The word ‘courage,’ comes from the Latin coeur, which means of course, ‘heart’ — it originally meant to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. This essay speaks to fully inhabiting our lives, seeing things all the way through. Who is it you think you are and whose story is it anyway?
Taking It All to Heart:
“Humans are asleep; it is at their death they awaken”[1]
To be present is to become as we are, as we have always been thus, from the beginning, doing what is needed to be done. The image in the heart is like an eye opening, deepening our sense of place and deepening our perspective of the world we live in. The wound of speech comes out of our fear of death, of loosening the grip and a fear of our own potential, for what it would mean to be complete. The work of the present is a hearkening back, following subtle complex threads, winding in and through a labyrinth path. For the dead have the power to speak through us, but, too often we hear them badly, or, not at all.
The opening of the bones reveals this true body, this deeply imaginative, feeling body. I cannot say I have honored actual lives of ancestors or payed homage in a conscious way. Yet, indirectly through practice, and before that, I have come upon the living stream through which they move and the history they leave behind through us, inside us, and, as, ‘time’. In our culture we are loosely connected, transient in the sense of being displaced, as, there is no sense of belonging that comes from outside, real belonging, community, touches a deeper root.
There is a need to differentiate between everyday life as a conventional assumption and everyday life which encompasses possibility. Individuals bring forth memory, not of dates and times, but of beings, ghosts, and latent experience, or rather memory brings us forth, from the unfolding of seed to the birth of new seeds: traces of unfathomable connections. I have thought that there are two kinds of death, the life of the dead we meet in time and the energy of the dead as breath: this timeless essence. There is a kind of death in unlived life, a refusal to meet the past. There is the ability to be present to the work of the past, transformed into imaginative presence.
I feel a gap in our culture between our perception of the sensory world, and the life of the inner person. I speak to dream, the arts and mythologies, giving form and voice to imaginal personages, who people the inner landscape. Images alive with fingers and toes, eyes and ears, they are of the body even though seemingly without body. They draw out aspects of our lives not easily put into words, as denizens of spirit who name the quest, with symbols potent and alive. Sitting meditation, we meet and look deeply into our fear, anger and despair: letting go, where, does it go? Giving voice to the emptiness, who is it that gives voice? It is not a matter of resignation, oh well, I am not this, oh well, I can’t do that, as there are many ways to live and to be realized and the issue is more about opening the field of everyday life permitting other kinds of life and experience to enter.
In the Lotus Sutra, Bodhisattvas rise from beneath the earth, and offer themselves as manifestations of ways of being with the world, possibilities for its healing and transfiguration. They are images of the fabulous that point to the greater truth, and they arise because they live with us already. Dedication, devotion, what we term worship is not reverence for some super being ( Buddha or otherwise) who does this work for us, it has to do with a recognition of shared qualities, taking account of, and being accountable, broadening our sense of what we need to be accountable for.
I write this, because in my humble opinion, the world we live in today does not adequately mirror who we are. The timeless reflected through our works, as a commitment we make together. How do we find our way back, and how, ask, as persons of this practice, how deep our responsibilities are? We are a culture of the myth untold, our stories buried beneath our distractions. What has happened to the power to recognize and speak, to the interiority of things? The archetypes – gods and goddesses, dragons, thrones, jewels, kings, a princess, or, raven, dogfish, and goose woman, the enchantment, in the rocks, trees, sea and stones- our connection to the whole cosmic story- what has happened to these for us, where have they gone? We litter our would-be creative imaginal spaces with billboards and advertisements, whereas for more ancient, aboriginal and medieval cultures this place was infused with the life of the dead and the sacred. Being for profit and sale, do we think this doesn’t affect us? That our lives do not reflect this?
Robert Bringhurst, linguist and poet, “Sun, moon, mountains and rivers are the writing of being, the literature of what-is. Long before our species was born the books have been written. The library was here before we were. We live in it. We can add to it or we can try, we can also subtract from it, we can chop it down, incinerate it, strip mine it, bury it under our trash. But we didn’t create it, and if we destroy it we cannot replace it. Literature, culture and pattern aren’t man made. The culture of the tao is not man made, the culture of humans is not man made. It is just the human part of culture as a whole.”[2]
And, “Our minds, our brains, our hearts are grown out of the world just as mushrooms and buttercups are.”[3]
Our sorrow, fear, anger and despair is a universal, the trees, the wind, the rains also sorrow. Good reason to begin to converse together, not merely in private consulting rooms, certainly not, to commiserate and complain. But maybe, to begin to ask, well, what is it that is the matter? Why does it matter, that it matters because it is not merely about us. Practice is this very life, the fruit, nothing more or less than this. So what we do, and say, and how we go about our day, is of vital importance.
The bodhisattva image is particular to Mahayana, an awakening being who aspires to the attainment of enlightenment for the sake of all beings. It is related to the making of vows and to Bodhichitta the arousing of the heart. Our true nature articulated through our person, the bodhisattva’s insight into the complexity of persons, how we see, feel, and touch, as deeply imagined. The practice itself moves us out of the way, so that something larger and more potent speaks. That which informs, guides and leads us.
We are equal in our differences, yet not simply one of many, as a bird has wings to fly through air and fish have gills to breath under water. We are not only relative to each other but relative to a practice, a practice teeming with difficult and subtle learning. So what does it mean to be healed? I am thinking of the movie The Elephant Man. And this is just my memory of it, a story, about an extremely disfigured man who lived most of his life in the circus. He was owned by another, chained and beaten. Finally he was ‘discovered’ by a scientist and assumed to be an idiot, “Oh my god,” they said, “He must be.” There was an attempt to buy him from his owner and when that was unsuccessful to steal him for their purposes, to put him on display his malady a specimen for learning in service of medical science. It turns out he was far from an idiot. He had become a being of uncommon kindness, wise, difficult and extraordinary. He kept a locket which when opened held a picture of his mother. I imagine her as archetypal, Kuan Yin, or the archetypal, Jizo, guiding him and blessing through the circumstance of his life. But the elephant man is still the elephant man, his disease the bridge the Buddha built, to help him to make passage and cross over. He did eventually find much needed and deserved joy and friendship and he dies in the end of his own choosing, he lay his head down on his pillow at night and I am guessing he was suffocated by its weight.
In truth, our ability to love, to see beauty and act in the present is forged here. Thusness is, each point of intersection, between the relative and absolute and the act of seeing deeply a function of our artist’s eye. So image in this context is, the way in which we are moved within ever changing perspectives, the ability to imagine that is, is, “what forms and shapes our life.”[4] Renee Coleman, Icon of the Dreaming Heart, “We see through the image to something that is beyond it, because what is beyond it can only be seen, felt, imagined, and experienced, through it, ”[5] and I would add that which most significantly completes it and is it.
If I had a wish, it would be for individuals to cultivate a greater trust in inner life, to create with forms that sing in sympathy with being. True joy is creative joy, with its promise of renewal: fresh because it is personal, hence, potent with meaning. Our true nature is expressed through the tangible, as pattern, rhythm, beauty and color, internally spacious, content, our joy, pain, and yes, even our despair. The Person, I speak to the bodhisattva person, true nature person, like a tree, mountain, and, or, serpent person. Person with a capital P, so beyond ego or merely self-expressive, the person not as an epiphenomena, but is primal and phenomena.
Hence, this is an invitation, for those of us reaching back toward the original poetry of things, reconnecting to a profound sense of world speaking both, to us and through us, in the poetry of images. In ancient cultures, (I believe this to be true of early Buddhist cultures, including Dogen’s time and Keizan), art and mythology functioned as the voice and image of the spirit. The creative and spiritual served as two sides of a coin, a hidden made manifest.
Cecil Collins, artist and visionary, suggests, “Each person contains a secret mythology, a unique creation which represents symbolic images by which his interior life thrives, forming his basic psychic structure,
And, ” the creative imagination of each one of us leavens the general sensibility of a collective society with fresh revelation.”6
Johann Georg Hamann, German scholar and mystic writes, ” Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race , even as the garden is older than the plowed field, painting than script; as song is more ancient than declamation; parables older than reasoning;barter than trade. A deep sleep was the repose of our farthest ancestors; and their movement a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of deep thought or wonder; and would open their mouths to utter winged sentences.”7
Meinrad Craighead, Benedictine nun, a most wonderful artist and mystic. “It’s the work in the cauldron. You throw anything in and it all comes together as something delicious,”
and “it seethes, it makes noises, it stinks, it bubbles and emits gases. All of that is transformation. The work of the spirit is in each of us. All we’ve got to do is just do it. That is the incarnation, making the invisible visible.”8
Thus what is communal or lineage is a contiguity of persons, co-creating and refreshing the threads of a tradition. I find it hard to believe that any work done with genuine and disciplined passion, especially work done with a commitment to community and practice, could be so unfitting, as not to be welcomed and informing to the whole. Creative life is personal, embraced within the transcendent, each of us uniquely Buddha: the whole thing, and yet part of this inner, living, timeless history.
[1] Henri Corbin, Alone with the Alone, p.
[2] Tree of Meaning, p.143 Bringhurst, Robert
[3] Tree of Meaning, p.158 Bringhurst, Robert
[4] Icons of a Dreaming Heart, Hillman James Coleman Renee, locations (454-457)
[5] Icons of Dreaming Heart, Coleman,Renee
[6] The Vision of the Fool and other writings, Cecil Collins, p. 59
[7] Green Man, Earth Angel,The Battle For The Soul Of The World, Tom Cheetham, p.
[8] Common Boundary, November December-1990, Meinrad Craighead
