Risk

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

~Annie Dillard

Good evening friends,

It’s Christmas Eve. Our theme today is risk. How does risk relate to Christmas Eve? You might ask. Well, let me explain. Two stories come to my mind when I think of Christmas Eve. The first is the story of what Christmas is about, the birth of Jesus in the Christian faith. The version I know involves a poor couple traveling a vast distance and eventually settling in a barn to deliver their first child (who is reputed to be the son of God and the savior to all humankind). Sounds risky to me! Now if that one doesn’t get you consider my second story, that of Santa Claus, who according to legend is currently (probably currently in NZ) flying through the air in a sled pulled by eight reindeer, and depositing gifts under the tree of all English speaking children above a certain socio-economic status! So you see, there is no day more fitting during which to speak of risk than Christmas Eve.

In our email today you will find the next chapter from The Endurance. Next you will find two illustrations of risk by Annie Dillard, the first excerpted from her masterpiece, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, and the second from An American Childhood (which is told in a spirit especially fitting for Christmas). Next, Mary Oliver will share her poem, When Death Comes, which speaks to the risk of full engagement with the world. Tara Brach will then speak to the same in a message intended to help us take the personal risk of openness (please note that the Tara Brach section is presented both as an audio file and as a transcript of the same audio file, so enjoy that as you choose). Finally, Charles Bukowski’s short film, The Man With The Beautiful Eyes touches on numerous types of risk (authenticity, thought, seclusion, judgement), and Flying by Cody Fry will offer an encouraging, spiritual conclusion.

The Endurance:

For the twenty-two men who turned their faces inland, the excitement was past and the trial by patience had begun. Their helplessness was almost total, and they knew it. The Caird had sailed, taking with her the best of everything they had.

After awhile they pulled the Wills farther up onto the beach, then turned her over and crawled underneath. ‘As we sat there, cramped, crowded and wet,’ wrote Macklin, ‘we wondered how we were going to face the month ahead of us, which was the very least we could hope for without relief.’ And this, he admitted, was a ‘most optimistic’ expectation, based upon a half-dozen assumptions – the first among them being that the Caird would actually get through.

On this score, their general feeling, at least outwardly, was confident. But how else might they have felt? Any other attitude would have been the equivalent of admitting that they were doomed. No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

Supper was served early, and the men turned in almost immediately. They awoke the following morning to a bleak, forbidding day of half mist, half snow. The bad weather only made it the most imperative that some sort of shelter be devised, so all able hands returned to the work of excavating the ice cave in the face of the glacier. They kept at it all that day, and the next, and the next, and the next. But by morning of the twenty-eighth, four days after the Caird sailed, it was obvious that the idea would have to be abandoned. Whenever they were inside the cave, which was now large enough for several men to enter, the heat given off by their bodies would melt the interior so that streams of water ran down the walls and along the bottom.

Only one possibility remained – the boats. Greenstreet and Marston suggested that they might be inverted to form the roof of a hut, and Wild agreed. They began to collect rocks to build a foundation. It was exhausting toil. ‘We are all ridiculously weak,’ Orde-Lees wrote. ‘Stones that we could easily have lifted at other times we found quite beyond our capacity, and it needed two or three of us to carry some that would otherwise have been one man’s load… Our weakness is best compared with that which one experiences on getting up from a long illness…

But if they were to survive there was work to be done. In spite of the cold and the wind, which was sometimes so furious that they had to duck inside until the gusts eased off, they set about making the shelter more secure. Some men rearranged the tent over the roof and lashed down the guy roped more solidly. Others tucked in bits of blankets around the foundation and packed wet grit from the beach against the whole affair to seal it up.

But again that night the blizzard raged on. Snow once more found its way inside, though not nearly so much as the night before. On the morning of April 30, James, Hudson, and Hurley, who had been trying to sleep in their tent, gave up and moved into the shelter with everybody else. Hurley wrote: ‘Life here without a hut and equipment is almost beyond endurance.’ But little by little, as the wind revealed their vulnerable spots, they sealed them up, and each day the shelter became just a little more livable.

There were lengthy debates about how long it would take the Caird to reach South Georgia, and how long after that it would before a rescue ship arrived. The most optimistic figured that by May 12, a week hence, they might expect to see a ship. More conservative guesses said that it would be June 1 before there could be any thought of rescue. But again it was a matter of fighting back hope. Even as early as May 8, long before they could expect anything to have happened, all of them were already worrying about whether the ice conditions around the island might prevent a relief ship from approaching.

The anxiety had a solid basis in fact. The month of May – the equivalent to November in the Northern Hemisphere – was already one quarter over. Winter was only a matter of weeks, possibly days, away. When it did arrive, there was a strong possibility that ice might form completely around the island and thwart any attempts to bring a ship in. On May 12, Macklin wrote: ‘Wind from E. Expect we will get the pack into the bay again – we do not want this just now, with daily hope of the relief ship.’

Macklin wrote on May 22: ‘There is a big change in the scenery about here – everything is now covered in snow, and there is a considerable ice foot to both sides of the spit. For the last few days ice has been coming in, and dense pack extends in all directions as far as the eye can reach, making the chances of a near rescue seem very remote. No ship but a properly constructed ice-ship would be safe in this pack; an iron steamer would be smashed up very soon. Besides this there is very little daylight now…’

Indeed, the realization was spreading that, logically at least, a rescue before winter was becoming increasingly improbable, if not impossible. On May 25, one month and one day after the Caird had sailed, Hurley wrote: ‘Weather drifting snow and wind from east. Our wintry environment embodies the most inhospitable and desolate prospect imaginable. All are resigned now and fully anticipate wintering.’

“Mary, when she was surprised by Gabriel… she saw a form that could give her new life. 

Like the sun coming up or a rose opens. She leapt as her habit was, out of herself 

into the divine presence.

There was fire in the smoke of her breath… I am smoke from that fire.”

~ Rumi

The Writing: Annie Dillard from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts of the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

Also by Annie Dillard, From An American Childhood

Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly—then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it. 

Boys welcomed me at baseball, too, for I had, through enthusiastic practice, what was weirdly known as a boy’s arm. In winter, in the snow, there was neither baseball nor football, so the boys and I threw snowballs at passing cars. I got in trouble throwing snowballs and have seldom been happier since. 

On one weekday morning after Christmas, six inches of new snow had just fallen. We were standing up to our boot tops in snow on a front yard on trafficked Reynolds Street, waiting for cars. The cars traveled Reynolds Street slowly and evenly; they were targets all but wrapped in red ribbons, cream puffs. We couldn’t miss. 

I was seven; the boys were eight, nine, and ten. The oldest two Fahey boys were there—Mikey and Peter—polite blond boys who lived near me on Lloyd Street, and who already had four brothers and sisters. My parents approved Mikey and Peter Fahey. Chickie McBride was there, a tough kid, and Billy Paul and Mackie Kean too, from across Reynolds, where the boys grew up dark and furious, grew up skinny, knowing, and skilled. We had all drifted from our houses that morning looking for action and had found it here on Reynolds Street. 

It was cloudy but cold. The cars’ tires laid behind them on the snowy street a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls. I had stepped on some earlier; they squeaked. We could have wished for more traffic. When a car came, we all popped it one. In the intervals between cars we reverted to the natural solitude of children. 

I started making an ice ball—a perfect ice ball, from perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent so no snow remained all the way through. (The Fahey boys and I considered it unfair actually to throw an ice ball at somebody, but it had been known to happen.) 

I had just embarked on the ice-ball project when we heard tire chains come clanking from afar. A black Buick was moving toward us down the street. We all spread out, banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew nigh, fired. 

A soft snowball hit the driver’s windshield right before the driver’s face. It made a smashed star with a hump in the middle. 

Often, of course, we hit our target, but this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man got out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door. 

He ran after us, and we ran away from him, up the snowy Reynolds sidewalk. At the corner, I looked back; incredibly, he was still after us. He was in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. Any normal adult would have quit, having sprung us into flight and made his point. This man was gaining on us. He was a thin man, all action. All of a sudden, we were running for our lives. 

Wordless, we split up. We were on our turf; we could lose ourselves in the neighborhood backyards, everyone for himself. I paused and considered. Everyone had vanished except Mikey Fahey, who was just rounding the corner of a yellow brick house. Poor Mikey, I trailed him. The driver of the Buick sensibly picked the two of us to follow. The man apparently had all day. 

He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in another hedge, entered a scruffy backyard and ran around its back porch and tight between houses to Edgerton Avenue; we ran across Edgerton to an alley and up our own sliding woodpile to the Halls’ front yard; he kept coming. We ran up Lloyd Street and wound through mazy backyards toward the steep hilltop at Willard and Lang. 

He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive. 

Mikey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us. He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places to slow him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us—for he would never give up, this man—and we were losing speed. 

He chased us through the backyard labyrinths of ten blocks before he caught us by our jackets. He caught us, and we all stopped. 

We three stood staggering, half blinded, coughing, in an obscure hilltop backyard: a man in his twenties, a boy, a girl. He had released our jackets, our pursuer, our captor, our hero: he knew we weren’t going anywhere. We all played by the rules. Mikey and I unzipped our jackets. I pulled off my sopping mittens. Our tracks multiplied in the backyard’s new snow. We had been breaking new snow all morning. We didn’t look at each other. I was cherishing my excitement. The man’s lower pants legs were wet; his cuffs were full of snow, and there was a prow of snow beneath them on his shoes and socks. Some trees bordered the little flat backyard, some messy winter trees. There was no one around: a clearing in a grove, and we the only players. 

It was a long time before he could speak. I had some difficulty at first recalling why we were there. My lips felt swollen; I couldn’t see out of the sides of my eyes; I kept coughing.

“You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily. 

We listened perfunctorily indeed, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and so he had caught us. Now he came down to earth. I wanted the glory to last forever. 

But how could the glory have lasted forever? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. But when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal, what precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory? I brooded about this for the next few years. He could only have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills. None of which I really wanted, and none of which any adult was likely to do, even in the spirit of fun. He could only chew us out there in the Panamanian jungle, after months or years of exalting pursuit. He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense. 

If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing has required so much of me since as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter—running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious redheaded man who wished to have a word with us. I don’t know how he found his way back to his car. 

“Above all take a chance. Sing like the blood going down the vein.”

~ Mary Oliver

The Poetic: Mary Oliver

WHEN DEATH COMES

By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like a hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse 

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes
like the measle-pox; 

when death comes
like an iceberg between shoulder blades, 

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? 

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood
and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, 

and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, 

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, 

and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth, 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. 

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument. 

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

“Do not be afraid, Mary”

~ Luke 1:30

A Strategy: Tara Brach, from The Exquisite Risk (To listen to this talk, including the meditations included, follow this link: https://www.tarabrach.com/undefended-heart/)

One of the metaphors for spiritual transformation that we hear a lot is that we are like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and that awakening comes as we feel the sense of the cocoon and realize that it is time to go beyond; and then we transform into a butterfly and fly into freedom. It is a very useful metaphor. Individually and as a species, we live in this familiar cocoon of our egoic thoughts and behaviors and so on, and they serve us—the cocoon serves us in earlier stages of development—and then the time comes to go beyond. And if we don’t, the cocoon creates a pressure and we start getting more and more squeezed because we are living in too small a space for our growing spirit. So that pressure is a reminder to take the chance and break open. And it is damaging if we don’t. It is arrested development. 

It is even more useful to remember that, for humans, this is not a one-shot and we are continually waking up out of our cocoons— cocoons of illusion, cocoons of limiting beliefs, cocoons of behaviors keep us small. It is an ongoing process of coming into contact with a wider reality. It is like shedding a skin, and each time that we shed our skin, we feel more exposed because the new skin is more porous, than the old skin, so there is more contact, more flow through, and more of a sense of vulnerability.

So, I would like to take a phrase that I heard recently from the poet Mark Nepo, who I love. He describes this shedding of the skin as, “taking the exquisite risk.” Every time we open up out of our familiar cocoon to contact a wider reality, to really touch aliveness more fully, we are taking the exquisite risk. I love it because exquisite connotes a kind of beauty and excellence and sensitivity and responsiveness. Exquisite. And then risk—it is exposure to danger and loss. We are willing to let go of an old experience that gave us some measure of comfort, security or certainty and exchange it for what is unfamiliar and way more alive. The exquisite risk. 

So one flavor of the exquisite risk comes from Andre Gregory. Many of you saw My Dinner with Andre. In it, a man asks Andre about writing and he responds with a story about his wife. She was going into surgery and after she had anesthesia, he realized he hadn’t said what he needed to. He said that from then on, he dedicated himself to speaking his heart as if for the last time, not taking the risk of not being real. And then he told the man: “Write like that, Write like it is the last time, like this is it. And live your life like that, from that wholeheartedness.” 

The exquisite risk. 

Basically, this path of exquisite risk arises in the moments that we are willing to be fully present. It is full unconditional presence—meeting the moment, wide open. One Buddhist nun from the fifteen-hundreds said, “I meet this life with my whole body.” You can kind of feel that, this undefended presence. 

Frederik Nietzsche writes: “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”  So, again, we are talking about what happens when we are not willing. This coincides with a belief that indigenous people had that humans originally had the power to rejuvenate and live fully by shedding their skin. That’s what gave them the power. There is a story from the Polynesian culture about the mother of a tribe that went regularly to the river to shed her skin. But one such time, she shed her skin and the old skin got caught in a bit of driftwood. So she goes back to the village and her teenage daughter sees her and is frightened you know, because she doesn’t look like her old self. And the mother tries to reassure her, but the daughter was repulsed by seeing this raw-skinned new person that didn’t look like her mother. She was so distressed and angry that the mother decided that, to soothe her fear, she would go back to the river. And so, she found the old skin and put it back on, and from that day on humans lost their ability to be immortal. Arrested development. 

Of course, shedding our skin doesn’t mean to be without skin. It means that we are opening to a level where there is more transparency and more porousness and more of a natural exchange—a belonging to our world. 

What I would like to do in our reflection here is to look at the challenges and the blessings of taking the exquisite risk and what it really means—not in some big super-human way that we are going to plan for down the road—but right in any moment, right this moment, as much as any moment in your life, you can take the exquisite risk of really arriving, putting down ideas and certainties and orientations . . . that quality of openness. 

So the challenge, for all of us, is that we are very habituated and attached to and identified with our particular familiar skin—our cocoon. Every one of us. It is part of our evolution. We develop our cocoon and we are attached to it, and we have to deal with that. The ego-self is organized around controlling life. Most of the time, we are trying to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want and trying to hold on to security and comfort and push away fear or pain. 

You can see with meditation instruction: Oh just relax, just come into the present moment. That little word just. Do you know what I mean? We are rigged to be vigilant, to not come into the present moment, to constantly be darting off. In fact, our brain is designed with a default network in it and, when we don’t have a task . . . when we are told, “Oh, just be” . . . that default-network gets activated and has us scurrying around to re-affirm our selfness by looking into the future and the past just to reorient ourselves. It is part of our evolutionary potential to keep awakening out of our cocoon, but there are pulls to stay inside. In the Buddhist tradition, the pulls are described as our reactions to the eight worldly winds. We are constantly trying to control and to have praise but not blame, success but not failure, pleasure but not pain, fame but not disrepute. Those are the eight winds. That is the way we are maintaining our cocoon—we are busy trying to organize around having what we want and not, in some way, losing what we really want to keep with us. 

It is hard to overestimate the power of the eight winds and how many moments we are holding on to our skin, so to speak—trying to thicken it up . . . trying to hang on to that cocoon so that we can protect ourselves and get what we want. And so, the big question is: What enables us to keep evolving to eventually let go? What we find is, that it hurts more to hang on than to let go. It is suffering to stay in that small container. After a brush with cancer, Mary Oliver wrote: 

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” 

So, the inquiry is: Where in our life right now are we sensing that prod? Where 

is the cocoon squeezing? Where are we suffering? What is our growing edge? 

For many of us, the hook is looking good and getting approval, right? And that is where we get small. It is interesting. Don’t take my word for it. Just notice when you are in an interaction, check and sense: How much of the way I am expressing myself is, in some way, designed to get a certain response from another person? 

We get rewards for good presentation. We get rewards for being clever. We get rewards for having the right answer or for looking a certain way or acting a certain way. But we can also see how much the seeking of approval stops us from being spontaneous and it stops us from being, you know, really authentic. And in a deep way, as long as we think we need to act a certain way to be okay, we can’t trust in our innate lovability. It keeps us trapped in insecurity. 

So we need the prod of the cocoon—the squeeze—because we get so habituated. Whatever we practice regularly—whatever we are regularly thinking and the regular ways we behave—that is what we strengthen. If you are practicing worry, you strengthen the pathways that have to do with biological and psychological fear. If you are practicing blaming, that gets strengthened. We need that prod so that we begin to practice in a different way—so we start turning towards presence. 

We usually need a while to get in touch with our bodies and our heart so, if you just have a short time available now, you might sense your intention—your intention to explore letting go of the old skin, of just practicing those same thoughts and beliefs, and coming into this tender connectedness with what is really here, breathing with it, feeling it, offering a kindness. This is the foundation of being able to take the exquisite risk with others. If we are willing to bravely be with the vulnerability inside us, then we can begin to engage with others without a mask. We can begin to be more real. 

So often we are with each other and to others, it might seem we are being real— we are being who we are. We might be in a lively place, a fun-place, a sweet place, but only we can know for sure whether we are actually engaging from a groundless presence, where we are not playing out our routines, but we are really there. And to be taking the exquisite risk requires dropping a lot of our certainty and really listening inwardly and outwardly—being truly interested in what it’s like for another person. So, there is an internal awareness of what it is like and what is going on inside of your own being, but it also extends to a real curiosity that is attending to the other. And there is a willingness to be changed by the shared experience. This means really putting down our habits, it is a radical kind of presence. So, I want to name a few guidelines and then practice again and explore into it. 

If you want to, more consciously, dare to be present in this way, the most basic attitude is to be very forgiving of how hard it is and how quickly you lapse back into the old familiar cocoon behaviors—like truly forgiving—because the conditioning is there, and it is not our fault. All we can do is intend to be real, so we need to know we are going to open sometimes and we are going to close sometimes. We need to encourage ourselves. 

We have so much pain and so many wounds from our early connections with each other or lack thereof, that we are afraid of each other. It is in our bodies. So, just like we do with meditation, it is important to be able to recognize that, sometimes, taking the exquisite risk is not the most compassionate and wise thing to do in a moment because we might re-traumatize ourselves in some way. It is not like, in every single moment, “thou shalt take a risk.” There is a wisdom to it and we start where it seems like there is enough safety. It is never a hundred percent—it is not supposed to be—but we start coming out of the cocoon where it feels safe enough. 

The Cinematic: The Man With The Beautiful Eyes

The Musical (and the spiritual): “Flying” by Cody Fry

I wish you all a magical Christmas Eve.

Sincerely,

Shannon