Month: August 2023

Our language can reveal a lot about who we are, who we have been, who we might become.

“Aren’t you just the spitting image of her?” We’ve all heard or used that phrase, or something similar. Some say spitten’ or splitting, depending on the place from which they hail. Before you wonder about whether “hail” in that last sentence refers to the precipitate that sometimes falls from the sky, you should know it does not; sailors instead used to “hail” each other when passing on the high or low seas of human travel and exploration. You can almost hear the echo of their hollers across the waves of time. “Hello! Where are you from?” Imagine human voices mingling with water and wind as voyagers sought connection, even if only for a moment. We are a curious species. Programmed to learn from each other, it is natural for us to hope that someone who has already been somewhere can ready us for our own journeys. It is also invigorating to envision the sights and sensory possibilities of someplace new, somewhere foreign to our own experience, based on a stranger’s description.

Maybe that helps explain a related instinct to marvel when we recognize likeness among people or across generations. Sure, we know that shared genes evidence in familiar features; it is not surprising to observe that the shape and color of someone’s eyes are remarkably similar to their mother’s. We’ve all been taught about the power of DNA. We don’t doubt that inheritance happens through genetics.

And yet there is a different type of legacy we often identify, an heirloom of heritage associated with something else, something intangible yet recognizable loitering behind a similar eye shape and color: a “look”. People are often populated by presences that feel more ethereal than physical. It isn’t the same necessarily as a dead relative or friend but it is, well, spittingly consubstantial, congruent, kindred. It’s like windows are occasionally, even fleetingly, opened into some sacred sense of spiritual sharing, some inexplicable ancestry of soul. The view can be brief, disarming, and strangely reassuring. The image we experience is more felt than seen. We might swear that someone we once knew and perhaps loved is smiling at us, tilting their head a certain way, or using a word or phrase only we understand has special significance, in that moment, to our lives. We feel hailed from a world beyond physical form.

Why should a soul be static? I just took a big leap there; the springboard from metaphysical experience to the demonstrable existence of immaterial spirit requires considerable potential and kinetic energy. But does it really? A friend and colleague passed last week from the earthly plane. Before I could begin to plumb the layers of grief associated with sudden loss, the image of him smiling was just there, planted inside my mind’s eye in a way that felt powerfully visible in the air and space around me. If you had been standing next to me, I feel sure you would have seen the same thing. Memory? The human capacity to seek meaning and comfort through creative exploitation of interior imagination? We too easily relegate our reality to rational explanations and justifications. The binary dominates our viewfinder. Alive and dead. Here and then. Physical and non-physical. Soul and non-soul.

I have a theory: the soul exists, it is continuous, and it is continuously emerging. Depending on your beliefs, you may agree (or not) with the first two characteristics of my theory. But continuously emerging? What does that mean? I’m not completely sure. I think it suggests that my soul borrows from, is infused by, and indeed inherits some parts of other souls. Why should we not, however, be capable to taking the best (or sadly sometimes the worst) of others, during and after their lifetimes? I have no doubt whatsoever that there is persistence of being outside our three dimensional forms; certain experiences have convinced me that consciousness, spirit, and life are not confined to what our five senses typically feel. From that place and perspective, it is easier, in fact freeing, to open myself to the possibility that soul, specifically my soul, is a compositional amalgamation of forces, influences, and continuances from other souls, most notably those who have left the forms we so readily identify with names. Pictures, stories, written words, artistic works, disappointments and accomplishments are left for our material world to retain and catalogue. The unique constellation of spiritual intent and history comprising the person behind and within that organic residue and remembrance need not immutably endure. It can be reconfigured. It may be reconstituted. It might return to and through us in the shape of spitting images, discernible glimpses into a great beyond that is mysteriously and incomprehensibly reshaping, reemerging, and forever being.

My early morning routine is guided by insights from a blend of wisdom traditions. Over a cup of tea, I reflect on the wonderful uncertainty of life through readings, recordings, and commentary from Buddhism, Greek classicism, and Judea-Christian scripture. I used to fuss a bit over which tradition I should invite into each day. In recent years, however, I’ve been learning to welcome any that aspire to helping humans overcome our ego-driven tendencies to grasp, to hold, and to possess. Some days there is an astounding alignment across them all – if only I ease my focus and let their likeness shine. When I lose myself in the wonder of positive intent, there is so much more to find.

Silence is more than the absence of sound.

It was an idyllic autumn afternoon. I recall a canvas of shiny azure celestial ceiling, amber cliff faces and sandstone, and dusty boots. A medical student completing a family medicine rotation on the Navajo Nation, I had been invited on a weekend hike to some overlooks and canyons in the region. Somewhere in the middle of an afternoon made for landscape painters, I sat on a rock ledge, drank some water, and closed my eyes. The months hung like a jet engine’s contrail; their residue shifted with time’s winds until they were mysteriously absorbed by the depths of time’s atmosphere. It felt good to pause, to be awake without responsibility, to sit close-eyed without a desire for sleep. The earth was beneath and behind. A giant yawn of canyon and sky stretched before and around. A single bird called from some distant horizon. Then nothingness embraced me.

Surely I had experienced total silence in the past; we hardly notice what we are not ready to recognize. At this moment, however, in this particular place, it seemed I had earned the right to receive emptiness. There was no sound. There was no thought. The boundary between being and becoming blurred. I was fully awake, powerfully present, yet foundationally unmoored from standard states of awareness and consciousness. Unexpectedly and without intention, I had relaxed into a space of simple harmony. No up. No down. No then. Only now. Just this. Not even this. Just …

What – no sound? The observation retethered me to thought. Could I hear anything? Could I really hear nothing? Had I ever been anywhere in my life when I was unable to hear anything?

Some say that sensory deprivation can have unsettling effects on the psyche. This was not such an experience. It felt invigorating to know that it was possible not to hear. I could create sound, yes; I tested the theory by a slight ruffling of my shirt sleeve. But nothing else was rumbling, roaring, buzzing, or bothering me for attention. It seemed that the universe had gone mute. Or maybe it had forgotten my name. It was reassuring to imagine that I might, even momentarily, be forgotten.

Once observed, reality changes. The weightless sensation dissipated like the last gust of wind from a passing weather system. I fell back into my body, re-opening my eyes to a place that was both foreign and forever familiar. A bush shimmered beside me. The boot of another hiker reminded me of some schedule and timeline. “There you are,” a voice said. “Ready?”

We live our days like frames from a movie reel. Played at the appropriate speed, there is the impression of continuity, of seamless interconnection. Slowed down, however, experience is not as continuous as we presume. There are spaces in between our senses, crevasses in cognition, gaping gazes into the abyss of being that are as much breathtaking as it is breath offering. My experience decades ago on the brink of auditory emptiness was but a taste of the power and potential of silence, of stillness. Meditation motions us toward immutability. When we stop, sit, and cease to speak and listen, when we pause and perch on the precarious ledge of any precise moment, there is a place, a sliver of potential, for poise, for balance. For engaged and detached and ungrasping presence.

At the age of sixty-four, I find myself called by silence. Inside its welcome, there is neither regret nor joy nor desire to be better, different, or anything other than here, inside a still moment, sheltered by the tranquil happiness for the gift of being alive.