Deepening

The paths of becoming, 4

‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’
—Martin Shaw, Smokehole

‘Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real…’
—Rainer Marie Rilke, ‘You are not surprised at the force of the storm’, from The Book of Hours

Photo by Robin Godefridi

Dear reader,

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I’ve ditched the ‘Seven’ from the title of this ‘Paths of becoming’ series. I keep thinking of new words and ideas to rummage around in, so I’ll just stop when it feels like the right time to do so, rather than adhering to an arbitrary number.

If you missed the first three reflections in the series, I’ve included links to them below, though reading them out of sequence (or picking and choosing whichever ones take your fancy) is absolutely fine. Thanks as always for spending time in The Green Chapel; and if you’re new, welcome – it’s great to have you here.

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Awakening

Dissolving

Healing

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Deepening

I spend much of the year thinking of the deliciousness of May: its ebullience; its soft opulence and urgency; the way it bursts with Yes, Now, Life. Here spring is at its lusty height – flower season, mating season, stretching-towards-the-sun season; everything leaf-glow and come-hither energy. Now, the air seems to say, is the time for motion, and for taking the hips of your lover.

We crave such lushness. Of course we do, charged as we are with a desire for more. We want our lives to be full of May; we want life, and more abundantly. Bright songs. Greening air. Growth.

We tend not to think of what comes first, or after.

For all this vivacity requires a depth of rooting. To germinate is to first reach downwards into the soil. Sprouting is consequent of root; budding is reliant of earth.

We’ve all heard of personal growth. Many of us will have chased it, or at least be told we should chase it. What we don’t hear much about is personal deepening; yet that is where a life of fullness begins. To become, we need to get into the ground of things. Soul is fathom, not peak; it is the going further in that allows us to open out. We need to be rooted – rich in underland knowledge, sunk into loamish fundamentals.

One literal translation of the word ‘profound’ (from the Latin pro fundus) could be ‘forward to the deep’. You have left the surface level behind, but not upwardly.

Photo by Liam Briese

Growth in the natural world is not an end in itself, but one part of the wheel. It comes from a desire for life; yet by necessity it has balance and limits. Over-growth is antithetical to harmony. A plant will never extend itself beyond its resources; and when the growing season ends, it collapses back into its roots.

The spirit of our age, however, is something quite different.

These are depthless days: skimming and ground-blind. Everything is rush and electric. We have been made into surface drifters, flotsam in our own existence. Life as a series of thirty second videos; life consumed, not created; life documented for display, not experienced; life held numbly in our heads, not spread out upon the feasting table. Hollow. Shallow. So ceaseless and neurotic that there can never be profundity.

We didn’t put ourselves here. You and I and us are not to blame. It is a spirit, an energy, an idea that has so unrooted us: a swaggering coven of gods who have been given too much power – growth, greed, and the drugs that they have laced our water supply with: distraction, convenience, materialism, individualism. The hunger to acquire, accumulate, hoard, possess – an insatiable lust for the storehouses to never stop growing.

And what is the harvest? These gods are obese from feasting on the blood of the earth; from draining our joy and contentment, even our grief. Inequality, injustice, environmental breakdown, the collapse of mental and bodily health, the death of community: all this can be traced to the worship of more. Greed driving unchecked growth; or, in other words, a tumour.

All this ruin stems from the misguided belief in the illimitude of existence. We want to extend, instead of rooting into here. We have reached peak everything, and so arrives the tidal wave of meaninglessness.

We can’t have everything we want. Such a desire precludes us getting anything we need.

Well, to hell with growth. How can we deepen?

Photo by Ronit Kaushik

‘To understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.’
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland

Deepening is characterised by presence, slowness, observation, raw honesty. It is an unstriving, an acceptance, a becoming of here. It is a lessening of self; a realisation that the largeness in which we live is the same largeness that is within us, and is thus not something we have to manufacture or acquire. Deep calls unto deep.

It is also, like so much of our becoming, not something that can be planned for. Depth is not aimed at or achieved, it is taught – more often than not by teachers who are uninvited, even unwelcome. Pray for a deepening and God might wince, knowing what you’re in for.

Sudden loss and heartbreak. Disaster. Plans gone awry. Rejection. Redundancy. Shifts in belief. Changes that you never asked for.

Such things can be triggers for deepening, if – if – we don’t tighten up. If we listen. If we quit reaching, striving, shouting out desperate attempts at answers. Instead of trying to solve the problem, we attend. We fall back. We go to ground, press some tendrils down into soul-matter. We root, and so become resilient.

I recently tried digging up some old bracken from my garden. If you know what well-established rhizomes are like, you’ll know that I eventually conceded that that part of the garden would remain theirs.

It’s hard to be insecure when you’re rhizomic. Such below-the-surface interconnection can’t be thwarted.

Deepening is a finding out (and, ultimately, accepting) who you really are, not who you’re expected to be or even who you want to be. It is thus a boundary making – a setting of beautiful limits, and so, you might have gathered, markedly counter-cultural.

Those who have deepened do not grasp at; they do not cling; they do not preen or gloat. They weep openly; their smiles have a luminosity that comes from knowing how precious a gift a smile really is. There’s a richness to their texture; think oak bark and weathered skin. They know both their light and their shadow, and that wholeness includes both. Cleverness and self-centred ambition don’t sit well with them. They can see the fruitlessness of a word like successful. They know when to stop, to pause, to rest; they know they’re not in a race. They’re tenacious, but only because they’ve failed so many times.

Depth has not interest in efficiency. It is rugged, not grandiose; subtle, not bombastic. It knows enough to know it should never shout about what it thinks. It is careworn, but cares more because of it.

Depth thinks a lot about May. It desires it, and inhales it gigglingly when it arrives. And it does so all the more because it knows what has come before, and what will come after.

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