One such theme is the need to come to terms with the contradictions within oneself. There is much good and bright and positive within us. However, there is also much we'd rather avoid, that we'd even like to hide from ourselves and others. Jung believed that if we are to become whole and fully ourselves, we must know all that lies within, denying nothing. Our job is find a way to hold the tension between the light and dark in our own natures, while also finding a way to form an alliance, perhaps even peace, between them.
This is the main task of the protagonist in Demian. However, in the process Hesse also applies this theme to society at large and to our spirituality. It was in my reading his book years ago that I first encountered the conception of God as Abraxis. Abraxis is described as "the god above gods," the force that gives rise to that which is good and to that which is dark. One character in Demian describes Abraxis as "a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of the godly and devilish elements" within ourselves and our world.
The "godly and devilish elements" of human nature are in the spotlight in our society today, as the best of human nature and its worst have taken the stage for all to see. While they've always been there, things do seem starker now and with higher stakes attached. As Adrienne Maree Brown famously put it years ago, "Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil."
No easy task, this looking open~eyed at that which is ugly. Yet if we are to see with true vision, we must. Luckily, there is light to balance the dark. Goodness overflows in response to darkness. One could even say there is a conversation always occurring between these polarities. We may not always converse well, but this always gives rise to that which gives rise to a new this.
A dear woman recently sent me For When People Ask, a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. "I want a word that means okay and not okay" her poem begins, "more than that: a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want a word that says I feel it all at once."
Yes! I want that word, one large enough to hold both the agony and the ecstasy, the hope and the fear. Both are part of my current experience, and instinctively I know that if I collapse into either one of them I do myself harm, and become less whole than I yearn to be.
This is the task of humankind. We live amid polarities, best expressed in pictorial form by the Yin~Yang symbol, showing a circle divided into two equal portions by a curving line—one side light, the other dark—but both part of the same unified whole. We live within that unified whole, no matter how disparate the sides seem. Our task is to see it all, honor it all, and find a wholesome way to bring our talents to interact with it effectively and in a way that brings meaning to our lives and grows our soul.
We can do this. We are even equipped to do this. Trommer's poem goes on to say that "the heart is not a songbird, singing one note at a time." She then employs the metaphor of a Tuvan throat singer, who "is able to sing both a drone and simultaneously two or three harmonics high above it."
I long for a word that at once means devastated and stunned with joy, but I suspect that word may not be a word at all, but the path forward that we each craft and walk step by step. Together, as Brown puts it, holding one other tight as we walk.
Trommer ends her poem by saying that the heart "blesses us with paradox, so we might walk more openly into this world so rife with devastations, this world so ripe with joy." Rife and ripe, we walk into the future that awaits us. And we walk into it together. As one.
But perhaps walking it the wrong metaphor to capture the feel of that forward movement. This morning, our musician friend Micky Sinko sang To Live Is To Fly, a seventies~era song by Townes Van Zandt. Its chorus goes like this: "To live is to fly, low and high. So shake the dust off of your wings, and the sleep out of your eyes."
Yes, let's shake off that dust and wipe the sleep from our eyes, so we can see truly the low and the high. And since to live is to fly, let us fly. Whether it be low or it be high, my friend, fly.
Much love,
Leia
