The Impeded Stream: Unsettled Hope
On Spiritual & Moral Growth, Raw Nerve Endings, and 'An Argument Against Cynicism'
Image widely circulated on Instagram.1
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.~ Wendell Berry2
In my experience the Buddhist tradition has represented a set of values more than a collection of religious beliefs.3 One of its values is courage and a refusal of stagnation. This is helpful for me because I understand the counter tendencies in my own nature toward comfort. This is quite human, so I have learned to not be embarrassed by it.
Terry Tempest Williams writes about how strange it is that we humans are so hooked on things staying the same while we live in a world that is constantly changing.4
The Buddhist tradition is known for acknowledging impermanence, for valuing the embrace of impermanence. This is understood as one of the ways to dampen the fires of our suffering in reference to the relentless flow of the river of experience. My teacher Jack likes to say when we try to hold on we get rope burn. Or, we go numb and enter into denial that the rope is slipping through our fingers.
Williams recounts a brief citing of a bird, a painted bunting. For seven short minutes at dawn the sun struck his feathers and “he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.”
Rainer Marie Rilke once said, “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” It is difficult to know exactly what he meant, but to me it means that every moment of beauty carries with it a notion of its passing, its ephemeral nature, its fragility. Here is Williams again:
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
The Jungians say that there is something in us that won’t leave us in stasis, that won’t tolerate our incessant desire to stay safe and avoid change.5 This is the tooth, Emily Dickinson said, that nibbles at the soul, the “terrible longing,” Hollis says, the soul feels for “connection to the mystery of being here.”6 This the “great doubt” of Zen which leads to “great faith.”7
This conflict no doubt explains much of the human penchant for addictions, mad pursuit of distraction, and ways of numbing. The problem is that while there is something in us that wants growth there are counterforces within that long to regress and hide.
It has become clear to me, for example, that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.8
“Fear of our own depths is the enemy.”9
The Buddhist tradition, like Jungian theory, urges us out of our comfort zones, which are actually zones of deadness. The mystical expressions of the world’s religious traditions all understand this alike, just as the poets do. Rumi habitually writes of the soul’s impetus to grow.
Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon's reflection.
For Rumi, merging with the holy involves a “death cry” which is ego death.
Artists know this intuitively.
For each ecstatic instant
we must an anguish pay ~ Emily Dickinson
The place where Jackson Pollock is buried is Green River Cemetery in Springs, NY. He was buried with a number of other artists. A stone marker there has this anonymous inscription:
Artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. By themselves they can do little to save humanity. Without them there would be little worth saving.
Many people distain Pollock’s work. Someone once falsely claimed that one of his famous paintings was merely the product of a drunken revelry with a friend.10 That painting today is valued at five hundred million dollars. This reminds me of a soldier in an intensive outpatient program where I taught spiritual practice, who said that he thought a Mary Oliver poem I read to him, was ‘not a very good poem.’ Google ‘Jackson Pollock’ and you will find many people dismissing his work as trash and others extolling its health benefits. What gives?
I recall the scene from Mona Lisa Smiles where the teacher played by Julia Roberts has her class of young women consider a Jackson Pollock painting. Your task, she said, is to consider. You don’t have to like it. You are to consider it. There is an important ethic here, one that might save us from much suffering.
To consider something we don’t understand or immediately appreciate, exercises the heart.
Here is how Jackson Pollock described his work:
I don’t care for ‘abstract expressionism,'” he said, “and it’s certainly not ‘nonobjective’ and not ‘nonrepresentational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We’re all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I’ve been a Jungian for a long time.11
Ah, the artist is working with the unconscious, the shadow, and the work is calling for the viewer, the reader, to that same depth.
Sure, on the surface, it’s splashes of paint.
But, just like Carrie Newcomer’s daughter, if you back up,12 or if you look deeply and perhaps when we look deeply at anything we are looking too at our own depth.
The unconscious, Jung suggested, is a shared phenomena. Isn’t this why the best poetry works when it does?
“Absolute attention is prayer,” Simone Weil said.
And, as Mary Oliver said, it’s heart attention that is needed. “Attention without feeling is only a report.”13
Attention, says Weil, is generosity. If you look at anything long enough, with heart, “something is given.”
So, perhaps the failure to appreciate art is not so much or always about the quality of the art but about a deficit in generosity, a stinginess of the human spirit, and an unwillingness to look deeply at our own shadow. Clearly, it seems to me, evident in our political culture, that our shadow is showing, and it’s not pretty.
If there is a hell, besides the ones we have all known on Earth, it will not include eternal flames and your wife’s sister but will be an attic with just enough light so you can make out the eyes of the rats in the dark. ~ Anne Lamott14
Plato said the real tragedy is not children who are afraid of the dark but grown adults who are afraid of the light.
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies. ~ Simone Weil
In the Buddhist tradition waking up is the preeminent value. To awaken means to face life as it is, with all its pain and terror, its ten thousand joys and sorrows.
It’s more comfortable to slumber. Thus, the dilemma.
The artist calls us to consider, at least, consider if we are given to too much to comfort, too much to self-deception, delighted too much with misinformation, too much to distraction, to the numbing agents in our culture that range from drugs to the incessant acquisition of stuff, to the slinging of mud and blame, to othering and scapegoating of those named as alien and enemy.
Artists are our raw nerve endings. I don’t know about you but I need that.
So I will close with a poem I found when I went looking for a Lutterman piece. This one was published alongside a Lutterman poem in Rattle, a serendipity on multiple levels. This one seemed so in tune with what I had written I decided to include it and save Lutterman for another time.
There is an antidote to cynicism, even in our time, and notice how Jen echoes my own call to the crucial importance of generous, loving attention.
And, believe it or not, I found this poem after I finished writing this essay, well, except for the last section. :)
I am having a really hard time with politics right now. I will spare you a diatribe.
And yet, little is gained by cynicism. The world does not need my despair or my rage. I don’t need my rage. So, what deserves my attention? Can I keep just enough of an eye on politics to vote responsibly but not so much that it steals my joy and makes me bitter?
I try to remember that it won’t be politicians or justices that save us anyway and they can lie all they want, but we do not have to believe them, and we don’t have to allow the mess to make us ugly and we don’t have to just give in to the tidal undertow.
Always remember, Ghandi said, tyrants never last. Tyranny won’t last, even if it is cloaked in religious robes. And it may be that the suffering of the times is what we need to awaken.
And the need for spiritual practices that ground us, cultivate kindness, generosity, curiosity, clear seeing, and courage, has never been more urgent.
Notice in the poem the hint of suggestion that the values of attention, generosity, and love are on display all around us, when we pay attention, even DeGregorio says, in journalists and entomologists.
Allow them all, poets, painters, scientists, artists of all kinds, to touch your raw nerve endings and wake you up, at least a little!
Sometimes I really don’t know what to do in light of these troubled times. I try to remember Wendell Berry, that perhaps I have come to my real work, and that it is the impeded stream that sings!
AN ARGUMENT AGAINST CYNICISM
by Jen DeGregorio15
What surprises me more than a new
millipede species was discovered this week
in Los Angeles County is that anyone cares
enough about millipedes to look for them. Entomologists
may be the last true heroes. They may be
a species unto themselves, one they have overlooked
in their zeal to turn from the mirror
toward the dirt. The Illacme socal
has four hundred eighty-six legs, a toothy head,
the L.A. Times says, and the greenish translucence
of a glow-in-the-dark toy. It weaves through the soil
as elegantly as an embroiderer’s needle. The reporter
must have labored over these phrases, felt enough
joy in prose to fuel her a few more days
in her reviled profession. A survey this year said half
of Americans think all journalists are liars. To them I offer
Corinne Purtill, who surely spent hours listening
to entomologists so she could tell us something approaching
the true nature of millipedes—not insects
but arthropods, more like lobsters than beetles,
vile-tasting to birds, garbagemen
of the forest, eaters of dead leaves they transform
into food for what grows—and of entomologists
themselves. How one named Paul Marek drove
on Christmas to Whiting Ranch to find specimens
which he gently scooped into plastic vials
with a bit of soil, then tucked into his carry-on
for the trip back to his lab. Attention
is the highest form of love. And I love entomologists
for the attention they pay to the smallest among us, and journalists
for the attention they pay to the ones who pay attention
to the spectrum of beauty and terror, our discoveries
and petty political battles and vicious crimes and acts
of unearned mercy and weddings and burials
in the somehow still teeming earth.
Gail Odgers, “Base Jumping Out of Your Comfort Zone,” Medium, 7 February 2018.
Wendell Berry, Standing by Words, (Counterpoint, 1983).
Faith in Buddhism is about confidence in one’s capacity to awaken and in one’s essential nature. Faith and doubt are not opposites but two sides of one coin. See Peter Coyote, Zen in the Vernacular, (Inner Traditions, 2024), 161-170). The three pillars of Zen are Great Faith, Great Doubt, Great Determination. Interestingly some Christian theologians value doubt in like manner. Paul Tillich said that doubt is a dynamic of faith and Frederick Buechner said that doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. Where Christianity and Buddhism seem to differ is where to locate the center of gravity for faith. Zen is agnostic on the question of god and does not require faith in gods. This is, however, murkier when you look at the mystical expression of Christianity where there is far more resonance. This is why you will see me quoting Christian mystics like Simone Weil, in conversation with Buddhist tradition.
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, (Picador, 2013). See also Maria Popova, “The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty,” The Marginalian, 26 January 2024.
See the work of James Hollis. See Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times, (Sounds True, 2020).
Ibid., 11.
“Great doubt – great awakening; Little doubt – little awakening; No doubt – no awakening.” Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age.
James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, (Gotham, 2008).
Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, (Inner City Books, 1993).
National Gallery of Australia, “Painted by drunks!, Medium, 27 August 2018.
See Maria Popova, “Jackson Pollock on Art and Life,” The Marginalian, 4 September 2013. The quote comes from Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, (Capricorn Books, 1961).
Quoted in my “Totally Made of Magic.” From Carrie Newcomer, The Beautiful Not Yet.
Mary Oliver, Our World, (Beacon Press, 2007).
Somehow: Thoughts on Love, (Riverhead Books, 2024).
Jen DeGregorio, “An Argument Against Cynicism,” Rattle, number 84, Summer 2024. I love that Jen says the poem emerged from her “pre-internet surfing” and her encounter with a story about the millipede discovery. This is so much like my own process of reading widely as I search for inspiration to write.