- The dance of life. Photo by emdot, Creative Commons License
Week 52: A Temporary Farewell
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues. —Cicero
In my impetuous youth, I took the drug ecstasy three times. All three were with the same friend, and the first time gave us everything we had hoped for and more. I would not describe the experience as ecstatic—a state I associate with at least a tinge of frenzy—so much as being joyfully at peace and entirely engaged. I knew that the drug had been used in psychotherapy before it had been outlawed in 1985 (shortly before I tried it), and I immediately grasped its therapeutic promise. To experience such a state of transcendent openness, even when artificially induced, was to touch the possible.
Our subsequent trials were not as successful. We weren’t really druggies; we didn’t have dependable “connections.” One of the problems with illicit drugs is that there is no quality control, and who knows what comprised our later purchases. They produced no pleasurable effects but left us feeling headachy and buzzed, like we’d taken No Doz or drunk too much coffee, and no doubt the tablets contained some combination of caffeine and other fillers like ibuprofen or talcum powder. At any rate, the third dose concluded my attempt at psychotropic experimentation, and I believe I would have abandoned it even if it had been more fun. Achieving enlightenment with the help of chemicals seemed like cheating.
In truth, I have enjoyed moments of peak experience without artificial assistance — once, surfing off the frigid coast of the Tasman Sea during a year as an exchange student in New Zealand; another time climbing Mount Hinman in Washington; several times on the ranch in Wyoming when I felt at one with my horse and the terrain, and more recently in prayer and meditation. Many religious traditions use mind-altering plants or extreme exertion as visionary sacraments, and though I claim no knowledge of the subtleties of such rituals, I sense that the idea is to experience the sublime in order to bring it more readily into quotidian awareness. Once we experience the presence of God or oneness or however we might describe the transcendent, we will arrange our lives to stand as near it as we can.
I have been thinking about such things as I conclude this year-long meditation I have called the Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off). As I mentioned in the first post, I embarked on this journey not to seek moral perfection but rather to live consciously. “You do not have to be good,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver in her extraordinary poem “Wild Geese.” “You do not have to walk on your knees/For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” Rather, Oliver suggests,
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Our sacred task, in other words, is to listen for our true calling in order to act, so far as we are able, on what we hear.
I embarked on this project as something of a lark. I wanted to start writing seriously again after concentrating for some years on visual art, and I created the blog to provide structure and form for practice. My interest in the virtues and vices was sincere, but I imagined the posts as short, humorous, and sometimes self-deprecating observations of one woman’s fantastic battle with herself (to paraphrase E. B. White). But I quickly found that my daily foibles didn’t interest me much (and certainly wouldn’t interest you) and turned instead to pondering how these basic moral themes play out on the larger stage.
The year turned into a profound experience of concentrated listening. Sincere practice has a way of drawing us into uncharted territory, and though many of the personalities and experiences I wrote about were familiar to me before I started, the desire to distill those voices for others made me ask more questions. So I have benefitted this year not only from the chance to “listen” to people and events that I see as generous forces in the world, but to enjoy as well the extraordinary privilege of being listened to. Your presence, dear readers, as well as your responses, have placed me in the center of a conversation that has stretched and enlightened me beyond my wildest imaginings.
In the beginning I said that I didn’t expect the year to change me. Certainly I wanted to protect myself from any expectation that I was or could become a paragon of virtue, and I can safely say that I am no more virtuous now than I have ever been. But the year has changed me—that’s the gift of mindfulness. After writing about the poet William Stafford’s habit of clearing his desk each day so he could meet a new poem fresh each morning, I somehow abandoned a lifetime habit of clutter to find myself tidying my work space each night before I go to bed. After my post about the new frugality, Hal and I decided to downsize, and are putting our big old house on the market this coming spring. Other bad habits still plague me. No matter how insightfully I have considered wrath and procrastination, I am still quick to temper and slow to get things done.
Many of you have kindly suggested that I continue this project beyond its initial year, a vote of confidence that touches me to my core. But it is time to step back from weekly deadlines and set upon the task of sculpting these musings into more durable form. Some posts seem weak to me now and need to be carved away; other topics, such as love and faith, deserve deeper consideration than I could give them within the time constraints. Still other topics, such as betrayal and selfishness, seemed too large to tackle at all in a single week, and need my attention now. The posts I have written so far will remain online until at least the end of 2011 and I hope I will have a deeper, richer book to offer you sometime next year.
As Hal suggested last week, the process of creating this blog has often been more agony than ecstasy. I remain, after a year of weekly practice, a slow and ponderous writer. One of life’s great paradoxes is that something so painful can be at the same moment pleasurable. Aristotle saw happiness not so much as a state of mind as an activity, and I suspect that what I have been seeking all along is not ecstasy so much as harmony, a way to place myself, as Mary Oliver might put it, “in the family of things.”
You, dear readers, have been part of that family and your embrace has given me gifts beyond reckoning. I believe Cicero is right that gratitude is the parent of all other virtues. The gratitude I feel for you makes me virtuous indeed.
