Harmony and Defiance are not mutually exclusive. Irish music taught me that.
I had the experience we are all visited by sometimes, when we are on the one hand, overwhelmed by what life seems to be asking of us and on the other hand, empty pocketed in all the ways we feel we should be showing up. And our wishes and prayers thoroughly unrequited and our window of opportunity jammed firmly shut; An acute case of Life saying ‘no’ to us gently but firmly a hundred times, before we stop listening for a ‘yes’ at the wrong door.
Our nervous systems believe our internal gossip and the drama it implies and are left always unsure how to belong to the present moment, given the outlandish demands we place on ourselves to do, to be, to perform against our true nature and in ignorance and neglect of our own human need for acceptance, which we are invited all along, to give ourselves, unconditionally.
Stance is Everything
Harmony and Defiance are not mutually exclusive. Irish music taught me that.
The following is not true as in I always manage to adopt this stance, but it is true in that it is the stance I aspire to:
I am someone who sits with my feelings.
I am someone who is present with my regrets and my triumphs, and observes them.
I am someone who can feel uncomfortable and not seek distraction, I am someone that prizes stillness, because I Understand that I cannot make the unconscious conscious if I am not present and facing, and because if I am not still I cannot truly be present.
Because I came here to live my life, to the full. I came here to know myself truly, and to connect with something bigger. Both of these two secrets lie on the far side of discoveries which ask of me to face my discomfort. Every time I seek refuge in distraction, it means I stop reaching towards the person I am to become. Every time I allow myself to be comforted by shallow engagement, the firmness of how I belong to this world is made less.
Deep and recursive rumination is still distraction. I cannot solve everything by thinking. And even so, when I am sad, I will be sad, when I am grieving I will do nothing other than grieve. When I am resting, or playing, or putting my cares down for a moment, I will be present in the space that is left when their demands have left the room for a while.
Looking after myself does not get in the way of who I am. Looking after myself is who I am.
Fun is not a distraction and joy is never in the way. My feelings and my needs are not a distraction. I may yet Choose the most frivolous of ways to spend my down time, I will do many of the same things I once did, except I will not do them impulsively and I will not do them for distraction.
I am me, I choose Life, I choose Me, and I am a thing in this world. I am Whole, within myself.
The photo above is one I took on a chill spring morning, just around sunrise in North Clare on a stone pier poking out into the inlet of Galway bay. The water would have been a bracing 11°, and representative of a way, which for years, I and so many of our generation have chosen to process the effects, which years of trauma, soul depletion, grief and and stress have had on our nervous systems; the price of a powerful existence and a late arrival into a troubled time.
Stopping the Show
The below piece (Stop the Show), was written shortly after stepping out of a mystical fever of peat smoke and uilleann pipes. It was the chiming of a gong, sending ripples through the depths of my own soul, of what was to become the fulcrum of a profoundly transformative spiritual experience, after a week of catalysts and mounting spiritual momentum from my recent walking tour. The scene of the epiphany was cottage 7 in Ballyvaughan, famed for spiritual experiences, and the heart of transmission during David Whyte’s walking tour in Ireland.
STOP THE SHOW In the tight living room the cottage is crowded with stirred hearts and easy cheer. The demanding hike through the gauntlet of gale and limestone traps well behind you, it’s blessing on you like windburn on your face, and it’s troubles belonging to yesterday; the place all your troubles go and wait patiently for you to return. White rafters, heels thumping on the wooden floor, and the Uilleann pipes working the bellows of your Irish kundalini to a holy fire, touching the hem of reckless mirth. Here at last your soul is caught off guard, as the dancer comes alive, before the shadow of your public self becomes aware, you can hear it rehearsing it’s lines in preparation to flood back onto the stage with the mask of readiness, to face the crowd. Right in the homely stillness, in the eye of the triumphant storm of the wild music between Friars Green and Stormy Night, a voice speaks out again from the prompt box, soft and resonant with myth and power, a simple line that changes everything by leaving everything alone. Three words: Stop the Show. And then the tears come, relief spilling over the floodgate carrying a spring melt of secret prayers for meaning, for the refuge of acceptance, as the arms of grace descend around you, holding you as you wanted to be held all along; Assuring you with familiar presence of remembering that the theatrics were always completely unnecessary. And that the audience, and the critics, and the talent scouts, were never there for you. Being instead all caught in the arresting light of their own drama, full of comedy and tragedy. And that the final act is no act at all. And all your fumbled lines and unrequited effort, as revealing and essential to the plot as the score and the lighting you could never have chosen for yourself. The music shares its truth with the ear of your understanding: You can surrender to harmony even as you choose to allow your own defiance. © Rocco Jarman
We all find ourselves pressed, by the anxious demands of a manic world and a weight of purpose, into a kind of ‘show’; An unconscious assumption of responsibility to walk on the eggshells of probity and language policing, to not offend, to show up in a certain way. To be ready in every moment to show a certain face to the world, despite feeling at times like we are crumbling and desperately out of our depths.
I think we all feel this. And I believe it is not designed to break us, it is designed precisely to snap us out of the effete pantomime; to stop the show.
There is no greater treasure than to be loved truly for who you truly are.
And to be thus loved for who you truly are, one of course has to have the courage to be vulnerable enough to let people see who you really are.