The days are gods

You cannot know what a day brings. Some days seem not to bring anything at all, unless you count aggravation. Last Tuesday, for instance. I really couldn't tell you where Tuesday went. I do remember the woman saying "I'm sorry, we're closed," and the traffic jam, and being startled at what time it was. It seemed I had missed a cue somewhere. But I'm not sure about that.

I can remember other days that started poorly and ended far worse, but I had been carried along by winds and gales or, surely, by the gods, and I hadn't known it. And when, on a later day I knew it, I saw the gods, as Emerson put it, sitting around me — and understood that they wanted something of me, were inviting me down a path I hadn't noticed was even there. And it made all the difference.

So Emerson says,¹

From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. . . .

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing . . . , and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion . . . Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. . . .

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. . . . The permanent interest of every [person] is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. . . .

For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence . . . We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature. . . .

. . . Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The . . . mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. . . . The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him alone."

As Emerson's biographer Robert Richardson comments, the personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken. Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock announces another day. On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet and Margaret Fuller began her work on the status of women in society. Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he or she can discern.

Each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken. But first we've got to recognize them, discern them.

One day in 1968 — this was in a previous life, as you will see — the famous fundamentalist evangelist for whom I worked sat me down someplace in Brooklyn to tell me he was firing me.

He had to fire me, he said, because how could a Christian organization have on its staff a communist sympathizer? I was dumbfounded, and I was shattered.

He was convinced, and felt no obligation to explain the steps that had led him to this conclusion that I was a communist sympathizer. While he continued speaking, my mind ran through the steps that would have gotten him there.

First, the Eugene McCarthy bumper sticker. Sen. McCarthy was running against Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic Primary on a platform of ending the war in Vietnam, which I had earnestly come to believe was wrong. That alone was proof enough to the evangelist, David Wilkerson. But there was more.

Second, I was involved in the civil rights movement in Brooklylln and had been exploring the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx with my camera, and had, until told to stop, been including some of my photographs in the evangelist's publications. It was bad enough that those pictures of black children would cost him contributions from his godly white constituency. I had messed with this civil rights business, and I knew well enough that in his mind, it was all communist inspired. Since Martin Luther King was a communist, surely it followed that I must be, too.

And third, the last straw. Rev. Wilkerson had just put out another one of his films, this one about how America's youth today are going to hell in a handbasket because they're just a bunch of communist homosexuals on drugs. To prove this he'd taken a camera to the Village and filmed an incoherent interview with a communist lesbian on drugs. Then he made us all watch it and then he asked each of us to respond. I had to say that I didn't think the film was very fair and really pretty stupid. Clearly, had I not been a communist sympathizer, I would have loved this brilliant piece of cinematography. He also asked each of us pointedly, because of course he had to, if we now had or had ever had, erm, you know, tendencies, but both he and I knew the gay thing was impossible and we kind of laughed off . . . such a . . . preposterous idea.

This particular day was a god.

It had all the characteristics of a god. It must have been a god.

What, after all, do gods do?

They bless. I didn't see that I was being blessed but I was.

They ask terrible questions. I knew I was being asked terrible questions, but I didn't really know how terrible they were.

They command. This I didn't pick up on until later.

They announce a new order. This I didn't pick up on until later.

The author David Whyte tells another story,² of finding himself in a long conversation with a man who encountered the gods in a window-box. He had gotten utterly lost, was at the end of his tether, his life a complete mess, and had sat one rainy night alone in front of the 12th-floor window of his London flat and there was nothing left for him to do except to jump and put an end to it all. But the years of drug abuse had left him pretty weak and he got stuck on a huge unkempt window-box and spent hours with his chin humiliatingly stuck in the mud and his knees stuck under the box in the rain so he hung weeping with frustration gazing at the street 12 stories below and then playing in the mud where his chin was stuck

and then he saw that he was surrounded by the gods in some kind of encounter in which were met all the forces and energies and currents of his life in some colossal illumination, silently, clearly, reconstituting his life.

While he stayed suspended in the window-box in the rain there was nothing for him to do but to landscape the disheveled window-box with his hands, moving the little plants and dirt, redirecting the river of rain in the windowbox where his chin was stuck in the mud. By the time David Whyte met him years later the man was a highly-regarded landscape gardener. The direct outcome of his encounter with the gods was the revelation of something more authentic and essential about him, and its unfolding.

The days are gods but

you have to face the gods

talk to them

fell the force of their gale winds

feel your face in the mud

and the reawakened yearning

and the fear, resentment, vulnerability, loss, urgency,

a disillusionment or boredom, some pull of necessity, the pull of a commanding dream never fulfilled

a simple beauty

a vista seen through some window that appears in the wall but now you have to stop and look

and you know the gods are there.

But there is something else to know about gods. They are power. I didn't feel very powerful the day I was fired by somebody I had believed in, who represented all the myths I'd grown up with and thought I believed in. I felt utterly destroyed.

When in the height of a storm, a conflict, a crisis — when trouble comes — and you might feel overwhelmed and scared —

Then you find that energies are present, capacities called forth, and you find the gods are present, and the gods are power. They evoke powers in you never before revealed. They are power and courage and conviction and heroic resolve.

The days are gods. Everything is divine.

Creation is continuous. There is no other world in which to worry about gods; this one is all there is.

Every day is the day of judgment.

The purpose of life is to come to face the gods on our own, bring to birth and give expression to the life and self that the gods give us to live and to be, because the world is a theatre for enlightenment.

The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own because the days are gods and the gods bestow power; they are power.

The really important stuff is intuitive and inarguable.

The man in the window-box — however he finally got out of it; we aren't told — he left that muddy box with a strange passion, a conviction about his life. My strange sojourn in religious fundamentalism and my expulsion from it had a similar effect. Sometime, somehow, something seizes you with a clarity and a conviction and a passion. Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm, which means, literally, being filled with the gods.

Life is an ecstasy.

Your work should be the praise of what you love.

Others have had the wisdom to recognize the gods in every day.

Gandhi said, "For me the Voice of God, or Conscience, or Truth, or the Inner Voice or "the Still Small Voice" mean one and the same thing. I saw no form. . . . But what I did hear was like a voice from afar and yet quite near. . . . The hearing of the Voice was preceded by a terrific struggle within me. Suddenly the Voice came upon me."

Brahms said, "Deep in the human heart, in a rather unconscious way perhaps, something often whispers and moves, which with time can resonate in the form of poetry or music."

Rilke wrote, "These days it sometimes happens that I discover how much I am listening within. . . . Something resonates deep in my being which, beyond these pages [his journal], beyond my cherished songs and all plans for future action, wants to reach the man in me. It is as if I should speak now, in this moment of lucid strength, when in my intimate being something greater than I sounds its voice: my bliss."

What does a day demand, so that our lives may amount to something more than "near-life" experiences? One day a visit is made, a word spoken. A thousand words written: a great poem. One day someone notices some human suffering and knows they have the power to stop it, and does. One day a career choice is made, or a commitment to handle a mundane career in the interest of a greater love, a life-work nobody sees.

What do gods do?

They bless. We do not always see that we are being blessed.

They ask terrible questions. Every day asks its terrible questions.

They command.

They announce a new order, for all is liquid and flow. Sometimes their news is cataclysmic and we are left quaking and unbelieving.

They are power. The days, these gods, they are power commensurate with the demands they bring.

You know, it is not assured that the great act will ever appear to us as such. You cannot know what is the great act, except that it flow from purity of heart, and from an inner flame of vision and passion. The deed may display no obvious eminence within time, and it may be that its eminence is not seen, not ever.

But what does it matter? Paraphrasing Emerson — When, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around you on their thrones, — they alone with you alone.

Each of us has all the time there is; each accepts those invitations he or she can discern. Every morning begins with infinite promise.

¹ In his essay, "Illusions."

² Crossing the Unknown Sea. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001, 17-21.

Readings

David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea.

New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.

[6f:]

[William] Blake saw the great powers of life working on us like a kind of permanent gravity field, the currents of life acting and pulling upon us according to our particular heft and spiritual weight, our makeup and our nature. These currents surround us and inform us whether we are in the kitchen or in the office, in the woods alone, or crowded in a downtown elevator. . . . [W]e must come to know these currents that surround us in an intimate way and build a kind of faith from the directional movement that results from a close conversation with these elements. . . .

[25-27:]

We change ourselves and our world every day by the way we are on the phone, in the office cubicle, or across the carpenter's workbench. . . . Wherever we work, we need courage both to remember what we are about and, according to the tenor of our times, reimagine ourselves while we are doing it. We are not alone in this endeavor but secretly joined to all those who struggle out loud where we have not yet begun to speak or, when publicly we are loud and vociferous, to those who labor painfully and secretly beside us. We are joined especially to those who have come before us.

Others worked hard or traveled to new shores and dutifully sacrificed for their sons and daughters, while their hearts and minds were elsewhere, their own dreams unfulfilled, their innermost selves left high and dry, disappointed by time's fleeting tide. . . . We are only the apex of innumerable lives of endeavor and sacrifice. . . .

And from Ralph Waldo Emerson, his essay, Illusions:

Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their they alone with him alone.

Meditation

At the surface of things, at an outer rim of ourselves,

Sometimes we are carried along

by appearances, by habit and popular illusion.

But a discontent stops us.

Underneath the surface of things

We feel other currents

those of the soul

winds and gales and forces

churning the world within

churning the world without

Let the doors of perception be cleansed

Let us discern the infinite depth of the moment we are given

In this silence.

Words for Parting

Look to this day!

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course lie all the verities

and realities of your existence:

the bliss of growth,

the glory of acttion,

The splendor of beauty;

For yesterday is but a dream,

And tomorrow is only a vision;

But today, well lived, makes every yesterday

A dream of happiness

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.