FilmOnDeepWater

Portola Valley, CA

6 April 1999

Just at pre-dawn.  A quiet, almost eerie time of day for me.  It is the time of promise and the time of confusion.  Is it day or night?  Neither? both? it doesn't matter.  It is just now.  This now - the one I am holding on to, the one that becomes then if you don' t let it go, and allow yourself to be, just be.

The most daunting task before me is to face the possibility of discouragement and failure.  They are related, but they are not the same.  I really do believe that failure is nothing more or less than bits of information about what has already transpired.  It is impossible to fail in the moment because the moment always holds the tension between the actual and the potential, between what was and what is possible.  Failure is merely information about what was.

Discouragement is in the present.  It is about losing my heart.  It is about heartbreak.  I usually think of broken hearts only in the romantic sense.  But I think hearts are broken all the time.  If I let it, my heart gets broken in my work fairly often.  I sometimes break my own heart when I choose not to face my fears and let them run my life.  I break my heart when I see patterns in my life that are harmful, but I fail to muster up the courage -- the heart -- to face them and alter their course a bit.  And I break my heart when I disengage from the people I love.

It's revealing to me that one of the definitions for encourage is "to hearten". What in my life heartens me, gives me more heart?  What comes to mind, oddly enough, is words.  Encouraging words.  And actions.  Actions that lead me toward hopefulness and greater possibility.

For me encouragement means having more heart, moving into a greater sense of self. I recall reading about aboriginal people who would (still do?) eat the heart of the wild animal they killed.  The animal demonstrated great courage and, once vanquished, became an offering to the hunter for him to literally take in that courage by eating the heart.  The hunter was then encouraged, filled with more courage, and thereby able to continue on.  It is as if the hunter knew (maybe he did) that the task was too great for him to do alone.  So he relied on the relationship he had with his prey to nourish his soul as well as his body.

Encouragement for me comes from words these days.  It comes from the nourishing conversations I have with people close to me, people who know and love me.  The words may not always be pleasant, often they are not, but they are heartening.  The remarkable thing for me to realize right now is how much I need those words of encouragement, more so than even when I was younger.  I don't need those words as often, but they now go deeper into me.  I eat them.  They become part of me in a way that they didn't in the past. 

All this living, and loving and succeeding and failing and hoping - the whole catastrophe of living the life of a seeker - is also a task too great to do alone.  By taking an arrogant stance of going it alone, it is too easy to lose heart, to become discouraged, to give into fear.  It is only by the action of opening my heart that I can become even more resilient, more tempered, more able to face into those fears, and continue to face into the biting headwinds of resistance and fear. 

I know right now that, for me, my path is into the wind, for a time at least.  The wind will not be at my back, as the Irish wish, not for a while.  Each step I take, each action no matter how small, is itself encouraging.  Each simple action leads to another that begins to create a heartening pattern.

And what is stronger or more beautiful, or more encouraging than a pattern of interlocking hearts?