Dissolving

Seven paths of becoming, 2

‘Dissolution is the only thing that allows the soul to go to a deeper place.’
—Richard Rohr

Detail from ‘Job hearing of his ruin’ (1867), by Gustave Dore

Dear reader,

Just two devotions deep into this series and already I’m reflecting on a word that wasn’t on my original list. But I realised that I’d tried to avoid the unavoidable; that, perhaps subconsciously, I’d wanted to touch on this in ‘Awakening’ and then move on. But that wouldn’t do it justice. This is one of the things that, if you move through life for long enough— if you’re on that journey into soul—you cannot escape. Yet, in one of those bitter ironies of being human, it is the one thing we would want to escape.

So, let us meditate on the necessity of dissolving.

Gideon

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Dissolving

In an ideal world, experience would be a pearl—searched for and found in the mother-clutch of azure saltiness.

In an ideal world, wisdom would be warmth—a feather of dawn alighting on our grateful, unruined hearts.

Our becoming would grow out of book-musk, or the woody sayings of an elder, or the wide vista of a mountain top. It would be achieved, route-mapped, asked for and gained. Our inner lives would be changed by planning and good intentions; we would be led into our depths by comfortable resolutions and well-produced podcasts.

There would be no blood on the fingers of myth. The gods would be handed our prayers and smile benignly. The path would be clear; growth an inevitable consequence of abiding by the way.

We would be made by the moments we live for—the ones that take our breath away. Not by the ones we have to live through—the ones in which we struggle to breathe.

In an ideal world. A different world.

In our world, we swim out for the pearl and are crushed by a wave; churned; pulled down towards the sea worms.

We go out at dawn and plant a seed of growth, and out of it sprouts not a flower, but a creature of horn and gob who starts gnawing our treasures. What do you make of this? he says.

We follow the light into the trees to find their gnarl has shredded it, and now we are in a world of green dark and roots waiting to coil around us. Wild eyes stare out at us from hidden holes, lips smacking with the lessons their hunger might teach us.

Soulfulness needs the almond reek that rises from a hip bone broken in the night. Experience is what you find when your brothers tear your clothes and throw you into a pit. It is what is sucked into the space that gets hollowed out in us by the desert days. Wisdom will approach us only when we don’t get what we want and figure out why that’s important.

When it’s dark, you have to rely on what’s right in front of you, instead of being blinded by abundance. You learn what it is you really need. Chin up and strut will never find the ground-gold. The dove told Christ who he was, but he had to go into the wilderness and talk to the devil before he could become it.

If you’ve lived enough of a life, you know this already. At least in part. You peer into the cauldron of things that have shaped you most—that brought you face to face with something beyond the ego—and words like hurt, failure, fall, humiliation and heartbreak bubble to the surface.

Loss draws god-circles around what actually matters. Our grief-groans conjure up the dark matter that gives mass to our souls. In our shattering, the cracks that Leonard Cohen spoke of are made; the ones that let the light in.

The song of becoming is all-encompassing. It needs both the minor and the major key.

I wish it wasn’t like this.
I wish I could have learned another way.
I wish my poetry could have been born out of an easy life.

But that’s not how it works. Here we are in our smithereens, with the angels merely saying, ‘Let it be.’ This is somehow part of the pattern of things. Life, death, life. We dissolve, and out of that dissolution something more tangible is made. God is death, and what death becomes.

This is not the same thing as saying everything happens for a reason, or that everything will be okay—that we need to smile and bear up. Some things are just awful. Meaninglessly awful.

What it does mean, however, is that there can be an after.

It won’t happen, however—the after—without our attention. We have to, when the time is right, when it is safe, look at the wound; put our our hands amid the sting. We won’t heal what we don’t face. But if we transform our pain, our pain could transform us. Concentrating. Softening. Opening. And so the collapse ends up initiating us into a more soulful perspective. The brokenness ends up sharpening our sense of the real. In the pit, you find something that the pearl-swimmers and ambitious mountaineers miss.

An immature person either hasn’t been through much in life; or they have, but they have failed to reckon with it yet.

It’s a long and sometimes lonely task, going through that tangled forest. I have had to fight in recent years for the piled up losses not to add up to bitterness. I have had to be wary of my weariness sinking so deep into my bones that it becomes structural. What is life telling me? That I’m not done yet. That I have things to learn, things to let go of, weatherings that could yet become a map. My grief tells me that I’ve loved enough for it to matter, and that the mattering matters. The sting tells me that I’m alive—that life is fragile and therefore worth cherishing, worth going further into because an easy life is one without great love or great richness of depth. The art, the music wouldn’t make as much sense.

You wouldn’t know how sweet the dawn really is.

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A little note to say…

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