Soul Activism

(No time to read? Listen to this 8-minute recording on your next commute or walk!)

Their flannel collar was rough like wool, deep marsh hues of blue and green contrasting the gentle lines on the skin of their neck, the soft fringe of their hair cropped neatly around the ear. Their being became a gently rolling hill before me, framed by a shrine of bright orange flowers, photographs of smiling faces, flickering candles, a sports jersey, a bunch of feathers, a solitary wolf figurine, howling. Their hand reached back to pat their shoulder, inviting my hand to settle on their crest like the dawn sun melting up over the ridge. I rose to my knees to brace myself for their waves of grief as they curled forward in a constricted wail and rocked back in expansive surrender. I heard the raucous, righteous voices of the Village singing behind me, the drum beats holding and shaking us loose. A piercing shriek to my left tore me open and it became my turn to lay down my own offering at the grief shrine.

We do not grieve unless we have been moved, profoundly, by something that has inhabited us, and taken a part of us away with it into a cold darkness beyond our reach. We do not grieve unless we have witnessed what is most sacred and precious to us desecrated, annihilated, often with casual ambivalence. This searing pain, this holy outrage, takes strength, phenomenal strength, to approach. It is understandable that we should harden, wall-off, deny it ever really mattered to us, or that we retreat to a safe cerebral distance echoing hollow clichés of wisdom or cynical existential conclusions. We might even seek the dulled and placid peace of dissolving into a lifeless puddle of powerlessness in the face of a cruel and unfeeling world.

But to lift our hands in the Village square, to stomp our feet, to raise our voices is a righteous act of defiance against all the forces within and around us that tempt us to forget, to deny, to numb. We write the truth of what we love in jagged, mixed-up prose streaming from dreams, memories, gut sensations – the smell of a lover, the sight of geese in fight, the sound of a forest rustling at dawn – and we are brought alive again to our senses. Being awake to this life is a holy howl.

There is a pressure on our hearts. The Tibetans have a word for it: sok lung – a blockage of the primary winds of the heart borne of the insecurity and pressure to perform in a highly competitive society. My elder Francis Weller once approached a woman in an African village to inquire about the secret to her joy. “I cry a lot,” was all she said. In a culture with so much rage, violence, addiction, and drama in our media, we seem to be obsessed with a constant stream of emotional displays without ever really being cleansed. It’s as though the more we indulge our grief and outrage, the more all-consuming it becomes. What did the woman in Africa have that we are missing?

Francis Weller believes what we lack is adequate holding, an adequate container for our grief. Without it our pain is stuck in us, recycling itself over and over, or it hardens and we leave our bodies for distracting fantasies or safety in the intellect. We are designed to sing and dance and drum our grief, to build shrines and tell stories, to shriek and wail and be held, as long as it takes for the pain to leave us, and then rise to take our place with renewed grace, depth, richness. And for the Village to shadow and hold us every step of the way. This takes patience, warmth, and witnessing, and while much of it is a solitary journey, we need the Village to hold what is never solely ours. This is what it means to belong.

What I am coming to most admire in others and to see as most revolutionary in our world are not the people who are inventing and achieving, but those who are committed to keeping their hearts soft, responsive, and steadfast in the midst of powerful limitations and opposing forces. It’s the under-employed academic writing a novel in the evenings. It’s the illustrator asking a guy she just met in a coffee shop if he wants to kiss her. It’s the burnt out executive posting videos of himself talking with wildflowers. It’s the counseling student bed-ridden with Lyme disease who does phone sessions with clients. It’s the mother who’s lost her body and sense of self to her young children and who finds the voice to sing a lullaby. It’s the survivor of childhood molestation who finds his holy howl of “no more”.

“It takes courage and tremendous psychic strength to keep one’s face turned into the wind in our culture,” Francis Weller says – to clearly see the truth of the world, to live inside of it, and yet to nurture a new reality within. To do so is “a form of soul activism and a fierce response to what’s going on in our world”. It enlarges us to face more of the truth. It roots us in the power of the unique gift we discover inside ourselves when all else is stripped away. It keeps us actively engaged with both the beauty and suffering inside of and around us.

I was not expecting my experience of the grief ritual to be about outrage and ferocity. I wept a few frail tears for my mother and then the fire entered me and I knew, without a shred of doubt, that no one will ever abuse my body again. The thundering voice that found its home in my throat cannot now be dislodged, and I emerged ready to take a stand for what I most love.

I’m not naïve. I know what I’m up against. There’s no need for me to list the limitations in myself or the stakes stacked against anyone longing for an outwardly soulful life. But I also know I don’t need anything around me to change or anyone to notice. I am wholly convinced that as we come to better know our deeper selves, we can bring our authenticity and our gifts to any set of circumstances. What transforms our experience of ourselves and our lives isn’t whether anyone else values what we are offering and becoming, but that we are nurturing it for ourselves. And that, ironically, is what starts to change everything.

Nancy

 

“In the very center, under it all,

what we have that no one can take away

and all that we’ve lost face each other.

It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured

by a holiness that exists inside everything.

I am so sad and everything is beautiful.”

• Mark Nepo