Aging in Place
More deeply, broadly, and honestly
Into the Abyss
The longer I am here on this earth
The less I am content to exist on the surface
The more I need to descend into the abyss*
The more I must see and live beyond and below the surface
As I grow older, I see more deeply, broadly, and honestly
I see less clearly, less distinctly, less further away
I see less down the road and more here and now
I see less possibilities and more limitations
I see less answers, and yet more questions and mystery
I see less righteousness and yet more sacredness
I see less certainty and yet more hope, more wonder and awe
I see a smaller world that I more fully inhabit
Letting go and living the questions, loving the mystery
Letting go and living the wonder, embracing the uncertainty
Letting go and living the sacred where nothing is ordinary
Letting go and living here and now, in place, without worry.
Seeing all things with new eyes...
Settling into My Abyss
I feel like I have lived 3 very distinct lives and am beginning my 4th. I have been through some form of my own abyss each time. So what I’m expressing here is more of a matter of “settling into my abyss.” I’ve learned over the past 14 years while entering and emerging from the Dark Night of the Soul (My Abyss) into the light, Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth speaks to me everyday. Life is quite a journey. I still struggle to see myself as the hero he depicts in all of us, but I guess we are all the heroes of our own lives. Whether a triumphant hero, a hero that barely survived, or a hero stuck in the muck of addiction or depression or self deprecation, either way, we are the main character of our lives. No one else is going to endure your journey. And no one else is going to discover and recover your treasure buried in your abyss. And no one else can tell your story. But it is in the telling that we find meaning and come alive.
“When we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed from our isolation and loneliness. Strange as it may seem, self knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don't know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and an open heart.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xviii)
"I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So... I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me." (Carl Jung)
“We are on the hero’s journey when we submit to the deep processes of life and allow them to affect us and bore their necessities into us. We are the hero when we take on the challenges and go through our initiations and transformations, enduring loss and gain, feeling happy and sad, making progress and falling back. The hero is engaged in life. The hero is not the one who displays force and muscle without deep insight or the courage to be. The hero may not look heroic from the outside but may go through powerful developments in a quiet way. The difference is that the real hero engages life and reflects on it. She becomes more and more what he or she is destined to be.” (Thomas Moore)
Sometimes, a Hero’s Journey can happen while you sit in a beach chair over a weekend in deep contemplation. Or it can be at a spiritual retreat where a process helps to crack you open emotionally and make something deeper available to you. Or it can be a decades-long struggle with addiction or poor self-concept which goes through many forms of The Abyss experience. There is no single version of the journey. https://newthoughtevolutionary.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/joseph-campbell-the-heros-journey-part-3-the-abyss/
“The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.” (Joseph Campbell)
See also: http://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-power-of-stories.html -- https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/04/a-downward-journey.html -- https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-macro-narrative-and-micro.html
*The Abyss:
Abyss is a step in the 8 step transformation of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey that we all experience
The Abyss
The biggest challenge of the journey
Must overcome his/her greatest fears,
and must face them alone.
He/She must “slay the dragon”
which often takes the shape of something he dreads or needs to resolve.
If not ready or has a character flaw, the challenge can beat him/her.
Or maybe he/she cannot surrender to the quest/adventure and must retreat.
Unless he/she tries again, his/her life becomes a shadow of what it should be, and he/she will become dissatisfied and bitter.
Abyss (religion) In the Bible, the abyss is an unfathomably deep or boundless space. The term comes from the Greek ἄβυσσος, meaning bottomless, unfathomable, boundless. It is used as both an adjective and a noun. (Wikipedia)
Origins and Images of the Abyss
Abyss from the Greek abyssos typically signifies a bottomless or boundless deep. The abyss appears in biblical tradition in several related senses. In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1:2, abyssos relates to the Hebrew tĕhōm, which most likely stems from the Babylonian Tiāmat, a personification of the primordial deep of waters existent before creation of world (NRSV). In Babylonian mythology, Tiāmat as the primal sea was personified as a goddess, (Jacobsen, 1968: 104–108) and also as a monstrous embodiment of elemental chaos (Dalley, 1987: 329).
The Egyptian worldview had a similar concept in Nun. Nun referred to the primeval water that encircles the entire world, and from which everything was created, personified as a god. In contrast to Tiāmat’s goddess, feminine nature, Nun was considered to be an ancient god, the father of all the gods, which refers to his primacy rather than literal parentage (Lindemans, 2000).
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-0-387-71802-6_4
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