The thirteenth-century Sufi Fakhruddin 'Iraqi said, "Love courses through everything" and 1800 years earlier the Buddha's last words were reported as "Impermanent are all formations. Observe this carefully, constantly" (Novak 1994, pp. 330, 62).

Somehow, the indestructible insight of these two truths leads us to understand the life of the spirit in much the way that Einstein led us to understand the life of energy. For, as matter can be broken down but its energy not destroyed, so, too, may our lives and the forms we assume be broken and even crushed but the energy of love we are made of cannot be destroyed. This constant journey between love and impermanence is the dance and the spirit's irrefusable call is to dance it.

When you consider that the word freedom comes from the Old English freon, to love, set free, and that the word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, breath, from spirare, to breathe (Soukhanov 1992, pp. 723, 1737), it is possible to understand this dance of love through its earthly forms as freedom of spirit: the soul's work at breathing love in an unending effort to set itself free.

Yet, in living out this freedom of spirit, we continually cycle from brokenness to wholeness to brokenness to wholeness. Within this cycle, transformation can be seen as the unnerving process by which life dismantles our current phase of wholeness; and healing can describe the process of grace by which we are then reassembled into the next phase of wholeness.

Perhaps transformation and healing are spiritual counterparts to centripetal and centrifugal forces; the transforming spin outward throwing things away from center, and the healing pull inward bringing things ever to center.

Like those centripetal and centrifugal forces which exist simultaneously as long as the earth spins its way across the dark around the light, it seems that our humanness does the same; transforming and healing simultaneously as we spin across the dark around the light, breaking our way into wholeness again and again. And just as the planet never repeats its exact orbit about the sun, the path of our love and impermanence, while cyclically dynamic, is an evolution and not a repetition.

And since no one can escape transforming and healing, anymore than anyone can escape gravity, the mystery of freedom compels us to humility; for, as every wisdom tradition affirms, the entirety of reality (God) is in every broken shard of humanity. We are at once complete and yet subject to this endless unfolding.

Just as the smallest atom or quark contains the energy of the Universe, the inch of pain and reverence we each have earned by living contains the transformation and healing of humanity.

As the Zen Master Dogen says:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass. The moon does not get wet, nor is the drop of water broken. (And) the whole moon and entire sky are reflected in even one drop of water. (Tanahashi 1985, p. 71)

It is the same with our wholeness and our brokenness, with our love and impermanence. Both the spiritual center and the quiet individual pain of waking anew each day are the moon and the dewdrop. One and the same. The transformation and healing of humankind is reflected entirely in an ounce of suffering and insight endured and cherished by any one of us. In the part is the Whole. In the other is the self. In the process is the goal. All becoming One. All these aspects of freedom unfold into each other.

Much like atoms 'which are irreducible in themselves, though they are never at rest, it seems our spiritual nature enjoys and endures the same quantum rest-less-ness: an actualizing of being, yearning, and thingness that together keeps us being and becoming at once.

In a very deep and palpable way, freedom of spirit can be seen as the physics of this being and becoming. It can be seen as the gravity and release of our ongoing transformation and healing; as the laws of energy governing our rest-less-ness; as the intangible winds that stir our being, yearning, and thingness.

To further explore this, it helps to imagine that as air is the atmosphere Of the planet, this love that courses through is the atmosphere of God. And just as there is air inside us: in our lungs, our organs, our blood, our very tissue; the atmosphere of God lives within us. Love is in every cell. With that in mind, let us consider how the movement of air is known as wind and continue the analogy: the movement or energy of love is what we call freedom. And as wind is only seen in the things it blows through — in the mass of willows swaying, in the crest of waves lifting, in the hair of women untangling — freedom (the energy of love) is only visible in the things it moves through — in the hearts of lives awakening, in the fire of awareness that brightens for being fanned. Yes, if air is love, and wind is freedom, then we are the human trees mysteriously brought alive, again and again, each time the unseeable whole moves through us. And what is wind on the other side of a lifted tree, like the sigh of understanding on the other side of experience, but the breath of life, the energy of creation resurrecting itself, a moment where wind and breath are one.

These are our moments of truth and revelation and clear expression. These are our moments of poetry, whether written or spoken or lived out in silence; those unexpected utterances of the soul. Shelley puts it this way:

Poetry is not like reasoning...
for the mind in creation
is as a fading coal, which
some invisible influence,
like an, inconstant wind,
awakens
to transitory brightness¹.

That is to say, the breath of life is less a function of our will or reason than it is the offspring of freedom; the offspring of that inconstant wind — that energy of love — moving through the spirit.

LOVING AS BREATHING

As I write this, a child is crying, somewhere, unseen, far off, in the hidden spaces of glass and brick, and I imagine the wind of all there is moving through that small spirit giving voice to its cry. For isn't that cry the rustle of a human leaf?

In the Native American Mic Maq tribe, the names of trees are the sound that the wind makes as it moves through their leaves in the fall². It makes ancient sense to name ourselves in this manner, knowing who we are by the sound of what moves through us.

This has always been true, ever underneath the guise of intellect and sophistication. As Lao Tzu said 2500 years ago:

Each separate being
               in the universe
returns to (a) common source.
Returning to the source
               is serenity.

          (Mitchell 1988, p. l6)

So often, this returning is standing erect and opening ourselves to the mystery, to the energy of love that seems to arise like a wind out of nowhere. In essence, this opening of ourselves is the courage to be free. In Siberia, the Eskimos sing a shamanistic prayer to heal themselves open:

The sky and strong wind
have moved the spirit
               inside me
till I am carried away
               trembling with joy.

          (Novak. 1994, pp. 362-3)

We are left then to consider that the air inside us is comprised of the same essential stuff as the air that forms the great sky. In actual fact, who knows where the air we breathe has been, in what other creatures' lungs. Have I just inhaled the air of the hawk that killed a squirrel outside my window three nights ago? Have you just taken in the sigh of the sad dancer who sulked by you on the street? In actual fact, the exchange of inner and outer between living things is endless and full of quiet majesty.

In this regard, the same essential quality of love exists both in and around us, and as we must inhale and exhale in order to survive, we must continually perceive and express, receive and give, open and let through. These are the psycho-spiritual equivalents of breathing. These are the small winds of freedom, the elemental movements of love that operate within us, even when we sleep. It can be understood as a spiritual law: we need this continual exchange in order to stay alive, and freedom is the only way to move the love that is in us out into the world, as it is also the only way to bring the. love that is out in the world into us.

It is interesting that human beings arc involuntary breathers. Our reflex to inhale and exhale is automatic. In contrast, whales are voluntary breathers. They choose to breathe and so, can never sleep. At best, they hover the surface, resting one half of their brain while the other half inhales and exhales, keeping them alive.

There is a paradox in this that I don't quite understand. It somehow describes the conscious and unconscious ways we experience the entirety of Reality (God). For we as spiritual beings are forever exchanging die substance of life, taking it in and letting it out, on an unconscious, involuntary level. We are never exempt from experiencing the unconscious, only at times precluded from being aware of that experience and so, unable at times to understand it. Yet we can trust that as the lungs remember to breathe, even when we sleep, the spirit keeps us alive through the dream of our will.

Still, as human beings we are Voluntary in our participation in consciousness. If we are to inhabit the deep in a lasting way, if we are to retain our sense of freedom, we must be diligent in our mindfulness. Like whales, we must stay awake. "Without this, even the whale in its own element will drown. This is not to say there can be no rest, but rather, as the storehouse of meditative traditions bear witness, we must attend the deep in order to feel its currents'.

Often, it is this mindfulness or conscious awareness that marks the difference between brokenness and wholeness. Often, it is awareness with feeling that .stirs the energy of love to rise out of pain, and in this we know the beginnings of freedom.

The Jungian analyst Helen Luke defines this awareness-with-feeling as contemplation:

[It is] an attitude of life, a way of relating to all phenomena, whether of the world outside or of the world within. To contemplate is to look at — and at the same time to reflect upon that which we see, with feeling as well as thought. There is no true contemplation without both detachment and involvement, For the most part men react partially to phenomena, to things, to people, to events, to themselves. Truly to look at and to see objectively, and so experience something in its wholeness, takes a very high level of awareness. All scientific observation demands long training and discipline, but this may be attained without involvement of the whole personality; not so contemplation, through which we may come to know fact and image, time and eternity, conscious and unconscious, in the Smallest happenings of our lives. To put it another way: when we begin to contemplate, we are seeking to discern that which Jung called the Self at the center of our lives, in place of the ego. (Luke 1989, p. 77)

Feeling without awareness is a form of misery, and awareness without feeling is a form of numbness. Both conditions indicate that the flow of air — the energy oflove, the connection of freedom to the whole — is blocked.

Tills is all powerfully framed in the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's poem, My Soul:

There is a great battle raging,
for my mouth
not to harden
and for my jaws
not to become like heavy doors
of an iron safe, so that my life
may not be called pre-death.
Like a newspaper clinging to
a fence in the blowing wind,
so my soul clings to me.
If the wind stops, my soul will
fall³.

The Great Battle: to stay open, to slay porous, to stay move-through-able, to remain teachable, especially by those aspects of the world that exist beneath words. It remains a great battle because the recurring instant we cease to be teachable, we lock ourselves in a way of being that is remarkably close to life, though it is not life, but, as Amichai says, it becomes a form of pre-death.

This firings us to his profound image of his soul as a piece of newspaper clinging to a fence, sustained in the way it blankets his life by the great, mysterious wind.

THE GREAT MYSTERIOUS WIND

For the Oglala Sioux of North America, it is the Great Spirit, Taku Skanskan, that fills the sky. And even Taku Skanskan, though considered the most powerful spirit-being, is only one of many Wakan beings; that is, spirits that inhabit the objects of the world. The Sioux believe that Wakan beings are greater than humankind because they are never born and they never die (Novak 1994, p. 354). The Great Spirit, the Hoi, Spirit, the Tao, Dharma, Atman, the indestructible vibrant space that keeps neutron and electron spinning together: all are different names for the great, mysterious wind that, at any moment, can present itself or remain out of reach; not by the caprice of a personified supreme being, but, in the way that air currents thread about the globe, love moves about God, the unending source.

Where love is absent, we live in separation from ourselves; the soul falls away; we are estranged. And love, without the object of a person to focus on, is nothing less than the energy of attention given fully to the miracle of the ordinary — holding the broken gate us you would the head of a dying father, or reading the slap of water over stone as you would the holiest of texts, or letting yourself feel the fingers of the wind as you would the comfort of a lover.

Is not freedom, then, the presence of all that was never horn and that will never die moving through us? Isn't living a spiritual life, then, embracing and honoring the movement of all that is essential as it comes in and moves through us, until we live as part of something greater, until we can wake with the gratitude of D.H. Lawrence when he says, "Not I, but the wind that blows through me!" (D.H. Lawrence 1959, p. 74)

But there have always been two ways to experience wind: you climb and place yourself in the open and be still; or you move quickly, either under your own power or under the power of others, thereby creating your own wind. Likewise, there have always been two ways to experience freedom and the energy of love: to expose yourself to the world, surrender, and be; or to run to or from the things of the world, using your will to become. It is not by chance that the running to is always fueled with ambition of some sort, and that the running from is always fueled with some aspect of fear.

Still, we cannot escape either being or becoming, anymore than we. can escape inhaling or exhaling, and so the calisthenics of freedom inevitably arise out of our exercise of surrender (or acceptance) and will (or intention). In the context of our original discussion, no one can remove themselves from thc cycle of transformation and healing, from the journey of brokenness to wholeness to brokenness to wholeness; but the degree to which we arc conscious of this process, the degree to which we exercise our acceptance and intention, greatly determines whether the bud that is: our soul will bloom while We are in this form on earth.

The great Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi describes the paradox of being and becoming when lie notes that:

There is no greater mystery
than this, that we keep seek-
ing reality though in fact we
are reality.

          (Mitchell 1988, p. 90)

Yet there is something to be gained from this searching for what is in us all along. For searching creates its own wind, its own movement of love, which as Eliot suggests can only lead us to the wisdom we’ve been carrying around inside us like a seed:

We shall not cease from
               exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will he to arrive where ire started
And know the place
               for the first time.

          (T.S. Eliot 1943, p. 39)

Perhaps the function of searching, for human beings, is to germinate that innate wisdom seed. Perhaps without some degree of intention on our part, the piece of God we carry within won't grow into the open. Perhaps this touches on thc function of freedom. Perhaps the energy of love moving through us is tantamount to watering that seed. Perhaps it takes nothing less than the light of all that was never born and that will never die to cause the soul of a human being to open.

Here we come upon experiential courage, nowhere said as succinctly as by Anais Nin:

And then the day wine
when the risk
to remain tight, in a bud
was more painful
than the risk to bloom.

In truth, in deed, in way upon way of being, you can only hear a great wind (or the many trees that stand against it and only God through the spirit of those who prevail like thirsty oak. The more I live, the more I feel that God is the sky moving through the needle of my time on earth.

LIFE CREATING NEW LIFE

We participate, willingly or not, in ah ongoing creation, and every time the Great Spirit moves through us, every time we inhale that which is greater than our private dreams and exhale like pollen a puff of the mystical that defies all logic, we perpetuate the infinite energy that sustains the world. For me, one of the great Western misconceptions about Genesis is that it was an event that has come and gone, and so, is attributed to an idealized God very far removed from our daily lives. I suggest, however, that Genesis, like miracle or love or birth or death, is an ongoing process, not an event; an alive stream that paradoxically like the Tao has no beginning and no end.

As life moves through us, it creates new life, and in our inner breathing, in our spiritual respiration, as Rob Lehman puts it, we arc each like red blood cells reproducing in the cosmic body; each of us like Michelangelo's depiction of God separating light and dark; not once, but continually, for eternity.

If we are indeed formed in God's image, I prefer to imagine us swimming through experience and — just as fish part the patch of ocean in front of them, to have it glove their length, and rejoin behind them — we part the entirety of reality (God) briefly and continually, as all that is unsayable and indestructible and whole rejoins behind us.

So what is the purpose of all this parting and rejoining; of all this freedom and love? Perhaps, simply, to keep our souls alive while keeping creation going. Perhaps like fish, who must keep waiter moving through their gills, spirits must keep experiencing the deep or they will perish. Perhaps our ongoing collective swimming rejuvenates the deep.

In any event, it is our participation that is necessary over our watching, our experiencing God that is necessary over our understanding of theology. The contemporary prophet Meher Baba likens this quest for the deep secrets of spiritual life to approaching tire ocean: the one who stands on the shore will have a glimpse of the surface, lint the experience of it is reserved for those who are willing to risk plunging into its depths (Lewis 1996, p. 42). And entering that ocean always hinges on transcending what is merely private, in finding what is unifying and eternal at the core of all that is personal.

Einstein felt strongly about this:

Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in Science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections arc not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are engaged in Art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.

I am coming to believe that this continual swimming through the depth of all experience is what keeps the world alive. One of the requisites and rewards of consciousness is that immersing ourselves in the swim awakens that "loving devotion to that which transcends (both) personal concerns and volition". Now when I swim, literally, in pool or lake or ocean, I part the unpartable depth, and feel it hold me clearly, and feel it rejoin without a trace of my effort, and I recite this small poem:

I've been a fish
in search of bottom
when I've surfaced
in search of surface
when I've bottomed
and the ribbon of God's sea
passim', through my gills
is what I've felt
and thought
and spoken.

          (Nepo, Inhabiting Wonder in manuscript)

It has become a ritual for me, a symbolic acceptance of the humble, yet intricate part we all play in enlivening the mystery. It has led me to wonder If all expression is uttered as an involuntary song that results when life moves through us; a shiver or flush of heart and tongue that registers the sensation of life as it passes through. Perhaps this is at the very center of our irrepressible urge to speak: the want to re-enact the feeling of creation, to re-enact the instant of birth, over and over; and this act of searching (diving) and expressing (surfacing) lands us in our freshest moments of living.

LIFE OUT OF DEATH

The fruit rots and seeds a tree, the hero fails and his human character rises from underneath the failure, the crown we achieve in one dream becomes a howl when we are starving; and after generations the bones of a holy man become fertilizer, anonymous and chalky. Given time, everything trans-forms: its essence constant but its outer form manifest in an unforeseen way. When clinging to our ego-view or current dream as the only possibility, we can experience these changes as tragic and not natural. We don't make the team, or get that job, or love turns out unexpectedly. We are crushed, but something else is already happening, precisely because we are crushed. The farmer dies in the house he was born in, and no one is left to work the farm. One form ends but the fruit breaks down and seeds as something else. How often is an outer dream kindling for our inner fate?

"Life out of death, not life after death" (Luke 1989). This is how Helen Luke translates the archetype of Jesus that we all embody and live out, like it or not. It is through this deeper sense of resurrection, more phoenix-like than sacrificial, that the gyres of brokenness and wholeness, of love and impermanence, spiral upward. Within our lifetime on earth, we circle through the same process over and over, but like a coil each cycle of self brings us closer to heaven; not a destination outside of us, but a deeper, more thorough living of what we know and where we've already been. We grow, die, shed and grow⁴ more essential; meeting more truly the ever-essential entirety of reality God). In this regard, freedom is opening our selves through continual rebirth to the vibrancy of all there is that in-forms the ordinary days.

From a different angle of inquiry, we are led back to the same wisdom; that the difference between broken-ness and wholeness is often held potently in whether we are consciously assuming our place, in eternity (aware with feeling) or drifting in imagined isolation, suffering the illusion that there is no whole.

We are continually challenged to view our lives from an eternal perspective, from the vantage point of wholeness; to get out of our limited mentality and ego-viewing.

Again, Lao Tzu, in his ornery wisdom, asks:

Can you bold the door
               of your tent
 wide to the firmament?

          (LaoTzu 1944, No.TO)

This is not just offered as an etiquette of openness. It has always been, pre-requisite to health. All the eternal wisdom traditions, each in their own way, conclude that pain is separation from the Whole, from the Divine Reality, from the Universal Flow. In the Islamic, Jewish, Christian Scientist, Buddhist, Hindu and Native American models, and even in Florence-Nightingale's worldview, pain at its deepest level has always been the breaking of the part from the Whole. And so, chronic pain, though we have only been able to name it and see it under a microscope in modern times, has been as eternal; the slate of living separated from the Whole.

Thus, the first step toward healing, on any level, might just be to acknowledge that there is a Whole, a Universal How, a sense of God (an entirely of reality) that informs the world. For only in acknowledging a flow' - of life larger than one's sell can we open our selves to that flow.

I learned this first hand when struggling with cancer. When in the midst of great pain after surgery, I realized by being forced open to this flow that to be broken is no reason to see all things as, broken. And so, everything not broken at that time lent its wholeness to my recovery. It helps to remember that, though we might be suffering, we are part of a Universe that, like our bodies, is sending energy from its healthy tissue to its broken parts. In truth, as a soul beneath an ancient tree can imagine the earth from above the trees, a heart encumbered by reality can enter eternity.

As important is our acceptance of the process of life, the ongoing flow of events which always encompasses the breakdown of our ways (death and transformation) and the rejuvenation of our very lives (birth and healing). It is endless and unavoidable. The Buddhist view of this is very helpful here: suffering is the resistance of pain, or more accurately, suffering is what results when we resist the flow of life, which includes pain. Suffering is what we endure when trying hopelessly to stop the endless process of life.

Imagine the wheel of life with its enormous weight and inertia rolling steadily across the centuries, and then imagine any one of us, the size of an ant, trying to stop its eternal movement. The strain of such an effort would be torturous. Yet, so many of us, with our audacity of ego, believe it within our power to freeze or stall the movement of life, to prevent events from coming to pass. Or, once having happened, we think we can prevent them from affecting us.

If pain is the friction of the endless mystery and process of life, then suffering is an added level of pain that arises when we try in vain to freeze or halt the process of this mystery. Often, this manifests particularly in our prideful attempts to stop aging, to halt the process of humility that all experience inevitably brings us to, and to deny the effect of being in the world by refusing to experience our pain. In order to see how strong the contemporary will is in this regard, we have only to note our fascination and obsession with photographing and chronicling our selves, relentlessly trying to stop time and live in memory. I am not implying a ban on photographs, but rather acknowledging that it is this underlying hubris that we might stop or slow the wheel of life that separates us from the whole of life and, thus, from the deepest form of health.

Such states of separation, if allowed to dominate our lives, become forms of chronic suffering. As such, we can view the inability to sustain a comprehension of the whole as a chronic form of existential suffering; an unending form of mental separation. And on the spiritual level, the inability to experience Eternity (joining with elements that are timeless and larger than ourselves), the inability to experience Compassion and Connectedness, the inability to experience our Common Being; all this creates the spiritual equivalent of chronic suffering. These states of separation leave us clinging to the smaller self as the only raft we have in an incomprehensible sea. Thus, spiritual suffering prevents us from realizing (making real) the Eternal Self.

Once more, LaoTzu pre-articulates all this when he prods us to consider:

How can you follow the course
  of your life
 if you do not let it flaw?

          (Lao Tzu 1944)

We cannot experience freedom of spirit, the breathing of love that sets us free, while trying to stop the world in order to shield ourselves from pain. As a river can't choose what courses over its bottom, the human spirit can't choose what ripples through its heart. It makes me want to vary the old Irish saying, may the wind always be at your back, and offer: may the wind always, and in all ways, move through your heart.

"We are not the first to consider such things, and there is great comfort in finding other signs along the way; such. as the profound greeting, still in use in Hawaii, where the original people lived daily with the endless winds that seemed to come from nowhere.

Upon parting, one will say in Hawaiian: A-low—Haa, may you always face the breath of the spirit, and the other will respond: A-hoo-ee—Ho, until our eyes touch...

They say the Aborigines sing everything they see into existence: rocks, trees, rivers, light. They say they have done this for thousands of years. It bespeaks an eternal partnership by which everything already in existence allows itself to be experienced. And we can only hope that if the earth be an image of all that is possible within a single soul, then somewhere in the forests that elude us, deep within, lives this primal force that sings die very air of our spirit into being...

Notes

 1. "A Defence of Poetry." Shelley.

 2. As explained by Sa'kc'j Henderson to David Peat in Peat (1994), p. 227.

 3. "My Soul," Yehuda Amichai.

 4. See Mitchell (1968), pp. 4, 6, 7.

References

Eliot, T.S. 1943. Four Quartets. New York; Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Lao Tzu. 1944. Tao Teh Chimg. Translated by W. Bynner.

lawrence, D.H. 1959. Selected Poems. New York: Viking.

Lewis, N. 1996. Review of What is Enlightenment: Exploring the Goal of the Spiritual Path, by John White, ed. Noetic Science Review 38 (Summer): '12.

Iuke, H. 1989. Dark Wood to White Rose: The Journey of Transformation in Dante's Divine Comedy. New York: Parabola Books. Mitchell, S. Trans. 1988. Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu. New York: Harper & How.

Novak, P., ed. 1994, The World's Wisdom. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Peat, D. 1994. Lighting the Seventh Fire: the Spiritual Ways, Healing, and Science of the Native American. New York: Birch Lane Press.

Soukhanov, A. H., ed. 1992. The American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

Tanahashi, K., ed. and trans. 1985. Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. San Francisco; North Point Press.