Getting On With It
Back from Ireland and Scotland and my so-called “experience is food for the soul.” Actually it gave me a bad case of psychological indigestion. As I sat on the plane from Amsterdam to Los Angeles, it occurred to me that when James Hillman said that experience is food for the soul, he never implied that experience is comfort food for the soul. That was my own romantic interpretation. Perhaps there will be time and space to share more of my trip to Ireland and my disappointment in the Jung conference in a future essay, but for now psyche whispers “it’s time to get on with it.” When psyche says “it’s time to get on with it” one needs to give her very careful attention, especially when that “one” is seventy-eight years old.
For me, getting on with it means that it is time to post “A Letter from Crete,” which I wrote when I was thirty-six years old. My resistance to posting it has been illuminating. I have treasured it since I wrote it forty years ago, sharing it with a few friends over the years, not to mention the number of clients who have had to listen (probably more than once) to the stories about my journey to Crete and India beyond that. So why such resistance to making something so precious to me public? Perhaps the answer is clear in the question.
As I ponder my resistance, I think that I have always judged my Letter too harshly. It’s clearly no masterpiece, nor is it a spiritual tour de force. It isn’t deep like Jung or engaging like Hillman. Nor is it awe-inspiring like words of the Buddha. In fact it is much like a childhood treasure that one has hidden away for decades. One finally can see the child in the treasure and love it for what it is
I cannot tell the story of my life, without sharing that letter and the puer aeternas (eternal child) who wrote it. Getting on with it also means something else. It means sharing some songs that I wrote during my life as a musician in New York, music long since forgotten! I recorded “Byrdsongs” in my apartment with Jim McNeely, a great jazz pianist, along with an excellent sound engineer in 1986, just before leaving for three years of meditation at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Somehow I truly knew that I was leaving my life as a musician forever, and I wanted some record of some of my songs. Perhaps mostly, I want to share an Anglican Mass that I wrote for the choir of St. Edward the Martyr in Harlem in the late 70’s. I am astonished to listen to it now and to love it, and to remember the guy who wrote that music.
As an introduction to what will come in future posts, let me share this short essay.
_____________________________________________
“When I first arrived in Heraklion, I found a pension owned by a wonderful woman named Helen. In those days, people with a room to rent would stand on the dock, waving little handwritten signs that said “rooms for rent,” as they waited for the daily boat arriving with a fresh load of tourists from Athens. When I stepped off the boat, I headed directly toward Helen, as if I already knew she was the right person for me. I got in her car, and off we drove to her home. After going through the usual mechanics of renting a room and unpacking a few clothes, I put my traveling bag in a closet and walked immediately down to the Mediterranean Sea which was patiently waiting, perhaps half a mile below Helen’s home. Even though I was exhausted from a sleepless night, having opted for the cheapest ticket - simply a chair on the deck of the boat, I had this urge to walk down to the sea.
In some way that only the heart understands, arriving in Crete was a kind of homecoming for me; I found a rather desolate area, quite a distance from the bustling harbor, spied a large rock, and sat down to ponder and embrace where I was. I had spent the night on deck reading Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis’s autobiographical work that intermingles his life with El Greco’s. It is a wonderful book. Now here I was on the very island where they were both born, sitting by the same sea that nurtured the soul of who they were
My body was thirty-six years old. How old was the psychological one who called himself Victor? At that time, I would have said that, emotionally, I was a teenager, maybe sixteen? In retrospect, I realize that I was even younger.
I had been traveling for weeks: Rome, Florence, Venice, traveling by bus up the Adriatic coast of Croatia, stopping in Dubrovnik and finally Belgrade. From there I took a train to Athens, and sat next to a woman with a huge wicker basket filled with food for her husband who was in jail for some offense. I simply loved who she was, and knew that her man was lucky indeed. But here, sitting by the sea, something in me finally rested, and in some complete way I literally drank it all in, not just the mind or the intellect, but somehow the body itself was home, every cell was communing with the soul of Crete. I have never had a similar experience. Perhaps one can only return home just once in a lifetime.
The thought came to me, “Why am I getting to have this experience?” Perhaps that sounds strange to you, but that was the thought that came to me. Why did I get to experience this amazing moment and not my brother Jim or my sister Sue? I knew that they would never get to have a moment like this, nor most of the friends whom I had left behind in New York City, where I had lived for the past decade. I knew that my brother and sister would each have their own wonderful moments, experiences that I would never have, and I was glad for them. But there was something about this moment, this reconnecting to mystery, that seemed utterly rare.
Then another thought came that I have remembered and cherished to this very day. I knew that I was sitting there, on that rock, so far away from the safe shelter of home, family and the familiar, for the sake of some future Victor yet to be born. I knew that one day he would look back and remember this Victor and he would be grateful for the young man who had the courage to leave his small, safe world in America and come here to be utterly alone and afraid. I think perhaps this is why I want to share his letter from Crete and to share who he was with you.
As I sat on that big rock, I spied a stray dog warily making his way toward me. He was all skin and bones, shabby fur, and utterly alone, and as he slowly and cautiously ambled in my direction, I remembered immediately my own dog, Willy, my gorgeous, silly, fantastic Doberman Pincer. I gave him up in order to come to Crete, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. My eyes were wet with tears as that stray dog quietly, carefully moved near; I gently rubbed his head, and it seemed likely that he had never had someone touch him softly in his life. To this day I remember the way he lifted his head and moved into the touch of my outstretched hand. Slowly and very carefully he touched my hand with his tongue, which felt so rough and yet so gentle. It felt as if he knew instinctively that this was perhaps all he would ever get in his short life. I had no food to give him, had no way to take care of him, and I was exhausted, but not as exhausted with life as he must have been. And I still had a long climb up the hill back to the pension. The thing is, he did not seem to want or expect anything from me. That was what was most amazing. When I left that spot, he did not try to follow me – he just sat and watched me walk away. We parted having touched one another in the deepest part.
Until a few years ago, I always thought that psychological change, true psychological change, is only available to the wounded. Almost in an inverse relationship, the more profound the wound, the greater potential for real change. It is as if our psychic wounds are the very grains of sand that create a pearl of something new. Of course that sets up quite a paradox, since the more profound the psychological wound, the less likely one is able to transcend that wound. I always suspected that there was more than a little narcissism in my theory; after all, I dragged my bundle of psychological wounds all the way from New York City to Heraklion, too certain, and perhaps foolishly, that I was on the verge of a miracle. But the narcissism did not worry me as much as the pessimism inherent in that theory. What chance do we humans have to grow in awareness and love, to truly change, if the only ones who have a real possibility of true psychological change are the misfits (as I dimly knew myself to be), the ones who are unable to find a comfortable nest where they can settle down like domesticated animals and live out the relentless patterns laid down so long ago?
I think this is why, many years after Crete, my discovery of the teachings of Buddha was such a pivotal moment in my life. From the Buddha’s perspective, we are all misfits; endlessly seeking to fill up empty space because we cannot bear the truth of our essence. You can see how this “pessimistic” view of reality, the Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering, eventually became, for me, the best news possible. The “irritating” grains of sand that cause us to suffer are not some cosmic accident of birth, or of karma, or some stark deterministic obituary for our lives. The irritating grains are not problems to be fixed by improving our function or learning “techniques for smoother living.” They are the intrinsic, human urge to wholeness that Carl Jung so wisely saw and taught. They are psyche’s silent whisper telling us that it’s time to get on with it.
