The Wisdom of Spring

Since the invention of language, poets and writers have strained every linguistic fiber and stretched every metaphoric muscle to celebrate the magic of spring. Songs have been written, symphonies composed, paintings painted and sculptures sculpted. We’re perennially drawn to the emblematic power of spring because it represents our own capacity to begin again, to rise from the ashes of winter and to stand reborn in the bright light of redemption. Spring is proof that death is not real. No matter how low and how long the downturn, there is always resurrection. Hidden in plain sight, right before our eyes, spring turns the myth of eternal recurrence into concrete fact. The wisdom of spring is ripening all around us.

Grow. Like ascending fireworks, flower bulbs shoot up long thin columns that burst into color. The smooth and deceptively barren wood of deciduous trees erupts with buds that split open unfurling bright green flags in the wind. Everywhere new forms arise from the pregnant core of old forms. The emptiness of winter fills with emerging shapes casting new shadows across the thaw. And like the awakening world around us, the restlessness we feel inside of our body, mind and soul is our own endless unfurling. We hunger to learn more, see more, be more, and find new ways to give voice to the music within us. Learning to get out of the way, we allow what is emerging through us to flower and expand into fruition.

Be bold. In spring time, life gets loud. Every living thing comes out of its shell and stands tall. Colors just a little too vivid, birdsongs just a little too shrill, sunlight just a little too bright – everything is over the top, unafraid to grab attention and rise above the rest. What if we dropped our practiced reticence? What if we stopped being so…beige? What if we let the explosive beauty of our own inner nature finally arise unfiltered, unprocessed, raw and impetuous? Would we frighten our more polite neighbors? You’re alive, and life is messy. So be it.

Play. Newborn lambs bound across the field, leaping in the air for the sheer joy of having legs. Coyote pups roll in the sage grappling and snarling in mock combat. Everywhere the young at heart let a skip into their step and do delightful things for no good reason. What if we let the simple enjoyment of being alive guide us for an hour or so? Would we really fall so far behind on our precious to-do lists? Or would our mindless reverie invigorate and enliven our deeper creativities? Fall into play, and watch your productivity climb tenfold.

Celebrate. Nature decorates itself majestically. Festooned with blossoms and flowing curtains of green, a dogwood and cedar forest draws close around a meadow of columbine like a gathering of family. Through the meadow runs a ribbon of cold clear water the color of lapis and quicksilver. Butterflies float from blossom to blossom like thoughts meandering through a placid mind. In our homes we clean and renew and restore and rededicate. We paint rooms, clear out garages and wash windows. We set tables, light candles, arrange bouquets, and prepare meals from the bounty of our gardens. We welcome friends and let the space in which we gather become a sacred place of commemoration and celebration, banishing the mundane banality of our aloneness with the mirth of our songs.

Be beautiful. Nature cannot help but be beautiful. Her beauty arises out of her own nature, not arduous effort. So too the beauty of our lives arises out of our own nature and not through calculated artifice or clever striving. We do not add one speck of beauty to our lives by worrying if we are good enough or by comparing ourselves with others. Yes our clothes and hair and make-up and jewelry are wonderful, and it is certainly fun to play in the field of forms, but real beauty is an inner light not of our own making. You can’t find it at the mall. Beauty is not something you buy – it is something you are.

Take chances. Rabbits run the same trails as coyotes. Mule deer sleep in the meadow with mountain lions. Sparrows fly in the flight lines of Cooper’s hawks. New sagebrush and lavender spring up from the scorched earth left by last year’s wildfires. Nature risks everything for a chance to fly, run or bloom. In our own lives there are always a million reasons why it’s never going to work and a long list of impending disasters. Instead of carefully cataloging the height and width of every barrier, marveling at the power of our enemies and inventing problems that never happen, let us simply take root, take flight or take the next step as if the universe were conspiring in our favor, because it is.

Shine right where you are. When a seed falls in a crack in a granite boulder it doesn’t dream of loamy meadows – it grows and blooms right where it is. Every place is the right place to be. Making peace with our genetic code, saying yes to the conditions of our lives that we cannot change, practicing deep and mindful acceptance – these are the gifts we give ourselves on the path to serenity and effectiveness. How can we truly grow, create and thrive if we do not first stop resisting what is?

Say yes to love. When spring lights up the world, love is certainly in the air. Love invites us into a deep and vital reckoning with all that is good and bad about ourselves, all of our unconscious maladies and beauties. In love we must surrender to the truth about whom and what we really are. Nothing is hidden, all is revealed. In order to embrace and be embraced by love, we must tap into everything we know and apply every skill as artfully as possible while simultaneously relinquishing control and surrendering to music we did not write and cannot fully hear. We must embody everything spring has taught us. We must allow growth, be bold, recover our playfulness, celebrate our beauty and the beauty of others, take enormous risks, and learn to shine in the here and now of this time and place. When we answer the call and join together with another in love, we come to know, not in our minds but deep in our bones, that this life-force surging in us, through us, and as us is an energy not of our own making, and the very fact of our lives is a mystery and a majesty no poet, sage or prophet has every fully conveyed or understood. When we love we dive deep into that formless ocean of sacred consciousness that goes down and down and down to the place where all of the riddles are solved, all of the heartaches are healed, and all of the secrets are revealed – but when we rise again to the surface we cannot bring any of that with us. We reappear naked and naïve, stripped of insight and bereft of wisdom – frolicking like fawn in the meadows of renewal, caught by the beauty and significance of the world, but strangers in it still and awkward in our own skin. Yet there beside us is a trusted friend, a soul like us, a kind face, a hand up, a loving embrace, and in their presence we feel our worth, and we learn to trust their trust, honor their honor and take refuge in the shelter of their love. Together we rise up and take our place among the sacred things of this world. Together we are beautiful and free. Together we honor the seeds from which we came and grow strong enough to pass along what we have been given in the great blossoming. This and so much more is what we learn from the wisdom of spring.

The Hidden Meaning of Easter

“Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” -- Eckhart Tolle


Lately I’ve been trying to grow cilantro. Having an inexpensive and unending supply of the versatile herb is very appealing to me. But it happens every time. As soon as there are enough leaves for one good harvest the plant goes to seed, shooting up a thick leafless seed stalk. Cilantro doesn’t seem too concerned with what I want, or its own survival for that matter. All it cares about is the next generation. Its sole purpose seems to be to produce seeds, then promptly die. The fresh, pungent leaves that perfect my guacamole and chicken pad thai seem an incidental side effect.

Out on the patio, bent over another failed planter box of cilantro on a radiant spring morning, I can’t help but ponder the circling spiral of birth and death framed by the one changeless constant – forms may come and go but Life itself is eternal.

In world mythology and religion there is a long-standing tradition of drawing images and metaphors, and indeed entire theological scenarios from the world of nature. For Laozi the Dao is like water or a tender blade of grass. For Krishna, Brahman is like the sea that never imposes its own shape but takes on the shape of the shore as its own. For Jesus, God’s love is like rain, the Kingdom Heaven is like seeds, Jesus is the vine, we are the branches and by our fruit we shall be known. Jesus knew how to talk to farmers, even disheartened backyard cilantro farmers.

Every year in the spring billions of Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Many believe it was a literal event – that Jesus actually came back from the dead. For others, the story is a metaphor signifying the undying nature of Spirit. Either way, Easter signifies the triumph of life over death, a theme ancient agricultural people would have no trouble understanding.

Even a cursory glance at the world’s mythological and religious traditions reveals the widespread presence of the dying god motif, the archetypal tale of the gift-giving god whose sacrificial death brings rain or corn or eternal life. From Osiris to Quetzalcoatl to Odin to Attis to Dionysus to Jesus the god must die, often hung from a tree and then buried in the ground, planted like a seed only to rise again. The loss becomes a gain. The seed becomes grain for the bread of life. Sacrificial death, initially seen as an act of destruction, becomes an act of creation. As old forms dissolve, new forms arise. The tomb becomes a womb.

It is no accident that the dying god motif originated in early agricultural societies. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that early farming cultures, bound by the seasons, would recognize the cyclical nature of birth and death. Seeds are the source of new life and it is only in the death stage that plants produce seeds. Life comes only from death and from no where else. It becomes clear that death and birth are simply two points on a circle. The yin-yang symbol, the archetypal image of the snake eating its own tail as well as the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, Navajo sand painting and Jungian psychology all illustrate the universal awareness of this essential principle.

Also prevalent in early agricultural societies is the archetype of the Mother Goddess. Intimate with the generative energies of the earth, early farmers began to characterize the earth’s powers as feminine. Like mother earth, human mothers give life out of their own bodies and then sustain and nourish that life from their own bodies. The alignment of the twenty eight day lunar cycle and the twenty eight day menstrual cycle further concretizes this primal symmetry.

It is the Mother Goddess who ushers us into the world of forms. Every human being who ever walked the earth emerged from the body of a woman. From the goddess we come and to the goddess we return. The burial ritual is clearly a carry-over from this ancient realization. The dead, in burial, are taken back into the body of the earth-mother like seeds, completing the circle and thus overcoming the apparent finality of death. Circles, by definition, have no beginning and no end. As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “there never was a time when you did not exist, nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist.” Rebirth is not only suggested by the burial rite; it is assured, at least in the minds of its participants.

Since it is the Goddess so to speak that gave birth to us all, it should come as no surprise that gods too have mothers. The Mother Goddess sends forth her son, the dying god, as a willing sacrifice – a short-lived spark from the eternal realm bringing light into the darkness of the world. This fundamental narrative is repeated all over the world on every continent and in every mythology. Some dying gods, like Odin, Dionysus and Jesus are hung on trees (or manmade structures resembling trees like crosses) before they are buried underground or journey to the underworld. Jesus goes into the tomb for three days, the same length of time Jonah was in the belly of the great fish. Three days is also the length of time the moon is dark before beginning its journey back to fullness. Astronomical and physiological analogies abound. To modern people perpetually insulated from the night sky by their well-lit homes this may seem merely curious or even insignificant. To ancient people living under the stars for tens of thousands of years these alignments were as real as the night was long.

Central to the dying god motif is the theme of generative sacrifice. The death or suffering of the god always results in tremendous benefit to the world at large. In explicit violation of Zeus’s wishes Prometheus steals fire from Mt. Olympus and gives it to humankind, enraging Zeus and earning himself a horrible punishment. For all eternity Prometheus must remain chained to a rock while his liver is ripped from his body by vultures, only to grow back overnight with the whole process commencing anew in the morning. Talk about sacrifice. If given the chance to do it all over again, even with his infinite suffering, Prometheus wouldn’t change a thing. That’s just what gods do. And he isn’t the only one. Gods all over the world gave their lives in order that we might have corn or fire or everlasting life. Native American mythology is particularly rich with the theme of the gift-giving god who relinquishes his form yet somehow lives on.

In his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recounts an Ojibwe myth about the hero Wunzh (who Longfellow called Hiawatha). In the tale, Wunzh embarks on a heroic quest with all the requisite elements – hardship, danger, struggle, prayer and visions followed by electrifying encounters with monsters and magical beings. Just another day at the office, right? As Wunzh grows weaker and weaker he is approached by a mysterious figure called Mondamin, a youth “dressed in garments green and yellow…plumes of green bent o’er his forhead and his hair was soft and golden.” Mondamin is, naturally, a personification of corn, the primary food source and sacred substance of numerous Native American peoples. But Mondamin doesn’t just hand himself over. Wunzh is going to have to fight for it.

In a luminous Great Lakes twilight, Mondamin challenges Wunzh to a wrestling match. Weak from fasting, Wunzh agrees and the two grapple and fall to the dusty ground in a twisting, flailing embrace. Somehow, just touching Mondamin fills Wunzh with a renewed strength. For three sunsets they wrestle and struggle, Wunzh growing stronger and stronger with each encounter. On the third night, Mondamin congratulates Wunzh for his courage, conviction, purity of mind and perseverance. Then he makes a startling offer. When I return tomorrow evening, Mondamin tells Wunzh, you will kill me, and when you do, you must bury me in the ground and protect my grave from all disturbances. On the fourth night, just as Mondamin predicted, Wunzh prevails and buries the lifeless body of Mondamin as instructed. Soon, small green shoots of tender corn begin to peek from the ground.

Mondamin’s “death” was a self-directed, willing act of sacrifice that not only saved Wunzh from imminent starvation; it gave the Ojibwe their primary food as well as the central object of their ritual life. It isn’t lost on any of us that the very marrow of our life is won only through struggle, and yet the persistent vision remains that we live not in a hostile universe but in a profoundly nurturing and cooperative one. On the surface – struggle and scarcity. Beneath the surface – endless abundance, infinite creativity and a deep, resounding harmony.

In the Jesus story we see an amalgam of all these elements – the willing and self-directed sacrifice, the death and resurrection, the bringing of gifts and the presence of a divine order beneath the vale of tears.

But there is still a deeper layer yet to be uncovered.

What if the story of Jesus isn’t about Jesus at all?

To re-cast a famous Joseph Campbell saying, what if each of us is the dying god of our own lives? What riches are uncovered if we read the dying god stories not as literal, historical events but as metaphors for our own evolution from material, biological beings bound by instinctual conditioning into spiritual beings of awakened consciousness? Is it any wonder then that the dying god is so often born of a virgin or through some other non-biological process? Horus was conceived as his mother Isis hovered in the form of a hawk over the dead body of her husband Osiris. Mithra was born spontaneously from a rock. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl and many others were born of virgins. The hero, the gift-giver and the dying god live and have their being in higher consciousness, not in the lower realms of ego, competition and conflict. In the Gospel of John, when Nicodemus asks for Jesus’ advice, Jesus simply says, “you must be born from above.” In other words, each of us must shift from lower consciousness to the higher plane of God-consciousness within. The virgin birth signifies that each of us, at the level of our divine essence, was not born from the union of sperm and egg but are identical and unified with the eternally Real, what Krishna called “the unborn” and what Jesus called “everlasting life”. Shifting out of body and ego identification is the work of every spiritual tradition.

If the purpose of myth is to teach us how to live our own lives, then what have we learned?

In Buddhism the central metaphor is that of awakening from the sleep of ignorance, suffering and conditioning. In Christianity the central metaphor is death and rebirth, coming out of our animal nature with its instinctual drives of acquisition and conflict and rising into the unitive experience of God-consciousness, transcending all boundaries and limitations. Resurrection is transformation. Rebirth signifies death to the ego, to limitation, to space and time. Rising from the “grave” of our lower nature embodies the realization of awakening.

Beneath the crests and troughs of the ocean’s waves lies an immense stillness, a stillness that is both the source of the waves and their destination. Is it not true that we “die” every night? Were it not for sleep, this cyclical, recurring “death”, this immersion into the sea of unconsciousness, our life would cease. Just as the silence between notes makes music possible, so too the empty formlessness of the Void makes possible the vibrant fullness of our conscious, waking life. In the end, the inner and the outer are the same. The surface mirrors the depth. The tomb is a womb. Nirvana is samsara, and the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us, only we do not see it. Not only is there a correspondence, there is an identity. Life, in essence, is synonymous with the eternal Ground of Being, the Real, what we in the west call God, and as such it is ultimately untouched by death. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” Despite centuries of theological calcification it is still possible for us to exhume the universal spiritual wisdom of the Christian story, that each of us is the presence of God-consciousness in the field of forms. Only, as Buddha pointed out, we don’t know it. Like the sun breaking over the horizon at countless sunrise services throughout Christendom this Easter, we too are gradually dawning to the truth of our divine nature. Dare to say it out loud. Let your sun rise. Let the wisdom within you shape your thoughts and words and actions. Become, finally, who you really are. This is the hidden meaning of Easter.

This article first appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of Unity Magazine

Growing Pains

Spring is bursting out all over. New buds are pushing out through the bark of last year’s branches. Roots bore deeper into the earth while new leaves like pendants wave in the wind. Sun and rain chase each other like birds across the brightening sky. The whole earth seems to be awakening from silence and shadow. With the patience of Job, life emerges from the dormant forms of last year’s leavings, rising like the sun and moon – inexorable, indomitable, selfless and unafraid.

In our own lives we too feel the restless stirring of new life emerging. We sat down to write a quick note to our dads and a nine page letter poured out. We began humming a tune under our breath at an important meeting and wrote a song walking back to the car. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and threw ourselves into a favorite recipe, the whole house cast under the spell of roasting garlic and rosemary. We faced down our old two-headed enemy resistance and avoidance and finally tackled that ugly pile of papers on our desk, reveling at last in the clarity afforded by uncluttered space and asking ourselves, why did I put that off for so long? Then we pick up the phone and make that difficult call – the one that’s been haunting us for months, even years – and learn the truth that by simply cultivating willingness we allow the irrepressible healing of love and forgiveness to well up and wash clean the wounds we have made.

It is the nature of all life to expand. In Indian philosophy, the word for ultimate reality is Brahman. The Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita teach that Brahman is not a god; it is the undifferentiated source of all things. Our idea of God is a stop-gap measure, a mere personification of this primal energy. Brahman is the underlying nature of reality itself, beyond all the dualities of being and non-being, existence and non-existence, God and not-God. Brahman is the ground of being, the sacred, formless source from which all forms are made. It is within all things. Everything is a manifestation of Brahman – every object, every thought, every particle of light. The whirling of electrons around nuclei, the energy of consciousness, the poppies in the field, the blue whales in the sea, the spiraling galaxies in the endless night, even the fabric of space and time itself – these are all Brahman. Therefore, so are we.

The etymology of Brahman is clear and revealing. The Sanskrit word Brahman comes from brih which means “to expand” or “to grow”. It is the nature of God-consciousness to continuously move outward, to manifest itself as ever-changing forms. We are one of those forms. When we come to understand this, we can finally be at peace and stop resisting the never ending restlessness within us, that unsettling habit of never being satisfied, of always wanting more, of feeling that no matter how great this moment is there must be yet another accomplishment to achieve, another mountain to climb, another song to write.

And in our calm and clarity we move closer toward understanding another fundamental truth: growth hurts. There can be no growth without the necessary dissolution of previous forms – forms that once meant so much to us. Growing means forever letting go.

Seeds burst and die as new sprouts emerge. Flowers whither and fade as fruit takes form. Growth is always a kind of death, and to deny this is to live forever in a debilitating lie. We must say yes to loss and transformation. We have no choice.

With every new achievement comes a host of new problems. You want fame? Now you can’t go anywhere without people bothering you. You want money? Now you long for the simplicity of the lean years. You want success and mastery? Now the demands others place on you become staggering. But they can never equal the ridiculous demands you place on yourself – the nagging, haunting worry that you are never good enough, no matter what you do.

But all of this is healed in the light of wisdom – the wisdom each of us holds deep within the folds of our awareness. We are enough, because we are the presence of God-consciousness in the world. We are the Presence of eternity in the field of time. While the forms may come and go, that which we really are was never born and will never die. Brahman is Life. “Life is not the opposite of death,” writes Eckhart Tolle. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.”

Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and every other wisdom teacher worth his or her salt spent their whole life begging us to acknowledge this truth – we are not who we think we are. Wisdom means breaking free of our limited and limiting perception of ourselves and moving into the deeper realization of our identity with the infinite, eternal ground of being, what Jesus called the Father, what Buddha called Emptiness and what Krishna called the Self. When asked how he healed people Jesus answered, “It is not I who do these things, but the Father in me. And all of these things you could do, and more.”

Creating is costly. It hurts to be more. Most of us spend our lives cultivating comfort, asleep to the fact that comfort is the enemy of greatness. To expand and grow into what and who we really are is to stretch beyond our former bounds. Sometimes we feel like we’re breaking apart – and we are. Learning to love discomfort is the final hurdle. When we cross that hurdle and transcend our childish complacency we are born into a realm of limitless possibility. Knowing this, we can weather change with serenity, equanimity, generosity and compassion. The next time you find yourself surrounded by abundance, yet still yearning for more, you can smile and know that two contradictory truths are at play: we already have everything (because we already are everything), yet still feel the ceaseless expansion of our natures. The temporary forms that make up “the world”, including us, are forever emerging, expanding, colliding, conflicting, aligning, receding, dissolving and re-forming. It is our sacred right and duty to participate in this glorious emergence, this concert of co-operation. We are not to fear, avoid or resent this process. We are to practice loving-kindness, even and perhaps most especially toward ourselves. We are to join in and guide with a light touch this flowering and fading of which we are an inexorable part. This is our beautiful, glorious, heartbreaking life. These are our tears. These are the things we make. This is the light we bring with the flame of our growing awareness. These are our gifts. These are the things we must in the end let go. These are our growing pains.