One Clear Path

Freeing Our Lives From the Distracted Mind

During the November Three Sundays sessions, we worked with the ancient path that human beings have walked for centuries – one that seems to emanate from somewhere deep inside our hearts, our minds and our very bodies and then proceeds out and over a horizon that is far beyond our present understanding into what is always intuited as a place of simultaneously - a deeper knowledge of the self and a deeper knowledge of the world. Finding the ‘one clear path’ might be thought of as finding a new way forward, but it might be more accurate to think of the one clear path being simply the simple, self compassionate ability to return again and again to the conversation we were born, from the beginning, to hold and to make real in the world.

We recognize this sense of return whenever we feel that we touch something that is precious to us. One of the diagnostics of being on the path, or of finding the path again is a sense of deep, invitational and robust vulnerability and of profound anticipation all at the same time. If we look back in our lives and think about times when we were touched by a sense of our own gift and the possibility of giving that gift in the world, there was often a sense of being found in quite a remarkable, disorienting way accompanied by a sense of fragility; but strangely, a fragility that is connected to something quite grounding and robust underneath. The understanding is that the initial fragility of discovery is going to change into something quite enduring and powerful, though we do not as yet know how that will happen.

Acknowledging and approaching what is hidden in ourselves is one of the most powerful things we can do. That's how we know it's the path we are supposed to be on; there is the feeling of being in the right place, but this place is not a solid, arrived platform – it's not static. It is a conversation between this deep sense of origin inside us and from which emanates the trajectory that is going to take us beyond ourselves.

When we discover what seems like a clear path, what we're really discovering is our place in that gravitational field, in that trajectory, from the deep, intimate sense of origin in our body that lies below the horizon of our understanding, out to as far a horizon as we can understand and then – beyond it. In many ways, we're feeling this knitting together of what were previously irreconcilable unknowns: the unknown that lies inside us, the place of origin, the deep well, the heart, the soul – all of these words human beings have used for this precious part of ourselves connected to what is beckoning to us, seemingly beyond us, calling us over the horizon of our lives. Returning again and again, through all difficulties, we start to make the ability to return to the conversation easier and easier until it becomes just the matter of a moment. For myself, just the moment between writing and not writing, between thinking of something and touching the keys of the laptop or pressing my fountain pen to a white page. Practicing this return we shorten the period of approach and access until there is no approach at all, just the sheer immediacy of an incredible, sometimes overwhelming but emboldening conversation.

Photo: © David Whyte