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Thought of the Week Archives
April 1999
April 5
[These quotes are from Tim O'Brien's The Things they Carried. They
are taken from a section of the book where O'Brien tells the story of
how he was drafted and then drove north, toward Canada, to sort things
out and decide what to do. At the Tip Top Lodge, he met a man named Elroy
Berdahl, who acted as mentor on this miniature journey. In the best mentor
sense, Berdahl understood the problem, but he did not offer advice. He
only showed O'Brien the options, made him feel the experience from all
sides, all without judgment or desire that O'Brien do one thing over the
other.
Mentors must remain detatched in the sense that they must provide support
and understanding without attaching themselves to the results. They must
remember that the Journey must be taken by the initiate, not the mentor.
To interfer is to betray the mentor role by stealing the journey from
the initiate. The initiate must choose -- and experience the results of
that choice. That is the heart of the journey -- working through the shadows,
through the fears, through the challenges. The mentor may support, explain,
and listen, but he or she should never choose for the initiate.
Anyway, on with the quotes. --RH]
----
The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life. How do
I say this without sounding sappy? Blurt it our -- the man saved me. He
offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at
all. He took me in. He was there at a critical time -- a silent, watchful
presence. Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper
way to thank him, and I never have, and so, if nothing else, this story
represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue. (p. 51)
---
- [Later, Berdahl takes O'Brien in a boat right across the river until
he is a stone's throw from Canada.]
... For a time I didn't pay attention to anything, just feeling the
cold spray against my face, but then it occurred to me that at some point
we must've passed into Canadian waters, across that dotted line between
two different worlds, and I remember a sudden tightness in my chest as
I looked up and watched the far shore come at me. This wasn't a daydream.
It was tangible and real. As we came in toward land, Elroy cut the engine,
letting the boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. The old
man didn't look at me or speak. Bending down, he opened up his tackle
box and busined himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming
to himself, his eyes down.
...I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide
me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of
vigil as I chose a life for myself.
- [After confronting his choice on his own, O'Brien began to cry quietly.]
At the rear of the boat Elroy Berdahl pretended not to notice...I realized
that Canada had become a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no
longer a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I understood
That I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown
and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself
as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare
pipe dream. (p59-60)
- [And, finally, he heads home to face the Vietnam War.]
And right then I submitted.
I would go to the war -- I would kill and maybe die -- because I was
embarrassed not to. (p. 62)
- [He left Berdahl and headed home.]
I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests
and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and
then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward.
I went to war. (p. 63)
[As I have mentioned before, The Things They Carried is a remarkable
book and a wonderful text. If you are not using it at your school, you
should consider it. -- RH]
April 12
In some other contemporary traditions, such as ours, that have separated
humanity from its divine roots, the goddess is all but absent. There,
the male principle is artificially inflated by her enforced absence and
careens helter-skelter in his fool's paradise of the real world, oblivious
to or jealous of any remnants of her ideal reality. Among other surviving
traditions, such as the Navajo and Tibetan, male and female spiritual
principles continue to coexist, to inform and balance one another, and
to enrich the human spirit.
- Peter Gold,
Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of the Spirit
April 19
It is not possible...to associate the hasty, grinding wheels of the
machine culture as the echoes or surroundings of ritual. Ritual is not
compatible with the rapid rhythm that industrialism has injected into
life. So whenever ritual happens in a place commanded by or dominated
by a machine, ritual becomes a statement against the very rhythm that
feeds the needs of the machine. It makes no difference whether it is a
political machine or otherwise.
I say this because it feels to me that this elusive sense of the divine
in the modern world and the practice of blatant consumerism have spread
even into the spiritual realm. This reveals the attempt of a mechanized
culture to protect itself from having to face even subtle duties toward
its higher self. To say that ritual is needed in the industrialized world
is an understatment. We have seen in my own people that it is probably
impossible to live a sane life without it.
- Malidoma Patrice Some
Ritual: Power Healing and Community
April 26
The cave, the armor, the dungeon, the treadmill, the labyrinth -- all
these have been used as images for the bound, trapped, imprisoned, repetitive,
closed-in nature of human consciousness and existence. The labyrinth,
or maze, is a particularly apt symbol for the conditioned mind, bound
up in anxiety and defensiveness. In a maze, as in this kind of thinking,
we can't see where we're going; we take numerous blind alleys, go backward,
sideways, and around in circles, usually without knowing it; we have to
backtrack, double over, analyze, figure, review, project, and so on --
and still we may never find our way out. The monstrous Minotaur that sits
in the center of the labyrinth is a symbol of the unacceptable shadow
part of our nature, that which we try to hide and deny: the enemy within.
Ralph Metzner
The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Tranformative Experience
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