Gardening the self through shrines
creating unpredictable transformations, intention, surrender, matthew mcconaughey, totoro, shrines, devotion & bureaucracy, unknown whys
From Ghibli’s “My Neighbor Totoro”
A poet spends his life in repeated projects, over and over again, attempting to build or to dream a world in which he lives.
— Thomas Merton
Sometimes — no, often — I am a toothpaste. A self-creating one, to be sure, consciously (but much more often than I'd like to admit, unconsciously) forming the tube that shapes me.
What I'm most interested in is making tubes that unpredictably change me into exactly what I needed: chaos generators guided by divine will.1 The paradox — one hundred percent responsibility, one hundred percent surrender. Intention and courage draw me away from becoming lost in the haze, endlessly wandering in the habit of comfort, avoiding that which demands me to grow. Openness allows the unknown to pierce me. It is hubris to believe that I am the creator of my own transformation — they happen to me by grace. The best I can do is to call for it and lay still, listening, and when a response sweeps through to grip onto it with all my might. Matthew McConaughey said that humility means admitting you've got more to learn. He also said that he's at his best when he's praying with his eyes open. To me, they're inseparable.2
Since re-watching Totoro some months ago, I keep returning to this almost offhandedly included moment. The two girls are rushing home from school in pouring rain and, lacking an umbrella, takes shelter underneath a road-side shrine. Given the weather, they turn around and ask the deity if they might stay a while til it clears.
In a spirit-filled world, you pay respects to the living gods that weave among the landscapes you tread. I feel that I am shepherded by many forces beyond my comprehension, and tending to their shrines is a way I can thread a relationship with them through time. Here are six of mine:
Shrine of Aliveness
Shrine of Connection
Shrine of the Hearth
Shrine of the Muses
Shrine of the Round Table
Shrine of the Scholar
Different gods take different offerings, and the rituals you do shape you into alignment with the one you call upon. For instance, the Muses are appeased by this writing project and practicing the piano whereas the Round Table requires clarifying intentions and following through on them.
This list fresh and incomplete, so I rest a gentle attention on the periphery in much the same way as how I keep note of what tugs on my intellectual curiosity, for that's the Scholar guiding my heart. These are my best attempt to cover the corners of what matters most to me right now, things I return to — sacrifice to — weekly, daily.
We are the habits we repeatedly do. We are, also, the structures we're repeatedly in. Devotion and bureaucracy are funnily similar like this, and both changes you in ways seen and unseen.
David Chapman said that devotion is a yearning that pulls you towards something. Each shrine roots itself in a “why” that I cannot explain. Being drawn towards something that does not yield to reason is unnerving, but I've learnt that giving myself to it spurs passion. Again and again, I've found truth in the idea that people aren't so much looking for the meaning of life as they are the experience of being alive.3
If I have a life philosophy, it is this:
Happy new years — may it bring you what you most need, in the time that you most need it.
Improv taught me how to pay close attention and find what's emotionally underneath what someone is saying — I was expecting play and spontaneity, not directly applicable relational skills at that level. Weekly writing has made we want to read a lot more — I got into it just to consolidate what I've already been thinking about, but now not only idea-heavy books but also non-fiction prose books are exciting. General curiosity has also gone up as everything is now a trailhead.
Paraphrase of Joseph Campbell