Conversations with a Soul (3 page)

Is a colleague, also now deceased, still very much alive and present to me in his huge impatience with mediocrity and deception, even as he waged war with his own daemons and addictions? Does he still, without compromise or vacillation, but also without harsh judgment, demand that I own up to my own truth and journey wherever that commitment takes me?

Watching my brother taking care of my ailing mother was to discover a powerful, gracious spirit, to whom I had paid scant attention, but who set aside his needs to gently care for someone he loved, and I wondered whether I would ever have found such courage, which now became his gift to me.

And are they all still alive within me?

If so, then is must be possible for us to meet and engage each other again!

At some deep mysterious level, where the give and take of dialogue is something felt rather than heard; where intuition enlivens memory; where a sudden illumination re-frames an insoluble problem; and it all happens in a manner that brings to mind the characteristics of a certain way of thinking and seeing. For a moment I discern a hand and recognize a touch and I suddenly sense I am in the presence of one of the wise guardians. Those who once graced my being with their lives, and taught me to see, have come again.

The more I thought about that assembly, and the more I recognized their vitality, the richer I felt. Here is a magnificent community without whom I would be so much less of a person. Many of them, like my brother, would be surprised to find themselves playing such a role, yet here I was, years later, seeking a return to them to be nourished and renewed.

Individually and collectively they offer me a powerful community and a collective repository of wisdom.

Just off the map, beyond the Interstates, out past the power lines and the shopping malls, up that little side road without a sign on it, lies the land of the Wisdomkeepers. Hidden from the mainstream of contemporary life, these living treasures of traditional Native America are revered among their people as the Elders, the Old Ones, the Grandfathers and Grandmothers – the fragile repositories of ancient ways and sacred knowledge going back millenniums. They don’t preserve it. They live it.
³

Wisdomkeepers told the stories that explained why things were as they were; mythical tales which gave meaning and identity to their people. Wisdomkeepers could tell of the secrets of healing missing from medical books. With a few words, frequently crafted into narratives, Wisdomkeepers could guide men or women to renew their hope and make sane choices for their lives. They kept alive ancient and rich ceremonies that emphasized and celebrated the values of their people, without which their community would lose its way. They were Keepers of Wisdom, because they incarnated traditional wisdom in their daily lives and mediated wisdom to any who took the time to listen.

Most times it was not hard to grasp what you were being told.

All life on Mother Earth depends on the pure water, yet we spill every kind of dirt and filth and poison into it. That makes no common sense at all. Your legislature can pass a law saying it’s OK but it’s not OK. Natural law doesn’t care about your man’s law; Natural law is going to hit you. You can’t get out of the way. You don’t fool around with Natural law and get away with it. If you kill the water, you kill the life that depends on it, your own included. That’s Natural law. It’s also common sense . . . . All life is equal. That’s our philosophy. You have to respect life – all life, not just your own. The key word is ‘respect’. Unless you respect the earth, you destroy it. Unless you respect all life as much as your own life, you become a destroyer, a murderer.
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While I am primarily concerned to explore my personal engagement with
my
Wisdomkeepers I want to acknowledge that Wisdom and Wisdomkeepers can be found everywhere. Myths, legends, stories, institutions, libraries, biographies all point us toward a vast repository of communal wisdom hewn from common struggles, forged in the agony of choice and decision and offered as a gift to our time. These are our
National Archetypes
who model new possibilities for our country and its future.

Unfortunately, like an invitation to a Soul conversation, the gift is too easily dismissed, the words ceremoniously quoted but never heeded because our addiction to political manipulation and our insatiable hunger for wealth leave no time for something as fragile as wisdom.

“
The Dispute with His Soul of One Who Is Tired of Life”
sounds like the title of a novel one might, in desperation, but not with high hopes, purchase at an airport book stall hoping to idle away a couple of hours.

Actually it was a written before 2000 B.C. in Egypt and formed part of a whole international cluster of
wisdom writings
. Egyptian scholars were in the vanguard of this movement but they were only a part of it for the movement spread throughout the nations of the Fertile Crescent. An interesting comment on King Solomon seems to suggest that in the search for wisdom, different nations and sages engaged in a lively dialogue.

The Wisdom of Solomon surpassed the wisdom of all the sons of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than any other, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, wiser than Heman and Calcol and Darda.
⁵

Notwithstanding the verbal contest with the “sons of the East” he also flirted with the Queen of Sheba by dazzling her with his wisdom.
⁶
Naughty boy! Wisdom, then and now, seemingly falls victim to the lure of sexual temptation.

The quest for wisdom has some ancient roots and certainly predates the Greek philosophical tradition to which we usually defer when questions about wisdom arise. Yet the issue is as contemporary as present day political debates when questions about who has the wisdom to lead are tossed back and forth.

Unfortunately, we have an uncanny ability to discount our own questions and sabotage our answers. Any candidate who gives the impression of
thinking
about issues, in preference to blurting out trite answers, (which may win a few votes – the holy grail of aspiring politicians) is destined to be labelled a candidate lacking a policy, or depending on the depth of thought, elitist. A strange malady, which also has early roots, noticed by Tocqueville more than a hundred years ago, leading him to comment:

American intellectuals when they are being consciously American or political, are remarkably quick to suggest that an art which is marked by perception and knowledge, although all very well in its way, can never get us through gross dangers and difficulties.
⁷

Widespread disillusionment with Government and political leadership has left most of us yearning for leaders who value integrity above all else. We hunger for men and women whose judgments are characterized by wise choices, which usually means, at the very least, being able to see the consequences of their decisions before those decisions are implemented. And we hunger no less for leaders who put the welfare of the state before their own aggrandizement.

In 2002 The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war in Iraq would cost $651
Billion
through the end of 2007
.
The New York Times and Boston Herald revised that figure to somewhere between $1 and $1.6
Trillion
. One economist has calculated that with $1 trillion we could have:

…
. constructed as many as eight million new dwelling units, employed 13 million more school teachers, provided elementary education to 120 million kids or health insurance to 530 million children for one year or granted scholarships to 43 million students for four years.
⁸

The
Opportunity Cost
is phenomenal. Amongst those 43 million scholars, could there have been some who would have made major discoveries and pioneered new ways of dealing with many of our most pressing problems? How many writers, teachers, poets, artists, mathematicians, medical researchers, physicists and social reformers have been lost because of a war?

Living under the shadow of this disaster, the words of an Onondaga Wisdomkeeper, Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah, shines with a kind of patent transparency:

…
We live in an era when far too much money is expended on the military. Even as we enter a time of increasing potential for peace among the major powers, military expenditures remain grotesquely high. The purpose of these high military budgets must be the anticipation of violence. As a mother I demand that our sons not be raised to die in war. War is irrational, its causes suspect. If we are to live on this planet, we must eliminate warfare, which is harmful to all living things.
⁹

My old friend and Wisdomkeeper, Ross Snyder, often used to speak about
mining our experiences so as to extract wisdom.
Behind that phrase lay his conviction that everyone, all through life, accumulated a rich repertoire of experiences: some joyous and celebratory, some deep and rich, some disturbing, some painful, and some of no great significance whatsoever. Periodically, and more frequently than we suspect, when we take time to reflect, and possibly even share these experiences with another, we come up against a piece of our personal history which, to use his words,
is coiled with explosive power
.

These are the experiences which have the potential to change our lives, yet even these seminal events, over time, lose their potency. Eventually we forget and the repertoire shrinks, or we keep on having the same experiences without ever digging into them and extracting the treasures, or the hungers, or the disasters that are waiting to be revealed and transformed into wisdom.

The journey from experience to wisdom always follows a path of reflection. The route traverses through a sacred realm, home to our Wisdomkeepers.

However we describe the process, this is the work of Soul! This is where that deep, mysterious inner part of me invites the Wisdomkeepers of my life to come and be present and illuminate and empower my efforts. This is where the light falls. This is where God speaks.