I’ve been at the house truck for six weeks now – long enough for fantasy to become reality as summer dies into autumn.
One of the reasons I took on this eight month sit in a tiny home is that I wanted to live close to nature. Nature is not always sweet and sunny as we well know but also wild, stormy and ruthless at times. So, as with any relationship, I have to take the rough with the smooth. Easy in theory but ever a challenge in practice. I always find that any spiritual adventure I embark upon turns out to have a very different purpose to the one I had envisaged. So hold on for another lesson in what it means to be human.
After three months of daily cloudless skies, long hours of sunshine and earth cracking drought, the clocks changed and stormy autumn arrived right on cue. It was a rude awakening and baptism into the dark side. It seemed all the rain we’d missed had been stored in some vast vats in the sky and these were now being emptied unceremoniously on our heads – ok boys and girls, time to get serious.
Yesterday we had a big storm; an easterly wind off the sea travelling at 120k battered the Top O’ the South. Here, in my little patch, the truck heaved up and down like a small ship on a rough sea until I felt sea sick; the chimney of the pot belly stove rattled so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. Outside everything was in ferment, the wind moving horizontally at a vast rate of knots. Chaos had come again. All the buckets, chairs, corrugated iron that wasn’t tied down was flying across the paddock and when I was forced to venture out to collect fire wood or shopping from the car I could barely stand upright, while a cold rain lashed at my face and drenched me to the skin in seconds. Inside, whilst warm and dry, I felt trapped in a nightmarish existence with no escape from the turbulence, unable to find my way back to the Ground of Being and the zen-like calm I remembered was inside me somewhere.
My whole being was in resistance to the experience. I was saying No to the storm, indignant about the disruption of my plans. Alone with the two dogs, I felt vulnerable, threatened and scared. At one point I went outside and screamed into the wind, “No, I won’t have it, I won’t put up with this. This is no way to live.” The wind laughed in my face and raced on.
After a few hours the storm abated slightly, the power came back on and I was able to relax and reflect. I’ve been writing and talking a lot about crisis recently as part of my Tribe in Transition programme and, even if this was just a minor lifting of the veils on the crisis scale, it was still potentially life threatening and a cause for anxiety. This is what I remembered:
- For me, crisis is any experience which strips away the veneer of security and brings me face to face with my own mortality and with the vulnerability of living in a human body.
- No matter how skilled I am at creating and manifesting I am not in control of life and I am not in control of when and how I die. There is a consciousness much more powerful than me at play.
- Security and control are delusions I use to comfort and protect myself from this existential edge.
- I am brought face to face with the paradox that we human beings are at once unlimited spirit and universe-in-action and we are also made of this earth. We are both powerful creators, each of us with the potential to be the difference in the world and we are also puny, inconsequential and easily snuffed out.
This is not so different from the lessons Siddhartha learned on his journey to becoming the Buddha: mortality, suffering and impermanence are facts of life and the ego screams in defiance. How fitting that today is Good Friday with its story of the crucifixion on the cross. The vertical axis of spirit crossed by the horizontal axis of matter and the ego crucified so that new life can be released.
Every crisis is a time for reflection and a time of choice. I was tempted in the heart of the storm to give up my experiment of living in the house truck and my increasingly feral existence, close to nature, and to go off in search of a life more predictable. But very soon I remembered that we live in a world in chaos, there is nowhere predictably safe and e are all in this together. And yet it seems to me there is something real about this radical insecurity. I have chosen to live on the edge to experience both the light and the dark side of being a spiritual being having a human experience – this is a path to wholeness.
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