April 21, 2010 - Death

I know the tendency we have to want things, including Enlightenment, now.  What's the fastest way I can get there?  Where's my Fast Trak pass?  I try for patience but on this day I wondered aloud, "What's the one thing I need to know, the one thing that if I mastered I could achieve a happy and healthy heart and life, sooner, this year, as opposed to later?'  And Death came back.

Life is full of transitions and endings.  I am not always good with them.  There are forces or currents that carry us to and through, what my grandmother called "the gods," which I tend to think as fate.  Sometimes we are caught up in the inescapable, the inexorable.  Like Odysseus, we try to avoid the war but in the end we must go, and thus begins our long exile from home.  I am not always graceful with these larger forces either.  I can accept bypass surgery, hip replacement, but I cannot gracefully allow the end of a love, the loss of a love.  I may have come to terms with the loss of a job, the unfortunate fallout of what comes after, but there are some things I cannot seem to accept, or at least that is how I have been.  Nietzsche uses a term, amor fati, to love one's fate, the good and the bad all as necessary.  That is where I need to be, the only healthy and happy place to be.  This is my greatest struggle, but should I master myself and come to terms with it, how life will open.  Not sure how to do it beyond continued wrestling with myself.  Maybe one day, I'll just get too tired, raise my hands in surrender and just let go.

There is just such a place in the Odyssey.  Odysseus is clinging to what's left of his raft.  Poseidon, angry at Odysseus for killing his son, is tossing the hero about, doing his godly best to drown him.  And a goddess comes to Odysseus and lends him her scarf which will keep him safe (but not unbattered; there is so much wisdom in this story) and urges him to let go of that bit of raft and trust himself, her scarf, his fate.  After much grousing and grumbling, ranting and railing (Odysseus and I have a lot in common), he does just that, and is tossed and hurt but delivered onto land, to a welcoming place that will ultimately help him find his way home.  I don't know if Odysseus ever came to love his fate, but he did come to accept it, to let go, and to find his way home.  One could say the letting go was the last step, the critical one.  Maybe all journeys home require this last, reluctant release of our hopes and expectations.

Seems a pretty tall order for this modern day Odysseus, but I'm hopeful.  In the meantime, I promise I'll keep you posted.