On Courage

Courage is what love looks like when it is tested, by the sometimes overwhelming everyday necessities of being alive. Courage is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposition, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public... to show courage. Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.

To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere, or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply; and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about - with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. 

Perhaps, this could be more accurately described as meeting an immense storm front, the squally vulnerable edge that overwhelms fearful human beings; and which seems to overpower us through various forms of helplessness like unemployment, immigration, cultural and/or technological arrivals that we feel we do not want to welcome. The waveform that overwhelms maturing human beings [or society] is the inescapable nature of our own flaws and weaknesses, our self-deceptions and our attempts to create false stories to place ourselves in the world. 

This immense wave is the invitation to give that self up; to be borne off by the wave and renamed, revealed and re-ordered by the powerful flow of a world rearranging itself before our eyes. Riding this wave is the hardest place to stay, to make a world of our willingness to risk ourselves - aware of our need to be needed, our wish to be seen, our constant need for help - and inhabiting that world with generosity, luminous vulnerability and intensity. We give up our wish for constant immunity, but gain a more robust life; not as trauma but as a necessary change of season. 

This is when the spirit warrior archetype enters consciousness; the ones who are prepared to ride the wave, without accepting any fear-based aspects of this temporary reality we call life. Spirit warriors see and acknowledge these fear-based realities; and are willing to fight for those who are unable to. They protest the issues that are detrimental to humanity's best interests; and create an awareness for those who may be beginning their spiritual journeys. 

Spirit warriors are intimately tied to a larger soul group. They tend to develop an immediate bond with the persons in their own soul group. They also feel as though they have known these people for a long time and perhaps, many lifetimes. They literally have millions of family members in their particular soul group. They have made numerous soul contracts with thousands of people; who come and go, in and out of their incarnations. They are here for a purpose and they have their mission; and all of humanity benefits from the work they are doing.

Solace

Solace is the art of asking the beautiful question, of our selves, of our world; or of one another, often in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the spacious, imaginative home we make where disappointment is welcomed and rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body’s innate wisdom to come to the fore, a part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing. 

To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not soothe falsely; but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into the privilege of both life and death as an equal birthright.

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even more amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear loss? And how will you endure it? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to - and as beautiful and as astonishing as - a world that can birth you?

Solace is not an excuse for withdrawal from the fray, but as a quieter foundation on which to stand for a better, more spacious, more humanly generous way forward, holding to account those who are under the strange misapprehension that they are exempt from the losses and griefs that accompany a human life; and whose defence against their own ultimate and necessary losses, is to degrade and demean others in the name of political and financial success.