“What gives life?” My friend Jeff posed the question, “What is the most important thing in the room right now?” I thought about it for a minute and I said, “Us.” My answer was wrong. The correct answer was “air – oxygen.” Without air we’re not here. “No one ever gets that question right,” he demurred.
Beautiful insight. My friend was trying to get me to see that we all need oxygen for us to survive. That which feeds us, gives us life. That which gives us life, feeds the world we encounter. What is the thing that gives you oxygen in meaningful ways? What is the life line to deeper realization that informs the soul?
There’s an old adage. When a plane is going down the air masks fall and we are told to put the masks on ourselves before helping others. We need to keep the oxygen flowing before we can help another. It’s a practical point and one that should be taken to heart.
In scripture Jesus uses analogies of trees and life-giving aspects of plants. One such example is when he says, “You are the branches, I am the vine.” The vine is the thing that provides the nourishment for a tree to bear rich fruit. The vine is filled with chlorophyl and nutrients that feed the budding plant to produce fruit – the lifeline of conscious awareness that triggers the depths of meaning. The limbs and branches are the bones of the tree that hold the vine.
Paul Tillich said, “It’s not enough to read about God. We need to have an experience of God to understand what God is.” He not only asserts that this is possible, it’s part of life experience and there is a holy interplay between divinity and mortality.
I’ve had the great pleasure of dedicating myself to writing and reading – a life giving act as I delve deeper into the wisdom of the world and the powerful testaments of sages, but there is no substitute for life experience and participating in life’s parade of foibles and folly.
The movie “Good Will Hunting” has one of the greatest monologues I’ve ever seen regarding this idea of learned education. Will is a precocious young man, a genius who reads books and solves mathematical equations even the greatest professors at Harvard cannot solve. His therapist takes him to a park and calls him out for not “knowing shit” because he hasn’t really lived life and experienced life and know what it means to sit with a friend who is dying in a foxhole as “you hold him in your arms and watch him take his last gasp of air,” or experience the love of a woman “who could level you with her eyes.” He doesn’t have the experience. Books can only do so much, but to tap into the wisdom of a day is enlightening, because it uniquely affirms life and the glamorous expression of being.
Venturing forth in my role at my community has informed my conscience in ways I can’t readily understand. When I’m present to the act of seeing something out of the ordinary, it’s registered in the back of my brain but I go on living as I take in the whole picture. Later as I look at the picture of my day, I see the shadows and light of any given situation. The light I shone on it was one part of a person’s portrait. The rich depths of darkness and pain presented to any given person at any given time in life create the wrinkles, and blemishes, the deep-set features of impoverishment and the glimmer of light detected in the sparkle of an eye that richly gives way to seeing possibility.
We are enriched by collapses of life’s disappointments. We rebuild and bolster our foundations one event at a time. We lift ourselves off the ground, wipe the proverbial dirt of misfortune off our clothes and move forward to rebuild.
How many a night have we spent in the drunken doldrums of a club where frantic souls prey on bodies for answers? Down we go. How desperate we’ve become to foster inhibitions and insecurities and quell the creative urge because we’ve ventured a guess at what someone might say? Boom! Back on the ground. How insipid we are sitting in front of mindless entertainment to pacify the senses that have been inundated by the calculus of needs in a day and a boss’s desire to meet “quarterly goals?” How many times have we said a disparaging word about someone because we didn’t feel good about a situation and needed to feel better about what we were doing?
We are pacified through satiating the senses with leisure and feeling good. It the mesmerism of worldly fascination that cuts out the divine and chains us to suffering. G.I. Gurdjieff said, “We are walking in our sleep.” We cough the air of constancy and choke on the ordinary rituals of survival. The wise man wrote, “A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering.”
We’re animated by passions but stifled by self-loathing and our inability to reconcile with our own desires. But there’s no need to “die on the vine.” We breathe in the oxygen of creativity… We may be encumbered by our obligations but there is a creative way to address them that can make them worthy of our attention.
I walked into the day yesterday at the pantry with a blue sky of promise. I knew I was doing good and a shot of energy was sent to the brain. This is the enlightened self-interest I’ve been talking about to my students over the years. This is a realization that though it was a back breaking day, I was reminded I was alive and giving life – performing a duty for the sake of other and helping myself to the benefits of goodness.
I watched an exorcism through dance in St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City. The historic church served as a stop on the underground railroad during the Civil War. The ghosts of slavery’s indecency have seen a great light. The rhythmic beats of hardship and gyrations of dispelling painful memories that told those stories of the black experience and the gospel harmonies reverberating in the walls of the church speak to something greater as dancers were baptized in the “waters of renewal.”
It’s the energy of creative earnestness that infuses life with the shot of adrenalin we need. It’s the mindful artful intention of collaboration that sparks the fire in an audience’s belly and nourishes them with inspiration and wonder.
We live on the vine. For some it’s the arts, others its gardening, still others its cherishing presence and cultivating noble ambitions and manners in a child or inspiring others to seek justice through service. Whatever the case may be, the chlorophyl of a magic elixir is feeding the senses. Life-giving energy envelopes all we are. Find the passion, tap in and create.
spirit beat 