Sanctuary Redux

Okay, after a few cups of coffee and a visit with my religion, exercize, I have further thoughts about that "sanctuary" to which Rilke may have been referring. Yes, relationships help define us, but there is also that relationship to our selves, our souls to which we must pay attention when feeling untethered on the oceanic swells of our lives.

Jung says: "Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in teh face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes teh individual, teh most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with teh greatest possible freedom for self determination."

When in midlife we find this supreme discomfort, we can look out our relationships to people, things, work, our bodies, our religion and ask why do I feel so out of sorts. Hollis (op cit) opines: "What pulls us out of false rebellion or the easy torpor of the familiar is that the soul's protest has grown too painful to ignore. Then we are called to achieve our particular idiosysncrasies as our gift to the collective. In the end, the meaning of our life will be judged not by our peers or their collecctive expectations, but by our experience of it, and by whatever transcendent source brought us to it in the first place."

That "transcendent source" perhaps, then, is Rilke's sanctuary to the East. For after examining those relationships to others where we seek support, solace and succor, we must look further within to how we relate to ourselves. And when we wake up one day and feel some overwhelming desire, (which comes from the Latin nautical term for "of the star." Hollis says, "To have desire is to have a vector, an intentionality, a direction. To lose desire is to be as adrift as a mariner who has lost the guiding star across otherwise trackless seas.") we must look at our maps and see where that desire points us. If we are awake enough to see clearly it may indeed point to where we already are. (I just had an exquisite un planned moment of bliss, sitting in the sun in my backyard). But that compass may also spur us to rise from the evening meal, to go outside and go and go and go...