The
Winter Cold
It's a dark, drizzly winter's day and I'm nursing a bad
cold. My lungs barely work, my head feels like it got hit by a train, and my
body aches in places I didn't even know I had. There are no comfortable chairs
in the whole house. Lying down even hurts. I'm too groggy to be productive, too
jangly to sit still. TV is intolerably tedious. I can't focus my eyes on a
book. I'm grumpy and I don't want to talk. Nothing holds my interest. Nothing
feels right. There is nothing left to do but drift in and out of the moment,
vaguely aware of two opposing truths: being sick sucks and maybe, just maybe,
this is exactly what I need.
On the
grand scale of human disease, a cold has to rank as one of the lowliest, least
significant ailments, right down there with a stubbed toe or a paper cut. We
know it's not deadly, we know it's not permanent, we know we have no real right
to complain, but the fact remains – a good cold knocks you so completely off
track that you simply have to retreat from the day-to-day demands of life and
hide out whimpering in some dark corner until the damn thing passes.
Upon
reflection, sickness, like winter itself, is a time of turning inward. All
one's energies have sunk down into the soil and the outer leaves have withered
away. Our skin is sallow and our eyes lifeless. Our hair is dull and flat. We
shuffle like zombies between tea kettles and Kleenex boxes. We have no gifts to
give. For the earth, of course, winter is a necessary time of rest and
regeneration. No longer outward-turned, nature settles into its roots and
restores its energies. Soon enough there will be new branches to clothe with
leaves, but for now, we slumber deep within our cool, grey tombs, dead to the
world.
In the archetypal
hero's journey, the hero must always descend into the abyss, the underworld, to
confront the monster. In the quest to be reborn into one's higher nature, one
must die to old, limiting notions of self. One must leave the known – the world
of competence and familiarity – and enter a darkening realm of incompetence and
unfamiliarity. Then, when we are at our weakest, the monster appears. With
courage, integrity, humility, and honor we summon the last of our strength and
stand before it. Then, as we confront the monster without fear, a magical
alchemy of transformation occurs. Through a grace beyond our understanding we
are carried over the threshold on the very back of the monster we thought was
our enemy. The mysteries never end. Our enemy becomes our ally. Without this
necessary journey through the underworld we would never realize our deeper
nature. In other words, winter and its counterpart, sickness, are absolutely
essential passages on the way to a fully realized life. Without these seasons
of decay and decline there could be no bursting forth, no miraculous creation.
Can a baby be born without nausea and blood-letting? We owe our very lives to
pain.
It is our
suffering that shapes us, that burns away our egocentric childishness. Tears
and loss clarify for us three essential truths: one, that nothing is permanent;
two, that our essential nature is untouched by these surface sufferings; and
three, that the endless beauty of the world is only possible because of
so-called "suffering." Hence suffering is really only a surface of a deep and
profound birthing. When one realizes these three truths, not just
intellectually but in the ground of one's being, one is awash in wave after
wave of endless gratitude, even, and perhaps especially, for the things that
have brought us pain.
How can we
learn to recognize that our enemies, our adversaries, our sufferings are all
conspiring together to help us give birth to our deeper, more authentic selves?
The answer to that question is something each of us must uncover for ourselves.
A good starting point would be acceptance – to learn to accept the actual
conditions of our lives. To let other people be who they are. To say yes to
reality. Buddha called it non-attachment or acceptance. There is great peace in
the realization that all the apparent contradictions of life are actually in
concert with one another. And that when we stop struggling against the
universe, it begins to respond in harmonious ways. If we learned to see the
enemy as a co-conspirator for our good, fear would turn into love.
In an old
Hasidic story a lumberjack goes into the forest to cut down trees. Instead of
cowering in fear the trees see the long wooden handle of the ax and say, "Look,
one of us."
How can I
learn to recognize that my enemy and I are one, my disease and I are one, and
that together we are bringing forth a wonder that neither of us could do alone?
How can I learn to say yes to the truth that the roots of all our future bounty
lie deep within this winter cold?
Peter Bolland is a
professor of philosophy and humanities at Southwestern College and
singer-songwriter-guitarist of The Coyote Problem. You can complain to him
about what you read here at peterbolland@cox.net. www.thecoyoteproblem.com is
the ethereal home of The Coyote Problem.