This is about the transcendant power of dreams to imagine something far beyond ourselves, and the enormous power of vows, and relationships, being the vessels we skipper to reach there.
To reach, beautifully, means both to strive towards something beyond ourselves, and our arrival there.
There is such a powerfully clarifying and freeing insight that I arrived at a few years ago. That is We go through our lives in containers —like a boat or a ferry, or maybe even a current —in which we navigate or get pulled along, in our crossing of the wide and troubled ocean of Life.
The vessel, or container, that I have crossed the last tumultuous, trying and electrifying stretch of open water in, was of course the ship of my marriage—my relation-ship as it were, with the outriggers of my work and my own personal life-leadership, providing the stabilising tensions of that draft.
(Incidentally, the word ‘Draft’ is a nautical term that refers to the depth of water a vessel requires to float freely; it is the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the hull (keel). At the same time ‘draft’ represents the marriage contract I entered into. I don’t know what the word is to describe the pleasure I enjoy from playing with words like this, but if you enjoy it as much as I do, you may take pleasure in noticing the other easter eggs smuggled subtly into the copy.)
We are all undertaking kindred projects. They can appear dissimilar, but in the end, they are all of a piece—to be Whole and to be Home. What that means for each of us is a private matter between ourselves and our truth. Some of us are not immediately or perhaps directly aware of our own truth, but we follow it and live it in some way regardless. For some of us, this means seeking connection through partnership, family and friends. For some, it is the pursuit of meaning through accomplishment and legacy. For others, it is the seeking of transcendence of some kind, no matter whether we call that peace, release, or ascendance.
Our containers, the vessels or vehicles we undertake these journeys in, are our relationships, with work, with calling and with our spouses and families.
My work and my own calling, have been for me a reflection of an ache and a longing in my soul that functioned like a compass, attracting me home. My marriage to my wife, and the growth and evolution that has gifted me, have been the ship on which I have had the adventure of a lifetime over the last nearly six years. Our callings are Destiny, both related to the ideas of what we describe as spiritual coming home as well as Legacy, that which we want to leave behind and perhaps be appreciated for.
This Was My Vow.
These were the words I spoke to my wife the day we were married:
I very literally feel like I have lived 7 lives already, and every few years, my world, in some way, would be unmade, and the clocks would stop and the beams that held up the ceiling of my dreams would burn and fall to ruin and ash.
I had become familiar with the soundtrack that preceded each new collapse,
and how it felt when I heard the music rising.
So that I asked myself one day:
Am I in the kind of relationship i would want for my best friend.
Am i living the life I would want for my best friend.
The fire and hammers of that answer, unravelled my whole life,
but this time in the char and cold soot of that defeat,
I found something new written in the ashes
And in the strength I found in my utter aloneness
I stood before the place with a hundred thousand eyes
I wrote the truth of my heart
everything that I valued
everything that I sought,
everything that I offered,
everything that I was,
and spoke it into the world.
and I found my way,
surprisingly,
impossibly to you.
And learned with surprise,
you had always been searching for me too.
I thought I knew what love was,
until I met you.
You took my most broken pieces and honoured them
You saw me standing in my full light
and did not shield your eyes,
but praised me and held me up.
You taught me gentleness and rewrote, properly, for the first time
the meaning of words like loyalty, honour, and faith.
You showed me the very meaning of grace.
So that now, when I ask myself
am I in the relationship i would want for my best friend
am I living a life that i would want for my best friend
the answer wonderfully, is "yes!"
and
you are my best friend, which puts a burden on me
of always being the best man i can be for you
and always putting love above fear.
and that is why:
I choose to love you.
I choose to protect you.
I choose to walk whatever miles it will take to be the best version of myself,
so that I might hold a clear mirror up to the incredible soul that you are.
I choose to allow your tides and your seasons.
I choose to honour the goddess in you.
I call upon the people here present to witness that I,
Rocco Jarman,
take you, Dympna Mary Forte,
to be my lawful wedded wife.
The Journey
I dreamed a powerful dream.
I spoke that dream, perfectly honed and raw, into the fertile womb of possibility on that day.
I look back now at the temerity, vision and self-belief that younger man had in himself and I do not think him a fool for it. Instead, I have enormous gratitude for the courage it took to be so audacious and the tenacity and vulnerability it took to hold true to the vows I made and stay the course.
I am today, a more fulfilled, more arrived, more authentic and integrated version—a more realised version, of that man I stood in the shadow of on that day. I made a vow and to my own credit, I held myself to that vow. Every single one of my capacities and limits were tested. My valuation is not something I would feel fair to be measured by the stockmarket-zig-zag of daily ups and downs that define a life, even when the levels of support were sometimes sorely tested, but rather the overall signature of the curve.
I believe now more than ever in the power of self-belief and the veracity of the idea of Destiny. By that, I believe even more now in myself, not just that I feel vindicated in a sense of arrival, but vindicated also that my intuitions had guided me truly, even when sorely tempted to doubt myself because of the social cost of acceptance or the challenge of the way. You have to choose a profound loneliness when you choose yourself in this way.
To choose Yourself takes none of the arrogance all your critics think they must be seeing, but rather profound vulnerability and preparedness to endure isolation, ridicule, blame and disconnection with a stoic resolve, in the service of your own integrity.
A big part of the dream I dreamed, the night I met my wife-to-be, was that all the dysfunction and suffering I had endured, and contributed to in my own pain and ignorance, would not be for nothing. I was determined to own the deep simple lessons of my failed marriage, the loss of my family, my children, my home and most unjustly of all, my reputation. I was determined to love myself, and I was determined to show up as a leader in my own life, in my marriage and in my calling. I reasoned that I could not control the outcome of trying to persuade other people of my worth and value. By this, I reasoned that the transformation I was aiming to realise would be the only noble way I could give myself permission to forgive myself and still love and respect the person I became and the person I had been, perhaps more, in the process.
There was a whole year of life between when we met, and when we got married, during which I had time and opportunity to demonstrate the proof-of-concept to my wife and help her co-draft the conditions of our life together. This was part honeymoon, part rude awakening. Over that time, I was going through a very destructive, punitive divorce, which crippled my mental health and depleted my libido and took away every financial investment and nest egg I had built over the last 20 years. Over that same time, my wife-to-be was dealing with a 20-year dependency on depression medication, and for the first time in her life, coming to grips with the implications of generational and ancestral trauma. So by the time it came to wedding vows, this was how I was so certain in the moment because life had given me enough opportunities to demonstrate my own leadership and conviction and I knew thereby that I could trust my heart. I knew, as did someone beautiful and good, that I could lead and be led. When we made that call, we were both as ‘eyes wide open’ as we could have been.
I have learned an enormous gratitude and appreciation for my wife, and the unwavering devotion we have both shown, less to each other than to ourselves. We really chose growth and whatever it took to forge our way towards it, in an incredible, often overwhelming blend of grace and defiance. My wife taught me what love means, and through her, I have learned to love myself more gently, to master my anger and to temper my iron resolve.
On the day, I had the Promethean foresight to bring my craft and my calling ‘in’ to the marriage, and specifically for it to preside at our wedding day and ceremony itself. My craft is devotion through poetry, philosophy and practice, specifically in the projects of Actualisation and Meaning-making.
‘Craft’, wonderfully, is another word for ‘ship’ or vehicle.
What my ‘Craft’ looks like, is expression and articulation, publicly, through poetry and writing, and privately, through prayer and ceremony. My patron angel then, and still remains, the spirit of Understanding, in its existence and in its gifts and related costs. (The ancient Greeks called this Nous—sort of a combination and mix of consciousness, reason and understanding often depicted via the metaphor of light, hence “enlightenment”.) To further play with the nautical metaphor, often when we encounter storms that threaten to sink us, it is not that we have to take on board more, learn more or do more—we actually have to jettison things that we thought we valued, but allow us to be ‘lightened’ in the water. A lot of Understanding comes through being prepared to unlearn and disintegrate what we thought was true about the world, or about ourselves.
My own form of self-love was an unwavering devotion to authenticity and integrity, and by that an unwavering commitment towards my own care and my own actualisation, true to my own deepest truest heart’s desires. This demands radical vulnerability, self-awareness and radical honesty.
This is the poem on Vows, that I read at our wedding:
ON VOWS A vow is a pilgrimage, an often unrequited demand to not remain unchanged as we go from this place, asking of us, when we stand, here at the forking of the path, in the light of another, of a witness, and, especially in the shadow of that best part of ourselves; the person we have not maybe even yet become. To give our word to go to another place, to weather those seasons, to live those days. And thus to choose, willingly the way we will walk thither, the places in between we will come to, what we will take with us, what we will collect by the way and what we will have to leave behind us and most of all the manner of our grace when we discover we might never arrive. —Rocco Jarman
Promises, Agreements & Vows
It still fascinates me, every time I visit these words, that I did not—could not—understand the profound wisdom of what I was writing or what they would yet come to mean when I first spoke them. Promises, I learned later, are actually meant to be broken. They are always made by smaller versions of ourselves about things we cannot truly hold ourselves and others to, without burdening us or them in some way. Promises always burden and bind the people we love in chains, and the inevitable cost is always shame and suffering.
What we should rather be doing instead, amongst ourselves and other adults of good faith, is to be making Agreements. Agreements have terms. Terms are limits of time, circumstance and condition. Agreements can therefore allow for people to mutually benefit, to mutually grow and even to mutually move on from, or fail, each other, and still be held with some fondness and appreciation. (I often invite people to simply imagine how this might make divorce either unnecessary or relatively painless.)
And then for very special circumstances, there are Vows. A vow is the establishment of a covenant, to stay true to a cause and to a relationship as the vehicle of that destination. A vow, by definition, is not something conditional to your satisfaction of expectations, it assumes some sacrifice, some surrender and some compromise. A vow should underwrite any real agreement, the more profound the agreement, the more solemn should be the vow. And it ought to be more serious and more courageous than, but not so ambitious as, a Promise.
Beautifully, the bounds, demands and tolerances of a vow, with poetic irony, invariably result in the very necessary pressures and frictions required to cut and polish you that you chose to become under the aegis and tabernacle of that covenant. I came to understand, that what you had thought development and growth were going to mean had to break and disintegrate, quite painfully and necessarily, to make way for the emerging unfolding dream. I came to appreciate that this was precisely the way the crucibles of our relationships facilitate the alchemy of our actualisation.
Another way of saying this is that you think you know what love means in design, and then having to love in prod, you are taught what love actually means and the reality is always more profound and more poignant than anything we could have imagined. How else do you become fulfilled in your growth unless the result is surprising and the test so much harder than the smaller version of you would have wagered? How else do you grow, except by eventually breaking the boundaries and limits of your current limitations? That has to include limitations of imagination, discernment and appreciation. Bumpy rides are the only way we really learn a profound trust and mastery of our ships and our ability to skipper them.
That is what a vow means. It means to choose growth and to choose the discomforts and lessons as both necessary and essential to that growth.
True Devotion means the pursuit of, and dedication to, a goal, and to being equally dedicated to forging the way, as following the way. When you are truly devoted to something, you don’t stop to wonder about giving up or why the world is arrayed against you. There is no question. The only question is “Which way from here?”.
I cannot recommend this approach highly enough.
Knowing what I know now, there is no way I would choose to have had it any other way. There is absolutely no way I would have grown and evolved as much as I have if my relationship and my ‘craft & calling’ had ‘worked out’ and become realised in the way my then smaller, sillier ambitions and their poverty of reach once described.
When our daughter was born, we had just endured the COVID pandemic and the deranging mind virus that had birthed into the world at that time. My wife and I were struggling and the little soul that came was quite autistic and did not want to be loved the way we had wanted to love. Because we had entered into a covenant so sacredly, when we began to understand what it would mean to love our daughter, we had to grow up and grieve the loss of things that we had thought we wanted. We believed ultimately, that she deserved the full benefit of that vow—all the blessings that we might have enjoyed if the world had not been so wounded and all of us, so wounded inside. A vow does not just provide the covenant to guide us to our own promise of transcendence, arrival and belonging, but is also the ark in which we can find safe albeit harrowing passage in turbulent times, to tomorrow and safe harbour. Our vow became the shield, the aegis, by which we could shield our daughter and her own journey forever in this world, from the woundedness we had inherited. The way we have held space for her needs has helped her flourish and arrive, how she has learned to belong. Our vow created that.
A vow after all is a binding commitment to choose to always look for elegant solutions to challenges in ways that look like love and leadership. A vow is a pre-emptive choice to not be a victim in this world. Vows are so powerful because a true vow can only be made by someone in deep and sincere relationship with their own truth. Because vows in this way are powered by our connection to our true self, and therefore our inner child and our shadow, vows have the power to shape reality. Vows make us doggedly inclined towards curiosity, imagination and therefore, to creativity, or to leadership. That level of determination driven by love, is how we transcend our current limits, how we strive to find paths, how we make the willing sacrifice of energy and attention and cycles to develop new skills and gain greater self-mastery.
XXIX Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking. Traveller, the path is your tracks And nothing more. Traveller, there is no path The path is made by walking. By walking you make a path And turning, you look back At a way you will never tread again Traveller, there is no road Only wakes in the sea.” Antonio Machado
Vows are how we grow and transcend. Devotion is the ongoing conversation. It is the sailor’s pilgrimage.
What I Learned to Know.
I know now, that to be free in this world, you have to choose you, above everything. And not (of course), a small greedy kind of selfishness, but the kind that refuses to let anything clip the wings of your soul, knowing the price you paid to get here. It is the kind that looks like self-ownership, that has you choosing your trials and losses, having touched, and been touched by, the sheer joy of how it is to be free, unburdened by anything that does not bring you alive or meet you in your sense of purpose.
The journey here was not straight, having lived so many angry and unnecessary moments, acting with the iron resolve of what I would one day come to know, but not the generosity I know now. Too much breath and vigour, wasted on snarling at a world that was guilty only of an ignorance and a lack of imagination. The journey tempered me.
I understand now that our journeys are not supposed to be measured in sunshine, fair weather or favourable winds only. We ride the crest of a wave, the wind at our backs and the sunshine on our faces and we tell ourselves “This is it!” But it is always fleeting. And when it slides away from us, we wonder what is wrong about us.
And then invariably, we get tossed by the waves, our worlds are tumbled upside down, and we are dragged even into the depths to face again our own unintegrated shadow, in ways that feel like we are lost, and will never find our way. We mistakenly normalise the notion that the project of a spiritual life is about light and joy only. We never really get taught, not properly that is, that much of what we are doing here, is as James Hillman said, not about rising above life, but about growing down into it.
And this “growing down into it” need mean nothing more obscure than simply belonging to one’s own life. If our inclination to climb, to become and to ascend is called Spirit, our neglected need to integrate, connect and belong can be called Soul. I have repeated this idea so many times now, that ‘Soul’ is nothing more than the human appetite and capacity for connection, belonging and purpose, from which we derive our vitality and creativity, from where we derive all Meaning.
‘Soul’ is nothing more than the human appetite and capacity for connection, belonging and purpose, from which we derive our vitality and creativity, from where we derive all Meaning.
Any relationship, even with your work, is a suitable vehicle for the journey and process of Growing Upwards and Downwards, of Becoming and of Being. A relationship under the covenant of a vow is just that much more powerful. All that ‘Soul retrieval’ really is, is not an ethereal abstract spiritual nonsense, but simply the process of owning and accepting the person that you are today. This, when explored deeply means the life circumstances, the childhood, the experience, the time, the era, and the ancestry that you are the product of.
Imagine what your life could be like if you were as devoted to the acceptance of your nature and your circumstance as you were to the notion of growth and becoming.
The beautiful reality is that these all become different ‘ships’ for us to make headway on our journeys which turn our lives from an arduous wandering in exile to sacred pilgrimages of daring adventure. This means we are building and refining those ‘ships’ while we are sailing them. We are actually developing ‘craft’, honing our skills and experience through the testing challenges and deep disappointments which we discover are not only inevitable but singly instrumental in both projects, of Growth and Belonging. Storms must be weathered, courses must be corrected, and sometimes, repairs must be made in the aftermath of setbacks. Yet, it is these very challenges that teach us how to sail more skillfully. Mastery is not achieved in calm seas but in the ability to steer a steady course despite the tumultuous waters.
For all these reasons, I simply could not advocate this approach strongly enough.
“It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Whatever I once believed was mental health, I learned was actually closer to spiritual health. And I have come to understand that the world is deeply unwell, and we have normalised a lot of ignorant ideas that have long since become too small to serve us, and the language we are holding the conversation “far too small for the territory we already entered”. I have come to learn that everything was always going my way and that all the resistance I ever felt was to my sense of delusion and expectation, not to my true way forward. I have come to know now to have every reason to trust the “beautiful feeling that everything’s goin’ my way.”
I am coming to discover that this is the key to Abundance actually, this lived belief in pronoia, where you can begin to trust that whichever you are striving, and however that journey is disappointing your expectations, everything is happening for you, not to you.
I came to understand that urgency comes from an urge—an “animal fear”—a lived belief in scarcity, that tells us there is not ‘enough’ or enough time. In this mindset, anything that is created or realised (manifested), is emergence via emergency, tempted as we are to believe an alarming tragedy is mounting or that we have every reason to be over-cautious and afraid. The opposite of this must therefore imply that there is time, that everything has meaning, and that it will be okay, great even in the end, and if it’s not that great, it’s probably not the end. When you really struggle to understand this, it becomes a hell of an education in self-honesty and self-awareness. You invariably figure out what you do and don’t want, and you learn the hard way, the wisdom to not assume to define how it should happen, how it should feel, and which route we will have to follow to get there.
Where to From Here; Following The Way.
That’s the question for me now. How do I cross the next stretch of wild seas?
How do I chart a course to Tomorrow? What star exactly am I following in the sky? How can I possibly dream a dream that can unfold bigger than my own limited imagining and what ship can carry me there?
We can never set off on a new journey without two things. Firstly we have to allow the last journey to be over, and we need to distil the essence of that experience as appreciation and understanding. Secondly, we have to take very frank stock of where we are and the conditions we are facing.
To the first point, I feel it is a ripe time to draw a line under the ledger —to close the books and accept the gains and losses as they are.
“Death comes in the middle of a very long life.”
Irish Proverb
Tim Urban, creator of WaitButWhy.com, is responsible for the following diagram.
This diagram beautifully illustrates a powerful paradigm shift that is always available, whereby we break out of the illusion of the scarcity or ‘finitude’ of possibility, given our subconscious awareness of the amount of collapsed ‘sliding-door’ paths that are closed to us because of the choices we have made. When we make choices, our possibilities crystalise, leaving only what is now possible from here. When we were young, we did not become as easily anxious or depressed, or rather we were more buoyant and hopeful because of the sheer enormity of possibility we always sensed ahead of us, still open. When we become married, when we choose a career, a job, a mortgage, a pet even, or most profound of all, to have children of our own, all the roads not travelled, and their rich seams of possibility, are cauterised and the sense of vitality and youthfulness they bore, forever stemmed.
Because of the Left-brain dominant culture we live in, we place too much value on the ‘should have’, ‘could have’ and ‘might have’ narrative, we amplify the regret and thereby erode the sense of abundant potential that can still be yielded from what is always an infinite field of possibility. All that we need to do, is choose, with our whole hearts, the sum of everything that happened up until now, all our gifts and handicaps, all our curses and blessings, in a word, our Fate.
The original image by Tim Urban does not include the underlying watermark image. It was my own idea to layer this diagram over an image of Odin from Norse mythology, depicting the motif of Odin sacrificing himself to the attainment of Wisdom, by hanging on Yggdrasil, the world tree, to obtain the wisdom of the Runes. It seemed fitting, given that Yggdrasil does not merely represent the interconnectedness of all things but also suggests a symbol of the dynamic, evolving nature of our lives. The pursuit of wisdom and the expansion of our horizons is an ever-present opportunity. This speaks to the idea that every choice is a convergence of sacrifice and enlightenment. Nothing is without sacrifice. With each step we take, we shape our own world tree, rich with the gems of personal insight, below the surface, and the fruits of growth, above.
To the second point, the world is in tumult. Our bodies are full of plastic and heavy metals. Our hormones are suffering from the quality of our food and our food is affected by the quality of our environment, our lack of discernment and self-care. Our social exchanges of news and opinion are choked with noise and our systems of cooperation, administration and exchange are configured for propaganda and extortion. This is where we are. For my daughter, I have little hope that humanity at large is going to wake up to the nightmare we are creating and the amount of regret we are engineering along the way. I have zero faith in the education system, and I have no idea how to create a village of love and belonging for her.
For me, what this can only mean, is that it is time for a new vow. Not one that will supersede the old one—the vow to my wife stands, and I believe in the integrity and promise of that vessel. It seems the right time to make a vow to my Craft and my Calling, to my ‘occupation’, so that I choose to find a way, rather than be afraid of resistance and struggle.
It means I need to have the courage, and temerity, to dream a new dream.
As for what the dream is, well, that will be the subject of another Conversation, but it should suffice to say, that it has to do with how to realise, how to ‘make real’, the essence of my purpose. It has less to do with the ‘ideal’ and more so with how to manifest it, how to step out from beneath the overbearing weight of my own shadow and how to face, accept and enable my shining. It will, as always, be an Invitation—to bring whoever wants to come along for this journey, to discover the depth of their own shadow, the expanse of their power and the magnificence of their own shine.
The vow will be nothing elaborate, nothing so high-minded—nothing more than simple devotion to that dream and the integration of the lessons I have learned. Among those lessons are what I gave testament to above. That is, that Life kindly says “no” to us in a thousand ways before we stop waiting for a “yes” at the wrong door. It is that my Life is always happening for me, not to me, that change is how we move forward, and that hardships and mistakes are the proving grounds we exactly need to hone our craft. It is that my life is my teacher. It is that much of what I want to reach for can only be possible if I am able to grow downwards into my life, it means that there has to be an ebb and flow, there have to be tides and seasons. It means that readiness is something that comes like ripeness, in its own time. This of course is not just a self-congratulating soliloquy, it is a way for me to make myself accountable by speaking it into the world, and it is also thereby an invitation for you to consider doing the same.
The hardship of the journey is exactly matched to the value of the prize and the greatness of the soul who dares the way.
It means that there will be stuckness and threshing and that there will be periods of uncertainty, feeling like we have lost the way. It means to choose now, to come back, and keep coming back, again and again, and again, to the belief in meaning, and the refuge in the grace of understanding that all of it, simply, is the way.
Our vows are always made actually, to our deeper, nobler, future selves.
I choose to love you. I choose to protect you. I choose to walk whatever miles it will take to be the best version of myself so that I might hold a clear mirror up to the incredible soul that you are. I choose to allow your tides and your seasons. I choose to honour the divinity in you.
Won’t you join me?
Rocco