Until all too recently, I believed that I should be more focused on my mind than my heart, to listen to reason, weigh facts, allowing my heart also to weigh in, but attempting to understand what I feel, to puzzle-out everything, making feelings of secondary importance and reason primary. After all, I have a couple of college degrees, like a great many of us middle-class Americans who became convinced that education (that is, earning "degrees") is the key to a "better" life. We learned that logic and reason would somehow "save" us. During my work life (from which I'm now almost two years retired, gratefully), I also witnessed the doors that closed to those who expressed what was considered "excess emotion" and learned to hide myself, to maintain silence and a placid face when I recognized how little good it did to speak. I wasn't effective in keeping this attitude restricted to work, however, and almost lost myself in the process.
Having grown up with a father and brother who were much more adept at argument, I frequently felt overwhelmed by emotion when they displayed impatience at my bumbling attempts to recall facts when all I truly knew was how I felt---which didn't support a thing in their minds, except that I'm "too emotional" (read: "not as smart"). This pattern repeats itself in me even now when I feel that someone isn't giving credence to something that feels "obviously true" to me, merely because I am unable to line up the facts and figures perfectly. I finally realized that I will never know enough (and I still love to read), never have all the facts that will keep me from looking like the fool to someone. I have also begun to recognize that paying more attention to my intuition, my feelings, makes my life much more exciting, interesting, and purpose-filled than being led by mere intellectual curiosity.
And so, as I waited in the courtroom today to find out whether I would be chosen for jury duty (and I felt it a paradox that I was), I read from the July issue of The Sun an interview of Malidoma Some'----whom I'd never heard of before, but who----at least in this interview----sounds so wonderfully wise and expresses exactly how I'm feeling. The entire interview is fascinating and well worth reading, but I'm going to focus on the part that seems particularly applicable to my life now.
Since only a week and a half ago I returned from a six-day workshop and I'm signed up for a couple more over the next few months, I'm sensitive to his remarks about people in "the West" who are "starving for ritual. . . When one is over, they shed tears of dread: now they must return to the so-called real world, where there is no room for what they have experienced. It is not valued or even tolerated. This is a serious problem. . . Until there are communities in which these rituals are done consistently and can be reconciled with everyday living, there will always be what we call 'workshop junkies'. . ."
Of course, he doesn't have any easy answers for this problem, other than one must strive to maintain the "ritual energy" in spite of one's culture and, more importantly, one can become a part of creating a community where such support is a part of everyday life. I suppose the striving is what "real life" is all about, this recognizing and acknowledging the sacred amid the mundane, all the while attempting to keep one's heart open, one's connection to others----and love----in tact.
