The Bad Candle

    

Red Tailed Hawk, Sparkill, March 2021. 

This one is around and about with its mate almost daily.

Both of them are very interested in my chickens.

This morning, I find myself beginning life all over again, as I do every day.

Of course I’m born this morning into pre-existing conditions: everything I have ever been, packed in to the metaphysical space of a past that no longer exists except inside me alone. Thrust into the present of the impressions that only I will receive; to everyone around me, receiving impressions of the same moment, they will be different—not just because they’re perceived from a different point of view, but because they fall into a different being than my own and will be weighed and evaluated differently. 

Facing a future that I will be uniquely responsible for in every way because of these preceding established facts.

The birds are singing outside the window. It’s March 14; somewhere around the end of February, all the birds songs started to change and began, in ways that cannot be explained with words alone, to sing of finding a mate and raising a family. One can hear this in bird song in its emotional inflection; somehow, it has nothing to do with the science of the matter, but taps into an ancient emotional wish which the planet itself gives rise to. It’s cosmological in nature; and yet we have trained ourselves to not know such things, even though our organism was designed to sense them instinctively.

In these pre-existing conditions, one of my best friend’s wife is dying of bulbar palsy; by the time this is published she’ll almost certainly be dead. 

I wake up every morning living within these conditions, which reminds me of what is important in life. To live, to feel, and to love to the maximum extent possible— what else could actually matter? Everything in life is pointed towards understanding love. It doesn’t matter how many things I have or how much money I make if I don’t love; the things and the money become absolutely worthless right away in the absence of any love. Health itself becomes worthless in the absence of love. 

In fact, I defy you to think of anything that retains its value in the absence of love. It simply can’t happen.

Yet do we wake up every morning concerned, first, with the quality of feeling within ourselves? No, we don’t. Not in any good way, anyway. Most likely, my habit is to wake up with only one concern about the quality of feeling, and that concern is about whether I feel good or not. All feeling is about me. In this sense I’m a neutron star that has collapsed into a black hole where I suck everything into myself and try to make it my own, instead of understanding the context of my life.

This is a poor quality of feeling. Feeling was designed to bring me outward and into relationship with the world; to develop, as Beelzebub told his grandson, a being-world view with diverse aspects. Of course that world view can’t be formed with a single center, but to simply be in the world and perceive it forms almost nothing. It’s only with the participation of feeling that any whole view can be formed; and there is nothing diverse in a feeling view that is composed entirely out of selfishness. The diversity of awareness under consideration lies principally in the appreciation of others, not myself.

I’m compelled, once again this morning, to understand my life from the perspective of what I owe. I can’t appreciate duty if I don’t appreciate my debt.

I notice many around me who strangely seem to avoid this question, despite notable levels of inner development. Each of them wants to have things their own way, quite secretly and with a concrete stubbornness that resists every effort to dissolve it from within. I only say this because I’m familiar with this part in myself and have been watching it for 20 years now. Anyone who thinks it isn’t in them or that it will go away so easily is too naïve to continue spiritual work. No matter how hard we work to dissolve this crystal that sits so firmly within the depths of our being, it is always there: and it exerts a secret magnetism, a form of charismatic hypnotism that affects anything that gets near it. Every thought that I have, every action that I take, is secretly influenced by this malevolent star that shines alone in the darkness of my own cosmos.

I will have to deal with this; it will be here today as well, attempting to exert its influence over everything I do without being seen. It’s the bad candle that cannot be extinguished.

This is, however, a useful function; because in my effort to be, I need to have an enemy. If I come to know my enemy, it’s the first place where I can develop some respect for the place I’m in and the forces that influence me. So long as I think that my enemy is my friend, I am my enemy; when we recognize one another, however, a mutual respect is born. 

Enemies have the potential for truce. With friends, one lives under the eternal threat of betrayal. 

We grow up and live our inner lives making a long and complicated set of assumptions about what parts of ourselves are friends. Those assumptions are very often mistaken. We begin in weakness; and as we are in weakness, so we act in weakness. We do not have the strength to resist the attraction of desire.

Can I spend this day trying to see every single thing that I want to have my own way? It will surely open my own eyes wider if I succeed in even a fraction of that task. The part that wants that thinks it’s the ruler of the kingdom; and here is where the gate to hell opens with a friendly invitation. Folks don’t understand that hell looks like a really great place; and for the part that wants to have everything its own way, it is. This is never a place I'm sent to: it is always a place where I want to go. 

This is exactly what desire is all about; and it needs to be contemplated quite carefully.

The geese have just made a big racket on the creek, and the sun is just now rising above the horizon.

This is an ancient place I live in and this kind of thing has been going on for many thousands of years, without the need for man to keep itself healthy. 

Embedded as I am in the many memories of the passage of time—the consummated results of evolution, geography, geology, culture, and history which surround me— I am required to come to this day with an appropriate respect for my place, an awareness of the debt I owe, and a love for the beauty of the life that is given. 

In any single instant I am a representative of the results of all of this; can I live up to that?

This is the question for this morning.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.