Buoyancy
Growth at any philosophical level has always looked like a vague image of a man climbing a wall needing a boost to leverage himself to push upward onto the top so he can cross over. The soul’s tricky amortization phase. But we can’t continue to willpower our way to the other side with “bootstrap stuff.” We must actually abandon those rudimentary things to go deeper - or we ante up, change arenas or update our vision board.
Recycled and repackaged, reformulated with a little more oratory caffeine and mental bluster. The principles, the formulas, the rules, the motivational shit, the incantational platitude faith that apparently moves mountains. These items are all signposts that we must learn well so we can learn to break them well later as we come to understand that they are not reality themselves but point to a reality beyond themselves.
They lead us to treasure, but they are not the treasure nor are they the key that opens the treasure chest. The patience, the surrender, the paradoxical wrestling match with these apparitional sages is the leverage. And once we have allowed ourselves to risk the fall over to the other side; the wall we were unknowingly guided to climb blocks us from any sight or even any understanding of the previous land we occupied a split second ago.
I have found the leverage for the wall that I’ve been climbing for several years now and have begun the subversive descent to the other side. It is a river that has been flowing in the backdrop of our lives since before we were born. We can’t force our way to it, though at first, we must cooperate with disciplines that lead us there long enough only to be invited by them to let go of them. There is the tension of wrestling for the new and tension created by resistance to the new. It’s imperative to know the difference. Rebirth is contingent upon this.
It is a terrifying jump. No, the Spirit pushes us as it senses our readiness; a similar entrance to but not in the same blunt, unexpected and unannounced way we are invited (Invited?!) into the dark night of the soul. We either move onward in this way or we die in the dis-ease that earlier frameworks have now become. Plunging the waters, we inevitably fight to swim our way to safety, struggling to fill our lungs with toxic air we once called oxygen.
The irony is that the River will pull you under and submerge you until you learn that the way forward now is to stop swimming. And then, to our frightened and relieved astonishment, we discover a characteristic of this divine Inertia that opposes all the frantic desire for control, power, significance and the illusion of certainty that has fueled all our lives. The rules are hidden in the molecules of Her being and always kept. We learn that the Spirit is…buoyant.
