ouroboros, too, one of my favorite symbols. Birth and death and rebirth and death, the serpent endlessly swallowing its own tail. Rilke put it this way:

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last onebut I will give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of yearsand I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours

Each time we move through the circle, we have the opportunity, at least, to see, to understand, to experience, to embody. And then comes the inevitable death, or as my good friend Julie says, the infinite remembering and forgetting. The inevitable forgetting that finds us each time around.

My favorite author, Peter Kingsley, weaves in another thread here. In Reality, he describes becoming conscious as "learning to die before we die," and invites us to follow our longing "down to the world of death while still alive." Perhaps the meaning of it all, the purpose of it all, is to die before we die, as many times as possible. Stephen Jenkinson's Die Wise sounds much the same theme. If we want to live, we must learn to die. If we spend our lives trying to dodge death, we never really live. And the good news, as Jenkinson puts it, is that you can practice it "in all the mundane corners of daily life."

I think this might be why I'm so enthralled by, so mesmerized by, relationship. Why I'm a forever student of it. Certainly relationship with other humans: my marriage has been such fertile ground for dying before death, and so has parenting. But also our relationships with animals and with nature. I'd venture to say even our relationship with, and understanding of, technology.

In my personal life and in my clinical work, I see how, in our focus on living and comfort and indulging in pleasure, we're sometimes quite inconvenienced by relationship. By its inevitable tension, and most certainly by its inevitable death. Whether that's physical death or the daily ego death required to stay in contact with other humans and with the world.

And perhaps that's even why I'm here, writing. As I mentioned in my first post, this longing has been stirring for quite some time, and I've mostly met it with fear. But I find myself so in love with, and so heartbroken by, this experience of being a human in a body. The grief is real too. As Jenkinson writes, "Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born."

Circling back to Nietzsche: I know my physical body is closer to death than it has ever been. The tide is coming. Maybe just for me, or maybe for all of us, given how much uncertainty there is about the future of humanity. I don't think this writing is an attempt to stop the tide, or to change it. But maybe it's a way to face it.

And to love it anyway.

Which brings me to one of my favorite poems, Jane Hirshfield's "Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World."

If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature,

accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,oil the hooves well,caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewels.

Spare no expense, pay what is asked,when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself

would be treated,brought speechless and naked

into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,

do not hesitate even an instant—

Stroke the white throat,the heavy, trembling dewlaps

you've come to believe were yours,and plunge in the knife.

Not once did you enter the pasture

without pause,without yourself trembling.

That you came to love it, that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.