The Feminity that Bore Us

He hired me to clear half an acre of his land where he wanted to later build a greenhouse for his wife. It was May and it rained most days. The earth was wet and the thin stalks of dogwood glistened at the bases of the trees. He led me to his garage, pulled down a chainsaw, and promptly began to instruct me on its use, first directing me to the alternating blades, which he taught me to sharpen one by one with a round file, then showing me how to properly oil and fuel the motor. He lent me a pair of steel-toed boots, a pair of Kevlar chaps, a helmet with a visor, and a pair of earmuffs. He took me to the woods and taught me the proper angles and the depths and the heights at which to press the roaring blade into the trees. He named the largest, one by one, distinguishing those he would harvest for firewood from those he would have me discard in a brush pile one hundred meters away. He taught me to see where the tree wanted to fall, and how to then manipulate its path to my liking. He taught me how to anticipate a pinched blade or a kickback, and how to avoid both. He taught me what he thought I needed to know and then he left me to my work.

 

I’ve always admired trees. I’m fond of them. It’s not unusual for me to press my hand against them as I pass by, or to climb into one and find a comfortable branch where I can sit for awhile. They become instantly familiar and by them I recall many I have known before, those I used to often climb, like the mango tree on the side of a thickly forested hill whose branches were the highways of leaf-cutter ants that would charge me angrily but assert no real threat, or the maple in the front yard when I was still a child whose tears tasted so sweet that I would scrape my tongue on its branches, believing I had discovered something magical. I’ve sat in the presence of trees that have known a thousand years or more, their bodies ascending from valley floors, reaching above waterfalls, dwarfed only by mountains. I’ve tried to imagine the passage of time from their singular perspective. I’ve tried to imagine how many of their kin have fallen around them, by our father’s hands, their bodies given for our survival, or taken for our comfort, or our pleasure, or our power.

 

That May, I spent a week plotting and executing the slow descent of a small forest, systematically disassembling its delicate composition, and hauling its corpses away to an unmarked grave. Trees far older than me, and far larger and stronger, fell at my will. I partitioned their bodies into manageable lengths and placed them on alternate shoulders. I felt the weight of them upon me. I felt masculine. It rained most days and my body ached, and this too felt masculine. I worked until I was exhausted, until the weight of fallen limbs bore down upon my strength, and this too felt masculine. I cut them down, young and old, until all that remained were the stumps, standing still, like gravestones to be later removed, and this too felt masculine. In the night, I dreamed the trees were angry with me. And in the morning, as I continued to cut them down, I felt both powerful and sad.

 

I’ve been compelled by nature all my life. Its beauty pulls at my heart. A deer passes beneath the apple tree. I see its grace and am drawn to place my hand on its shoulder. I see the hawks, still as sentries, perched in the trees and I’m drawn to know the softness of their feathers. Even the trees draw me to them, and I wonder, as I have always wondered, how to respond. For the times in my life when such compulsions felt too pastoral to entertain, I have looked cynically upon myself with the thought that although its beauty calls to me, my attraction to nature is not qualified by a sense of belonging. Beauty dwells in every unborn leaf. It emanates from the melting ice upon the lake. It moves with the deer’s every step. It is in the slow breath of trees and in the soil awakening beneath me. And I, a man, remain apart.

 

I was once a boy, tearing a branch needlessly from a tree. I saw its flesh, smelled the freshness of its fluids, felt at once a sense of wonder and a tinge of remorse knowing I had wounded something beautiful and innocent. And on the sidewalk, with a piece of convex glass, I held the sun against an insect in a focused beam, watched its body swell, smelt its skin burn, and felt a tyrant and a thief. And in summer’s evening light, I watched a plague of frogs rush across the gravel of a church parking lot, their tender bellies thick with coarse, dusty grit, their legs splaying with every wild leap, as they desperately fled the onslaught of emerging believers. I felt my own guilt swell as their eyes bulged and their voices burst beneath the laughter of another boy’s stomping feet – with whom I shared at least one thing in common, though the sickness in my stomach compelled me to believe that, in some ways at least, I was not like him.

 

The supposed nature of boys is one of aggression, dominance, and assertion. We are taught the value of competition, of skill, and of power, while tenderness and sensitivity are deemed negations from our true nature. Repressing and starving these parts of ourselves, we suffer an inability to respond with gentleness even when beauty pulls tenderly at us. And so, to the wonder of tiny creatures we respond with tyranny, and to the simple beauty of a tree we respond with destruction. But behind every display of cruelty, there must have been some confused desire to connect, to receive rather than destroy, to admire rather than take, to love rather than kill. Beneath the desire to prove our masculinity, there must have existed, within each of us, the fading memory of the femininity that bore us.

 

Compelled by the beauty of a tree, or by the wonder of the intricate lives of tiny creatures, we experience an innate desire to respond. And we are told that this response, even as young boys, should be inarguably masculine. But what is the masculine response to beauty? I watch the deer cross my yard and it compels me. As a man, I am taught that if something compels me, I must act, I must dominate, I must possess. Perhaps, as a man, I should pull a rifle down from above the mantel, and with one clean shot, bring the the deer to his knees, where, in his grace and his beauty, his body can bleed out, and his bowels can empty, and I can know, with certainty, that amidst all this beauty, I have a role, that I am not separate from it. Beauty calls, and I want to answer, but what do I say?

 

Born of a deep misunderstanding of beauty, our insecurity as men compels us to dominance, assertion, and a will to possess. Afraid that we do not belong to beauty, or that belonging to it would negate our masculinity, we take control, and in doing so invert beauty’s role in our lives. But beauty does not exist as a thing to be taken and possessed, and yet held distinctly separate from us. The masculine response to beauty is not to dominate, but to submit, to be held, to know that our own connection to beauty, which we have known since birth, is not a thing to be buried, or abandoned, or even diminished, but something to be embraced, with familiarity and without fear.

 

On the sixth day, when nearly all the trees had fallen and the sky was vacant and grey, and my body was tired and warm from exertion, I cut down the last of the birch. I sighted its descent carefully, started the motor of the chainsaw and removed the initial notch from the North side of the tree then came to the other side to make the final cut. The blades moved cleanly through its base and when it began to fall I calmly moved away. I felt the air move and the ground pulse as its body lay down amongst the scattered stumps. I regarded its tremendous form, no less impressive now supine than when it had stood above me. When I turned to examine the cuts I had made my heart immediately sank even as my curiosity peaked. In its stump I saw the trembling womb of an entire colony of hibernating ants. And they were beautiful, and they were doomed, and I felt masculine, and conflicted, and sad.

– C

A Thin Veneer

The lake remains entirely covered by ice. The commercial fishermen have abandoned their series of netted holes, and more than a few hobbyists have waited too long to pack away their shelters, which now rest dubiously on the lake’s diminishing surface. The wind is in the trees and the lake remains eerily still. How can something so large be so quiet? Migrating seabirds skim over the surface in the morning light as if they can sense the movement of tiny fish still drifting about in the water below. With anticipatory grace they fly so low that it appears they are gliding upon the ice itself. A cloud moves in the opposite direction, and for a moment its shadow negates the flashing white of their bodies until they emerge from the opposite side. And the fish below, having stayed awake all winter, find a brief period of reprieve while the ice becomes too thin to afford the weight of men with poles, but remains thick enough to bar the entry of hungry eagles and eager gulls.

 

I wrote a letter to two brothers today. We’ve been out of touch. Our lives are now drastically different than when we were boys riding our bikes down the trails at the Dead End, composing forts out of fallen trees, swinging out over the river on the rope that hung from a giant elm, and ending the day at the neighbourhood pool. It’s been years since we came to this same lake on a rainy day and set up a tarp out on the beach. We had the whole stretch of it to ourselves and despite the rain and the cold we went out and stood in the water beside the giant rocks where the sand was soft and pulled at our feet until we had sunk so deep we could no longer move them. We laughed and took turns pulling each other out. We laughed for the feeling of freedom and the sense that the world belonged to us. We’ve been out of touch for a long time, but nothing is lost of our history or our connection. I’d be just as happy doing all of those things with them tomorrow as I was over fifteen years ago.

 

The shadows now cross the blindingly white lake, clipping along at a tremendous speed. Time passes in immeasurable ways. The seconds forever split into smaller and smaller denominations, never arriving at a final indivisible fragment. It expands forever larger, larger than the years I’ve known, beyond centuries and eons, beyond anything, simply beyond. And here I exist in an infinite moment, as seamlessly tethered to my past as I am to the years that preceded me, as I am to the future when I will not breathe.

 

I wrote a letter to two brothers today, and in it I recalled my youth as if it were a story I had once read. And they, the two brothers, were characters alongside me. We had our adventures and our misadventures and along the plot we often faltered, and from it we often veered. And now, upon recollection these moments become as real to me as any moment I have had within this past year, or even those I had just this morning. Time stretches out and simultaneously compresses inward without limitation. I exist within it. I always have. Like time, matter cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be reimagined. I look at the delicate lines of the unique patterns imprinted on my fingertips. They are constantly regenerating the same designs, forgeries since before my birth, constantly expiring like every other cell in my body. None of the cells that currently make up my body were there seven years ago. I’m entirely remade, and the skin cells that carefully align to form my fingerprints are composed of matter that may have once belonged to a dinosaur, or an ocean, or a rock buried deep underground. Once, each fragment of my body belonged to a star that expired long ago. I am a composition of used parts. I am a subject of time and space, willing to bend, and in my fluidity I am not so easily defined.

 

For most of my life, I have called myself an introvert. For most of my life I have acted according to this name. From my family, I often withdrew as a child. Slipping out the door into the backyard, I would climb a tree and sit in the spring air looking out over suburban rooftops, listening for birds, and losing my thoughts to some childish fantasy of living in the woods with a gift for communicating plainly with its creatures. My fantasies were of solitude, and among peers I was quiet and unlikely to take the lead. Aloneness became a part of my identity, and one of which I was often proud. So proud, that at times, I resisted a connection with others for fear of betraying the identity I had begun to depend on, even when the pull to connect was far truer than the imperative to resist it.

 

My penchant for aloneness remains a cherished aspect of my identity. But with it, comes proclivities of which I must remain keenly aware. When I cling to the thought that I am who I am only by behaving in a certain, carefully bridled way, I miss the opportunity to experience new things. I confine myself to a rigid idea and limit myself from infinite possibilities. Though my pull to solitude is genuine and healthy, my stubbornness in remaining there past my due is entirely selfish. Healthy solitude becomes manipulative aloofness. Even when I have no conscious intention of manipulating those on the periphery of my life, I do so when my solitude is not my genuine need. And, what is perhaps worse, when I remain in solitude beyond my need for solitude, and yet still cleave to the belief that my identity depends on this solitude, I manipulate myself.

 

Aloneness does not always denote loneliness. But often it does. Afraid to sacrifice my isolation, I have withdrawn from people in my life too aggressively. I’ve done this under the notion that I had to preserve something that I value, but the value of that thing is negated when my separation becomes severe and misanthropic. Solitude is a gift. It allows me to move inward and connect with my soul. It allows me to observe the world from a detached perspective. It allows me a quality of rest that I do not otherwise find. It allows me to remember who I am.

 

When I make the mistake of seeing solitude not as a gift but as a thing that defines me, when I take it on as a costume to hide myself from the world, I lose its meaning and suffer loneliness and isolation. I contort its purpose so that it offers me an escape, when its true meaning is to teach me how to better connect. In loneliness I begin to believe that I do not deserve to connect. I begin to believe that I am unworthy of love. To cope with this feeling, I withdraw further. I decide that I don’t need other people, a sentiment that bears truth, but which, expressed from this posture, is actually a claim that I am somehow separate from others, which isn’t true. My connection to others is inherent and invulnerable. My awareness of this connection, however, is not so absolute or constant. Only when I embrace the knowledge that my connection cannot be broken will solitude take on its true meaning, which is to provide a refuge in which to raise my own awareness of the interconnectedness of all life. Solitude then does not separate me from the people in my life; it allows me to see that separation is not possible.

 

Too often, I have waited with an attitude of aloofness for the attention of others. This is rarely a conscious decision, but a behavior I must have learned when I was young. Rather than admitting my desire to connect in real ways, I have withheld myself in the hope that my absence would elicit intrigue. Others might be more controlling, demanding the attention of others, knowing that if they speak loud enough, they will be heard. Others might present themselves as victims knowing that the compassionate will rush to their aid and they will feel loved. We all want to feel connected. Our delusion is that we are not connected and that we are dependant on manipulating others and ourselves in order to experience connection. We lure one another for attention, or we demand it. We present ourselves in careful ways in the hope that we will be accepted. We follow the cues that society offers knowing that others will follow them also, knowing that we need only ascribe to the social norm to know that we will not be alone. We cower to connect. We strain to connect. We contort to connect. We lie to connect. We are desperate to connect.

 

What I loved most about my relationship with the brothers to whom I wrote a letter today was that with them, I did not confine myself to some idea that I had about my identity. I used to look at my behavior with them as being a side of myself. Now I see that, with them, I was just relaxed. The parts of me that I withheld for fear of judgment, for fear of being seen differently than the avatar I so carefully presented, were finally allowed room to play. These things did not always come out in healthy ways, but with these brothers I was at least safe to blunder, knowing that my connection to them was not dependent on a carefully composed posture. We were ridiculous at times, rarely serious, sometimes irresponsible. I wrote them a letter today with the unveiled intent to connect.

 

The ice is thin now that separates the birds from the fish. When the ice finally melts, the eagle, patiently soaring above the lake, will swoop down upon the water and from it he will retrieve his prey. His talons will sink into its flesh and he will carry it away from the water where its life will become his own. Seen as violence, this is terrible. The eagle does not appear noble at all but tyrannical. And the fish can be seen only as a victim. But if we can see through the violence inherent in all nature, if these two creatures can be reimagined as ancient friends, this reunion takes on a quality of depth and connection, wherein the fish, trapped for months beneath the ice is at last offered an opportunity to transcend his former identity and become one with the eagle who soars above the earth. The fish – or rather the form of the fish – dies, but his life continues.

 

Maybe it’s a stretch to suggest that the connection between the eagle and the fish is anything but hostile and terrifying. But when I think back to the moments in my life when I have connected most truly with a friend, something has always had to die in order for this to happen. Something of my ego has to be dropped. Rather than attempting to harness others’ perceptions of me by aloofness, or identifying myself as a victim, or by domination, I can instead offer myself in absolute honesty and know that from that place of vulnerability a true depth of connection can occur. From that place, I can be seen beyond my fabrications.

– C

 

The Line of a Shallow Wave

Nobody ever taught me to swim. I’m not very good at it. When I was four years old I watched my Dad dive effortlessly into a pool and was so compelled by his grace that I promptly left my mother’s side and followed him off the pool’s edge. Having not known to hold my breath, I quickly sank to the bottom of the pool where a family friend heroically retrieved me. A few years later, when I finally mustered the courage to again leave the shallow end of a different pool, I remembered to hold my breath. I put my head under the water, surged forward about three feet and then urgently, and with some disorientation, turned back and surfaced with a premature gasp that left me coughing and sputtering, red-eyed and embarrassed. I might have been six or seven years old by then. I’m better at it now, but by no means would I call myself a strong swimmer. I fail to fall into that steady rhythm of breath that practiced swimmers display with such apparent ease, exhaling below the surface through several strokes, and inhaling for a brief moment above it. Instead, having given up on submersion, I keep my head above the water the entire time, turning it from side to side with each inept stroke while my legs trail confusedly behind me. After twenty to thirty of these I turn onto my back where I spend the remainder of my time, peacefully deafened by the water filling my ears, staring through the silence at a reoriented sky, and carefully feigning relaxation with each half-exhaled breath. I reach past my head, and pull myself through the water to stay afloat. I pause only when my lungs are filled to bursting.

 

There was a crow today, flying among the skeletal trees outside my window. Between every thrust of her wings she fell for a moment, and by the next thrust of her wings she recovered. I don’t know the particulars of the flight patterns of crows, whether they differ depending on the wind, or the crow’s elevation, or the direction the crow is flying, but this particular crow flew in a wave, rising and falling with every beat. There is a moment in this wave of flight when the crow reaches her apex. For a moment, she is suspended without effort. She has not yet begun to fall, but nor is she rising. She continues to move forward, but her vertical position is in suspense. The moment passes, and so she descends, and there too there is the antithesis of an apex, though its nature is entirely different. At the top of the wave, the crow ceases to rise because the exerted force of her moving wings is spent. Gravity becomes the dominant force, and so she begins to fall. The turning point at the bottom of the wave, however, is not a result of the inherence of the environment. Rather, the crow only ceases to fall because the crow wills not to.

 

There have been times in my life when I have conceded to the slow descent of an absent will. Unlike the crow, whose descent upon ceasing to flap her wings is soon ended by the ground below, my own descent can feel at times limitless. It begins simply; often nothing more than an apathetic thought, that gives reason to an apathetic feeling, that results in the absence of an act. Days might pass, or months, or years. For every reason to act, there are several reasons not to and as I resign to a version of my life that demands little from me and offers nothing of the dreams I once had for myself, my priorities shift away from my true aspirations and begin to dwell in the status quo where comfort takes precedence over growth, and security takes precedence over movement. I’ll admit that these have not been happy times, though happiness is always the claimed intent. I’ll admit that the slow descent of resignation always begins to feel most normal just before the forgotten ground flashes before my eyes. It is then that I awake to the vague recollection of an aspired ascent.

 

I have pursued my dreams, but I have often failed to continue my pursuit of them through to their realization. I’ve depended on the momentum of a courageous first step, or the hope that that first step would yield immediate results. I’ve felt inspired at the apex of the wave, and upon descending failed to resume the required action. I’ve been lost in the desire for euphoria, and like a spoiled child, I’ve abandoned the work when it stopped being fun. Dreams, unlike fantasy, do not exist in order to offer an escape from our reality. They exist to show us a vision of what we are meant to actualize within our reality. They are the work we are meant to do. Pursuing our dreams must involve the will to do so, but if that will is one in flux, or one dependent on the emotional rewards of reaching previously unknown heights, we will exhaust ourselves merely by the imperative to continually decide whether or not we will go on. We will reach the inevitable lows and have to decide from that difficult and biased perspective whether our dreams are still worth pursuing.

 

I watch the crow fly the line of a shallow wave, rising and falling like a beating heart. She flaps her wings each time her body begins to fall. It elevates her, but never to permanence. No single thrust is enough to move her beyond gravity’s pull. But although she repeats this movement again and again, and though her body continues to respond to the inevitable descent, her flight is not an endlessly repeated question of will. In the lowest point of her flight she does not suffer an existential crisis wherein she must summon the will to flap her wings again lest she hit the ground. Rather, her governing will, which is to fly, makes the decision automatic. Her body responds, knowing that the decision has already been made.

 

Our dreams are treasured things. We hold them close and we hold them tightly. We conceal them in veiled pursuits, or burry them with the distant thought of a later resurrection. We value them, and yet rarely do we ever allow their value to be revealed. Our dreams are not meant to exist as private thoughts, to be treated as fantasy when our days become mundane. Nor are they meant to haunt us for our failure to achieve them. They are not childish whims, nor haphazard follies. They are our true calling. We keep looking for meaning outside of ourselves while all the while there exists within us such beautiful impetus to act. All the while, our purpose in this life is already written in our hearts. We need only the will to follow it.

 

Against my own will, the varying winds of dissembled fear are quick to press. Behind masks of apathy, self-doubt, and cynicism, fear offers a peaceful exit, a host of reasons why a pursued dream is better abandoned early, before the scale of possible failure becomes too large. It reminds me that my dreams are unachievable, that I will inevitably fail, and that in failing I will lose my chance to declare my value as a person. And so my dreams ask that I not only try, but that my will to try would not be contingent on the immediate outcome of my attempts. My dreams ask that when I reach the point furthest from my apex, I would not resign to despair, but that I would see the value and even the beauty in reaching that depth, and that I would remember that it is in that very moment when I begin to ascend once again.

 

The crow alights upon the naked limb of the birch outside my door. She lets out a strange thread of amusing noises and I can’t imagine what these noises mean. She alights, which is to say that though her will is to fly, fatigue can ruin the most willful of dreamers. I speak of flight and the pursuit of dreams, of the importance of enduring moments of doubt and submitting to my own governing will, but I must also make allowances for my humanness and not confuse a momentary reprieve with the cessation of some pursued dream. I must be willing to rest or I will fall to the ground, not from a lack of will, but from pure exhaustion.

– C

A Self-made Myth

What struck me was not so much the presence of the eagle, but the willfulness of his gaze. I caught the gleam of his feathers when the light fell through the space between the encroaching buildings. I saw the breadth of his wings and the steadiness of his intention as he flew toward me, twenty feet above the slow rush of cars. He was flying north, defiantly, toward the lakes and the rivers that are, for now, still frozen. He moved through the city without showing any concern for food or climate, answering only the imperative to reach some isolated place, to claim breeding territory and wait for a mate. He flew over my head and I looked around expecting to see a throng of bystanders staring and pointing in wonder, but it seemed I was the only one who noticed. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop smiling.

 

Here, where I live, we’re known for our winters. Still in April, everyone is talking about the cold. Those who thought they had missed it by travelling to Thailand for a few months, or vacationing in Mexico for the worst of it, are now returning feeling cheated. We complain, and secretly we feel proud to be distinguished as one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. For many of us who remain, we go into what is commonly spoken of as a kind of creative hibernation. We seal our doors and our windows, carefully minimalize our time spent outside, and forgive one another infinitely for cancelled engagements. We go inside and are quiet with ourselves. This is not always a healthy thing, but it can be. Sometimes we manage to produce something of merit. Sometimes we feel grateful for quietness and rest. Sometimes we sink into depression and then hope to move through that depression and emerge with a deeper understanding of ourselves. Our seasons are distinct, but I imagine people experience these periods in their lives regardless of where they live.

 

When we choose to enter a period of intense introspection, or when a period of intense introspection is insisted upon us, we never know what we’ll discover. We begin peeling back protective layers and the resulting vulnerability is often terrifying. We sift through our underlying memories and find that they are often incomplete, or skewed, and are always of a singular perspective. When we discover things that misalign with our self-perception our response is most often to alter them, or to condemn them, or to deny them. Rarely do we allow them to alter us.

 

One of my earliest memories is of a dream. I remember it faintly, but I’ve retold it to myself so often that I now know it more by rote than by true recollection. I was three years old at the time, and in the dream I had somehow managed to lean from the second-story window of a bedroom that must have been mine. It was a warm summer day. The sky was blue. The grass was green. Below me in the yard, several family members lifted their faces to me and calmly waved. When I lifted my own face to the sky I saw an eagle descending toward me and just before he reached my window I let go. He bore me away and I watched the world disappear.

 

This memory became the beginning of a living mythology to which I am constantly submitting new aspects and at times reaching back to alter misremembered facts. It is a mythology comprised not of experiences but mere reflections of experiences by mirrors that are never perfect and at times even intentionally distorted. Who I believe myself to be is defined by this constantly morphing story, which contains themes, and patterns, and plot, and subplots, and roles, and environments, and lessons. I see it is a morphing story, but it is more often my experiences that are morphed in order to align with the story. Occasionally an experience is so profound that my personal mythology is forever changed, but even then I retain some control so that these new developments do not contradict past events but instead provide further evolution within their already established trajectories. New experiences – however unexpected, or dramatic, or tragic, or euphoric – are absorbed and assimilated by the already established mythology and the full effect of these experiences is often missed.

 

As the protagonist of my personal mythology I have spent my life sorting though my experiences, choosing carefully those that support my self-perceptions and dismissing those that oppose them. The result has been ultimately deleterious. Within my personal mythology I’ve come to expect myself to be the flawless hero, and the only way to do this has been to diminish, distort, or discard my faults and my shortcomings. One of the most common themes in my personal mythology is: I am of value because I do the right thing. The obvious problem with this is that I do not always do the right thing. To cope with my awareness of these “anomalies”, I repress the memory of failures, or paint them with an altering light. I defend myself even when I should not.

 

If I continue to live as I have lived, believing in a mythology that requires me to be the flawless hero, I will inevitably fail. I will be constantly, and neurotically sifting through my experiences, my self-perception, and the perceptions of others, frantically trying to maintain a myth that is both frail and unconvincing. I will live in fear of my imperfections, of which I am constantly aware, and from which I have no escape. When I step back for a moment from the role of protagonist, when I regard my mythology from the perspective of author or reader, I see clearly that it is not my failure that condemns me, but the prohibition of failure.

 

I was twenty-four years old when my marriage ended. We fell in love quickly and were already, I think, falling out of love by the time of our wedding. A year later we went to work in Lebanon and then Ghana where we worked on separate projects in separate regions of those countries. When we returned home we endured a few months of increasing distance and then it was over, two weeks shy of our two-year anniversary. In the months that followed I experienced tremendous self-doubt, I questioned my value as a man, I felt stigmatized, and I felt like a failure. I felt like a failure but I presented myself most often as someone who had been failed. In my personal mythology I was familiar with the theme of martyrdom, but there was no room within my personal beliefs to allow for an admittance of fault so blaringly obvious. To admit that I had failed at marriage would be to dismantle a significant aspect of my personal mythology and put into question the very nature of my character. Instead, I subscribed to the belief that my marriage ended not because I had done something wrong, but because, as I had already imagined countless times in my life, I did not deserve love. I could see myself as a kind of heroic victim. And so, I survived, but only by retreating to the manufactured solace of a false belief.

 

In looking clearly and honestly at my experiences, and in allowing them to inform my understanding of who I am, I glean from both pain and bliss the possibility of growth and change. In these moments of introspection it would be easy to ascribe to old belief systems of who I am, to adapt experiences to confirm a belief I have about myself. Alternately, in my awareness that my old belief systems are limiting me, I could just as easily created a new belief system to counter my old one. I could look back at my failed marriage, see how I had adapted that experience to align with my old belief systems and say, “no, that’s wrong,” and then turn around and develop a new belief system, one defined by the understanding that I had been the one that failed and not the one that had been failed. In both cases, I limit myself from being able to look back, with grace and compassion, and see an experience that informed me, but did not define me. My personal mythology is not indelibly scribed in an eternal manuscript beyond my reach, but it is rather more like a sketchbook that I keep in my back pocket, to mull over from time to time. When seen casually, divorced from its position of authority, it becomes a reflective device that can be incredibly insightful, but nothing more.

 

I saw an eagle in the evening light, in the city, when the rivers were still frozen and it made no sense for him to be there. I watched him fly over my head in a moment so surreal that I had to immediately abandon my prior understanding of the nature of eagles. Without doing this I could not really have accepted the experience. We have these moments that exist outside of our common experience of ourselves and of life. They are surreal, at times transcendent. They thrill us. Sometimes they devastate us. We are, for a moment, suspended in wonder, in the absence of belief, in the midst of infinite possibilities where we can, if only briefly, abandon our self-made myths and experience our truest selves, undefined. It’s in this moment of infinite wonder that we experience the divine.

– C