The prisons we choose to live in are closely connected to our experience of limit and frontier. We often remain passively within our inner prisons, because we believe the limitations are fixed and given. It is strange how being caught makes you lose the sense of the outside and the beyond. You become trapped on one side of a wall. After a while you learn to see only what cages you; you begin to forget other views and possibilities. It is the lonely struggle of the prisoner to continue to remember that he belongs to life and not to limitation. Limitation is, of course, real and factual, but it is meant to be temporary. A limit is meant to call you beyond itself towards the next new field of experience. We usually view limitation not as a calling to growth, but as confinement and impossibility. Something begins to change when we can see exactly where the walls of limitation stand in our lives. A strong poem by Cavafy, “Walls,” describes how the walls that lock us in are secretly built. You hear nothing and you notice nothing.
When they were building the walls,
How could I not have noticed?
But I never heard the builders,
Not a sound,
Imperceptibly they closed me off
From the outside world.
Cavafy articulates something that happens to all of us. Your complicity with other people’s images and expectations of you allows them to box you in completely. It takes a long time to recognize how some key people on your life’s journey exercise so much control over your mind, behaviour, and actions. Through the image they project onto you or through the expectations they have of you, they claim you. Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit and unstated subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful for not being direct and obvious. When you become conscious of these powerful builders and their work of housing you in, something within you refuses to comply; you begin to send back the building materials. There is no planning permission here, thanks for the kindness! Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the need to control. Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. In contrast, friendship liberates you.
The Delicate Art of Freeing Yourself
Real friendship is a powerful presence in helping you to see the prisons within which you live. From inside your own life, it is so difficult to gain enough distance to look back on yourself and see the outer shape of your life. This discernment is often easier for your friend than it would be for you. Real friends will never come with a battering ram to demolish the prison in which they see you. They know that it could be too soon. You are not yet ready to leave. They also know that until you see for yourself how and where you are caught, you cannot become free. If they destroy this prison cell, you will inevitably build a new one from the old material. True friendship attunes itself in care to the rhythm of your soul. In conversation and affection, your friend will only attempt something very modest, namely, to remove one pebble from the wall. When that pencil of light shines in on your darkness, it arouses your longing to become free. It reminds you of the freshness and fragrance of another life that you had learned to forget in your cell. This dot of light empowers you, and then, brick by brick, you will remove the walls you had placed between the light and yourself. True friendship trusts the soul to find the light, to loosen one pebble in the wall and open the way to freedom. Massive inner structures begin to loosen and break when the first pencil-thin beam of recognition hits us.
Often others may judge you to be in a prison, whereas in actual fact you were never more free and creative. True knowing goes beyond projection, impression, and expectation. There is a whole moral question here regarding the nature and timing of disclosure and intervention. If you show someone bluntly that he is caught in a prison, you make him aware of his confinement. If the person is incapable of liberating himself, you have left him with a heavier burden.
There is a telling story of a British anthropologist who came to a village in India where the natives wove the most beautiful shawls. The art of weaving was highly prized there. The workers wove the shawls amidst conversation with each other about local events and old stories. Weaving was their secret skill, and its methods had become like second nature. The anthropologist observed them for weeks. Then one morning, he came there and told them that he had worked out exactly how they did it. He made explicit the implicit skill they exercised. He showed them the secret of their artistry. In that disclosure, he robbed their artistry of all its magic. With that he changed them from surprised artists of emergent beauty into helpless, impoverished workers. This story could stand as a metaphor for the massive transformation in the modern world. The natural and ancient creativity of soul is being replaced by the miserable little arithmetic of know-how.
Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition, context, and surprise. Analysis is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity. Our culture is becoming crowded with analysts, and much of what passes for creativity is merely clever know-how. When creativity dries up, the analysts turn on themselves and begin to empty out the inner world; this has contributed to the terrible loss of soul in our culture. It is wise to recall that “analysis” comes from the Greek word “ana-luein,” which means to break something complex into its simple elements. When the embrace and depth of creativity are absent, analysis becomes destruction. It can break things apart, but there is nothing now to put them back together again. Nature always maintains this balance between breakage and new life.
The True Shelter of the Porous Wall
Among the most delightful features in the West of Ireland landscape are the stone walls. These walls frame off the fields from each other. They bestow personality and shape on the fields. These walls are more like frontiers than hermetic boundaries. When you see a wall on the mountain, you see the different styles of openings between the stones. Each wall is a series of different windows of light. Rabbits, hares, and foxes have favourite windows in these walls through which they always cross. Each wall is frontier and simultaneously a labyrinth of invisibility. Often, as children, if we were herding cattle on the mountain, we would shelter during showers by these walls. When we looked out from one of these windows between the stones, we would see the whole landscape beneath us in a new way; everything was framed differently. These walls, called “foiseach” in Irish, are also often shelters for all kinds of growth: grasses, plants, briars. They became home to a whole subculture of insects, bees, birds, and animals. Because of the shelter and kindness of the walls, you would often find the sweetest grasses there. Sheep and cattle were never slow to find out the sweetest grass. Wouldn’t it be interesting if instead of hermetically sealed barriers, the areas of beginning and ending in our hearts and lives could be such rich and latticed frontiers? They would be windows to look out on alternative possibilities; in other words, the freshness of other styles of being and thinking could still be somehow present even if they were not directly adjacent or even engaged. The natural shelter that grows on both sides of such frontiers would be left alone, to grow according to its own instinct. The most trustable shelter around the human mind and heart is the one that grows naturally there.
Every life has its own natural shelter belt. So often our severity with ourselves cuts that to shreds. Then we wonder why we feel so naked and unsheltered when the storm comes. The wisdom of folk culture always recognizes that when the storm of suffering rages one should not go out there into single combat with it. Rather, one should lie in and shelter close to the wall until the storm has abated. There is a lovely humility in the idea of lying low and sheltering. It recognizes that the storm comes from the penumbral unknown; it has a mind and direction of its own, and the vulnerable individual can but shelter until the time of tranquillity returns. The modern tendency to safari into subjectivity to find the cause of everything was alien to the folk mind.