I say travels, but I am not going anywhere.
Most of my life I projected a future that – although it never came – kept me passionately focused on tomorrow rather than today, there instead of here. It felt optimistic and forward looking. It privileged dreaming over any other activity. A different house, different land, different job, different writing, different whatever. That’s when life begins! That’s when I’ll be happy!
I no longer do that. So I am not going anywhere.
This is a disorienting and unsettled way of being, but I am grateful. Letting go of a valuable defense is never easy, but good things happen when we clear space for God.
One of the hard things – one of the things I wish I could share with folks getting started with the course – is that when you become responsible for projection, when you actively seek reality rather than fantasy, life unsettles itself. It can feel boring or even scary.
Projection is always a defense against knowing yourself. When we lay a defense down we feel vulnerable. What if I am attacked? I get attacked all the time.
The work is, you have to stick it out through that fear. The commitment to becoming responsible for projection isn’t about changing the content of the projection. It’s not about new and improved projections.
It’s about laying the whole mental process of projection aside forever.
Vulnerability is what it feels like to remember your innocence. It’s not easy. But when we are vulnerable, we are in the presence of innocence. It’s good to intentionally notice this. It makes the rawness feel less troubling. There’s a beauty and a harmony there that’s deeper than fear can reach.
If we practice being still within the experience of vulnerability, then a transformation occurs. The innocence clarified by vulnerability becomes a light in which we see the value of sharing – of supporting one another, making one another safe, making one another at home in the world.
Tara Singh wrote often about the connection between awakening and “having something to give another.” It changes everything, having something to give and knowing what it is.
So “I am not going anywhere” is also a statement about my commitment to facing my fear of holiness and relationship that you offer me. That is what “here” becomes – the site where we learn what we are in truth through the gentle mechanics of a relationship in which both parties seek only the holiness and well-being of the other.
If I stop projecting a future in which everything is brighter, solider, happier, livelier – just, you know, different than all this – then I learn something.
I learn that I am scared of a quiet life, a stable life, a tender life. I learn that I am scared of what relationship means in a life like that.
I meet the interior addict again – the one who cannot bear boredom or sameness, who treasures specialness and separate interests, who will literally put his life in danger just to feel something. Even after all these years his arguments remain persuasive.
I meet the inner child again – the one who loves prisms and reading, walking dogs in the forest, baking bread and soup, playing guitar and writing poems. He appears so naive and trusting.
I’m scared to love that child. I know the ways the world can destroy him. I also hate him for being weak. Why should I have to step up and be his protector?
I wish I didn’t feel that way but I do. I wish there had been another way – an easier way, maybe. Less cluttered and winding.
I put the writing aside and go outdoors. The horses don’t know it’s Advent. The hemlock trees aren’t ranging through the intersection of pop spirituality and twelve step psychology.
They are my teachers, too.
The air is cold in my lungs; crows holler on the far side of the river. I mutter a few prayers and face the rising sun.
Cater-corner to the horse pasture is our raspberry patch. For the last couple years I have forgotten to trim them back. What was once neat rows for easy picking has become an impenetrable tangle. Woodchucks built an entrance to their underground palace at its center. I count a couple empty bird nests.
I’m a bad homesteader. There’s probably half a dozen pies and twenty or thirty pints of jam in there, and we basically eat a couple handfuls in passing. If I was more disciplined, lessy dreamy . . .
But also, what’s messy to me is not to the woodchucks. What doesn’t go in my pantry doesn’t go uneaten – blue jays and chickadees and sparrows see to that. Does it matter if the patch has overgrown the fire pit? Crept nearly all the way to the horse gate?
I’m not going anywhere, I tell the horses. The horses say – in the way horses do – that’s cool but you could at least go to the barn and get us a couple flakes of hay?
I get them hay.
The bland lesson of all my life’s travels – the escapism, the lies, the homelessness – all the catastrophes and all the comedy – is that wherever I have gone, I am always there waiting.
I wrote last week about finding a gift for God this Advent, and I wonder if the question is less what is the gift – that’s not really a secret, is it – than do I have the courage and discipline to give it.
I can’t tell if the raspberries are a failure or a success. I don’t know if my heart is ready for the truth. I’ve come a long way but . . .
. . . where am I really?
I go back inside and make more coffee to finish the writing. The kids are up getting ready for chores. I’m scared and confused – but also a little happy – getting around to these last sentences. I wish you were here. Over coffee and pancakes we could talk about it: what does God want? What can we possibly give?
At the table – in the inquiry – I wonder where we would go?
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And away we go…glad to be scribbling on the path with you this Advent season.
I used to pride myself on not being one of those people who dwell on the past. I was a future-oriented person! Ha! Live and learn.
I could comment on just about every sentence here, Sean, but I’ve got my own entry to write. 😉 This one, though:
“One of the hard things – one of the things I wish I could share with folks getting started with the course – is that when you become responsible for projection, when you actively seek reality rather than fantasy, life unsettles itself. It can feel boring or even scary.”
This is so true. I have seen it again and again in people who are beginning their journey with the Course. And these feelings still arise even after years of practice. To know that this is perfectly “normal” in the sense of “to be expected” eliminates some of the fear. This is why it’s so important to join hands and walk this path together…to let others know it’s okay…because tomorrow I may need someone to remind me.
I have started using the term “spiritual doula” to discuss how we help each other on this wonderful path we walk. We are steeped in a world that has so many ideas and opinions about how we live and die. As spiritual doulas, we show up for each other with a wink and a whisper of Truth when worldly fears surface.
Thanks, Margaret. I love the idea of a spiritual doula – and the concept of Doulas generally, such a helpful model for how to be in relationship with one another, and how to create a world in which we CAN be in relationship with one another.
I think also yes, the support and encouragement we offer, but the other thing I am lately aware of is the need for discernment, to have folks around that you can check yourself with – this is my understanding of this, this is the call I am hearing – can you help me think it through, see the many sides, so it can rest in my creatively and sustainably and non-dramatically.
Thank you 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Dear Sean,
I happily take the first steps with you and other brothers & sisters today on this Advent journey, without actually moving! ;-)) Where will we find ourselves? We are all very near to you, with you, drinking that coffee and talking about God.
“²He speaks from nearer than your heart to you. ³His Voice is closer than your hand. “[CE W-125.7:1-3].
But the same goes for all of us, we really are together, we may be miles apart, but it does not matter at all, we are in truth not apart at all and this journey is evidence of that.
So we take a sip of coffee and we will every day get closer to our Christ Self (that we share) and indeed that can go pretty deep, that inner journey. It can all be unsettling, this honest journalling. But now that we know we are not alone, it becomes a joy. Furthermore, I never write anything without the Holy Spirit. Talking about a guide and comforter close by!
So thanks so much for starting this and I have been journaling this morning. We had a blockage and a leak in my house here and it was wet and we had to clean it up, but I had to do my inner work and healing with this as well. It was not about the outside blockage and the flood of the water down the stairs, it was about the blockage and flood inside of me! It may have looked to be outside but it is ALL inside my mind, even if there was water involved LOL. This was already such a great situation for healing and journaling and this is only day 1! Looking forward to the rest of the days. Love, 💖 Valentine
Valentine you tripped right into a major trigger for me – water damage. I have such fear around that – and since we have to deal with water a lot where we live – lots of flooding and leaking in this old old house – I have to navigate this fear often. Once, in an older house a long time ago, the basement flooded and wading into it to try and save some stuff I came up on a handful of snakes writhing to death in the freezing water. My heart broke for them AND I was terrified of them.
So . . . I’m glad you were able to navigate that little challenge. I probably would have been weeping in a corner 🙂
And more seriously, thank you for sharing and for your deep kindness. I am grateful to be learning with you right now.
~ Sean
I was really interested by your inner child comment, my love and learning lately has been to protect my inner child, I recognised her for the first time this May and I saw that the protection she needed was from myself … I hated her for being weak also, I was shaming and crushing her for not being or having the qualities required for protection in the world … of my projection.
Im learning now to love her, I make promises to her, I tell her I won’t turn my back on you I won’t abandon you, I’m here now I will always be here … and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry i didn’t know it was safe, that I was safe loving you.
I’ve noticed when I am actively loving that innocence it feels like that is where safety is, it’s so beautiful and yet I don’t live there, I visit, I have to remember.
Being in Australia my first day of Advent was yesterday and I got my prompt from what you wrote in your Substack post – “Advent a season of longing that a promise may at last be kept.”
I long for what Is
Amanda this is so so clear and so so perfect. I am really grateful to you for picking up that inner child thread and carrying it forward. It’s an important one for me but I am scared of it and really struggle with the language and the tenderness and responsibility that it calls forth in us. Earlier last year I was doing a lot of work in the ACA space and it was both profoundly beautiful and helpful AND unsettling. I am so touched by your sharing and courage. Thank you 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Thank you for the invitation to join you for this Advent journey Sean. Yesterday I set the intent to join you…along with two of my very best friends…in this adventure. I was so looking forward to it! I suppose I should not have been surprised when I awoke in a very uncomfortable frame of mind this morning…to a day that seemed to follow suit. As I sit here looking back over the day, the one thing that colored the entire day with muddy colors was really nothing more than my frame of mind. And I wonder why was that dark frame of mind what I woke up to this morning? Where did that come from? And why did I seem so incapable of shaking it, in spite of all the many things I’ve learned since becoming a Course student…or should I say UNlearned? Apparently I still have much more yet to be unlearned.
While on the subject of questions, there were three things toward the end of your article that stood out for me…
…where am I really?
…what does God want that we could possibly give?
…in the inquiry, where will we go?
I was not sure what exactly to write about during this period of journaling. These questions…along with those I’ve asked myself in the previous paragraph…seem to be a good starting point. And I have no doubts that this peculiar and uncomfortable day was intended as a gift…waiting to be unwrapped…a very important part of this Advent experience.
Thank you again for the invitation. See you in the morning for coffee! Please bring raspberries…
Thank you, Donna. The “muddy colors” leaped out at me but also just that sense of holding a hopeful expectation and then finding it . . . kind of darkened or whatever. Like we can be all spiritually attuned and disciplined and ready to go and . . . the muddy colors come. Your comment – and Amanda’s – both helped me realize how much fear remains in my psyche, how much undoing remains, etc etc. I’m grateful for that.
I hope your journaling goes well – and yes to the coffee and raspberries 🙏🙏
~ Sean