I language the world for
a living. And though I hate to admit it (because it’s bad for business) it really
can’t be done. As a writer, lecturer, and singer-songwriter, my entire career
has been a quixotic battle to achieve the impossible. I strive to express what
cannot be expressed. I oversell and under-deliver every single day.
And yet I keep trying. Because you get close. Once in a
while you pierce the fog with the bright shard of an idea, a fortunate turn of
phrase, an apt metaphor. You get close to naming the mystery. You almost sing
truth. But stepping off stage you know you missed it. Your old friend
disappointment comes to visit. You didn’t get it, not really. But on the
calendar a string of speaking events, concerts, and writing deadlines loom
before you, like downstream towns on a river journey – chances to try again. You’ll
do better next time.
I guess all work is like this. Raising children, starting
a business, writing books, mastering any craft. You begin with the end in mind,
or at least what you imagine the end to be, and you get busy. But you don’t
really know what you’re doing, or where this is all going, or what value any of
it will have. You have nothing to guide you but your gut sense that this is
worthwhile, that it matters, that it will somehow help others meet their own
nameless needs. Because that is one thing you do know – that all work is
service, that we are all here to play our part in a symphony of infinite
complexity and breathtaking beauty. Seen this way, life begins to shimmer with
significance, and you begin to see your choices as instruments wielded not by your
narrow self-interest but by the cosmos itself. It no longer feels like you
alone are doing this. It’s more like you are being led or called or compelled
by something not you. Maybe the way we
show up and offer our gifts is how the universe shows up and offers its gifts.
Everything in the foreground is the mouthpiece through which the background
depths speak. When you get out of your own way your true voice emerges.
When you begin to understand this better, you begin to
relax. You let go of the illusion of control and you renounce the need to be
perfect. You know that who you are, how you are, and what you are is enough.
And with a sense of play you go about improving your work in a thousand little
ways, not because what you did last time was lousy – it wasn’t – but because
something better is trying to emerge through you, as you. And who are you to
interfere with that?
It’s liberating to know that you don’t have to have all
the answers before you begin. It’s inspiring to know that your own nameless
longing is the same nameless longing that courses through everything. And it’s
empowering to know that our private suffering connects us to one another in a
web of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being.” We are never alone. There is
no such thing as alone.
As we deepen into the realization that our yearning is
not a private pang of deficiency, but the cosmos longing to give birth to
itself through us, we surrender, let go, smile, and shift into optimism and
wonderment. Being a witness and a
participant of this great unfolding is our highest bliss.
The 13th century Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart put it this way: “What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the Son
of God 1,400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my
time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always
needing to be born.”
And 13th century Sufi poet Rumi put it this
way in his poem Each Note:
God
picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each
note is a need coming through one of us
a
passion, a longing-pain.
Remember
the lips
where
the wind-breath originated,
and
let your note be clear.
Don’t
try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll
show you how it’s enough.
Go
up on the roof at night
in
this city of the soul.
Let
everyone climb on their roofs
and
sing their notes!
Sing
loud!
When
we live authentically, answering the call and courageously trading security for
the danger of self-realization, we honor ourselves and the universal source in
one fell swoop. How can this not lead to rewards unimagined in more timid
hours?
We
do not breathe – we are breathed. We do not sing– we are sung. We do not make
art – art makes us. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings
having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human
experience.” And when you begin to experience life this way – not as a private
event but as a wave in a boundless sea of waves – you slip into illumined stillness
and from there everything is possible.
It
is the role of the artist to bring forth these realizations in ever new forms
relevant for their time and place, and to show us our oneness. Art connects us
all in a binding ritual and reminds us of our common humanity. Art crosses all
borders, no, annihilates all borders. The storytellers and film makers who
reveal our secrets through the lives of their characters, the musicians who color
our silence with sound, the poets who say the unsayable, the painters who show
what cannot be seen, the sculptors who wrest shape from shapelessness – artists
re-present the ineffable power of our own lives to us over and over again, and
in this way affirm us in our limitlessness and infinite beauty.
As
Meister Eckhart said, we are here to give birth to God – the formless source
that takes form as our thoughts, our bodies, our words, our actions, and the
majesty of the entire cosmos. “God is always needing to be born,” he wrote, and
he was right. As we midwife one another’s birthing, and as we endure the
sometimes agonizing process of our own birthing, we honor ourselves, each
other, and the sacred source. Our lives are the instruments through which the
universe sings. And as Rumi wrote, “Let your note be clear…be your note. I’ll
show you how it’s enough.”
