Serve the Divine

Times are busy for me right now at the university, but I wanted to do this entry before the thoughts slipped through my hands.

Of late, I've seen journalers questioning why they are keeping a journal.  I've seen journals abandoned, journals put on hold, and journals searching for a new direction.  Just a few entries ago, I was writing about how we are finding our tribe.  Now people are questioning what their role is within the tribe.  This is a good thing, it seems to me.

"Where are our moorings?  What behooves us?"  These are questions the poet Adrienne Rich once asked.

In searching for my mooring, I find myself always going back to the heart. 

At the end of our time at Esalen, Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun, mentioned a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.  After I got home, I ordered the book and have just finished it.  I still need to reread it and underline passages that are important to me, but I want to say something now about this book and how I think it relates to my moorings.

After the ecstasy of discovering our tribe, comes the day-to-day work of living within the tribe.  Of "doing the laundry," so to speak. 

In a section of the book, called "The Heart's Intention," Kornfield says that "Becoming aware of intention is a key to awakening ..."  He says that it is in "small things that we fulfill the lessons of the heart.  It is from our intentions that our life grows.  It is in opening to one another that our path is made whole" (253).

I think that as long as we bring some kind of awareness to the table we are spreading for our Internet friends, we are fulfilling an important need.  In opening up to one another, our lives are made whole.

Later in this book, Kornfield quotes E. B. White, who once said, "Every morning I awaken torn between the desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it."

I find this is exactly where my intention springs from--the tension between these two states of being.  If I incline too much toward trying to save the world, my writing gets dull and preachy.  If I write just to savor life, my writing loses its spiritual component, which is very important to me.  I have always been drawn to authors who elevate ordinary objects to the realm of the spirit--Richard Brautigan was such a writer, so was J. D. Salinger.  So, naturally, that is how I want to write, too.  To do that, I have to cultivate awareness. 

Richard Brautigan wrote a story called "The Kool-Aid Wino."  In the story, a child found delight in making a jar of Kool-Aid.  Because the child was poor, he put at least twice the amount of water into the mixture he was supposed to.  But the point of the story is that when he drew the water, the  spigot thrust itself out of the earth like the finger of saint.  Thus, making the Kool-Aid became a ritual, a spiritual act.

That is the kind of awareness I want.  That is the kind of awareness I want to bring to my writing.  Even to this journal.

In my last entry, I talked about the perils of the publishing world, that uniqueness is sometimes eshewed in favor of the "tried but true."  

Another idea I meant to express in that same entry was that if I begin any creative work with the goal to publish it, that piece of writing is dead from the start.  That's because, for me, writing for the sake of publishing is the wrong intention.

Don't get me wrong, getting work published feels good.  But I can't start there, with that intention.  I have to start with the need to reveal an awareness. 

All of us do writings that have clear purposes, writings that are requirements for our job, for our bread and butter.  I'm not talking about that kind of writing.  I'm talking about the kind of writing we do because of what's in our hearts.  The kind of writing that expresses why life itself is so precious.

It is much harder to determine the purpose of heart writing.  But that is indeed what we must do. 

Lest you think your writing is self-absorbed or that you're being selfish by taking the time to do it, consider what Kornfield says in his book:

"Years ago Ram Dass went to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, to ask, 'How can I best be enlightened?'  His guru answered, 'Love people.'  When he asked about the most direct path to awakening, his guru answered, 'Feed people.  Love people and feed people.  Serve the Divine in every form.'"

Remember what I told you Barry Lopez said?  That sometimes a person needs a story more than food?

Kornfield then asks, "But whom are we serving?"

His answer:

"It is ourselves.  When someone asked Gandhi how he could so continually sacrifice himself for India, he replied, 'I do this for myself alone.'  When we serve others we serve ourselves.  The Upanishads call this 'God feeding God.'"

So then, what are our moorings?  What is our heart's intention? Why do we keep a journal, anyway?

For many of us it is to speak the matters of the heart.

In doing so, we feed ourselves.  In feeding ourselves, we feed others.  In feeding others, we get closer to the divine.