Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is such a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one destination, the one role is all that is allotted to us. That we are lucky with so little. Certainty is a subtle destroyer.
We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition. One of the most deadening forces of all is repetition. Your response to the invitation and edge of your life becomes reduced to a series of automatic reflexes. For example, you are so used to getting up in the morning and observing the morning rituals of washing and dressing. You are still somewhat sleepy, your mind is thinking of things you have to do in the day that lies ahead. You go through these first gestures of the morning often without even noticing that you are doing them. This is a disturbing little image, because it suggests that you live so much of your one life with the same automatic blindness of adaptation. After a while, unknown to you, a wall has grown between you and the native force of your experiences. You go through things only half aware that they are actually happening to you. This subtle conditioning becomes so effortless that you are only half present in your life. Sometimes you are lucky and destiny wakes you up abruptly, you stumble and trip into love, or some arrow of suffering pierces your armour. These routines of repetition are often most evident in your work. You somehow manage enough concentration to get the motions right, so that hardly anybody suspects that you really live Elsewhere or that you have got badly lost in some bland Nowhere. It also often happens in our emotional life with the person with whom we live. Time and again, we find ourselves back at the same point in the circle of repetition with each other. The same difficulty repeats itself in an uncanny echo of the past.
Habit is a strong invisible prison. Habits are styles of feeling, perception, or action that have now become second nature to us. A habit is a sure cell of predictability; it can close you off from the unknown, the new, and the unexpected. You were sent to the earth to become a receiver of the unknown. From ancient times, these gifts were prepared for you; now they come towards you across eternal distances. Their destination is the altar of your heart. When you allow your life to move primarily along the tracks of habit, the creative side of your life diminishes. There is an old story from Russia about a prince who lived with a large retinue in a huge palace. One of the key rules in palace life was that no one could sleep two consecutive nights in the same room. The prince insisted on this constant changing about to keep alive their sense of being pilgrims here on earth. The true pilgrim is always at a new threshold.
The Danger of the Name
Language is one of the most fascinating presences in the world. The emergence of language and use of language are a unique human achievement. Words become the mirrors of reality. Imagine if the veil of language fell away totally from us tomorrow. We would not be able to think, understand, or communicate. Consciousness would be wiped clean. Words are the unnoticed treasure houses of discovery and meaning. Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” Without language, the world would fade away from us. Words keep things present. Language has a secret life, an undercurrent murmuring away, audible in rhymes and rhythms, ambiguities and assonances. Most official uses of language are hostile to this undercurrent. The poetic use of language honours these possibilities, keeps them alive, and sometimes reanimates the “ordinary” language we speak without thinking. Yet often our language is over-finished and cripplingly tight. Language is a great power. When something flows into the shore of your life, one of your first responses is the attempt to name it. A name should never trap a thing. In the Jewish tradition, for instance, if you knew the name of a thing, you had an inkling of its secret and mystery. The name was a doorway of reverence. When you name a dimension of your experience, one of your qualities or difficulties, or some presence within you, you give it an identity. It then responds to you according to the tone of its name. We need to exercise great care and respect when we come to name something. We always need to find a name that is worthy and spacious.
When we name things in a small way, we cripple them. Often our way of naming things is driven by our addiction to what is obviously visible. Celtic spirituality is awakening so powerfully now because it illuminates the fact that the visible is only one little edge of things. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible. The invisible is not empty, but is textured and tense with presences. These presences cannot be named; they can only be sensed, not seen. Names are powerful. Sometimes in folk culture people are quite “pisréogach,” or superstitious, about telling their own name. This is illustrated by a story I heard from a priest who was appointed to a rural area. During his first months there, he visited the whole parish. One day, he noticed an old man digging a garden. He said hello and the man came up, rested his arms on the wall, and held a most interesting and quite personal conversation with the new priest. As the conversation was about to end, the priest asked him his name. The old man glowered at him and said, “That is something I never told any one in my life” and went back to dig his garden.
Many of the places in our lives at which our growth has arrested are places where we have carried out negative baptisms. We have put the wrong names on many of our most important experiences. We have often caricatured and shown disrespect to some of our most faithful desires. We have kept some of our most beautiful longings as prisoners in our hearts, falsely imprisoned simply because of mistaken identity. Pablo Neruda has a poem called “Too Many Names”:
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
And the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
With your exhausted scissors,
And all the names of the day
Are washed out in the waters of night.
No one can claim the name of Pedro,
Nobody is Rosa or Maria,
All of us are dust or sand,
All of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
Of Chiles and Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
And I know of it is without a name….
The wildness of the invisible world is nameless. It has no name. A first step towards reawakening respect for your inner life may be to become aware of the private collage of dead names you have for your inner life. Often, the experiences of wilderness can return us to the nameless wildness within. Sometime, go away to a wild place on your own. Leave your name and the grid of intentions and projects and images which mark you out as citizen Z. Leave it all, and let yourself just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness. You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells, and mountains that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried under well-meant but dead names. To go beyond confinement is to rediscover yourself.
The Limit as Invitation to the Beyond