First, listen to & watch this interpretation of Rumi by Noah Aronson with sand art by Zhenya Lopatnik, then we’ll talk:
“Come, come whoever you are, come come
wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving,
it doesn’t matter,
our’s is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, even if you have been waiting
for a miracle to come.
Just come, whoever you are, come come.” - Rumi
“Shuva, shuva, shuva, yet again come.” - Aronson
Ours is not a caravan of despair. It cannot be. We can have pit stops of despair. We can dip our toes into the rivers of it, but then we have to bring them right back out again and keep moving forward.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
In case the past month has you asking yourself that question, here are some reminders:
You Are Here
The World is Full of Wonder
You Are a Part of the World
You Are Connected to Every. Living. Thing.
Some of us have forgotten it. Or never accepted it as truth. I almost wrote “have never known it,” but I think that we all know it on some level. The inner voice that reminds us of it tends to be quieter than the other inner voices, though. The critical ones. The ego-ic, self-centered, I-based ones.
My dad, a lifelong seeker with 40 years of sobriety under his belt, taught me how he has learned to differentiate between the two voices: the one of life and the one of despair. How to tell which is the voice of God, in his estimation, and which is not. He said, “God will never beat me up, tell me that I, or anyone else is worthless and an asshole. But my ego sure will.”
Recently he asked me how else I think we can tell the difference between the two voices.
“One is much louder than the other,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he replied, “the voice of God1is always much, much quieter.”
Your inner critic is a jerk. It wants to sabotage you. It wants to draw you off of your particular path and keep you small. Ultimately, because it wants to keep you safe. Safe from what, is different for each of us, but it tends to center around survival. This voice of yours developed when you were very young. It was essential to your existence for a time. It told you how to behave so that you wouldn’t be left out in the cold, alone. So that you wouldn’t die.
The voice of your highest self, the part of you that is attached to a vast web of invisible connection, that voice is much quieter, and gets elbowed out of the way by the ego voice. It’s the hardest to hear when that inner critic is on a rampage; but it is the “still, small voice,” that whispers in silence to you when you are at your most vulnerable and open. In my experience, it is a voice that whispers “you are not alone.”
It is always there, I think, like a frequency that we catch for a moment on an old-fashioned radio dial: crystal clear and then fuzzy again. But once you catch it, you know that it is there. You cannot un-hear it.
Unless you believe the louder voices of despair.
You can turn down the volume on the despair, by doing a few things:
Remembering to breathe. Really.
Knowing that you are not your thoughts and that feelings will (& do) pass.
Connecting with the natural world around you, as an organism of it, rather than apart from it.
Loving. Just loving harder and more and louder. Cringe be damned.
There are more, to be sure, but I don’t want to overwhelm you, so I’ll just plug one.
Mindfulness meditation practices are wonderful for this, but if you’re at all like me, you find it difficult to sit with your thoughts and feelings. They’re just so loud. It can be done. This book and the meditation recordings that accompany it online were what finally got me to sit with my Self, and learn to accept that I am not my thoughts, and that feelings will & do pass.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, it doesn’t matter. We are not a caravan of despair. We cannot be. Because if we do then that is the end. Of us. Of love. Of every good thing that exists in the world. This President and his people want to strip us of everything, including each other. Especially each other. Because if we’re torn apart, we’re less of a threat. But existence is on the line. Yours, mine, and ours. Our ancestors are calling to us from the ground not to let them down, and our descendants from the stars, not to leave them behind.
Just say “no” to despair. Build boundaries around it. Tell yourself, “when I’m feeling despair, then I will pull myself out of it by [insert one of the above list, or your own thing here].”
Noah Aronson concludes his musical tribute to this Rumi concept by adding the Hebrew words, “shuva, shuva, shuva,” which means both “turn” and “return.” Keep coming back to yourself. Keep coming back to that still, small voice that you’ve heard once or twice in your life that tells you creation is a miracle, and you are part of creation and can never truly be alone. To the parts of you that know you are an essential piece of this creation, and that you’ll return to it when you die.
And that is the point.
As my dear friend, Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer teaches, when I talk about G-O-D, I mean “(the) God (of your understanding).