Turnip Soup
““At twenty-six I grew confused with games played simultaneously;
And then each part without a heart became a refrain of monotony.”
”
A short autobiographical sidebar:
The first step in putting the pieces of my heart back together again came shortly after I moved to New York when I was twenty-nine. I had been hospitalized for a serous bout of tachycardia, which put me in intensive care for a number of days, and a dear friend from college urged me to try yoga. Fortunately I listened to his wise advice, and discovered that the Integral Yoga Institute was five blocks from my apartment. Here was a twenty-nine year old body that had never had any serious exercise its entire life. My heart condition had given me a perfect excuse to avoid gym in high school. Mr. Taylor, the principle, said, “but Victor wouldn’t it be better at least to hang out with the other boys during gym? With downcast eyes I haltingly responded, “ But it will make me feel so sad not to be able to do what everyone else does.” The look on my face must have been heart-rending, naturally, I got my way, as I invariably did. My acting abilities were Oscar worthy even by high school. So I got to drive to the little town, only a mile away, skipping physical education for all four years. Basically I didn’t want to have to take off my clothes and shower with the other boys. Oh well! I used my heart condition relentlessly to avoid anything that scared, confused or made me feel inferior, which was just about anyone and everything imaginable. Basically, I successfully avoided intimacy of any size and shape for most of my growing-up years. Looking back, I see that part of my intimacy disconnect included, quite naturally, my own body, which I literally hated.
So here was this skinny twenty-nine year old guy from Tennessee, who had never once thought about doing something as exotic as yoga (this was in the early 1970’s), and who had a heart that could go from 60 beats a minute to 190 in one single skip of the heart (which means that he had been watching his breath with the vigilance of a prison guard for almost twenty years) doing a yoga posture in this strange room on the upper west side of Manhattan, filled with statues and incense, including a lovely teacher named Santoshi. How can I describe the magic of that moment? My body knew those postures! Intimately. Every one of them. It could sit in a full lotus without the slightest effort and could flip into a shoulder stand as if it had been doing yoga for decades.
My mind went into some other dimension - inner chatter stopped, and my eyes were wet with tears for the entire ninety-minute class. At the end of the class, I wanted to express my gratitude to Santoshi, so I went up to where she was standing and said, “Oh! My body feels so heavy!” The look on her face was priceless. Walking the five blocks back to my street, I realized, eventually, that I had walked many blocks past where I lived. I believe that this was the first time my consciousness really inhabited VB’s body since he was a little boy. Does that sound crazy? I have never once doubted that some part of my mind came home to the body that day. Over the years I have talked about how many of us do not really incarnate into this life. We can live in our mind for a life-time, as if we are living out a story about our life rather than living in this life, and sometimes we never come home to “this little cabin we live in,” except when it is time to leave it for good.
So hatha yoga was the first piecing together of parts without a heart, and what accompanied that spiritual reconnect was my discovery of yoga, Vedanta and Sri Ramakrishna, the Hindu saint of India. I digested the Gospel of Ramkrishna like someone who had been starving for years, and I loved the teaching of his amazing disciple Vivekananda as well. Vivekananda said, “the only sinner is one who sees a sinner in others.” Not exactly a message a child heard in the southern version of Protestant Christianity.
Ramakrishna’s teaching and hatha yoga were a bridge that connected my heart back to the chasm that had been created when it disconnected from the spiritual and unconditional love the little boy felt for Jesus. Years later, when I was staying in a village in Crete, I dreamed that I was in a vast temple, with a roof so high it was barely visible. On the far end of that space, I saw a tiny stick-like figure of a man praying and bowing before an altar. He started speaking to my mind from his mind. And I knew it was Ramakrishna. His voice was huge and uncanny. It filled the entire space, and I knew that he was teaching me. When I woke up I could not consciously remember one single word of what he tried to teach. Another “oh well,” in my life.
Today, as I was pondering how to approach more of Jung’s paragraph on monotheism and what he meant by “gods and spirits,” I had the thought, “VB, all you are doing is writing a version of “Jung for Dummies.” (Sorry, dear reader!) “Who needs it? Who cares” And I remembered a story about turnip soup. Was it one of the hundreds of charming stories Ramakrishna told his disciples? I Cannot quite remember, but here is a version of the story.
Each year the guru would come to a little village, and all the villagers would come to sit at his feet and bring him gifts. As he sat blessing all the villagers, during this particular visit, he looked around at all the gifts spread out on the floor around him: gold and silver jewelry, beautiful bowls and silk shawls, scrumptious food lovingly and carefully prepared. He nodded with appreciation at the offerings, and then reached toward the most humble of all the gifts, a small, crude bowl filled with turnip soup. The guru picked it up and smiled at a small girl shyly standing behind others at the back of the room. He said, “this child has given the most of what she had to give, and it is the most precious gift of all”
Perhaps you have figured out where I am going with this. In the session with Tom, I realized that I had to establish my own beachhead in order to write these posts. But the crucial thing that I had to accept before I could begin was remembering the truth that my turnip soup is good enough. Our offerings are always good enough if they are coming from the heart. My turnip soup may not be as brilliant as James Hillman, and God knows it is not a “perfect offering,” but isn’t it time, not only for me, but for all of us to get on with living, beginning by offering our turnip soup to those who may need it?
“Ring the bells that still can ring;
Forget your perfect offering;
There is a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.”
I set the following lyric to music when I was in college. It The words were written by a wild and wonderful woman who saw straight into my heart. (obviously, she scared the hell out of me!)
“When very small I was
All the world to my family
Who treasured me.
At Eastern schools I broke many rules
And called it
Perspicuity.
At sixteen I gave girls a whirl
Bright girls burning to believe
The dreams I dreamed to
Undress them in,
Keeping two tricks up my
Tailored sleeves.
At twenty six I grew confused
With games played simultaneously
And then each part without a heart
Became a refrain of monotony.
At thirty three my family
Still treasures me,
But who I am
Someone must see
And explain to me a philosophy.,
For I’m not the same
Yet am stuck with me,
Wanting to be not thirty yet,
But more than three. ”
Three years after that age of thirty-three, and still with no philosophy, I left New York for Crete and India.
We will return to Jung’s “god’s, spirits, and the monotheism of consciousness” in the following post.
