WisdomBridge: Modern Pathways to Our Indigenous Soul

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Commencement Address for New College

by Francis Weller

You Don’t Ever Let Go of the Thread

It is an honor and a privilege to be with you this evening. For those of you who don’t know, I had the pleasure of teaching an unusual class at New College this past year called “Village Process.” The intention of the course was to introduce experientially, the ingredients of a living village. Now on 2 ½ hours a month, it was a challenge to bring this level of connection to the circle, but I feel we did just that. This group of individuals has found the thread that moves between and among each other and in so doing, each one of them has become more than who they thought they were.

But first things first: you are very accustomed to my beginning our times together with poetry and today, above all other days, should be no exception to that tradition. The first one is a poem by Rilke

Some People Wake Up

Again and again
Some people in the crowd wake up.
They have no ground in the crowd
And they emerge according to broader laws.
They carry strange customs with them,
And demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.

You have woken up and are calling passionately for the future to come in new forms, new dreams, new possibilities.

The second poem is by one of our contemporary elders, William Stafford. Stafford wrote a poem every day of his adult life; that was his soul practice. In fact the last volume of his poetry includes a photocopy of the poem he wrote the day he died. Someone once asked him, “Mr. Stafford, how is it that you were able to achieve such a thing as this, writing a poem every day.” His response was very instructive. He said, “It’s easy, you just lower your standards.” And yet he wrote some of the finest poetry of the past century. This one is called The Way It Is

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

This is the essence of my statement to you today: don’t ever let go of the thread. This thread is the root image, the driving passion, the soul’s calling to your life of meaning and direct participation in the shimmering, animate world. It is this thread that brought you to New College and urged you to deepen your understanding of what it is that holds purpose and significance for you. Your abiding responsibility is to track this thread by allowing the soul’s own affections to reach into the world.

It is this thread that calls you to activism, to respond to the world with compassion. It is what I call “soul activism.” The importance of this form of activism is all the more necessary in a world that has come to be largely influenced by systems that have abandoned soul. Instead we have opted for the politics of expediency, productivity and bottom-line thinking. The decisions being made today reflect this absence of soul, often lacking eloquence, beauty, poetry, imagination; the very basis of soul life. It is the responsibility of those of us who have, in Rilke’s terms, awakened to the soul-eating quality of monoculture, that we bring these elements to the very foreground of any and all activities that we attempt to engender.

In that light, I would like to speak to you briefly about soul activism, the recovery of soul in our times and the calling forth of your particular medicine for our world.

Soul Activism:

There are many ways to respond to the crises facing our communities and our planet today. They are all necessary, all valuable in the effort to restore sanity and decency in our relationships. What is often ignored however, is a quality of soulfullness, which addresses a layer of experience critical to core concerns for each of us.

The Roots of Our Belonging: Belonging is a fundamental need to the psyche. Belonging initiates a sequence of unfolding that drops us further and further into the world, into her folds and features. We become participants in the ritual of life rather than dispassionate spectators living “lives of quiet desperation” as Thoreau observed. Belonging confirms a sense of mattering that quiets the ghosts of exclusion and stills the questions of adequacy. After 25 years as a psychotherapist, I can tell you with no hesitation, that this culture has failed in instilling into our people a feeling of belonging. The reason I feel this is so vital to our attention is reflected in a stanza again, from William Stafford.

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Traditional cultures around the world have much to teach us about this fundamental need. They have developed an exquisite “technology of belonging” that carries a person throughout their lifetime, reaffirming their place within the community. This tells us something extremely important: belonging is fragile and is very prone to rupture. In other words, the felt sense of belonging requires frequent confirmation, which was the basis of ritual life among indigenous peoples. From birth, (even prior to conception) through death and into the realm of the ancestors, your place in the community was continually assured.

It is in the context of belonging that our deepest self emerges. There is a beautiful saying among a South African tribe that says, “I am, because we are.” Now think about that. I am, because we are. My sense of self is directly related to the depth of my being known, being an integral part of the whole. Contrast this with our western correlate: I think, therefore I am. Where are the others? And by others I also mean the animals, clouds, wind, rose, coyote yip, lichen, valley oak. Our sense of identity is shaped by relationship and this is predicated upon belonging. This need of the psyche to feel embedded within the holding space of multiple individuals is ancient. It was in that specific context that our psyches were shaped and it is what we expected upon our arrival here. When this familiarity is set, then the “primary satisfactions” of the soul are fulfilled. This is a critical understanding for us today.

In the absence of these primary satisfactions, (touch, comforting, embodiment, sensuous surrounds of fragrance, color, tastes, intimacies with the natural world, multiple reflections from the community) our attention moves to secondary forms of filling the need for belonging. We strive for success, wealth, prestige, we seek to gather material goods, bigger houses, multiple hummers, we become addicted to power, status or drugs, alcohol, all in an effort to fill what cannot be satisfied except through the experience of true homecoming. As our one-dimensional corporate fantasy spreads across the planet while simultaneously dislodging the social and spiritual base of traditional peoples, the clamoring for secondary satisfactions will increase, much to the pleasure of these corporate interests, but much to the dismay of our beleaguered planet. The earth cannot sustain attempts to fill the emptiness left when the essential need for belonging is aborted.

I see this as one of your central tasks: to translate your passions, your learning, and your particular strand of the thread into a new “technology of belonging.” I have seen how beautifully you have welcomed one another and have helped one another fill these primary satisfactions. I have seen the self-doubts and questions of adequacy abate and the courage to bring yourselves more fully into the world surge. You each carry a filament in the reweaving of the fabric of belonging and it gives me hope.

Drinking the Tears of the World. The second aspect of soul activism is a difficult one. It concerns our willingness to openly engage the sorrows of the world. You have shown me on many occasions during our times together, that you are deeply attuned to the suffering of our planet. Your tears have come; your hearts have broken for the ways in which the carelessness of institutions has led to large-scale scenes of pain.

Your task is to remain willing to stay open to this fountain of sorrow. This is essential especially when the culture is being saturated with fear that can easily cause the heart to petrify. It is then, when the heart has been turned to stone that things become black and white, either or, you’re either with us or against us. Grief becomes the solvent to soften the heart and keep us fluid, and in turn responsive to the cold, hard injustices that are administered daily. This is one of the deepest forms of soul activism. It is the heart aroused, the heart beating with outrage and compassion that offers us one of our most potent sources of response.

Denise Levertov speaks of the importance of grief in her brief poem:

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall.

Grief is an act of recognition that someone, something in the world, has indeed touched us and we sense our sorrow in its loss or pain. Grief is the work of mature men and women. It is our responsibility to source this emotion and offer it back to our struggling world. The gift of grief is the affirmation of life and of our intimacy with the world. It is risky to stay vulnerable in a culture increasingly dedicated to death, but without our willingness to stand witness through the power of our grief, we will not be able to stem the hemorrhaging of our communities, the senseless destruction of ecologies or the basic tyranny of monotonous existence. Each of these moves pushes us closer to the edge of the wasteland, a place where malls and cyberspace become our daily bread and our sensual lives diminish. Grief instead, stirs the heart, is indeed the song of a soul alive.

Grief is, as has been said, a powerful form of deep activism. If we refuse or neglect the responsibility for drinking the tears of the world, her losses and deaths cease to be registered by the ones meant to be the receptors of that information. It is our job to feel these losses and to mourn them. It is our job to openly grieve for the loss of wetlands, the destruction of forest systems, the decay of whale populations, the loss of cultures, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country. Imagine the power of our voices and tears being heard across the continent. I believe the wolves and coyotes would howl with us, the cranes, egrets and owls would screech, the willows would bend closer to the ground and together the great transforming could happen to us and our great grief cry could happen to the worlds beyond.

The importance of this has another side that one would not expect. It is hinted at in a statement of William Blake. He said, “the deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” Going back to the idea of primary satisfaction for a moment: we have become a flatline culture, experiencing little joy and instead relying upon excitement for some confirmation of being alive. True joy requires a heart quickened, open to the world and as Blake suggests, this occurs through the experience of sorrow.

Your ability to register the tears of the world and remain openhearted will inspire your work with a depth of compassion so needed in our world. I praise each of you and your profound concern for this sweet jewel of a home.

Communitas: The last area of soul activism I want to speak to today concerns the creation of genuine community. As I shared earlier our sense of self is directly affected by the experience of community. This word is used often in our discussions today, but what I am speaking of is the creation of true Communitas. This word was coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner to describe the heightened state of unity that would occur in tribal communities during ritual events. He noted that this sense of alignment went throughout the village and brought the community into a spiritual wholeness that we rarely see in our own culture.

You experienced this at times during our process together. I firmly believe and know that who we are can only truly be drawn into its fullness in the context of village. The fiction of individualism has revealed an impoverished sense of self, deprived of the rich gift of revelation when we are seen for who we are. Each of you felt the power of that during the “Medicine Day” ritual, when you were seen for the gifts you carry and how your particular medicine touched and healed others in the circle. Without the village, our gifts often remain hidden and neglected. We need each other desperately.

The creation of Communitas is fundamental to healing our planet. The Dalai Lama said that the next Buddha would not come as an individual, but would come as a community. We are becoming the Buddha, the healer, the shaman, we are becoming the medicine for the world and we will mend to the degree that we find in one another, our salvation.

Communitas engenders courage, imagination, creativity. Ironically it encourages our uniqueness to come forth. As I have said many times, in a culture obsessed with individualism, there are very few individuals to be found. We have created a cult of conformity, again out of fear that we will not be welcomed if we are different. True Communitas requires diversity, difference in which the full round of gifts and medicine is accounted for. Everyone becomes essential when who we are is what is being asked for.

I know that each of you carries a longing and a commitment to create this form of community wherever you go. I am sure that you all have heard or read the comment of Margaret Mead’s when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Look around you. These are your companions in changing the world.

Commencement:

The word commencement means, “to begin together.” The root word also has initiation in it. Initiation implies a beginning, an entry and in this case into a new level of spiritual responsibility. You now know that you are powerful enough to make significant changes in the world. You have faced the energies that would have you question your worth or your right to be in this world as you are. You can no longer allow that old story dissuade you from showing up for your life and your work. I have seen you shine, as have your friends.

It takes great courage and deep faith to place your heart and soul into making changes that may not fully realize until generations to come. This we have learned from our Native American elders: 7th generation. I helped to begin a project called “Men of Spirit” in 1997 and we began by casting out a dream of 200 years. The prayer is that in those future generations will be the germination of the seeds we planted on that mountain that our youth will feel in their bones that they belong and that they have beauty and gifts to share as men.

You are working, each in your own ways to render the world sane again, through the medicine of beauty: in your art, your design, your greening of the planet, your conversations, your dreams. You have each responded to Rilke’s question: “Earth: isn’t this what you want, an invisible re-arising within us?” You have each become a homeopathic dose to the ills of modernity, a positive virus that can spread a new and soulful vision of life on earth.

Hold onto the thread, as Stafford suggests, remembering that this thread includes each other. Look around you, see in one another the call to draw out what is most brilliant, beautiful and bold in each of you. Dedicate yourselves to this task: to call forth from one another the genius you came here to share with the world. So much is in bud, the poet Denise Levertov says, so much within us that we do not even recognize. We are awaiting the new forms, the emerging dreams that can and will transform

The challenges facing us today are not going to be solved by figuring it out, but by a change of heart. We will save only what we love. This is the great turning that Joanna Macy talks about, “World as Lover, World as Self.” We need to remain committed to one another, to the experience of relationship with all life and to track the subtle flirts of the sacred that come in a myriad of forms: tears, touches, visions, dreams. We must trust our authenticity, our authority that arises out of being who we are. There is nothing to prove, nothing to earn, only gifts to be offered.

I want to honor you, to thank you, to acknowledge you for your devotion and conviction to mend the broken places in our world. You have given me hope that our children and theirs might see better times ahead

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Don’t ever let go of the thread.

Thank you.

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