When I imagine my future spiritual direction, it begins by being open and receptive. Yet as soon as I take a step towards anything there is an urge to start asking 'does this feel right, does thus feel like a place where you could live, does this feel like home'. I appear always to be within the planetary orbit of this settling instinct. Encouraging me to grasp for coherence, for a known spiritual tradition, a safe context within which to understand how I am practising. A place where I can live, feel supported, sheltered and belong, because it can get lonely out here.
This is a theme likely to crop up repeatedly. What I'm attempting to do - to own my own walking - can slip from an easy solitary travelling, into being a long, hard and lonely road. In truth, it can be both things simultaneously. I have to be prepared to hold these two perceptions, ways of seeing the ground beneath my feet. Walking this independent form of spiritual path inevitably requires knowing its a tightrope and walking with care along the tension. Recognise when its showing its face once again, and not be too dismayed or dismissive about that.
Standing on' my own ground' presents me with the infinite possibilities of an open road, but at the same time there is the desire for someone to hold my hand. To help guide me along an unfamiliar path, to share their companionship, their experience and their wisdom. Such spiritual friendship requires shared values and practices to make a mutual bond useful. At this point, for myself, this would be seeking out security in a place of insecurity. There can be a wisdom in this insecurity, and that interests me even as I find myself pulling away from it.
Whilst I remain in the mood for exploring, to investigate what it is I'm naturally drawn towards, to go deeper into interests and new found enthusiasms, finding like minds is unlikely and potentially misleading. If I need to settle into anything it is the creativity required in this approach, how to respond and engage usefully with whatever I encounter. Observing where this type of focus naturally leads, without erecting any predefined or emerging contextual boundary around it.
This desire to find ones spiritual home can be a real need. But it also can come from a neurotic impulse. Trying to escape feelings, aspects of oneself, of reality as it actually is, that you are uncomfortable with, don't like or want to experience. Home can be a place to hide yourself from yourself. To take shelter away from any discomfort. To keep what is outside your experience outside. A home supports, but also contains and imprisons. Creating a way to filter what does and doesn't enter your experience. Should I conceptualise even my current spiritually independent path into another form of home, this could prove equally unhelpful.
I suspect one never finds ones true spiritual home, without letting go of ones ideas and concepts of what it is that home looks and feels like. What one needs your home to be for you. Home has a shifting perspective, that never has a permanent location or orientation. At some point we step out of the safety and isolation of home, in order to encounter anything or anyone new. To be renewed and reinvigorated is to be prepared to meet the unknown, whilst wandering in a wilderness of potential.
'Come, As a man who hears a sound at the gate
Opens the window and puts out the light
The better to see out into the dark,
look, I put it out.' *
* from Finally by W S Merwin
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