A New Day Rising

“To the extent that you close and pull back from your experience, you feel separate. To the extent that you close and protect your heart, you feel alone. To the extent that you close to your deepest desire and opt for security, you feel disempowered.”

From ‘Breathe Everything’ in Blue Truth by David Deida (2005: Sounds True)

New Day. New Moon. Rain washing the city streets momentarily clean…What are we doing with this day? Are we rushing through the wet streets in anguish or do we really believe in where we are going? Do we return home tonight to dissolve into the arms of our loved ones or is the doorway to them already closed before we get there? If we do not have loved ones can we be kind to ourselves? If we have lost someone recently can we open to this fully and allow the vast loss that echoes through the chambers of the heart of this world to resound in us also? In short, are we alive or dead?

Today in the rain there appears to me to be two deaths: one massive, appropriate and noble and the other a worm-tongued spin doctor spreading a lie…For the true death will come for us at our time. Whether in old age or youth, in our sleep or running around the block, we will be struck by the change…the sign of the white sail…to take us away. Yet many will have already been cheated. As I have often reflected with clients after a ‘close encounter’, a session that deepens the relationship to ourselves, it is amazing how far we will go to keep the reality of our existential reckoning, our nakedness before life and death, at bay. The fine and oh so expensive houses, the big cars, the HD widescreens to watch the shifting world and our feverish fantasies about that world, they offer a veil, the modern distraction. It is not wrong to have a car or TV, certainly I have them - it is what we do with them. Sometimes the big car and the high wall round the big house are just that, walls. Yes we need sanctuary but are we finding it? Is that what we see when we turn the lights on?

Deida writes that “Your effort to avoid pain is as natural as pain itself”. Yet this avoidance can cheat us from the true conflict of life and death and instead compensate with the death-in-life of false compromise and security; the Albatross of fear around our necks. Like the Ancient Mariner we cannot drink of life for our guilt and our fear. As I myself navigate the tides of ‘I should have..’ and ‘I wish I hadn’t done that..’, as I slow the ship down through the rocks of my self-angst, my unbearableness, the all-too-muchness of it all, I say could we start again?

Could this be a new day rising, a white sail on the horizon? Can we be reborn in the moment of ourselves, unfolding into our lives that are lived within the life of the World? There is a stream; the invitation is for us to enter. What would entering be like? Well we might ask questions…Could we finally just stop playing the game, the stupid blame, and love him or her? Or if not could we just say so ‘I don’t feel it right now..’ without our own or another’s world crashing down all around and if it does crash just being with that…in the new day.

Could we forgive our parents? God knows they won’t live forever and most of them were not the Nazi war criminals that our childish hurt made them. And those that were well we could forgive them to? Or even if not could we not act? Act as ourselves free of that link? Can we grow and be born into this world? Can we put down the crutches, the blame and despair, the substances and obsession with money? I ask you, all my friends, and those I will never meet, could we put it all down and meet each other in a new day?

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Sudden Shower at Ohashi Bridge at Atake by Ando Hiroshige (1857), Sunset after a Storm on the Coast of Sicily by Andreas Achenbach (1853)